‘That’s Not My Grandpa’s Democratic Party’: JD Vance Blasts Dem Senate Candidate El-Sayed

Vice President JD Vance turned a Michigan Senate candidate into the face of everything he says has gone wrong with the Democratic Party.

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Vance told supporters Friday at the Cleveland-Cliffs Middletown Works steel plant in his Ohio hometown that the party has walked away from the working people who once anchored it, singling out Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed. He recalled his late grandfather, who spent nearly 40 years as a welder at the plant and voted Democrat because he saw it as the party of union men.

Vance framed the modern party as one that answers to a different base. “This is the party, the Democrat Party of graduate students, rather than the union and nonunion workers who make this facility run,” he said in the address. He told the crowd it had drifted from the days of Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton, and now stood for “diversity quotas rather than opportunity for all.” (RELATED: Leading Democrat Senate Candidate’s Ex-Staffer Charged For Alleged Pro-Hamas Vandalism)

He then took aim at El-Sayed, the son of Muslim Egyptian immigrants. “Now, El-Sayed, this guy running for Senate in Michigan, he once argued, not too long ago, that criticisms of Sharia law were rooted in White supremacy,” Vance said. “I’d love to go back in time and tell my papaw that there’s 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 papaw’s Democrat Party, my friends.”

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The comment traced back to El-Sayed’s 2022 keynote at the Council on American-Islamic Relations banquet in Oklahoma, according to the New York Post. There he attacked State Question 755, a 2010 ballot measure barring courts from weighing Sharia law that voters approved by 70% before federal courts struck it down. El-Sayed tied the ban to the Trail of Tears and the Tulsa massacre, saying, “You cannot understand the challenges we face today without understanding White supremacy.”

El-Sayed faces Republican former Rep. Mike Rogers in a race that could decide Senate control, the Post reported. His past description of Israel as an “apartheid” state committing “genocide” has drawn fire, though he later said his commitment to Jewish safety matched his commitment to his own children.

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