Abdul El-Sayed is running for the U.S. Senate in Michigan. He's the Democratic nominee in a toss-up race, with an election tomorrow.

So of course he spent part of last week on Democrat-friendly Hasan Minhaj's podcast talking about Pete Hegseth's high school basketball career.

"He would have rode the pine," El-Sayed said of the Secretary of War. "He probably got to start two games his entire career."

Hegseth was all-conference and all-state at Forest Lake Area High School in Minnesota. He went on to make the basketball team at Princeton, a Division I program.

But El-Sayed wasn't really mad about basketball. He was mad about Hegseth's parents.

Hegseth's father, Brian, coached the Forest Lake boys' team. El-Sayed brought up Hegseth's mom too, describing her showing up in his jersey with a cap and a cake. Then he got to what was really bothering him.

"As a kid whose parents never came," El-Sayed said, he was a "brown kid whose parents, like, you know, no matter what you do, you're never enough."

Then he turned back to Hegseth. "Somebody told you you're a lot better than you really are," he said. "Bro, you grew up thinking that you were somehow special, but you are not."

A grown man, a doctor, a former health official, running for one of 100 seats in the U.S. Senate, went on a podcast and resented another man's parents for cheering him on at his games.

And El-Sayed wasn't exactly sitting in the bleachers himself. He was a three-sport varsity captain in wrestling, football and lacrosse. He had plenty of his own games to play. It just sounds like nobody came to watch.

Nicki Minaj, of all people, saw it immediately. "It's a misplaced anger at his own parents," she wrote, and told El-Sayed to "mend his heart."

Hegseth's dad had a shorter diagnosis. Brian Hegseth called it "little man syndrome" and said his son was an absolute star on the court.

El-Sayed didn't stop at basketball. In the same interview, he called Hegseth and Vice President JD Vance "mini-fool bullies." That's a man who's supposed to be making his closing argument to Michigan voters, and he's using it to trash talk the Secretary of War's childhood.

Then there's the racial edge. El-Sayed framed it as a "brown kid" who was never enough versus a guy raised to believe he was special. You don't have to work hard to see what he was implying about Hegseth.

Flip it around. Picture a Republican Senate nominee going on a podcast, describing himself as a white kid whose parents never showed up, and telling a minority cabinet secretary that his family made him think he was better than he is. That candidate would be finished before the episode finished uploading. El-Sayed got a few days of coverage, mostly from the right.

Michigan's choice tomorrow is between a Republican with a record and a Democrat who spent his final week on a podcast complaining that another man's mom brought cake to his games.

Pete Hegseth's parents showed up for him, and Abdul El-Sayed still can't get over it.