Vice President JD Vance rallied for Republican Senate nominee Mike Rogers in Monroe, Michigan, on Thursday, casting the state's toss-up Senate race as "a battle between grievance and gratitude" and calling Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed a "little weasel."
"Michigan deserves better. You deserve better than a little weasel who should shut his mouth and show a little gratitude to the country that gave him everything," Vance said.
El-Sayed spent the day campaigning with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Responding later, he said Vance had called him "a little weasel," and fired back by calling himself a "wolverine," using an expletive.
The Rogers–El-Sayed contest is one of the closest Senate races in the country ahead of the Nov. 3 election — one of the handful of contests likely to decide control of the Senate.
The setting mattered. Monroe, Michigan — a toss-up state, a toss-up race, and a vice president sent in to draw the contrast in the starkest terms available. "A battle between grievance and gratitude" was the frame; "little weasel" was the blade.
El-Sayed's answer — the "wolverine," delivered with an expletive at his own rally the same day — told its own story about the temperature of this race. He did not rebut the charge so much as wear a fiercer animal's name. The crowd laughed. The clip traveled.
Strip out the insults and Vance's argument is a familiar one: that Michigan deserves a senator grateful to the country, and that Rogers — the Republican nominee, the veteran — is that man. El-Sayed spent the day with Ocasio-Cortez; Vance spent it telling Monroe the choice is between someone who loves the country and someone who resents it.
One of the closest Senate races in the country, nineteen days out, and both sides have stopped pretending this is about policy papers. It is about who these men are. Nov. 3 is the verdict.
The "wolverine" line got the laugh, but Vance's framing is the one doing the real work: gratitude versus grievance. It is the choice, as he put it, between a nominee who spent his life serving the country in uniform and out, and one he says resents the places that gave him everything. Michigan's voters settle the argument on Nov. 3.
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