Representative Haley Stevens, a Democrat who has held a suburban Detroit district since 2019, announced on Sunday, November 1, that she is endorsing Republican Mike Rogers for the US Senate seat Michigan decides on Tuesday — abandoning Abdul El-Sayed, the Democrat who beat her in the party's August primary.
Stevens made the announcement in a video posted to social media. "I don't belong in Abdul's campaign," she said, adding that she was endorsing Rogers "today." Earlier the same day she had attended a service at Perfecting Church, a Black congregation in Detroit, alongside Rogers; his campaign posted a photograph of the two of them there.
Six days after she said the opposite
The reversal is recent and documented. As recently as last week, Stevens told CNN plainly: "I'm voting for the Democratic ticket." During the primary she had promised to endorse whoever won the nomination, and she did so after losing to El-Sayed.
What broke the truce was an advertisement. Stevens asked El-Sayed to disavow a spot run by an outside group that she described as antisemitic. A separate joint event, organised with Representative Jim Clyburn and El-Sayed, collapsed in the same dispute. Representative Debbie Dingell, who helped put that event together, said she was the one who called it off: "I'm the one who pulled it because it had become way too distracting." Dingell said she had asked Stevens not to attend, and that Stevens agreed.
Stevens' fiancé, Jason Turkish, has said he plans to vote for Rogers.
A seat that could decide the Senate
The Michigan seat is open: Democrat Gary Peters is retiring, and no incumbent is on the ballot. It is one of the small group of races that will settle which party controls the Senate for the next two years, and both campaigns have treated it as close.
The reaction split along the lines one would expect, and then some. President Donald Trump praised Stevens on social media for showing "great and almost unprecedented loyalty" to Michigan. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called the endorsement a "despicable betrayal" and described Rogers as a tool of Trump and of billionaire donors. Virgie Rollins, who chairs the Democratic National Committee's Black Caucus, was blunter still, calling Stevens "a sellout who used Black Michiganders for a political stunt" and saying Democrats are "ready to elect Abdul on Tuesday."
El-Sayed, for his part, declined to engage. He said he does not "think about Haley Stevens," and that he is focused on what voters raise with him — gas prices, the cost of groceries, air and water quality. On the dissent inside his own party he was brief: "there are always going to be some folks who have different opinions, and they're welcome to that."
Cross-party endorsements are not unknown in American politics, but one delivered by a sitting member of Congress against her own party's nominee, in a race that may determine control of the chamber, and twenty-four hours before polls open, is a different order of thing. Whether it moves votes in Oakland and Wayne counties — the suburbs Stevens knows best — is the question Tuesday answers.
Reporting from ABC News and Bridge Michigan.
