The saga of the Michigan Senate race took a bizarre turn on Sunday when Rep. Haley Stevens, who lost the primary to Abdul El-Sayed, abruptly announced that she was supporting Republican candidate Mike Rogers. A Democrat with once-bright political aspirations betraying her party two days before the midterm elections is shocking. Doing so for the reasons Stevens seems to be — because her ego has been bruised by losing to El-Sayed, then feeling snubbed and insulted by him — is particularly egregious. And it’s all made the more appalling by the fact that Rogers, the candidate Stevens has now endorsed, has run a campaign rife with anti-Muslim bigotry, fueled by Donald Trump’s vile and racist insults — Trump has called El-Sayed a “jihadist,” and just this weekend said that Congress would have to “get a special metal detector for Abdul.” One member of Mike Rogers’s campaign team said that, when it comes to the Jews, we should “send them to North Korea,” and suggested that women should not be in politics. Another defended the Young Republicans group chat in which participants said “I love Hitler,” called rape “epic,” and insulted Black people as monkeys and “watermelon people” (“Loyalty is the only political virtue that matters,” was his argument. “Capitulation is for losers.”). That this is the candidate Stevens is endorsing, in part because she says El-Sayed is an anti-Semite, defies all rationality (not to mention morality).
The New York Times has play-by-play reporting on Stevens’s defection, which basically suggests that she and El-Sayed have never gotten along (shocker); that she was seeing her political prospects dimming; that she legitimately disagreed with El-Sayed on the Israel / Palestine issue; that she felt entitled to make a series of escalating demands of El-Sayed, who understandably did not want to spend the last few days of his campaign catering to the person he beat in the primary; and that eventually she felt so slighted that she made a rash decision to back Rogers, who gave her the attention she seemed to so badly desire. This came after she assured prominent Democrat after prominent Democrat, and personal friend after personal friend, that she would back El-Sayed.
Democrats are to a one livid at her. The El-Sayed campaign is rightly trying to move beyond this distraction. Her staff have all resigned in protest. Stevens frankly seems to have been losing her grip for months, and in the wake of her Rogers endorsement, she’s did a truly bizarre television appearance on Anderson Cooper where she couldn’t even articulate why she did what she did — she seemed to just want to shrug and say, who lil’ ol’ me? I’m just voting for who I’m voting for!
The whole thing seems to be about a politician undone by her own ego and hubris. But it also seems to be about something else: Her fiancé.
