Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic US Senate candidate in Michigan, has hit back at Republican vice-president JD Vance’s onslaught against him, saying it is “evil” to deprive people of healthcare and affordable groceries.

Vance, in a Monday speech that railed against undocumented immigrants, cast El-Sayed as representative of “terrible evil” and as someone who fights for “one group at the expense of others”.

El-Sayed, who would become the first Muslim US senator if he wins in November, accused Vance of a “dog whistle” at the Islamophobic attacks he has faced throughout his campaign.

While Vance did not directly invoke El-Sayed’s religion during his speech in Sterling Heights, Michigan, the vice-president warned: “There’s something about Abdul El-Sayed that is very, very evil. And on the rise in the United States of America today.”

El-Sayed retorted in a statement: “Evil is ripping healthcare away from working people in exchange for tax breaks for billionaires. Evil is making people pay more for groceries and gas while pushing for trade wars and actual war. Evil is dividing people for your own gain. Evil is selling out your morals for a little bit of power.”

In his speech, Vance repeatedly claimed that El-Sayed prioritized his ethnic group over others, and called attention to comments El-Sayed made after the attack on Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan, earlier this year, where a man rammed a truck filled with gas and fireworks into a synonogue with families inside. As part of his initial response to the attack, El-Sayed noted the attacker had lost family members in an airstrike in Lebanon, saying “hurt people hurt people”. El-Sayed recently said he “made a mistake” and should have issued a statement that solely condemned the attack.

Vance said in his speech: “When you have people who start to say my ethnic group deserves something and yours doesn’t, or that ethnic group is good and this other ethnic group is bad, that is how you erode the very foundations of commonality and common citizenship that we need to continue to have the United States be the most powerful and prosperous nation anywhere in the world.”

Vance also told El-Sayed to “keep my wife’s name the hell out of your mouth, because she’s way out of your league”.

The jab was in response to comments El-Sayed had made about Vance’s family, after the vice-president said in an Ohio speech he would struggle to go back in time and explain the modern Democratic party to his late grandfather, whom he called “Papaw”. In those remarks, Vance baselessly accused El-Sayed of wanting to impose sharia law.

After Vance’s comments about Papaw, El- Sayed wrote on X: “So do we think JD is taking [his wife] Usha with him back in time to meet Papaw, or no?”

Rightwing commentators called the post racist, and said it was out of bounds to bring up spouses.

Usha Vance, who is Indian American, told Fox News that although she had not met her husband’s grandparents, she said Vance’s family was loving to her, and she believed his grandparents would have been loving toward her as well.

El-Sayed told CNN on Monday night he would “rather not talk about spouses at all”. But he said he brought up Usha Vance because JD Vance’s political philosophy relies on an idea that some people are “more American” than others. He asked why Vance would invoke his grandfather unless it was to hark back to a time when people like El-Sayed were “less than normal” in American politics.

Last month, Trump posted a photo of El-Sayed and his wife alongside one of Trump and his wife, which El-Sayed said was an attempt “to highlight the fact that my wife wears a hijab, as if to make an argument that that’s somehow less American”. Trump used El-Sayed’s full name, which Republicans have done to call attention to his ethnicity and religion, and wrote “two VERY DIFFERENT America’s [sic]”.

El-Sayed told CNN: “I believe in an America where any of us – me, his wife, any of us with different color skin or who pray different ways – can be just as American as JD and his Papaw, but he’s not making that argument.

“He [Vance] likes to dog whistle about these things, but when you actually call him out on it, he acts like he would never bring anything like that into our political conversation, despite him and his boss doing that every single day.”

The escalating attacks come as Mike Rogers, the Republican Senate nominee, seeks to appeal to moderate Democrats and Jewish Americans following a bruising primary that saw El-Sayed narrowly defeat the pro-Israel congresswoman Haley Stevens.

In closing his speech, Vance called on Michigan voters to “reject” El-Sayed, saying he “defends literal terrorism”. Vance urged people to vote for Rogers.

“I’m asking you to send the crazy people to the curb, send a message to the elected leadership of the Democratic party that if you want us to vote for you, you’ve got to stop sending us crazy people to represent your party,” Vance said.

El-Sayed referred to Vance and Rogers as “sock puppets from Ohio and Florida”, a reference to Vance’s home state and Rogers’ residence in Florida.

He said: “We understand what’s at stake, and Michiganders will show you at the ballot box this November when we send Mike Rogers packing.”