Michigan Madness And Party Meltdown As Dem Flips To GOP

Haley Stevens didn’t want to do this, and her decision is all the more powerful because she was reluctant to make it.

After her narrow loss to Abdul El-Sayed in the Democratic primary for this year’s Senate race in Michigan, Stevens hurriedly lined up behind the man – small in stature and small in spirit – who had run a particularly vicious campaign against her. “We must elect Democrats up and down the ballot… We need to win this Senate seat, because Elissa Slotkin deserves a partner like Abdul in the U.S. Senate,” declared Stevens at the time. “Let’s go forward and win… I campaigned. It got litigated. The voters voted. We got to move on.”

But on Sunday, the same day she was penciled in to appear alongside El-Sayed in a show of Democratic unity at a church in Detroit, she instead attended a similar event alongside Republican Mike Rogers, whom she revealed she was endorsing in El-Sayed’s stead.

Her fellow Democrats are naturally apoplectic.

The aforementioned Slotkin raged that “anyone who makes an election this important about themselves, and not Michiganders and our democracy, should think hard about whether they are serving the greater good.” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called it “a despicable betrayal.” George Conway, the man most famous for losing his own mind and family, called Stevens “certifiable.” Nancy Pelosi wailed that Stevens had “chosen to dangerously betray Michigan families’ healthcare, freedoms and future with her horrific endorsement of Mike Rogers.” The Bulwark’s Bill Kristol, confounded by the idea of a liberal mugged by reality, suggested she was having “a breakdown or something.” And Joe Scarborough, MS NOW’s resident wine dad, declared that Stevens had just “endorsed Donald Trump’s most savage policies.” It was as if millions of hysterical partisan hacks suddenly cried out in indignant horror.

But Stevens is no traitor, and the largely sexist submissions that she’s off her rocker are wildly off base. All she’s chosen to do is take her own side, and that of her country, too. What could be more sensible – or noble – than that?

Consider this: even before Stevens officially decided to leave El-Sayed’s camp for Rogers’s, her party was preparing to blame her if El-Sayed fell short. Why? Because in a statement she issued last Friday morning, she demonstrated the courage to do what other Democrats would not: forthrightly call on the candidate to disavow – not just dismiss – an antisemitic ad made on his behalf that repeated an argument he himself had made on the campaign trail, as well as one produced by his own team featuring Tucker Carlson, the country’s most famous Jew hater.

El-Sayed responded by ignoring the substance of Stevens’s plea, launching another broadside against the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, and accusing Stevens of “relitigating a primary that ended three months ago.”

To a man, progressive elites took El-Sayed’s side, castigating Stevens for asking him to meet the flexible, bare minimum standard she had bothered to set for him rather than him for failing to meet it.

Matthew Yglesias asserted that Stevens had “totally disgraced herself” by standing up for her Jewish countrymen. Mallory McMorrow took to CNN to say she had “no idea what the hell Haley Stevens is doing.” Vox’s Astead Herndon characterized Stevens as a sore loser. Strategist Karen Finney called it “shameful.” Pollster Adam Carlson gleefully pronounced Stevens’s “career in Democratic politics” over. Tommy Vietor, the 46-year-old Pod Bro who aspires to be just like Ben Rhodes when he grows up, accused her of “trying to sabotage” El-Sayed’s campaign and “destroying her own political future with this cynical shit.”

All this, again, before she ever withdrew her endorsement from El-Sayed or bestowed it upon Rogers.

The writing was on the wall. If El-Sayed lost, it was going to be Stevens’s fault for merely asking him to do the right thing – not his for failing to do it. All because the Democratic Party is constitutionally incapable of any measure of political or moral introspection.

El-Sayed ran an explicitly antisemitic primary campaign during which he peddled the genocide blood libel, drew a moral equivalency between Israel and Hamas, refused to acknowledge the former’s right to exist as a Jewish state, and mused that “hurt people hurt people” after an attempted massacre at a Michigan synagogue. One might think, after only just eking out his primary win with a slim plurality (48.5%-47.5%, when all was said and done), that El-Sayed might – with the encouragement of progressive pundits and party elders – make some effort to mend old wounds.

He didn’t try, and they never asked, though; and the consequence of their malpractice is an eminently competitive race that ought not be considered. This cycle is very likely to produce a Blue Wave most everywhere else.

So they can call Haley Stevens every name in the book. They can impugn her motives and question her sanity. They can do mental gymnastics and moral somersaults. They can even convince themselves that she really is the villain they imagine.

But deep down, they know that if Abdul El-Sayed loses on Tuesday, it’ll all be the candidate and his enablers’ fault – and that’s what their undignified meltdown is all about.

***

Isaac Schorr is a staff writer at Mediaite and a 2023–2024 Robert Novak Journalism Fellow at the Fund for American Studies.

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