Vice President JD Vance has attributed Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed’s primary victory to “self-hating white liberals” turning out en masse to vote for him.

The left-leaning El-Sayed beat centrist state representative Haley Stevens Tuesday after winning the endorsement of prominent progressives, including Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders and New York Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, surprising the party establishment.

Stevens reportedly outspent El-Sayed’s campaign by nine-to-one, with the American Israel Public Affairs Committee contributing $32 million to her war chest, but her defeat indicated a clear public appetite for candidates pulling further to the left to offer an alternative to Trumpism come 2028.

Interviewed by Laura Ingraham on Fox News’s The Ingraham Angle Wednesday, Vance reacted with scorn, dismissing El-Sayed as one of “these DSA types”. That is despite the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) declining to support him.

“He basically represents the modern Democratic coalition, which is self-hating white liberals united to people who just came to the country for the first time and don’t actually have the sense of appreciation for it that they should,” the VP told the presenter.

“Those are the people who are voting for El-Sayed. He doesn’t have the constituency among the working-class he pretends to represent.”

Vance, a graduate of Yale Law School, went on to hypothesize that college-educated young Americans were attracted to El-Sayed’s campaign because they had been “sold a whole promise at the elite universities in our country, and that promise is that they were going to be able to go to college, get a degree, and everything was gonna work out fine for them.”

He continued: “In reality, actually, a lot of universities sold these kids a bill of goods. They gave them a lot of debt. They did not give them useful skills or useful credentials, and a lot of these kids are very angry.

“But that really is – if you look at the data, Laura – the base of the Democratic Party today is downwardly mobile, hyper-progressive, well-educated people. People, I think, who were sold a bill of goods by universities have a lot of debt, but not a good job to show for it.”

Earlier in the day, the VP had attended an anti-fraud roundtable event in Washington at which he said in passing: “God forbid, you're going to have President El-Sayed in three years, we don’t want him to undo all the incredible work that we've been doing.”

The candidate got his right of reply when he appeared on MS NOW’s All in with Chris Hayes Wednesday evening and was shown a clip of Vance’s comments to Ingraham by stand-in host Jacob Soboroff.

“Is that Peter Thiel’s boy, with that Ohio charisma he’s got?” El-Sayed responded with a grin, alluding to the vice president’s earlier career as a protege of the tech billionaire when he was a venture capitalist in Silicon Valley.

“That guy… I think we’ve had enough of him. I think the last thing that he said that made any sense was Hillbilly Elegy – after he said that Donald Trump had no business being president of anything. That was the last time he made sense and then he decided to suck up to power.”

El-Sayed argued that Vance was symptomatic of a Republic class that would “do anything for power and money, including corrupt their office,” pivoting to an attack on former Michigan GOP Rep. Mike Rogers, the man he is running against in November for the chance to replace the retiring Sen. Gary Peters.

Trump also attacked El-Sayed Wednesday, resorting to old-fashioned Red Scare tactics as he told his audience at the Red Rock Casino Resort and Spa in Las Vegas, Nevada, that the Democrat was part of a wave of “communists” who would bring “squalor” and “death” to America.

“When I watch Abdul, he’s full of s***,” the president said. “Put him in office, you’re going to find out what he loves.

“He doesn’t love Israel. He doesn’t love Jewish people. He hates them. He hates them with a passion that burns in his heart.”

While the former public health official has criticized Israel’s actions in Gaza, he also made a point of thanking his Jewish supporters during his victory speech this week, vowing to represent constituents of all faiths.

“To all of my sisters and brothers of the Jewish faith, or any faith at all, or no faith at all, I want you to know that my commitment to your safety, my commitment to Jewish safety, is the same commitment that I have to the safety of my own daughters,” he said.