Michigan’s Democratic Senate Nominee Picked a Fight With JD Vance’s Family Online. Then He Went on Fox News and Asked Jesse Watters if He’s Circumcised.
Abdul El-Sayed (D) is the Democratic nominee for the Michigan Senate seat that Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI) is giving up, and the race against Republican Mike Rogers is close enough that either side’s unforced errors matter. Over eight days in late August, El-Sayed supplied two of them.
First he responded to Vice President JD Vance invoking his late grandfather at an Ohio rally by joking about Vance taking his Indian American wife “back in time to meet Papaw” — a jab that collapsed on its own timeline — Vance’s grandmother had already been dead five years by the time he met Usha, and his grandfather even longer. Then, defending himself on Jesse Watters’ Fox News show days later, El-Sayed compared surgery for transgender minors to circumcision and asked Watters, on air, whether he was circumcised.
Both moments were meant as counterpunches. Both went viral for the opposite reason — and Republicans, including the second lady herself, spent the week turning them into a closing argument.
- 8 daysone news cyclefrom Vance's August 21 rally remark to the Michigan GOP's August 28 press conference — compiled from Fox News, Legal Insurrection, and Michigan News Source reporting
- +7El-Sayed's lead over Rogers46%–39% in the Susquehanna Polling & Research survey of 800 likely voters, August 11–17, 2026 — Fox 2 Detroit
- 48–47AARP Michigan polleffectively a dead heat, within the survey's 3.3-point margin of error — Fox 2 Detroit
- 5 yearsthe timeline problembetween the 2005 death of Vance's grandmother “Mamaw” and his first meeting with Usha at Yale Law in 2010 — the gap that makes the “meet Papaw” joke impossible on its face
- 2separate viral incidentsthe Vance-family posts and the Watters circumcision exchange, both inside a single week of the general-election campaign
The fight started at a Vance campaign stop on Friday, August 21, at the Cleveland-Cliffs Middletown Works steel plant in Vance’s own Ohio hometown. Vance revisited a speech El-Sayed gave at CAIR’s 2022 annual banquet criticizing an Oklahoma ballot measure that barred courts from considering Sharia law — and invoked the grandfather he calls “Papaw,” a union welder of 40 years. “I’d love to go back in time and tell my Papaw 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 said. “That’s not my Papaw’s Democratic Party.”
El-Sayed said Vance had distorted a decade-old comment, then turned the attack toward Vance’s own marriage: “How do you look your parents-in-law in the eye and say that somehow they’re less American than you are?” — a reference to Usha Vance’s parents, who were born in India. The next day, he went further on X.
So do we think JD is taking Usha with him back in time to meet Papaw, or no…
The joke only works if Vance’s grandfather could plausibly have met Usha and objected to her on racial grounds. He couldn’t have met her at all. Vance’s grandmother, Bonnie “Mamaw” Blanton Vance, died on April 24, 2005; his grandfather, “Papaw,” predeceased her. Vance didn’t meet Usha until 2010, as a first-year Yale Law student — five years after Mamaw was gone. He wrote in his 2016 memoir, Hillbilly Elegy, that “it is one of the great regrets of my life that Mamaw and Papaw never met her.” El-Sayed’s dig assumed a meeting the timeline makes impossible — a large part of why it became the story instead of Vance’s original attack.
El-Sayed didn’t stop at the Papaw post. In the same weekend stretch he wrote that “JD Vance has Brown kids who he thinks are less American than everyone else. Usha, like, get out. Okay? Still got time,” and, responding separately to a Trump attack calling him a “communist fanatic,” mocked White House aide Natalie Harp: “Natalie, I think he’s had a little too much iPad for the week. He needs his rest.” Three separate targets, none of them Vance himself, in under 48 hours.
The backlash was immediate and bipartisan in tone if not in source. Rep. Brandon Gill (R-TX) posted the line that stuck.
Why does Abdulrahman Mohamed El-Sayed just assume that all White midwestern grandparents are racist?
“Racist creep” became the shorthand across conservative coverage by Sunday. El-Sayed’s campaign did not walk the posts back.
Two days later, on Monday, August 24, El-Sayed joined Jesse Watters on Jesse Watters Primetime to defend medical procedures for transgender minors. Watters pressed him directly: “So Abdul, you’re a doctor, right? So you think it’s OK for a parent to slash his kid’s ding-a-ling off?” El-Sayed turned it back on the host: “I mean, so, do you really wanna have this conversation? Are you circumcised?” Watters, caught off guard, replied, “Ah! Yeah, but I mean, uh, that’s a personal question, doctor!”
