JD Vance called Abdul El-Sayed “evil” on Monday at a MAGA Inc. rally in Sterling Heights, Michigan, turning a Senate campaign stop into a direct attack on the state’s Democratic nominee. Vance told the crowd he saw something about El-Sayed that was “very, very evil and on the rise in the United States of America today.”
The attack landed because El-Sayed is not a side figure in this race. He is the Democratic nominee for the Senate in Michigan and is set to face former Rep. Mike Rogers in November, in a contest that could help determine partisan control of the Senate. The MAGA Inc. event, staged in a warehouse for a local electric services contractor and tree-trimming company, drew several hundred people and marked the group’s first major midterm rally to feature Vance as a headliner.
Vance tied his criticism to El-Sayed’s response after an attack on a Michigan synagogue in March. El-Sayed condemned the attack in a video posted to social media and said that “hurt people hurt people.” He apologized last week, saying his comments may have been misconstrued to justify something he did not mean to justify. But critics had already said the response sounded wrongly empathetic toward someone who violently targeted Jewish people, and Vance used that opening to argue El-Sayed had shown sympathy for the wrong side.
Vance also reached for another line of attack, pointing to El-Sayed’s alliance with Hasan Piker, who had previously said on a livestream that “America deserved 9/11.” El-Sayed called that remark “dumb” this month on NBC News’ “Meet the Press” after winning the Democratic primary, but Vance told rallygoers that the connection revealed something deeper. He said El-Sayed was campaigning with someone who had made that comment and used it to portray him as someone with compassion for some people and not others, before urging the crowd to “Reject Abdul El-Sayed.”
El-Sayed answered in kind, casting Vance’s attack as hypocrisy from a political movement he said was doing real damage. “Evil is ripping healthcare away from working people in exchange for tax breaks for billionaires,” he said in a statement. “Evil is making people pay more for groceries and gas while pushing for trade wars and actual war.” He also said Michigan is better than being lectured to by “sock puppets from Ohio and Florida.”
The broader stakes are larger than one rally. The Senate seat is open because Gary Peters is not seeking a third term, and the November race is one of the contests that could decide which party controls the chamber. That gives Vance’s attack immediate value as a campaign weapon, but also leaves El-Sayed with a familiar test: whether he can keep his focus on the general-election race while fending off an attack built around words he has already tried to walk back.
