Michigan Senate Rift: Stevens Demands Apology, Campaign Asks Her to Stay Away
The Democratic campaign for Michigan’s open Senate seat entered its final days with a public rift on full display, after Representative Haley Stevens demanded that the party’s nominee, Abdul El-Sayed, apologise over remarks on Israel and condemn an outside group’s advertisement she called antisemitic, and El-Sayed’s campaign then asked Stevens to stay away from its remaining campaign events before Tuesday’s election. The exchange, which played out in statements and social media posts on Friday, October 30, turned a primary rivalry that had supposedly been set aside into a closing-weekend story in one of the closest and most consequential Senate races in the country, where El-Sayed faces Republican Mike Rogers for a seat Democrats must hold if they are to have any chance of taking the Senate.
The immediate trigger was an advertisement from an outside group, Rebellion PAC, which Stevens said ties United States support for Israel to grocery costs, and which she described as antisemitic. Stevens, who lost the August Democratic primary to El-Sayed, said in a statement on Friday morning that El-Sayed should disavow the advertisement and apologise for his own remarks linking aid used for military actions abroad, including aid to Israel, to funding that could have been spent on domestic priorities such as fighting inflation. El-Sayed’s campaign denied that it was affiliated with the advertisement, and El-Sayed responded on social media by firing back at Stevens, saying the primary had ended three months ago. His campaign then asked Stevens not to attend its final events, a step Stevens’s supporters and other Democrats described as an extraordinary break with the usual practice of rallying a defeated primary rival behind the nominee in the final days.
Michigan Senate Rift: A Primary That Never Fully Healed
To understand the rift, it is necessary to go back to the August 4 Democratic primary, which El-Sayed won narrowly over Stevens. El-Sayed, the former Wayne County and Detroit health director, is a Muslim progressive and a harsh critic of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, who has said the United States should cut off or condition military aid to Israel. Stevens, who won her House seat in 2018 and will be without a political job in January after giving it up to run for Senate, is a supporter of aid to Israel, is engaged to be married to Jewish lawyer Jason Turkish, and received more than 30 million dollars in support from staunchly pro-Israel groups targeting El-Sayed during the primary, according to reporting on the race.
Stevens and her supporters were particularly critical of El-Sayed’s campaigning during the primary alongside internet streamer Hasan Piker, whose comments critical of Israel’s policies some claim have strayed into antisemitism, a characterisation El-Sayed’s supporters dispute. Once El-Sayed won the primary, Stevens said she supported him, and for a time the party presented a united front, with establishment Democrats including former President Barack Obama campaigning for El-Sayed. But the unity was fragile, and it broke in the final week when Stevens’s fiance, Jason Turkish, told the Detroit News he would vote for Rogers, a disclosure that Stevens herself did not make but that placed her household publicly on the other side of the race’s central divide. Stevens told CNN she still supported El-Sayed, even as she issued her Friday demand for an apology, a combination that illustrates how tangled the personal, political and policy threads have become.
The Rebellion PAC advertisement sits at the centre of that tangle. Stevens’s statement, posted on social media on Friday, said that on the eve of the election a unifying moment had arrived because the Democratic nominee had disavowed the advertisement, which she said claimed Jews are responsible for America’s economic woes, and she added that she had learned from party leaders that he had done so. El-Sayed’s campaign denied affiliation with the advertisement, but the question Stevens raised was not only about affiliation; it was about whether El-Sayed had condemned the advertisement forcefully enough and whether his own rhetoric about foreign aid and domestic costs had created space for it. El-Sayed’s answer, in effect, was that the primary is over and that relitigating it days before the election helps only Rogers. Both positions are understandable on their own terms, and both cannot be fully satisfied at once, which is why the rift has proved so difficult to close.
