Remember, I'm Still a Democrat
On Sunday morning, at Perfecting Church on the east side of Detroit, Congresswoman Haley Stevens of Michigan's 11th District sat through a service beside Mike Rogers, the Republican nominee for the United States Senate, and his wife, and her own fiancé, and then put out a video. "Hey, Michigan, as you may have seen, our Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate, Abdul, said that I was no longer welcome in his campaign," she said. "And he's right, and that's why I am endorsing Mike Rogers for the United States Senate today." Two days before the election. Across town, at Greater Emmanuel Institutional Church of God in Christ, the man she lost the primary to by 13,792 votes was in a pew with Jim Clyburn, at the service she had been scheduled to attend with him until Saturday.
The paper endorsed Abdul El-Sayed on October 19, the first endorsement of its short life, and it will say up front that it has a side in this. It will also say that having a side is not the same as having a thumb on the scale, and that the test it is about to run on Ms. Stevens is the one it runs on everybody: words count for nothing, signatures and votes and reversals count for everything, and the posture gets named. So here is the ledger, by date, because the dates are the whole case.
August 4: she loses the primary, 744,952 to 731,160, nine-tenths of a point, after tens of millions in outside money, including a super PAC affiliated with AIPAC on her side, and the Senate Democrats' campaign arm and Chuck Schumer behind her. She concedes the next morning and congratulates him. August 6: the unity breakfast, the last time the two appear in the same room. Somewhere in there she pledges to help him however she can. Those are words. The paper gives no credit for them and, for the record, docked her nothing for them either; a pledge is a pledge until it is kept or broken, and for twelve weeks it was neither, because she did not campaign with him and, according to CNN on Wednesday, had not spoken to him in months.
Wednesday, October 28: her fiancé, Jason Turkish, a civil rights lawyer and a Democrat, tells The Detroit News he is voting for Rogers, citing "an escalation in his rhetoric since the primary" that "makes folks unsafe." That evening she goes on CNN with Kaitlan Collins. "We're a household divided," she says. "I still very much want our Democratic nominee, his name is Abdul, to win this race." She asks his campaign "to shut out the hate and to call it out." Those are words too, and they are on tape, and they are four days old.
Friday, October 30: the Associated Press reports that she will appear with Mr. El-Sayed and Mr. Clyburn at a Detroit church on Sunday. Within hours she posts a statement on X about an ad from Rebellion PAC, Cenk Uygur's outfit, in which a couple at a grocery store put back a carton of eggs because "we have to set that $7 aside for killing Palestinians." The ad is garbage, and the paper will not pretend otherwise. It is also, by PolitiFact's count, a thousand dollars of digital placement that has never aired on television except inside news stories about itself, made by a man who ran it first for his own presidential campaign in 2024, and Mr. El-Sayed's campaign had already said it was not affiliated with it "in any way." Ms. Stevens's statement did not stop at the ad. The ad, she wrote, "did not invent its argument," it "dramatized one Dr. El-Sayed has made in his own words throughout this campaign: that Israel is the reason Michigan cannot afford schools, health care and childcare." She demanded an apology. She demanded he take down his own ad featuring Tucker Carlson. "Abdul promises to get money out of politics. He can begin by getting Israel out of his explanation for everything Michigan cannot afford." Mr. El-Sayed answered that evening that she "seems intent on relitigating a primary that ended three months ago," and Politico reported that his campaign had asked her to stay away from its remaining events. On Friday Mr. Rogers called her "a courageous leader who deserves the respect of every Michigan voter."
Saturday, October 31: after a rally in Sterling Heights, Mr. El-Sayed says the thing she asked for, in his way. "You guys love to play the condemn game," he says, and then, "I've already made it clear that that ad was not made by me, and I do not agree with the contents of that ad." Late Saturday she says she is glad to see it. Saturday night she is on the phone with Debbie Dingell, who built the church event and who said on CNN the next night, asked whether Ms. Stevens had told her she would not endorse Mr. Rogers, "Yes, she did." Ms. Dingell pulls her from the event. "I'm the one who pulled it because it had become way too distracting," Ms. Dingell says. "The bishop was getting upset, because this is a real church service."
