US Vice-President JD Vance has intervened in the Michigan Senate race, calling Democratic candidate Abdul El-Sayed ‘evil’ at a rally for Republican Mike Rogers in a Detroit suburb on Monday night, as polling suggests El-Sayed holds a narrow lead in the battleground state.
Vance attacks El-Sayed at Rogers rally
Speaking to supporters of Rogers, Vance repeatedly accused El-Sayed of being a divisive figure. ‘I realise that there’s something about Abdul El-Sayed that is very, very evil and on the rise in the United States of America today,’ Vance said, adding that El-Sayed was seeking to ‘destroy’ the country.
Vance also warned El-Sayed to ‘keep my wife’s name the hell out of your mouth’, after the candidate appeared to suggest that Vance’s late grandfather would not have accepted Second Lady Usha Vance, who is Hindu.
The vice-president linked El-Sayed to far-left influencer and Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, who once suggested that the US ‘deserved’ the September 11 attacks. ‘You can pal around with terrorist sympathisers, and you can say that America deserved 9/11, or you could empathise not with the children who were targeted at Temple Israel, but with the attacker,’ Vance said. El-Sayed campaigned alongside Piker during his primary but has since distanced himself from him and has never made such comments himself.
El-Sayed fires back in Michigan Senate race row
El-Sayed, who is Muslim, responded in an interview with CNN later on Monday, turning the language back on Vance and the Trump administration.
‘Evil is ripping healthcare away from working people in exchange for tax breaks for billionaires,’ El-Sayed said. ‘Evil is making people pay more for groceries and gas while pushing for trade wars and actual war. Evil is dividing people for your own gain. Evil is selling out your morals for a little bit of power.’
El-Sayed also sought to clarify his earlier remarks about the Vance family, saying he was trying to illustrate that Vance ‘believes in a political philosophy that says that some people are somehow more American than others.’
Polling and the stakes in Michigan
The Michigan Senate race Vance has now entered is one of the most closely watched contests of the upcoming midterm elections. Michigan is a key battleground: former President Joe Biden won the state in 2020 and Donald Trump won it in 2024.
A survey released earlier this week by Michigan firm Epic-MRA suggests El-Sayed holds a narrow four-point lead over Rogers, a former law enforcement officer with long experience in politics. El-Sayed won the Democratic primary on 5 August, with his victory described as sending tremors through the Democratic Party.
The Michigan Senate race Vance weighed into on Monday drew national attention well before the vice-president’s appearance. El-Sayed’s emergence as the Democratic nominee, after campaigning as a political outsider, had already made the contest one of the most closely followed of the cycle. Vance’s intervention raises its profile further ahead of the midterms, with both parties treating the seat as a genuine prize in a state that has swung between the two in consecutive presidential elections.
Rogers, backed by the Trump administration, faces the task of closing a polling gap in a race where the Michigan Senate race Vance is now publicly invested in. Whether that investment moves the numbers will become clearer as further polling emerges from the state ahead of election day. The state of Michigan remains one of the few true toss-up battlegrounds on the midterm map, making every development in the contest a national news event.
