Vice President JD Vance went on the attack against the modern, radical left-wing version of the Democratic Party, focusing the verbal and ideological assault on Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed and his previous remarks connecting criticism of Sharia law to white supremacy, stating such comments are proof that the party has abandoned its working-class roots.
Vance gave a speech at the Cleveland-Cliffs Middletown Works steel plant located in his hometown in Ohio as Michigan prepares for one of the most competitive Senate races in the 2026 midterm election. El-Sayed is going head-to-head with Republican former Rep. Mike Rogers in a contest that could play a critical role in determining which party controls the Senate.
During the speech, the vice president spoke about his late grandfather, who spent his life working as a welder for four decades and voted Democrat because he believed it was “the party of union men.” However, Vance made the case that the Democratic Party of today has moved far from its working-class roots and identity.
“This is the party, the Democrat Party of graduate students, rather than the union and nonunion workers who make this facility run,” Vance went on to say, according to a report from The New York Post. “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.”
Vance then started talking about El-Sayed, who is the son of Egyptian immigrants. “He once argued, not too long ago, that criticisms of Sharia law were rooted in White supremacy,” the vice president said. “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.”
His comments were a reference to remarks made during a speech by El-Sayed at the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) during a 2022 annual banquet in Oklahoma, where the Michigan Democrat was the keynote speaker. El-Sayed slammed a 2010 ballot measure known as State Question 755, which was designed to amend the state constitution to ban courts from considering Sharia law in their decisions.
The measure was ultimately approved by 70% of voters, but federal courts ruled against it. “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,” El-Sayed stated during his speech.
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“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,” El-Sayed added. “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.”