Sunday, November 1: the other church, the other candidate, the video. And then, to a reporter: "At some point, you got to look at who's standing for country." And: "It's my personal and private decision." And: "It's a Michigan moment, and everyone is entitled to their opinion." And, the paper's favorite, that she is "still a very proud Democrat," which Mr. Rogers confirmed. "She reminded me at the end of our call," he said. "Remember, I'm still a Democrat." At the press conference she put a number on it: "90% of the votes I'm going to cast are going to be for Democrats."
Sunday night, CNN. Anderson Cooper asked what changed between the Saturday call and the Sunday video. "He didn't get angrier between midnight last night and this morning," he said, and then, "So, was there something specific that changed your mind?" "Anderson, you certainly weren't on the phone with me at midnight," she said. "And I don't think I was on the phone either." He asked whether, since she could not stand with hate, she thought Mr. El-Sayed was hateful or an antisemite. "I think some of the actions have certainly been antisemitic," she said, and, "I'm just sick of who he stands with." "It sounds like you're upset with me too, Anderson." "No, I'm not. You're not really answering any of my questions, so it's somewhat frustrating." She said the endorsement was "rock solid." She said it was "just a weight off my shoulders." She said "Abdul has been getting angrier and angrier. I was trying to help, and I endorsed him. That ad was very painful." Of the staff who quit on her: "These are great individuals who I care a lot about, and certainly, they're free to share their views on this." Of the Speaker of the House, who had called to tell her to stay safe: he has "not been up to all too much." Of her own office: "There's just a couple weeks of lame duck left here." Ms. Dingell, on the same network an hour later: "This was one of the most painful interviews I've ever watched." David Axelrod: "very, very sad," and "Haley Stevens is obviously struggling." The paper will not pile on an interview; it rates acts, not performances, and a bad fifteen minutes on television is not a clown. But the interview is evidence, and what it is evidence of is this: asked three ways what changed overnight, the one person who knows could not name a thing.
The paper will take her at her word on that, because it is the only one of her words this week that she has acted on. A Democrat who endorses the Republican in a Senate race that may decide the Senate, two days out, is not a Democrat who has changed her mind about the Senate. She is a Democrat who has changed her mind about a primary. The paper reads her Friday statement again and finds nothing in it about Mike Rogers, nothing about what he would do with the seat, nothing about the Affordable Care Act he tried to repeal, nothing about the President who endorsed him, and nothing about the religious test the Republican nominee has been running on since a man named Tommy stood up in Caro. It finds Abdul, and Abdul, and Abdul. Mr. El-Sayed said on Sunday that he does not think about Haley Stevens. The paper believes him. It does not believe the reverse.
What she got for it, by the paper's standing test, which is to find what the person asked for and what the person was given. She asked for an apology and a condemnation; she got a condemnation on Saturday and endorsed the other man on Sunday. She got "courage in politics" from Mr. Rogers, who added, candidly, that he is glad he is not running against her, which is a compliment to her and a reminder about August: he is running against the man who beat her, and he is glad. She got, from the President, at a rally in Dubuque, "brave," and that he has never met her and would "love her to join the Republican Party," and on Truth Social a post the paper will quote at length because it is the clearest statement anyone made all day of what the endorsement is for. "Her following is huge, and the level of respect from the People of Michigan, especially our African American and Jewish populations, is virtually unparalleled." The President has never met her, and he knows exactly which two groups of Michigan voters he wants to hear her name this week. Mike Johnson said he spoke with her and "encouraged her to stay safe and keep speaking the truth." Ronna McDaniel praised her for "putting our state before party." That is the whole list of what she got. Her chief of staff, Justin German, resigned, with "many" of her staff, "shocked and heartbroken," and asked people to vote for Mr. El-Sayed. Her communications director's auto-reply says the job was vacant as of November 1. The chair of the Michigan Democratic Party, Curtis Hertel, announced that she "is not a current member of the Michigan Democratic Party, nor will she be in the future," which is a sentence a chairman can say but not a thing a chairman can do, and the paper notes that the party's reflex when a member leaves is to lock the door behind her, as if she might come back. Mr. Schumer, who picked her in the primary, called it a "despicable betrayal." Jamie Raskin said she had told him she was voting "straight down the line on the Democratic ticket." Mallory McMorrow, who was in that primary too and got out of it in July, said the race "is not about people trying to get their last five minutes before they no longer have a title."
