“We were both very much rooted in our neighborhoods,” Tlaib says of herself and Omar. “We didn’t come from thin air. We’re centered and focused on a number of issues that we’ve been working on as moms, as women of color—and some that are related to being Muslim in America.”

Neither candidate ran in a district that has a sizable Muslim voting bloc—Omar’s district is primarily white, while Tlaib’s is predominantly African American—though that’s an assumption both have encountered. (Dearborn, a heavily Arab suburb, is just outside Tlaib’s district, and many Somali communities are near Omar’s.)

“Political pundits would like to have a conversation about how people like me are elected by people who look like me,” Omar says. “But the reality is that we were elected because we were the best candidate in that race. We are proud of our identities—and we are proud of the fact that we are issue-oriented, and we care about making positive changes and pushing aggressively for progressive agendas that lead to prosperity for all of us.”

Tlaib and Omar were among other Muslim women who ran for Congress this year in an election that has already broken national records for the number of female candidates filing.

Coming from different ethnic, racial, and socio-economic backgrounds, the candidates defied the stereotypes of a monolithic Muslim American community that often prevail in media narratives. “It’s such a great reflection of reality,” Dalia Mogahed, the executive director of the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding, said of the diversity among them.

According to a survey taken by the organization, more than two-thirds of the Muslim American community are dissatisfied with the direction of the country’s politics. For Muslim women and black Muslims, numbers were even higher. “It’s really inspiring to see how that energy has been channeled into greater civic engagement,” Mogahed says.

The fact that many of the Muslim women who ran in the midterm primaries leaned further left than their challengers might also reflect the fact that the Muslim community leans Democratic to begin with, Mogahed says. The community also skews younger and is predominantly composed of people of color. “The idea of social justice is deeply ingrained in how many Muslims interpret their faith, and these candidates amplify that value in so many ways,” she says.

While the Trump administration’s politics led some of the candidates to run for office, they are also tired of Democratic leadership that has taken Muslim voters for granted. That’s one of the reasons Tahirah Amatul-Wadud, a family-law attorney from Massachusetts, decided to challenge the 15-term Democratic incumbent Richard Neal, a ranking member of the House Ways and Means Committee.

“Our district has the second-highest rate of poverty out of all nine in Massachusetts, and ours is last in median income,” Amatul-Wadud says. “So I was thinking, We’ve had this gentleman in Ways and Means for so many years—how is our district failing?” Her platform included support for “Medicare for all,” as well as advocating for high-speed-internet access across the rural district, where thousands of constituents don’t have access to the same quality of service that city dwellers do.