ReutersA Democrat in Michigan has endorsed the Republican candidate in the state’s crucial US Senate contest, as a spat with her own party’s candidate Abdul El-Sayed escalated just days before the vote.
Haley Stevens, a sitting congresswoman who lost out on the Democratic Senate nomination to El-Sayed, made a surprise appearance alongside the Republican candidate Mike Rogers at a church on Sunday.
“I don’t belong in Abdul’s campaign,” she said in a video posted to X shortly after that appearance. “Who we are as Michiganders is not hate and is not what we are getting out from our Democratic nominee right now.”
“That’s why I am endorsing Mike Rogers,” Stevens said.
“This is a very close election, we all know that, but Abdul made clear that I was not welcome in his campaign, that he didn’t need me there, that he didn’t want me there,” Stevens told reporters after the Sunday church service.
The pair had been scheduled to appear together at a different event on Sunday, but El-Sayed reportedly asked her not to come.
They had clashed publicly over a campaign advert from an outside liberal group which blamed Israel for high food prices. El-Sayed criticised the advert and said he had nothing to do with its contents.
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When asked about Stevens’ endorsement, El-Sayed told reporters he was focused on the problems Michiganders are facing.
“At the end of the day, I don’t think about Haley Stevens,” he said. “None of this matters.”
In downtown Detroit, people were grabbing lunch or making their way to Ford Field stadium for the Detroit Lions American football game when the news broke. Every democrat that the BBC spoke with shared that they were disappointed by her endorsement of Rogers.
Summer Lawrence, a 21-year-old student, told the BBC that Stevens’ endorsement felt like a betrayal to the Democratic party and everything she told voters she stood for.
“I just genuinely don’t understand it,” she said. “I do think it’s a betrayal of the party because the things she stands for are not the same things that he stands for as a Republican.”
Matthew Barera, another Michigan voter told the BBC, he, too, did not understand Stevens’ reasoning.
“I don’t know if she had her own revenge or not, maybe she had frustrations with the party in her own elections,” he said.
Others, including Republicans who support Rogers, said they doubted it would make a difference to the race.
“People can see right through her actions, you know? She’s just angry,” Marissa Lee, a Rogers supporter, told the BBC. “She is not going to make anybody change their mind.”
The Michigan Senate race is considered by analysts to be one of the tightest in Tuesday’s midterm elections, which will decide which party controls Congress for the next two years.
It is one of a handful of battleground contests that will ultimately decide control of the Senate.
The seat is currently held by a retiring Democrat and the last time a Republican was elected to this Senate seat was in 1994. But in presidential elections, it is one of the crucial swing states – Michigan voted for Democrat Joe Biden in 2020 but Trump in 2024.
Rogers welcomed Stevens’ endorsement and said it showed “courage” during brief remarks with reporters outside the church.
President Donald Trump echoed that sentiment saying on Truth Social that, “[Stevens] showed great and almost unprecedented loyalty to the Great People of Michigan with what she did”.
Many of Stevens’ staff reportedly resigned immediately after her announcement, while the chair of the Democratic Party in Michigan said her decision “shows that she has abandoned everything she claims to care about”.
“We reject the attempts by Stevens and bad-faith actors to divide our party and undermine our momentum,” Curtis Hertel said in a statement.
Over the weekend, as Stevens’ criticism of El-Sayed escalated, a number of Democratic politicians in Michigan publicly encouraged her to end the feud and back the party’s candidates more directly.
“It feels like it’s more about her feelings than Michiganders,” State Senator Mallory McMorrow said on MSNow. “It is a choice between MAGA and Michigan. And I’m on team Michigan.”
On Sunday, Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer said he and the party were firmly behind El-Sayed, without mentioning Stevens by name.
“Senate Democrats are united in our support for Abdul El-Sayed, because we know he will fight for the economic interests of working families in Michigan,” he said.
After a bruising and sometimes bitter campaign earlier this year, El-Sayed, a left-wing outsider, defeated Stevens, the establishment-backed congresswoman, to win the party’s nomination for the US Senate race.
The primary, and the pair’s subsequent feud, has underlined divisions over the party’s direction ahead of the 2028 presidential election.
Former public health official El-Sayed, who is the son of Egyptian immigrants, has channelled grassroots frustration with Washington politics as well as US ties to Israel.
Stevens is a more centrist Democrat – and had the support of party figures such as Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer during the primary race.
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