Vance attacks El-Sayed over Sharia law remarks in Michigan Senate race

Vice President JD Vance traveled to a steel plant in his Ohio hometown on Friday to deliver a pointed critique of the Democratic Party, using a Michigan Senate race as his stage. Standing at the Cleveland-Cliffs Middletown Works facility, Vance invoked his late grandfather—a welder who spent four decades at the plant and voted Democratic because he saw the party as the natural home of union workers. That loyalty, Vance argued, no longer makes sense. The modern Democratic Party, he said, has become the party of graduate students and intellectuals, not the working people who keep factories running.

Vance's real target was Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for Michigan's Senate seat, a race that could tip control of the chamber. El-Sayed, the son of Egyptian Muslim immigrants, has become a focal point for conservative criticism over remarks he made at a 2022 Council on American-Islamic Relations banquet in Oklahoma. Speaking as the keynote speaker, El-Sayed had contextualized opposition to Sharia law within a longer history of American white supremacy, drawing a line from the forced removal of Native Americans in the 1830s through the destruction of Black Wall Street in Tulsa to contemporary efforts to restrict Muslim Americans' religious practices.

Vance seized on this framing as evidence of how far Democrats have drifted from their working-class moorings. "He once argued that criticisms of Sharia law were rooted in White supremacy," Vance said, before delivering his closing argument: "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."

El-Sayed's 2022 speech had specifically addressed Oklahoma's State Question 755, a 2010 ballot measure that sought to ban courts from considering Sharia law in their decisions. The measure passed with 70 percent of voters but was ultimately blocked by federal courts. In his remarks, El-Sayed drew explicit historical parallels: "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 argued that understanding contemporary challenges to Muslim Americans required understanding the historical context of white supremacy in America.

El-Sayed's record has drawn criticism from conservatives on multiple fronts. Beyond the Sharia law remarks, he has faced pushback for describing Israel as committing "genocide" and operating as an "apartheid" state—language that prompted concerns from Jewish community members. However, after winning his primary, El-Sayed released a statement attempting to reset that conversation, saying his commitment to Jewish safety matched his commitment to the safety of his own children and pledging to confront antisemitism in all its forms.

The Michigan Senate contest pits El-Sayed against Republican former Representative Mike Rogers, and the race has emerged as one of the cycle's most competitive. Control of the Senate could hinge on outcomes in races like this one, where cultural and religious questions have become inseparable from economic messaging. Vance's appearance at the steel plant was itself a statement about terrain—invoking the dignity of industrial labor while arguing that Democrats no longer speak to those workers' actual concerns. El-Sayed's campaign did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Vance's criticism.