Abdul El-Sayeds Are you circumcised? blunder could cost Dems and create greater party fracture

There are sentences one expects to hear in a United States Senate campaign. And then there are sentences that, until Monday night, had probably never been uttered during one. During a live interview on his show, Fox News host Jesse Watters asked Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed, “So you think it’s OK for a parent to slash his kid’s ding-a-ling off?” El-Sayed responded with a question of his own: “Are you circumcised?” Welcome to the 2026 midterms.It’s only going to go downhill from here. The exchange was typical of the dodge-and-weave strategy El-Sayed used throughout the Democratic primary race, as he smugly evaded tough and rational questions about his policy positions on hot-button issues. El-Sayed wasn’t just unprepared to answer questions on transgender medical interventions for children; he was equally unable to intelligently discuss Sharia law, reparations, healthcare costs and windmills on Lake Michigan. His smarmy performance has been a gift to Republicans who see in the candidate a dark turn toward a new generation of extremists running as Democrats: elites promoting socialism while remaining deeply disconnected from the concerns of everyday Americans. But it’s the issue of transgender “treatment” of children that presents Democrats with a real risk of coalitional fracture — and El-Sayed’s response to Watters indicated how unprepared they are for that eventuality. Consider the voters El-Sayed is courting in Michigan: progressives in college towns like Ann Arbor and religious Muslim voters in places like Dearborn. Democrats are counting on the latter to come through for them in November — but outside of a shared hostility toward Israel, the two groups have remarkably little in common. El-Sayed’s quip comparing gender-reassignment surgery to circumcision served as a detonation device between the two groups. Circumcision is, after all, one of the few religious practices Jews and Muslims emphatically ...