One more thing the President said in Dubuque, because it is the part of Sunday that will outlast Sunday. "Congresswoman Haley Stevens, who if you remember, she was gonna be like 25 points down," he said, and again, "she was gonna lose, remember, by 25 points and she ended up almost winning," and then, "It took like three, four days for them to so-called tabulate the vote. They tabulated with their machines." The paper checked. No public poll of that primary ever had Ms. Stevens 25 points down. The largest lead anyone measured was Emerson's, 54 to 39, fifteen points, in the last week of July; the RealClearPolling average going into the vote was ten; three weeks before that, Glengariff had her ahead by nearly seven. The polls were wrong, and the paper will say so plainly: they had him up ten and he won by nine-tenths. And the count did not take three or four days. The networks called it on election night, and she conceded the next morning, August 5. So the President took a real polling miss of nine points, called it twenty-five, and attached to it a count that did not happen and a machine that did nothing, two days before an election in which the three October polls of Michigan the paper cites below all had the Democrat ahead. The paper has heard this song before, in November of 2020, and it knows the next verse. It does not need a poll to tell it which way the wind is blowing in Michigan, and it does not need the President to tell it the wind is rigged.
That last one is the sentence the paper would have written if Ms. McMorrow had not got there first. Ms. Stevens gave up her House seat to run for the Senate. Her term ends January 3. She is a congresswoman for nine more weeks, and on the Sunday before the election that decides who holds the seat she wanted, she chose the one act available to her that would put her name in every paper in the country by Monday morning, and it worked, and here is the paper. It will not call her a sellout, because it does not know what she was sold, and nobody has shown that anything was. It will call her what the record shows: a candidate who lost by nine-tenths of a point, kept her pledge in the form of silence for twelve weeks, broke it in the form of a demand on Friday, got the thing she demanded on Saturday, and endorsed the other side on Sunday, in church, on camera, two days out, while describing herself as a proud Democrat to the Republican she was electing. The paper has a word for that posture, and the word is not courage.
The paper's forecasts, dated November 2. Abdul El-Sayed will win on Tuesday; the paper's expectation is by three to six points, inside the October polling, which had him at 51 to 44 in Mitchell's survey on October 28, 51.4 to 45.1 with Glengariff a week earlier, and 50 to 48 among likely voters with Marist in mid-October, before any of this. He will carry Oakland County, which Ms. Stevens carried in the primary 51.8 to 45.3 by the unofficial count, and that is the number the paper will grade her endorsement by on Wednesday, since her district, her fiancé, her county and her endorsement all live there; if Mr. Rogers carries Oakland, the paper will say so and give her the clown back. More than 1.7 million Michiganders had voted by Thursday, by the Secretary of State's count, before she opened her mouth. Ms. Stevens will not be on a ballot as a Democrat again, and the paper expects the "still a Democrat" line to have a shelf life of about one cable booking. Mr. Rogers will thank her by name on Tuesday night, win or lose, and not again.
Five clowns. Three are the congresswoman's: one for the reversal itself, measured from Wednesday's tape to Sunday's video; one for the statement that was about Abdul when it claimed to be about an ad; one for "still a Democrat," said to the man she was handing the seat to, which is the one the paper cannot get past. One is Mr. Rogers's, for "courage in politics," which is what a nominee calls a gift from the other side when the gift arrives on a Sunday, and for being glad he is not running against her, which is the primary talking. The fifth is the President's, for "brave," about a woman he has never met, for naming the two Michigan constituencies he intends to spend her on, and for "25 points" and a vote count that took three or four days, neither of which happened, said in the same breath as "machines," two days out. The paper endorsed Mr. El-Sayed on October 19 and it has read nothing this week that moves it. The election is Tuesday. Oakland County will report that night.