‘That’s Not My Grandpa’s Democratic Party’: JD Vance Blasts El-Sayed

Vice President JD Vance turned a Michigan Senate candidate into the face of everything he says has gone wrong with the Democratic Party.

Vance told supporters Friday at the Cleveland-Cliffs Middletown Works steel plant in his Ohio hometown that the party has walked away from the working people who once anchored it, singling out Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed. He recalled his late grandfather, who spent nearly 40 years as a welder at the plant and voted Democrat because he saw it as the party of union men.

Vance framed the modern party as one that answers to a different base. “This is the party, the Democrat Party of graduate students, rather than the union and nonunion workers who make this facility run,” he said in the address. He told the crowd it had drifted from the days of Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton, and now stood for “diversity quotas rather than opportunity for all.”