JD Vance turned the Michigan Senate contest personal on Monday night, telling a rally in a Detroit suburb that there was something very, very evil about the Democratic candidate Abdul El-Sayed and accusing him of seeking to destroy the country. The vice-president, campaigning for the Trump ally Mike Rogers, repeatedly linked El-Sayed to the Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, who once suggested the United States deserved the 9/11 attacks, and framed the candidate's choice as one between sympathy for the children targeted at Temple Israel and sympathy for their attacker. El-Sayed, who is Muslim, never used Piker's words and has since distanced himself from the streamer. Vance also warned him to keep his wife's name out of his mouth after El-Sayed appeared to suggest the vice-president's late grandfather would not have accepted Usha Vance, the second lady, who is Hindu. The 41-year-old hit back in a CNN interview hours later, redefining the word thrown at him: evil, he said, was stripping healthcare from working people in exchange for tax breaks for billionaires, raising the cost of groceries and petrol while pushing trade wars, dividing people for personal gain and selling out one's morals for power. He also clarified his earlier remarks about the Vance family, saying he had meant to show that the vice-president subscribes to a political philosophy in which some people count as more American than others, and accused the administration of starting wars abroad where there was peace. The race is among the most closely watched of the coming midterms and sits in a battleground state that Joe Biden carried in 2020 and Donald Trump won in 2024. A survey released earlier in the week by the Michigan firm Epic-MRA put El-Sayed four points ahead of Rogers, a former law enforcement officer with long experience in politics.