Stevens’ surprise defection portends more Democratic fights - Semafor
Democratic party leaders have found themselves unable to stave off an embarrassing schism in Michigan’s must-win Senate race, a crisis that may offer a glimpse of internal battles to come.
Days of frantic shuttle diplomacy and attempts to organize a joint appearance by erstwhile Senate primary rivals Abdul El-Sayed and Rep. Haley Stevens culminated in Stevens’ surprise Sunday endorsement of Republican nominee Mike Rogers.
Stevens appeared with Rogers at a Black church in Detroit less than 24 hours after vowing to colleagues that she would back El-Sayed, winning praise from President Donald Trump and calls for her eviction from the House Democratic Caucus. But perhaps the most stunning aspect of the crackup was how hard senior Democrats had worked to avoid it.
Party leaders like Reps. Debbie Dingell, D-Mich., and Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., were pushing hard to get El-Sayed and Stevens on the same page for a show of unity going into Tuesday’s critical elections. Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., said on national TV hours before Stevens’ defection that she had personally assured him on Saturday night she’d be backing El-Sayed.
Raskin told Semafor in an interview Sunday: “I was blindsided, and I feel dumbfounded by the whole thing.”
While the Senate race remains very close, it’s not clear how much Stevens’ turnabout will affect the final balloting. She has, however, laid bare deep divides within the party — principally over Israel and the establishment’s relationships with the left wing.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries’ statement backing El-Sayed after the flap did not mention Stevens, a member of his caucus, by name. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who had initially favored her as a better general election candidate than El-Sayed, called her endorsement of Rogers a “despicable betrayal.”
Many in the party believe leaders were powerless over Stevens: “I certainly don’t think it’s somebody else’s fault, other than Haley Stevens,” said a Michigan Democratic operative.
Yet Michigan, where El-Sayed was struggling to win over some Jewish and Black voters even before this week, is now set among the first-in-the-nation Democratic nominating states. And the party’s inability to come together during the final week of the election is likely to haunt it well into the 2028 primary.
Stevens kept her allies and staff in the dark through the whole process as she privately insisted she would keep backing Democrats, including El-Sayed.
As she and El-Sayed squabbled publicly over the last week, a few of her staff reached out to her discouraging her from endorsing Rogers, according to a source who’d worked on her race. Stevens’ response, according to the source: “Omg why would you think I would do that?!!”
By Sunday, many of her staff had resigned, slamming her Rogers endorsement.
“She lied to the people that she says she respects,” said the Michigan Democratic operative.
El-Sayed, who had implored Stevens not to campaign with him last week, brushed aside the news. “None of this matters,” he told reporters in Detroit.
Michigan party chair Curtis Hertel Jr. said Sunday on X Stevens was expelled from the state party. Meanwhile, national party leaders across the board were united in saying they supported El-Sayed.
Stevens faces rough waters ahead. She appears to have violated House Democratic caucus rules banning campaign activity for non-Democrats, and some in the caucus want to punish her. It’s not immediately clear whether Jeffries and Stevens have talked.
The Stevens-El-Sayed crackup had been building in the months since she lost to him in the primary. Stevens and other Michigan Democrats kept their distance from El-Sayed over his association with controversial streamer Hasan Piker and his positions on Israel.
The feud accelerated over the closing weeks of the campaign when Cenk Uygur’s Rebellion PAC began running the anti-Israel ad that would eventually convince Stevens to endorse Rogers. Now, Uygur says he never imagined that outcome when he aired it.“It wound up creating the perfect storm because it caused two weather fronts to collide,” Uygur told Semafor. “The establishment hated it with a passion and the internet loved it with equal passion. That’s what caused this explosion.”
Democrats are closing their campaigns this cycle with fairly unified, populist messaging about “affordability” and “corruption” that helps the super-rich stay wealthy. Underneath that messaging is a feud between the party’s left flank and centrist arm that’s bound to erupt after Tuesday’s results.
If El-Sayed loses, there will be a fight over blame between Democrats who spent tens of millions of dollars to support him and progressives who’ll argue that the party establishment can’t be trusted when leftist candidates win a nomination. This is in the air already, given Andrew Cuomo’s decision to run a third party campaign after losing the Democratic primary to democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani.
But if El-Sayed wins, his faction of the party will be able to say he did it with a knife plunged in his back by pro-Israel Democrats. That will weaken pro-Israel Democrats’ ability to say, as AIPAC does, that their agenda is “good policy and good politics.” That’s in the air too, with Democrats already gearing up to challenge Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., who’s stopped campaigning for other Democrats after feuding with pro-Palestine activists.