Michigan Senate Rift: What It Means for the Race Against Rogers
Rogers, the Republican nominee, has not hidden his satisfaction. On Friday night, he posted on social media calling Stevens a courageous leader who deserves the respect of every Michigan voter, and noting that she had conducted herself with class since the primary, a primary in which, he pointed out, a majority of voters did not vote for her party’s nominee. That praise, from the opposing candidate, is itself a measure of how useful the rift is to Rogers: it lets him present himself as the candidate respected across party lines, while El-Sayed is presented as the candidate who cannot hold his own party together. Democratic strategists quoted in reporting called the feud a gift to Rogers, with one saying it was 1,000 percent a gift, a vivid way of saying that internal Democratic conflict in the final days is worth more to Rogers than any advertisement he could buy.
Whether the rift changes votes is a different question, and the honest answer is that no one knows yet. El-Sayed goes into the final days with a polling lead, according to reporting on the race, and with establishment and progressive Democratic figures largely behind him. One Michigan Democratic chairman quoted in reporting said the race is probably already decided and that late infighting probably will not change the outcome, while adding that the party will have to deal with bringing its factions together after the election regardless of the result. That assessment may be right: most voters have already made up their minds, more than 51 million Americans have already voted nationwide, and a dispute between two Democrats, however bitter, may matter less to a voter deciding between El-Sayed and Rogers than the candidates’ positions on health care, the economy and the cost of living.
But the rift could matter at the margins, and Senate races in Michigan are often decided at the margins. If Stevens’s supporters, particularly in the Detroit suburbs where she built her House career, are less enthusiastic about turning out for El-Sayed, or if Jewish voters who supported Stevens in the primary hear in the dispute a reason to sit out or to vote for Rogers, a close race could tip. Conversely, if El-Sayed’s progressive base sees Stevens’s demand as an attempt by the party establishment to police the nominee days before the election, it could energise his supporters rather than demoralise them. The campaign’s decision to ask Stevens to stay away suggests it has calculated that her presence at events would do more harm than good, a calculation that may be correct for crowd energy even if it looks divisive from the outside.
Michigan Senate Rift: The Sunday Church Service and the Days Left
Stevens’s own Friday statement pointed to a possible softening. She wrote that on Sunday she would join Democratic leader Jim Clyburn and El-Sayed for a church service in Detroit, a setting that would put the two Democrats side by side in a city whose Black church community has been central to Democratic victories in Michigan. Whether that service happens as described, and whether it is presented as reconciliation or merely as parallel attendance, will be watched closely, because it may be the last public image of Democratic unity, or disunity, before Tuesday. A joint appearance at a church service does not resolve a policy disagreement about Israel aid, but it can signal to voters that personal and political differences have not broken the party’s ability to campaign together, and signals of that kind matter in a race where coalition management is itself a campaign skill.
The broader lesson of the Michigan rift extends beyond one state. Democratic Senate hopes depend on holding seats like Michigan’s while gaining Republican-held seats elsewhere, and the party’s coalition, spanning progressives, establishment figures, Black voters, Jewish voters, suburban moderates and young activists, is broad enough to win statewide races only when its factions can disagree without breaking apart. The El-Sayed-Stevens dispute tests that proposition in public, on the eve of an election, over an issue, Israel and antisemitism, on which disagreement is genuine and deeply felt on both sides. How the party handles that disagreement, in Michigan and elsewhere, will shape not only Tuesday’s result but the party’s ability to govern if it wins.
For Michigan voters, the choice on Tuesday remains between El-Sayed and Rogers, not between El-Sayed and Stevens, and the rift should not obscure the candidates’ own positions, which have been debated throughout the campaign. But voters are entitled to weigh, as part of that choice, how each candidate handles conflict within his own coalition, because that handling predicts how he will handle conflict in the Senate. El-Sayed’s handling, as shown this weekend, is to draw a line and move on. Stevens’s handling is to demand accountability and then show up anyway. Rogers’s handling is to welcome the division. Which of those approaches Michigan voters prefer will be one of the many judgements they render on Tuesday, alongside their judgements on the economy, health care and the direction of the country. Readers following this race can also read our earlier coverage of El-Sayed’s polling lead in Michigan, which explains how the race reached this point and why both parties regard it as a must-win contest.
Sources
USN reviewed reporting from multiple outlets for this story. Read more from Detroit Free Press, Politico and Reuters.