How an attempt at Democratic unity in Michigan imploded

By Eric Bradner, Edward-Isaac Dovere, Brian Todd, CNN

Detroit (CNN) — As recently as Saturday night, the prospect of Democrat Haley Stevens endorsing Republican Mike Rogers in Michigan’s Senate race had seemed implausible.

Stevens issued a statement praising Democratic candidate Abdul El-Sayed for saying he disagreed with a controversial advertisement that blamed the high cost of living in Michigan on the United States’ aid to Israel. Despite a week of speculation about her withdrawing an endorsement for El-Sayed, her primary rival, she repeatedly said that she would do no such thing.

When staffers reached out last week to urge her not to endorse Rogers, Stevens replied in a text message, according to a person who saw the message: “Omg why would you think I would do that??!!”

As recently as midnight Saturday, she told a key ally that she was sticking with El-Sayed. Then on Sunday morning, things changed.

She appeared at a Black church in Detroit with Rogers and then announced her change of heart to reporters gathered outside and on social media.

Her move stunned the political world — including Stevens’ friends, colleagues and even her own congressional staffers, most of whom found out about her decision on social media and promptly quit, according to a statement from her chief of staff and people familiar with the matter.

The question that could decide Michigan’s Senate race — and potentially, with it, which party will have majority control of the chamber for the last two years of Donald Trump’s presidency — is whether Stevens’ endorsement of Rogers will change votes or amount to more than political melodrama.

There have long been signs of discontent with El-Sayed within the Democratic coalition. Stevens was strongest in the August primary with Black and Jewish Democrats, some of whom have balked at supporting El-Sayed, a Muslim who is a strident critic of Israel’s actions in Gaza and an advocate for ending foreign aid for Israel’s military.

Prior to Stevens’ defection, CNN’s most recent poll of the Michigan Senate race had El-Sayed leading Rogers by seven points – with 95% support from Democratic likely voters. Already, Stevens’ endorsement of Rogers is becoming something of a rally-around-the-flag moment for Democratic leaders — uniting a coalition in the race’s final days around a shared sense of the stakes at hand.

Among the Democratic leaders who denounced Stevens and strongly backed El-Sayed were two of his most powerful intra-party critics: Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer, who tacitly supported Stevens in the primary, and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who just days ago said El-Sayed’s views on Israel were “wrong” and “more than concerning.”

Schumer accused Stevens of a “despicable betrayal.”

“Senate Democrats are united in our support for Abdul El-Sayed, because we know he will fight for the economic interests of working families in Michigan, unlike Mike Rogers, who is a tool of Donald Trump and billionaire donors,” the New York Democrat said.

Schumer added that Democrats “are equally united in our total revulsion at the racist, Islamophobic, and over-the-top false attacks on Abdul by Republicans.”

Pelosi, meanwhile, said on social media that El-Sayed “must win,” and that Stevens “has chosen to dangerously betray Michigan families’ healthcare, freedoms and future with her horrific endorsement of Mike Rogers.”

As Stevens and Rogers spoke to reporters outside the church after the service, an individual in the crowd shouted: “Haley’s a traitor!”

An El-Sayed campaign spokeswoman said he had raised $1.2 million in the hours after Stevens endorsed Rogers — his second-largest total in a single day since winning the primary.

What Stevens said on CNN

In an interview Sunday night with CNN’s Anderson Cooper, Stevens said that endorsing Rogers was “just a weight off my shoulders.” But she struggled to answer questions about why she’d changed her mind.

“Abdul has been getting angrier and angrier,” Stevens said. “There are so many Democrats who want to vote for our Democratic nominee, and they’re just being told, ‘Hey, this is a party you don’t belong in, or this is a campaign you don’t belong in.’”

What she didn’t explain, despite being asked several times, was what had changed between Saturday — when she told several Democrats she intended to appear with El-Sayed and Clyburn at church — and Sunday morning, when she instead went to a Detroit church with Rogers and endorsed him.

She said she was tired of watching El-Sayed stand with Hasan Piker — but didn’t address the reality that El-Sayed’s campaign appearances with Piker came before the primary election, and Stevens had endorsed El-Sayed after that primary’s conclusion.

“I’m just sick of the people he stands with,” Stevens said.

Michigan Rep. Debbie Dingell, a Democrat who had told CNN Sunday that Stevens reassured her Saturday that she wasn’t switching sides, reacted by saying: “That was one of the most painful interviews I have ever watched.”

Why did Stevens switch her endorsement?

Shortly after their primary, which El-Sayed won by less than a percentage point, the two hugged at a state party unity breakfast. But they had not campaigned together in months – or spoken directly during that time, as CNN reported last week.

Democrats attempted to negotiate a joint appearance Sunday at a Black church in Detroit alongside South Carolina Rep. Jim Clyburn, one of the party’s most influential figures. The goal was to shore up Black support for El-Sayed.

