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Page A6From§Eachthe coffee break edition — 1 September 2026

Vance wins over Republican Jewish voters same week he calls Michigan Senate candidate 'very, very evil.'

By SalStaff Writer · the coffee break edition, 1 September 2026

Photograph via The New York Times, from “JD Vance Called Michigan Senate Candidate Abdul El-Sayed ‘Evil’ in Speech”, 1 September 2026 — the original report

As it ran on the front

Watch the hands, not the mouth. In the same stretch of days, JD Vance is out here charming Republican Jewish donors who'd been holding back, working the room, doing the full handshake tour — and turning right around to call a Michigan Senate candidate 'very, very evil' to a crowd that cheered it. Same guy, same week, two completely different registers, and both are the same move: pick who gets the warm handshake and who gets the label, and use the label to make the warm handshake feel like loyalty instead of politics.

Here's what nobody says out loud: 'evil' isn't a policy critique, it's a permission slip. You don't have to argue with a guy's tax plan if you've already told the room he's evil — you just have to clap. Meanwhile the courting operation runs on the exact opposite fuel: reassurance, listening tour, 'I hear your concerns,' the whole treatment. One community gets outreach. One candidate gets flattened into a word you use for things you don't have to debate. That's not rhetoric getting hot, that's rhetoric doing its actual job, which is deciding in advance who you owe an argument to and who you don't.…

…(cont) And here's the part that should bother you even if you don't follow Michigan Senate primaries: this is a repeatable tool. It doesn't matter who's in the crosshairs this cycle, the mechanism is portable — court the base you need, torch the opponent you don't, and do both loud enough that the contrast reads as strength instead of what it actually is, which is triage. You're watching a guy manage two audiences with two different vocabularies in the same seven days, and the only people who don't notice are the ones only getting one of the two speeches.

El-Sayed swung back, which is his right and probably good politics, but notice what he had to spend energy doing: defending against an adjective. That's the tax. Not a policy disagreement, not a debate over a vote — an adjective, 'evil,' thrown by the sitting Vice President at a Senate candidate, and now that candidate's press cycle is about denying he's evil instead of talking about anything he'd actually do in office. That's the whole play, and it worked exactly as designed, at least for the week.

“Watch the hands, not the mouth. In the same stretch of days, JD Vance is out here charming Republican Jewish donors who'd been holding back, working the room, doing the full handshake tour, and turning right around to call a Michigan Senate candidate 'very, very evil' to a crowd that cheered it. Same guy, same week, two completely different registers, and both are the same move: pick who gets the warm handshake and who gets the label.”
Sal
“The Vice President is entitled to strong language about a candidate's record, that's just candid politics, and reaching out to Jewish Republican voters is called coalition-building. It's not a contradiction, it's — okay, it's two different messages to two different rooms, but that's just called messaging, every campaign does messaging.”
Chip

The receipts

Antisemitic incidents in 2025: 6,274 - the third-highest year since tracking began in 1979, with assaults at a record high ADL, 2025 Audit of Antisemitic Incidents

Vance wins over Republican Jews hesitant to support him
Washington Examinerright§

Vice President JD Vance delivered a speech behind closed doors at the annual Republican Jewish Coalition leadership summit on Monday in an attempt to win over pro-Israel Republicans who are hesitant to support him for a possible 2028…

This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front.