Vance Accuses El-Sayed of “Anti-White Racial Hate”

Vice President JD Vance gives a thumbs up as he speaks at a midterm campaign rally on October 27, 2026 in Howell, Michigan. Saul Loeb-Pool/Getty Get your news from a source that’s not owned and controlled by oligarchs. Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily. “Michigan is the most important election in the United States of America,” Vice President JD Vance said at a rally in Howell, Michigan, on Tuesday afternoon. In a town known as the “KKK capital of Michigan,” Vance delivered a bigoted midterms sales pitch. His words echoed Donald Trump’s Islamophobia from the day prior, when Trump called Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed a “jihadist” and argued that electing him would mean so much terrorism “you cannot even have Christmas.” Vance, in his followup, claimed at a pre-rally press gaggle that El-Sayed traffics in “anti-white racial hate,” and argued that if El-Sayed is elected, American cities will see protests on the scale of those in France this month. “The scenes of destruction in Paris may be an ocean away, but ask yourselves: are they really so hard to imagine here in the United States of America?” Vance said. “And I guarantee you, if those rioters were burning down New York or Detroit, the Hasan Pikers and the El-Sayeds would be right there leading them and cheering them on. Because what we saw in France—the hatred, the ingratitude, the desire to destroy rather than the desire to build…that exact same cancer is what has corrupted Abdul El-Sayed writ large.” By contrast, he said, Republican candidate Mike Rogers—a man who has engaged in his own Islamophobic rhetoric against El-Sayed—would “further build upon the great momentum of the last 18 months.” Michigan voters have been inundated with increasingly aggressive messaging from an anxious Republican Party over the past month. It’s easy to see why: two years after Trump carried the state by 1.4 percentage points, the party faces a serious risk of losing both Senate and House seats in the state in next Tuesday’s midterms. One of those battlegrounds is Michigan’s seventh congressional district, where Vance stumped for Republican incumbent Rep. Tom Barrett on Tuesday. Barrett, who won office in 2024, faces a strong challenge from progressive Democrat Will Lawrence. But Vance barely mentioned the local race, saying the candidate’s name exactly thrice—once describing him simply as “a patriot” who would secure the border, and twice not describing him at all. He said almost nothing about Barrett’s record. And though he spoke at length about Hasan Piker, who is not running for any elected office, he did not name Lawrence, Barrett’s actual opponent, once. Instead, Vance free-associated about his peewee football days, “backing the blue and waging war on criminals,” fuel extraction and manufacturing under Trump, and how “one of the things I’m proudest of is that we ended the tyranny of DEI and racial discrimination in jobs and universities.” While Vance’s rhetoric around the Michigan campaign trail barely addresses the races in question, or the candidates he’s ostensibly supporting, Republican money is pouring into Barrett’s district. Total ad spending in the seventh district has topped $47 million in the general election according to the analytics firm AdImpact. That makes this race one of the three most expensive midterm contests this cycle, alongside North Carolina’s first district and Florida’s 25th district. Trump’s own PACs are leading the blitz. The president’s “Safety and Affordability PAC,” launched in September, has reserved $6.3 million in local airtime through election day to help keep Barrett afloat against Lawrence, who has leveraged a populist, anti-data-center platform to lead by as much as eight points in recent polling.