Ted Cruz

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The senator-elect told “The View” that Republicans resorted to petty insults because they had nothing substantial to say to voters themselves.

Senior Reporter, Entertainment Events Lead

Sen.-elect Abdul El-Sayed (D-Mich.) couldn’t help but laugh at one Republican’s ridiculous Islamophobic insult while discussing the venom that followed his campaign during a Thursday visit to “The View.”

Panelist Sunny Hostin told El-Sayed that while she knows politics aren’t pretty, she was still staggered by how “ugly” things got during his race against Republican Mike Rogers, whom El-Sayed defeated by seven points in Tuesday’s midterm election.

Hostin referenced when Vice President JD Vance said there was something “very, very evil” about El-Sayed and how Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) called the nation’s soon-to-be first Muslim senator a “jihadist leprechaun.”

“I don’t even know what that means,” Hostin said.

He then argued that Republican attacks on his campaign were limited to personal smears and assaults on his faith because the GOP had nothing substantial to sell voters.

Senator-elect @AbdulElSayed responds to the Islamophobic attacks against him: “You can talk about my name and my faith all day if you want to. But they’re not the reason you can’t afford gas or you can’t afford your groceries, not the reason you can’t see a doctor.” pic.twitter.com/oaXCdOYKXD

“If they had something to say about the price of gas or the price of groceries or the fact that people can’t see a doctor, they would’ve said it. But they didn’t have anything to say,” he explained, adding that he was prepared for his opponents to dangle that kind of “red meat” in front of their base.

“Here’s the problem with the red meat: It becomes an addiction,” El-Sayed went on. “Once you go there and you put that out there, then you’re forced to defend it. So what do they do? They double down. They triple down again.”

Admitting that the hate came as no surprise, El-Sayed said, “More often than not, people don’t want to actually debate the issues. Instead, they want to debase the politics, and that’s exactly what we saw.”

Panelist Joy Behar then applauded the senator-elect for handling President Donald Trump and his cronies with such poise, particularly after Trump said El-Sayed would “have to go through a metal detector before he’s allowed to go into the Senate.”

“I’ll do a metal detector all day because I have nothing to hide,” El-Sayed repeated. “But Donald, if you’re watching, a lie detector is still on the table.”