Hamtramck Mayor Karen Majewski was reelected Tuesday for her 4th term, getting 61% of the vote to defeat challenger Councilman Mohammed Hassan.

The three Hamtramck city council candidates she endorsed -- incumbents Andrea Karpinski, Ian Perrotta, and new candidate Fadel Al-Marsoumi -- also won, adding to her victory Tuesday night in the diverse city of 22,000.

"This is fantastic," Majewski, 62, told the Free Press. "I'm really gratified and pleased that Hamtrmack residents placed their confidence in me for another term. I'm especially exicted about the council members who won this time. I'm looking forward to working with them. We're going to have a great council, with a lot of positive movement for Hamtramck."

More:Michigan Election Day 2017 results: Polls close in most of state

Majewski's vote margin was bigger than four years ago, when she defeated her opponent by just 98 votes. On Tuesday, she won by more than 700 votes, garnering 1,960 votes to Hassan's 1,231 votes.

Hassan, 51, an immigrant from Bangladesh, would have been the first mayor of Hamtramck who is Muslim. Majewski's win means that Hamtramck will continue to have a Polish-American mayor. The city's mayors have always been of Polish descent since it first started electing mayors in 1922.

In 2013, Majewski defeated Abdual Algazali, an immigrant from Yemen who was Muslim. Hassan sought to unite the Yemeni and Bangladeshi Muslim communities, who together make up more than half of the population, but Tuesday, Majewski appeared to get votes from Yemeni Muslims.

Hassan did not return messages on Tuesday.

Related stories:

Muslims, immigrants in Hamtramck seek power as race for mayor heats up

Muslims look to make a difference in Hamtramck

Hamtramck councilman apologizes for remarks on immigrants and sanitation

Hassan, an engineer who has worked at auto supply companies, said he wanted to reduce spending by merging police and fire departments, a move that Majewski said would hurt the city. Hassan and others had also criticized the continued state oversight of Hamtramck, saying it was undemocratic.

The lack of minorities in police, fire, and City Hall departments was another concern: while Hamtramck is more two-thirds non-white, there are only a handful of city employees who are not white.

Two years ago, a majority of Hamtramck's six-member council became Muslim majority, three of them immigrants from Bangladesh, one from Yemen. Over the past year, they clashed with the mayor and the other two members on council over several issues.

"They ignore” us when we raise issues, Hassan said last month. “They don’t care."

But critics of Hassan said he and his supporters were focusing on the Bangladeshi community and not the entire city.

Majewski rejected the narrative of Muslim vs. Christian in the campaign, saying the communities of Hamtramck are complex and diverse.

Hamtramck has often been in the spotlight nationally, drawing critics who hate Islam and immigrants.

"Hamtramck has rejected across the board the kind of hateful and divisive rhetoric of the Trump administration," Majewski said. "The great lesson Hamtramck has to offer is that whatever differences there may be demographically, we generally function as a united community. We come from all over the world. We have issues on which we disagree sometimes, and those sometimes get interpreted along religious lines or ethnic lines."

Majewski endorsed Al-Marsoumi, an Iraqi-American Muslim council candidate who gained support from another Arab group, Yemeni-American Muslims.

Last week, two Yemeni-American groups, including the Yemeni-American Political Action Committee, endorsed Al-Marsoumi and Majewski, not Hassan.

The vote totals indicated Majewski garnered Yemeni-American Muslim votes. Hamtramck was once heavily Polish, but today is only 8.8% Polish, show Census figures.

"The way Hamtramck is, there is no one ethnicity that has a majority, so in order for anyone to succeed politically, you have to create bridges across ethnic borders, across religious borders," Majewski said. "You have to appeal across those borders."

Contact Niraj Warikoo: nwarikoo@freepress.com or 313-223-4792. Follow him on Twitter @nwarikoo