Abdul El-Sayed’s racist swipe at Usha Vance badly backfiring with Indian-Americans, women

Abdul El-Sayed is running for Senate in Michigan, a state with one of the largest Indian-American populations in the country, and apparently decided the smart play was to take a shot at Usha Vance that reads as racially loaded. That's not a gaffe born of exhaustion on the campaign trail. It's the kind of thing that tells you what someone actually thinks when they believe the room is friendly.

The backfire here isn't complicated. Indian-American voters in Michigan aren't an abstraction to be cited in a stump speech about diversity. They're a real bloc, 130,000 strong by the numbers in this piece, and they can tell the difference between someone who respects them and someone who reaches for their identity as a punchline when it's politically convenient. Usha Vance didn't ask to be a proxy in anyone's campaign fight, and turning her into one because she's married to J.D. Vance says more about El-Sayed's instincts than it does about her.

Women voters watching this unfold aren't going to love it either. There's a pattern on the left where "punching up" gets used as cover for punching sideways at women who happen to be inconvenient, and it never ages well once it's out in the open. Insiders telling The Post this is hurting him isn't spin. It's just what happens when a candidate lets contempt slip out in public.

None of this should surprise anyone who's followed El-Sayed. Radical politics tends to produce radical carelessness, and voters in Michigan are apparently noticing before Election Day, not after.