One longtime Michigan Democratic operative said many older Black voters tend to cast their ballots on Election Day, rather than voting early, “because of a well-earned higher skepticism of absentee voting.” Those votes could be an essential piece of the Democratic coalition El-Sayed is trying to hold together.

Stevens said in a statement Friday morning that Clyburn, who endorsed and campaigned with her in the primary, had invited her to the church — and that she would be attending, marking the first time she would appear jointly with El-Sayed on the campaign trail.

However, she also issued a list of demands for El-Sayed — including attempting to pressure him into denouncing an outside group’s new advertisement that blamed the United States’ foreign aid for Israel for Americans’ struggles with high costs. The ad features two people in a grocery store suggesting they can’t afford basic goods due to the aid. It echoed what El-Sayed has often said on the campaign trail about Israel, even as he distanced himself from the ad.

El-Sayed responded in a statement Friday night that Stevens “seems intent on relitigating a primary that ended three months ago.”

It became clear that the joint appearance wouldn’t happen late Friday, when CNN and other outlets reported that El-Sayed’s campaign had asked Stevens to skip all campaign events in the race’s closing days. Dingell said on CNN Saturday that she was the one who delivered the message to Stevens.

Still, on Saturday, El-Sayed denounced the ad, and Stevens issued a statement praising him for doing so — developments that made her decision Sunday more of a head-scratcher to many Democrats close to her. Dingell told CNN Sunday that Stevens had reassured her overnight that she wasn’t switching sides.

Standing next to Rogers on Sunday, Stevens mentioned four times that El-Sayed’s campaign had excluded her from his events. She pointed to it again in her endorsement video posted on X, noting El-Sayed “had said that I was no longer welcome in his campaign and that I should stay away. And he’s right.”

“My vote for Senate is going to be with Mike Rogers, and I will tell you why. Because we have to stand with country. We can’t stand with hate. We can’t stand with Hasan Piker,” she said.

Party officials moved swiftly on Sunday to publicly condemn Stevens and criticize her focus on being uninvited. But they privately said there was blame to go around — notably for El-Sayed.

“He acted like he won the primary in a landslide, but he didn’t,” one longtime Democratic official told CNN. “Abdul gave himself his own October surprise.”

El-Sayed went ahead Sunday with the event. After asking reporters to focus on questions about issues facing people in his state rather than “two folks who aren’t here right now,” El-Sayed was asked if he believed Stevens had betrayed his party by backing Rogers.

“At the end of the day, I actually don’t think about Haley Stevens,” he said, standing next to Clyburn. “I think about, like I said, the 9,999,998 people who are not those two. Because you know what? I’m just less interested in the politics of it all than I am in the policy of it all.”

A core tension in Michigan reemerges

A deeply emotional argument for many in the Democratic Party became particularly personal for El-Sayed and Stevens, both of whom are known for not listening much to advisers and following their own instincts.

Stevens was backed in the primary by tens of millions of dollars in spending from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee — a flashpoint between her and El-Sayed, who denounced AIPAC and the influence of money in politics at nearly every campaign event. El-Sayed was criticized for campaigning with Piker, the stridently pro-Palestinian live-streamer with a long history of controversial comments about Jews, including comparing Jewish residents who oppose El-Sayed to members of the Ku Klux Klan, remarks widely denounced as antisemitic. AIPAC on X reshared Stevens’ video on Sunday endorsing Rogers.

During the primary, El-Sayed portrayed Stevens as an AIPAC puppet and called her “the least capable candidate in America.”

“Everyone in America understands you want to blame all of your problems on Jewish Americans,” Stevens responded on X days before the August 4 election.

As AIPAC’s allied groups boosted her campaign, the animosity grew too. El-Sayed’s multiple shots at Stevens as being a puppet angered her and made her dig in. Meanwhile, she was rankled by his repeated refusal to affirm that Israel had a right to exist as a Jewish state and his statements that it was committing genocide in Gaza and that funding to the country was hurting Michiganders.

Many of Stevens’ Democratic critics on Sunday blamed Stevens’ fiancé, Michigan lawyer Jason Turkish, who endorsed Rogers last week and did media interviews criticizing El-Sayed as uncommitted to Jewish safety.

One former Stevens staffer noted Sunday that after she and Turkish became engaged in May — something they kept private until after the August primary — Stevens grew more focused on defending Israel and AIPAC, even as the Democratic Party and US public opinion as a whole has become more skeptical of Israel. In the ex-staffer’s view, she was speaking less about the message she’d run on and won with before: growing Michigan’s economy and protecting manufacturing.

