Vice President JD Vance branded Democratic Senate hopeful Abdul El-Sayed a “psychopath” peddling anti-white hatred, a closing pitch as the Michigan race sits nearly tied.
Vance delivered the attack Tuesday in Howell, Mich., and again before boarding Air Force Two for a rally outside Detroit that drew several hundred people. He framed the Senate contest as a choice between Republican Mike Rogers and a left-wing Democrat he said would wreck the state’s auto base and traffic in racial grievance.
With Election Day one week away, RealClearPolitics’ average of recent polls shows El-Sayed ahead of Rogers by 2.5 points. Vance used the visit as a late push to persuade swing voters that the Democrat is too extreme for Michigan.
The Post reported that El-Sayed’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the remarks.
Speaking ahead of the Detroit-area stop, Vance did not soften the language.
He told reporters:
"Abdul El Sayed is a little bit of a psychopath, and we’re going to just try to make the argument as well as we can and help Mike out a little bit,"
He went further on race. Vance said El-Sayed has “engaged in the kind of explicitly anti-white racial hatred” perhaps “more than any Democrat running in the nation,” and called him “a guy who seems to love to traffic in racial hatred.” He offered no further examples in the remarks as reported.
He also tied the candidate to disorder abroad. If recent rioting in France spread to Detroit, Vance said, El-Sayed would be “right there and cheering them on.”
Vance zeroed in on how El-Sayed has described his own background. He said the Democrat was born in Rochester Hills, just north of Detroit, yet has presented himself as something else.
Vance put it this way:
"Abdul El-Sayed was born just north of Detroit in a town called Rochester Hills. Yet he is claiming to be, and I quote, ‘an immigrant from North Africa.’ For decades, he’s gone even further than that. He told people he is an Egyptian citizen,"
He treated the claim as proof of alienation from the state he wants to represent.
Vance continued:
"Why? Why would you tell people that you were not from the community that you’re actually from? It’s an insane claim to make... [He is] a man who would lie, who is so ashamed of this state that he would lie about being an immigrant from another continent."
The charge lands in a state where local roots and industrial work still carry weight. Vance cast the biography issue as more than a résumé quibble, as evidence El-Sayed is embarrassed by Michigan itself.
Energy and manufacturing came next. Vance said El-Sayed “says that he wants to pass the green new scam and kill the auto industry of this state.” He paired that with a character attack on the company El-Sayed keeps.
Vance said the Democrat has “campaigned with his best friend Hassan Piker, a man who said that we deserved 9/11.” The vice president offered that as a bright line for voters who still remember the attacks and expect Senate candidates to shun that kind of rhetoric.
Taken together, the pitch was simple: a Democrat who, in Vance’s account, would regulate the auto sector into retreat while platforming voices hostile to America.
Vance’s other job Tuesday was protecting Rogers from the right. Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson has opposed the Republican, a hawkish former House Intelligence Committee chairman. Vance brushed that off and sold Rogers as steady.
He called Rogers “fundamentally a decent guy and the kind of public servant that you want in Washington, D.C.”
On President Trump’s separate characterization of El-Sayed as a “jihadist,” Vance held back. “I don’t know what’s in the guy’s heart,” he said. “I just know he has a lot of weird friends.” The line kept the focus on associations and record rather than a religious label.
El-Sayed is Muslim; Vance’s refusal to fully echo the “jihadist” wording left the campaign contrast on policy, race rhetoric, industrial stakes, and running mates, not a blanket religious smear from the vice president’s own mouth.
Michigan’s Senate race is not a blowout. Polls show El-Sayed virtually tied with or leading Rogers, and the RCP average puts the Democrat up 2.5 points with seven days left. That is why a sitting vice president spent Tuesday in Howell and on the tarmac, then headed to a crowd outside Detroit.
Vance’s theory of the case is that swing voters will reject a candidate he paints as ashamed of Michigan, hostile to its core industry, casual about racial division, and comfortable with radical company. Rogers, in that telling, is the safer public servant.
Whether those attacks move the numbers is now a one-week question. El-Sayed’s campaign, at least in the first response window, gave Vance’s broadside no public rebuttal.
Michigan workers do not need a senator who treats their state as a costume and their jobs as a bargaining chip for green experiments.