Watters tried to draw a line — “A circumcision’s different than castration” — and El-Sayed pressed the analogy further: “I just think it’s a problem that you think you get to decide what happens between a parent, a doctor, and a patient. I’m just saying that, yes, circumcision is surgery on a kid’s ding-a-ling, so if you really wanna bring that up, you can.” The next night on The Five, Watters got the last word: “Well, I guess everybody now knows I’m circumcised,” he said. “Usually you look at the headlines, and if your headlines are all about your penis, usually you’ve done something very wrong.”
The Department of Health and Human Services weighed in the same day, distancing itself from the comparison in a statement to The Daily Signal from press secretary Grace Davis Jamison.
“Comparing sex-rejecting procedures, which alter healthy reproductive anatomy and can result in irreversible harm, to a routine, limited medical procedure is a gross distortion of their fundamentally different scope and consequences.”
Grace Davis Jamison, HHS Press Secretary — statement to The Daily Signal, August 25, 2026
Usha Vance answered the Papaw jab herself two days later, in an August 26 interview on Fox & Friends. She didn’t dispute the timeline — she leaned into it, and into the family that raised her husband after his grandparents were gone.
“I have to admit, I kind of laughed... I do know and love the children that they raised — his mom, his aunt and uncle — and they have never been anything but incredibly loving.”
Second Lady Usha Vance — Fox & Friends, August 26, 2026
Two days after that, on Friday, August 28, the Michigan Republican Party and a group of Indian American Republicans held a press conference at the party’s Troy office. The event was organized specifically around the Vance posts, not the circumcision exchange, and its message was pointed: Sunny Reddy, the Michigan GOP’s co-chair, told reporters El-Sayed could “debate him on immigration, debate him on the economy, debate him on foreign policy. But leave his wife and children out of it.”
Sunny Reddy — Michigan Republican Party Co-Chair: “This is no longer political disagreement. This is a pattern of personal, racial and misogynistic attacks on an Indian American woman, her marriage, her pregnancy and her children.”
Also speaking: Hima Kolanagireddy, RNC National Committeewoman; Krish Mathrani, Michigan GOP Youth Chair; Ashok Baddi, candidate for the state House’s 56th District; Dr. Haranath Policherla, an Indian American neurologist; and Ted Goodman, Michigan GOP Communications Director.
Former Michigan gubernatorial nominee Tudor Dixon (R) had made the same argument in sharper terms days earlier, tying the Vance and Harp posts together as a single pattern rather than two isolated jokes.
He goes after Usha. He goes after Natalie. This coward picks on women who are not in his fight. Imagine how he would treat female staffers in the halls of Congress.
Not every Democrat was thrilled either. Former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau used his own running “Don’t Talk About It for a Day” bit to prod Democrats toward message discipline — a signal that El-Sayed’s combativeness was becoming a problem of his own party’s making, too.
None of this is happening in a race Michigan Democrats can afford to treat as safe. El-Sayed narrowly beat Rep. Haley Stevens in the August 4 primary, and the general election against Rogers is close enough to be genuinely competitive — AARP’s Michigan poll has it inside its own 3.3-point margin of error (48–47), while Susquehanna gives El-Sayed a wider 46–39 edge. Peters’ retirement already made this an open seat in a state Republicans need for a Senate majority; a candidate whose viral moments keep drawing more attention than his platform makes that math worse, not better.
Abdul El-Sayed (D) — former Detroit health director, Democratic nominee, defeated Rep. Haley Stevens in the August 2026 primary.
Mike Rogers (R) — former U.S. representative, Republican nominee, unopposed in the primary.
Both are running for the seat Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI) is vacating after announcing in January 2025 that he would not seek re-election.
El-Sayed’s allies can note, fairly, that Vance raised his grandfather first and Watters asked the more graphic question. Neither fact changes what happened next: twice in one week, the nominee for a closely contested Senate seat escalated and handed Republicans a viral clip they didn’t have to build themselves.
Abdul El-Sayed had two chances in one week to land a punch on JD Vance and Fox News. Both times, the punch missed and the recoil hit him instead — a joke whose premise — a grandfather alive enough to object — was years out of date, and a live-television exchange that left Jesse Watters, not El-Sayed, looking like the reasonable one. Michigan Republicans didn’t need to manufacture a closing argument. El-Sayed handed them one, twice, in a race close enough that either could decide it.
