Vance rips Michigan’s ‘crazy’ El-Sayed: would be a ‘terrible senator’

Abdul El-Sayed won his primary and immediately went after JD Vance for "sucking up to power," which is a strange line of attack from a guy who just spent the last several years cheerleading every progressive litmus test going. Vance clapped back calling him "odd" and "crazy," and honestly, watching two guys sling schoolyard insults at each other isn't exactly statesmanship. But context matters here, and the context is that Michigan Democrats just nominated one of the more aggressively far-left candidates in the country for a swing-state Senate seat.

El-Sayed isn't some moderate technocrat who slipped on a rhetorical banana peel. He's built a career on Bernie-style democratic socialism and combative culture-war framing, and now he wants to represent a state that Trump carried. Calling Vance a sellout for governing inside the system he was elected to serve is rich coming from someone whose entire pitch is blowing that system up. Vance's response was blunt, maybe undiplomatic, but it wasn't unprovoked.

What's actually newsworthy isn't the name-calling, it's what it signals about where Michigan Democrats decided to go. They had options. They picked the guy running hardest to the left, betting that energizing the base beats winning the center. That's their gamble to make, but voters in a state that's flipped red before will get to judge whether "sucking up to power" was ever really the issue, or whether it's just what you call someone when you don't have a better argument.