What The Hell Is Going On In The Michigan Senate Race?

On Sunday morning, a sitting Democratic congresswoman sat in a Michigan church next to the Republican running for the Senate, before publicly endorsing him. 

In British terms, that’s like a Labour candidate losing a selection, then campaigning for the Tory against the Labour candidate who beat them, right before polling day.

The Senate seat opened when Democratic senator Gary Peters retired.

It is one of the few state seats Democrats held in states Trump won in 2024. Republicans haven’t won a Senate race in Michigan since 1994. So it’s an attractive job in American politics.

Republican Mike Rogers came close two years ago. He lost the state’s other seat to Elissa Slotkin by about 0.3 per cent. 

In August, the Democratic primary descended into a battle for the soul of the party.

Haley Stevens, a four-term congresswoman from the suburbs who was chief of staff on Obama’s task force to help save the car industry, was an establishment pick. 

The retiring senator, Peters, endorsed her. So did Governor Gretchen Whitmer, and the Democrats’ campaign arm backed her big time.

Abdul El-Sayed, an epidemiologist and former Detroit health commissioner, ran as a progressive, campaigned hard on Medicare for All, and was endorsed by Bernie Sanders. 

Israel and Gaza sat at the heart of the contest.

The pro-Israel lobby group AIPAC and its affiliate groups spent over $30m supporting Stevens, or more accurately opposing El-Sayed. 

It was close, but he won anyway.

Stevens appeared to take it on the chin, and, publicly at least, appeared to be a gracious loser in backing her former opponent against the staunchly pro-MAGA Rogers. 

As recently as Saturday night, the idea of her endorsing his Republican opponent, seemed implausible. 

One advert changed that. 

Rebellion PAC, an outside group linked to left-wing commentator Cenk Uygur, which isn’t affiliated with El-Sayed’s campaign, released an ad in which two people discuss grocery prices in a shop and blame American aid to Israel.

Stevens called the ad antisemitic and said it reflected arguments El-Sayed made in his campaign.

El-Sayed, who had no hand in the ad, pushed back and said he disagrees with it.. He also accused Stevens of ‘relitigating a primary that ended three months ago’. 

His campaign then briefed that she wouldn’t be welcome at a planned unity rally yesterday. 

So she went to church with Rogers instead and things went, frankly, batshit. 

In a video filmed in her car, she said El-Sayed had told her she was no longer welcome in his campaign, ‘and he’s right’.

Then she dropped the bombshell, ‘that’s why I am endorsing Mike Rogers for the United States Senate today’.

Democrats responded furiously. 

Local chair Curtis Hertel booted her out of the party and said she would not be a member in the future.

Stevens’ chief of staff, seemingly taken by surprise, and most of her team resigned and endorsed El-Sayed, with colleagues describing her as ‘petty, selfish and unhinged’.

A press conference with Rogers was cut short when protestors and hecklers called her a traitor. Trump, meanwhile and unsurprisingly, was delighted. He has never met her, but praised her for saying ‘what few people are willing to say’. 

At least he didn’t talk about her backside. 

Stevens’ betrayal is significant. 

Firstly, because pledged to back the Democratic nominee. She was the candidate the party machine spent its money and political capital on. 

Her concerns about the ad aren’t outrageous. Many Democrats called it counterproductive, and El-Sayed distanced himself from it.

But if your stated reason for changing sides is to stand against hate, it matters who you switch over to.

And a look at Republicans’ rhetoric on El-Sayed should have given her pause. 

At a Michigan rally, Trump said he had come to stop ‘a jihadist Muslim Brotherhood member’ from becoming a senator, and warned that El-Sayed would have to go through metal detectors to get into the Senate. 

Rogers said the Muslim Brotherhood had celebrated El-Sayed’s primary victory.

By the way, El-Sayed was born in Michigan and has no connection to the Muslim Brotherhood, which he has condemned on multiple occasions, not that it matters to his opponent or the President.

So it’s a little tricky to claim you’re fighting hate by endorsing a campaign that has used pretty much every prejudice in the Trump playbook, and it quickly looks much less like a principled stand and much more like throwing your toys out the pram. 

El-Sayed went into the weekend with polls putting him ahead.

His campaign says he raised $1.2m in the hours after Stevens’ announcement. His bruising statement shrugged her off: ‘At the end of the day, I actually don’t think about Haley Stevens’. 

But it could still have an impact. In the Oakland County suburbs, where Stevens beat him in the primary, Jewish voters were already on edge, and Rogers lost the state by 0.3 per cent two years ago. Margins are everything.

Whatever happens on Tuesday, and I suspect it won’t be good news for Stevens, it exposes a row Democrats still haven’t settled. 

Part how to talk about Israel and Gaza without tearing each other apart, and part whether the party establishment can live with insurgents who beat it.

Stevens gave up her House seat to run for the Senate. If El-Sayed wins, she will have burned through everything for nothing. 

If he loses narrowly, Democrats will argue over whether a bitter rival cost them the Senate. 

Either way, Stevens chose a church pew next to Mike Rogers over the future of her country, and whether she likes it or not, that’s her epitaph. 

Do you have a story you’d like to share? Get in touch by emailing Ross.Mccafferty@metro.co.uk. 

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