Vice President JD Vance used a Friday appearance at a steel plant in his Ohio hometown to tear into Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed over past comments linking criticism of Sharia law to White supremacy, framing El-Sayed as proof the Democratic Party has abandoned working-class Americans.
Vance spoke at the Cleveland-Cliffs Middletown Works steel plant in Middletown, Ohio, where he drew a sharp line between the Democratic Party his late grandfather supported and the one now fielding El-Sayed for a Senate seat that could help determine control of the chamber. El-Sayed, the son of Muslim Egyptian immigrants, won his primary and now faces Republican former U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers in one of the midterms' most competitive races.
The vice president zeroed in on a 2022 keynote speech El-Sayed delivered at the Council on American-Islamic Relations' annual banquet in Oklahoma, remarks that have drawn fresh scrutiny as El-Sayed moves from primary winner to general-election candidate in a battleground state.
Standing inside a working steel plant, Vance cast the modern Democratic Party as a vehicle for credentialed elites rather than the laborers around him. His grandfather, he said, worked as a welder for 40 years and voted Democrat because he believed it was "the party of union men."
That party, Vance argued, no longer exists. He told the crowd:
"This is the party, the Democrat party of graduate students, rather than the union and nonunion workers who make this facility run."
Vance then turned to El-Sayed's record as Exhibit A. He urged listeners to pay close attention to what Democratic candidates actually say when they think their base is the only audience.
"It's sometimes actually hard to understand what these modern Democrats actually stand for. But look what they say. Pay close attention, and they'll leave these little hints of what they actually care about."
At the 2022 CAIR banquet in Oklahoma, El-Sayed delivered a keynote address that wove together a series of historical episodes, the forced removal of Native Americans in the 1830s, the destruction of a prosperous Black business district in Tulsa roughly a century ago, a building bombing he described as occurring "decades ago," and efforts to ban Sharia law, into a single narrative of what he called ongoing White supremacy.
El-Sayed told the audience:
"The same exact forces that drove native peoples from their land two centuries ago, destroyed Black Wall Street a century ago, bombed a building decades ago and tried to ban Sharia law not a decade ago, those forces are alive and well today."
He went further, arguing that opposition to Sharia law in American courts could not be understood apart from historical atrocities against other groups:
"The reason I wanted to go all the way back to the 1830s is because you can't understand a Shariah ban without understanding the Trail of Tears."
And he drew a direct line from those events to the present day:
"You can't understand the efforts to uproot Muslim Americans without understanding the Tulsa massacre. You cannot understand the challenges we face today without understanding White supremacy."
The specific ballot measure El-Sayed was referencing was Oklahoma's State Question 755, a 2010 proposal to amend the state constitution so that courts could not consider Sharia law in their decisions. Oklahoma voters approved it with 70 percent support. Federal courts later blocked it from taking effect.
El-Sayed's framing equated a ballot measure backed by seven in ten Oklahoma voters with the Trail of Tears and the destruction of a Black community, casting mainstream opposition to religious law in American courts as an expression of racial hatred.
Vance seized on exactly that equivalence Friday. He paraphrased El-Sayed's position for the steelworkers, then delivered the line that crystallized his argument:
"He once argued, not too long ago, that criticisms of Sharia law were rooted in White supremacy."
Then Vance made it personal, invoking his late grandfather by name, the welder, the lifelong Democrat, as a stand-in for the kind of voter the party left behind:
"I'd love to go back in time and tell my papa that there is a man who claims to stand for working people who says not only should we have Sharia law, but if you criticize it you're a White supremacist. That's not my grandpa's Democratic Party, my friend."
The line landed a specific political argument: that a party which once organized around wages, pensions, and factory floors now elevates candidates whose defining passion is policing which criticisms of religious legal codes are morally permissible.
El-Sayed's CAIR remarks are not the only statements drawing scrutiny as the Michigan race heats up. He has also accused Israel of committing "genocide" and described it as an "apartheid" state, positions that put him well to the left of where most general-election voters in Michigan sit.
After his primary victory, El-Sayed appeared to anticipate the vulnerability. He offered a public statement on antisemitism, saying:
"My commitment to Jewish safety is the same as my commitment to the safety of my own kids. We have a responsibility to take on antisemitism in all of its forms, wherever we see it."
Whether that statement quiets concerns or sharpens them will depend on whether Michigan voters weigh the pledge against the candidate's longer record of rhetoric on Israel and Sharia law. Rogers and Republicans will make sure they see both.
The El-Sayed, Rogers matchup is shaping up as one of the midterms' most consequential Senate contests, with the outcome potentially affecting which party controls the chamber. Michigan is a state where blue-collar voters in places like Macomb County and the industrial west side have swung between parties in recent cycles, exactly the voters Vance was speaking to, even from across the state line in Ohio.
Vance chose his setting carefully. A steel plant in his own hometown, staffed by union and nonunion workers, is the physical embodiment of the coalition he argues Democrats surrendered. El-Sayed's CAIR speech, delivered to an advocacy audience in Oklahoma, not to autoworkers in Detroit, is the rhetorical embodiment of what Vance says replaced it.
The contrast writes itself: one party's vice president standing on a factory floor talking about welders and steelworkers, the other party's Senate nominee telling a banquet hall that objecting to Sharia law is indistinguishable from the Trail of Tears.
When a party's candidates have to explain that kind of comparison to general-election voters, the explaining is usually the problem.