The topic often came up while preparing for interviews or donor calls, the staffer said. Preparing for a June interview, Stevens pressed aides on why she should avoid defending AIPAC when she had done so in a 2022 House primary against former Rep. Andy Levin and won.

Speculation about Turkish’s influence burst into the open on Sunday, as Democrats — many of whom had either spoken to Stevens recently or been briefed by people who had — suggested he was playing an outsized role for a candidate’s partner.

Former Pennsylvania Rep. Susan Wild, who in 2023 was Stevens’ roommate in Washington and whose children regularly text with Stevens, said she was “terribly sad and disappointed” by her friend’s “appalling” move.

“If this is because of her new relationship (about which many of us were so happy for her after she lost the primary), all I can say is that any woman who abandons her friends when a new guy comes along is no friend at all,” Wild said.

Stevens’ mother, Maria Marcotte, a retired advertising executive, told CNN in a statement that her daughter’s fiancé had nothing to do with the change of heart — and that Marcotte herself had also voted for Rogers.

“Haley is her own woman. She always has been. Suggesting a man made her decision for her is insulting to her, and it is insulting to me as her mother,” Marcotte said.

She pointed to episodes in which progressive pro-Palestinian activists hounded Stevens during the primary campaign.

“Abdul should not have thrown her out of the campaign for speaking her truth,” she said. “Haley made this choice herself, with her eyes open, the way she has made every hard choice in her life. And I know Haley will support whoever wins this election, because that is who she is. I have never been prouder of her.”

Who’s to blame?

The anger between the two rivals kept growing from a distance after El-Sayed won the primary.

El-Sayed grouped Stevens in with all those he decided he didn’t need to build his coalition after his primary victory. Stevens would tell people that she thought he was running a weird and losing campaign, but that she didn’t feel it was her obligation to fix it.

Rogers aides, aware that his path to victory largely depended on a Democratic civil war, restrained themselves to spreading word of discontent and convincing themselves they weren’t just fantasizing that they could get her all the way to endorsing.

Then came the grocery-store ad that rekindled the tension. It was released by a group linked to Cenk Uygur, co-creator of The Young Turks and — in a twist practically designed to create acrimony — Piker’s uncle.

As Stevens demanded he denounce Uygur’s ad, El-Sayed returned to name-checking AIPAC in his statement criticizing Stevens, something Michigan attorney general Dana Nessel, a Stevens primary backer who has raised concerns about Jewish safety, asked him to stop doing before she endorsed him. Nessel told CNN in October that El-Sayed had agreed to her request.

Stevens’ defection threatened to worsen El-Sayed’s standing with Jewish voters. Rogers has already predicted publicly that he could win as much as half the Jewish vote on Tuesday.

“It feels like over the last eight weeks, Dr. El-Sayed has become more egregious in the language he’s been using,” said Rabbi Aaron Starr, the president of the Michigan Board of Rabbis and a leader of the “Nonnegotiable” group of Jewish leaders. That group calls on El-Sayed to do more about concerns regarding Jewish safety and to affirm Jewish sovereignty in Israel. Starr and other Jewish leaders held a call Sunday afternoon to discuss the endorsement flip.

But Stevens was also damaged with key allies.

Dingell, long a peacemaker within the state party, chided Stevens’ “continued efforts to get attention.”

“Unfortunately, she’s seriously hurt herself,” Dingell told CNN.

Curtis Hertel, the chairman of the Michigan Democratic Party, effectively booted Stevens from it. He wrote on social media: “Congresswoman Stevens is not a current member of the Michigan Democratic Party, nor will she be in the future.”

Many Democrats in the state felt that for most of the preceding year, Stevens was viable in the Senate race largely because she’d cornered Schumer into effectively backing her. Into the spring, complaints circulated about what a lackluster primary campaign she was running, how much she was struggling on the stump, and how she was lashing out against those who wouldn’t support her.

Despite her eventual strength with African American voters, Black church leaders were angry about her efforts to push for early endorsements. Chokwe Pitchford, a 27-year-old district commissioner from Benton Harbor and seen as a local rising star, told a story that he says encapsulated the kind of experience other Michigan Democrats he knows had: One morning, he discovered a graphic online from Stevens saying he’d endorsed her, even though as he posted in response, they’d never spoken.

“Instead of reaching out and apologizing, I had people from around the state calling from unknown numbers saying my political career is over if I don’t take that down,” Pitchford told CNN. “Some of us tried to ring this alarm bell a year ago; there was a problem here.”

Indeed, the most robust praise for Stevens on Sunday was coming from Republicans.

“Haley said what few people are willing to say. She showed great and almost unprecedented loyalty to the Great People of Michigan with what she did,” Trump wrote on Truth Social.

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Todd reported from Detroit. CNN’s Dana Bash, Manu Raju, Nicky Robertson and Jeff Zeleny contributed to this report.