Vice President JD Vance unloaded on Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed from a stage in suburban Detroit on August 31, 2026. Second Lady Usha Vance is a name the nominee should stop invoking, the vice president warned, painting El-Sayed as evil made flesh in American life. El-Sayed is refusing to back down.
MAGA Inc., the super PAC aligned with President Donald Trump, staged the campaign-style event at Universal Contracting Services and Urban Tree Trimming, a Sterling Heights business inside Michigan’s 10th Congressional District, in southern Macomb County. One man discussing another man’s wife strikes Michigan voters as strange, the vice president told the crowd — and then came the line that dominated the rest of the night.
“Whatever you want to talk about, Abdul, keep my wife’s name the hell out of your mouth because she’s way out of your league,” Vance said.
The line drew mockery online, where posters likened it to Will Smith striking Chris Rock at the 2022 Academy Awards, according to reporting published September 6. “JD brought up his own ‘Papaw.’ Abdul made one sarcastic reference to Usha, and Vance responded with a bargain-bin Will Smith impression while calling him ‘evil.’ That isn’t strength—it’s a thin-skinned little man performing outrage for applause,” one X poster wrote. Another X poster wrote, “Abdul El-Sayed is in way over his head.”
The Post That Set It Off
The flashpoint dates to August 22, when El-Sayed asked on X whether Vance would bring Usha Vance along on a trip back in time to meet “Papaw,” the vice president’s grandfather, who is no longer living. The post followed an Ohio speech in which Vance said he would have trouble explaining today’s Democratic Party to his grandfather; sharia law is what he also claimed, without offering evidence, that El-Sayed wants to impose.
Conservative commentators labeled the post racist, and their argument was that candidates’ spouses ought to be left out of the campaign. Journalist Emily Schrader called El-Sayed “a racist creep” over it, per reporting published September 6. Usha Vance — an Indian American Hindu whose parents emigrated from India — said the jab just made her laugh. Mamaw and Papaw were two people she never got the chance to meet herself, she said while speaking with Fox News host Rachel Campos-Duffy, though she has come to know and love the family the pair brought up. The people of Ohio, she added, proved so welcoming that they overturned whatever she had expected of the state.
Back in April, on “The Allen Analysis Show” podcast, El-Sayed had also speculated about the couple’s marriage, suggesting the second lady is unhappy with her husband and predicting that Vance will someday have to sit his own children down for an awkward conversation about a career spent going after people who are different. Republican Senate candidate Mike Rogers used his turn at the rally to apologize to Indian Americans throughout Michigan that he was sorry the state has a Senate candidate without the decency to treat them respectfully. The Republican Party is their home, he assured them, and he called the second lady smart, poised and a role model for young people.
El-Sayed Turns the Charge Around
CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins asked El-Sayed whether spouses ought to be off limits. Spouses, in his own preference, would stay out of politics altogether, he said — but the line, he then contended, had been crossed by Trump first. In a CNN interview, he recalled a Truth Social image the president had posted not long after he won the nomination, one setting the two couples side by side and highlighting his wife’s hijab as though it were somehow less American. The post used El-Sayed’s full name and described two very different Americas.
That sequence amounts to hypocrisy, El-Sayed said: the president supplies the provocation, and Vance then acts as though an attack like that were unthinkable. He explained that his point about the second lady concerned a philosophy the vice president holds, under which some people rank as more American than others. Why, he asked, invoke a grandfather dead for years to make a point about him, unless the aim was to evoke an era when men in his position were regarded as something short of normal?
Undocumented immigrants also drew Vance’s ire in the same speech, which cast El-Sayed as a politician fighting for one group at the expense of everyone else and warned that the shared citizenship binding the country together is corroded by ethnic grievance. El-Sayed called that a “dog whistle” at the Islamophobic attacks he has faced during the campaign, and he offered a definition of his own in a statement: stripping health care from working people to fund tax breaks for billionaires is the true evil, he said, as is driving grocery and gas prices up while flirting with trade wars. “Evil is dividing people for your own gain,” he said. Michigan, he added, is better than taking lectures from sock puppets out of Ohio and Florida.
The attack landed amid a wider push to make Muslims and Islam an issue before the November 3 midterms, according to reporting published September 9. Texas Governor Greg Abbott has called for an investigation into what he described as efforts to create “sharia courts,” and Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville has warned that “the enemy is inside the gates.” Representatives Keith Self and Chip Roy organized a “Sharia Free America Caucus,” and Representative Randy Fine has offered legislation of his own.
A Michigan Race With National Stakes
Ayman Ghazali, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Lebanon, drove an explosives-laden vehicle into Temple Israel in West Bloomfield Township as families gathered inside, and that March attack supplied much of Vance’s case. The building caught fire, and Ghazali killed himself at the scene. El-Sayed’s first response mentioned that the attacker had lost relatives in an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon the week before, and it carried a line about hurt people hurting others. He has since called that an error, saying the statement should have simply condemned the attack, and he apologized to Jewish Democrats on August 29. From the stage, Vance misphrased that line as “troubled people cause trouble,” and said he had met the temple’s rabbi and its security guards backstage and that they were in the audience.
A Glengariff Group poll published September 9 found the Michigan Senate race a statistical tie, with Rogers at 45.8 percent, El-Sayed at 44.4 percent and 9 percent undecided. Among independents, El-Sayed led by 14 points, and among voters who said they are “definitely” going to vote he led 46.7 to 44.4 percent. Both men ran underwater on favorability: El-Sayed by 8 points, at 42 percent unfavorable and 34 percent favorable, and Rogers by 9 points, at 28 percent favorable and 37 percent unfavorable.
El-Sayed’s stance on Israel divided Michigan Democrats at their state nominating convention in Lansing on August 29. He meets Rogers on the ballot November 3, and a victory would make him the first Muslim U.S. senator.
