Abdul El Sayed unveils new nickname for JD Vance - Newsweek

Abdul El-Sayed, the Democrats’ Senate nominee for Michigan, has called JD Vance “low T JD” in response to criticism he has received from the U.S. Vice President.

El-Sayed used the nickname in a segment on MS Now which played soundbites from Republicans taking aim at the Democrat and his policies.

The clip showed Vance telling a rally, “we could spend the next three hours talking about Abdul El-Sayed and we would not run out of stuff to talk (about).”

When asked for his response, El-Sayed told the network: “Low T JD. It's always funny, man. He just brings the energy down every time you hear him talk.”

Michigan’s Senate seat was vacated by Democratic Senator Gary Peters, making the state one of the key mid-term races as the Democrats hope to flip control of the U.S. Senate.

The U.S. Vice President has repeatedly criticized El-Sayed during the election campaign which pits him against the Republican nominee Mike Rogers.

Over the last two months, Vance has taken aim at El-Sayed’s views on religion, immigration, and blue-collar credentials.

On August 6, Vance told Fox News how El-Sayed “holds himself out as a working-class hero,” but “doesn't have a constituency among the working class."

On August 10, Vance continued with the insults as he called El-Sayed “crazy” in an interview with Fox News in which he added that he would be “a terrible senator for the people of Michigan.”

At the Cleveland-Cliffs Middletown Works steel plant in neighboring Ohio, Vance said on August 21, El-Sayed, the son of Muslim Egyptian immigrants “once argued, not too long ago, that criticisms of Sharia law were rooted in White supremacy.”

"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,” Vance added.

At a rally on August 31, in Sterling Heights, Michigan, Vance said he was a “man who has sympathy and compassion for people who share his religion but have nothing for people who don't."

“That is the root of this terrible evil, I believe, in the United States of America that is on the rise,” Vance added.

At the same event, Vance also referred to El-Sayed's post on X about the Indian immigrant upbringing of his wife, Usha Vance. The Democratic nominee posted "do we think JD is taking Usha with him back in time to meet Papaw, or no…"

He also warned El-Sayed to "keep my wife's name the hell out of your mouth."

The Democratic nominee has made several personal attacks on Vance during the election campaign, ranging from abandoning his principles for power to questioning his masculinity.

After Vance’s “evil” jibe, El-Sayed responded on August 31 with a statement that said “evil is selling out your morals for a little bit of power.”

He took aim at Vance’s links to the co-founder of PayPal who has helped his early political career, by saying on MS Now, that the Vice President was “Peter Thiel’s boy” and that Americans have had “enough of him.”

After Vance said that El-Sayed had a “patchy beard,” the Democrat responded with a challenge to a weightlifting contest, saying “I’d love to see him on a bench. I’d love to see him on a squat.”

The race for Michigan is classed as a “toss up” but as of Friday, El-Sayed has a lead of 3.5 percentage points over Rogers—48 percent to 44.5, according to the RealClearPolitics average.

A Fox News poll between September 24 and 28 put the race closer, with the Democrat at 50 percent, one percentage point ahead of Rogers.

But there was a wider margin in a new Marist Poll released Thursday which put El-Sayed on 51 percent and Rogers on 44 percent in the survey which had a 3.8 percentage point margin of error.

El-Sayed, who holds a medical degree, is running as an economic populist from the Democratic left, campaigning for Medicare for All, stronger unions and tougher antitrust enforcement.

Contact Newsweek editors on this story: John Fitzpatrick and Cristina Diciu.