Michigan Democrat Endorses Republican Senate Rival Two Days Before Election

DETROIT — In the single most honest act of this election cycle, Rep. Haley Stevens announced on Sunday that she is endorsing Republican Mike Rogers for the U.S. Senate, two days before Michigan voters go to the polls to elect the Democrat she lost to in the primary.

Stevens, who lost the August Democratic primary to Abdul El-Sayed and spent the morning of her endorsement conspicuously absent from her own party’s unity event, delivered her reasoning with a directness that the rest of the ticket has been avoiding all fall.

Read that again. The Democratic nominee told a sitting congresswoman to stay away, and she responded the way any reasonable person would: by going to the other party, which kept the door open and has never once told her to stay away.

State party chair Curtis Hertel called the move a “despicable betrayal” and said Stevens had abandoned everything she claims to care about, which is a strong thing to say about a person whose entire public argument for the past six weeks has been that she cares about the same things El-Sayed won’t discuss. Stevens had been demanding an apology from the campaign over an ad linking Israel to high grocery prices; the campaign’s silence on the matter lasted several days, roughly the length of time it takes to walk across the street to a Republican. On Sunday she completed the commute at a “Souls to the Polls” service at Perfecting Church, standing beside Rogers with the calm of a woman who has been handed her marching orders and decided to follow them.

The most damning opposition research in the Michigan race was therefore conducted not by the Rogers campaign but by the Rogers campaign’s favorite subject — a Democrat, with a congressional frank, delivering it from a church parking lot 48 hours before the polls close. In any other state this would be called a scandal. In Michigan, where the two parties have spent October trading accusations of genocide-apologism over a grocery ad, it is being called Tuesday’s news cycle.

By Sunday evening, the tell-tale artifacts of a campaign that knows it has lost the room were everywhere. Stevens’s communications director had set his email to an auto-reply announcing that as of Sunday he was no longer working for the Stevens office. Former staffers began publicly disowning their former boss. El-Sayed’s camp issued a statement rejecting the attempts of “Stevens and bad-faith actors to divide our party and undermine our momentum,” which is the phrase loyalists use at the exact moment the momentum has left the building and hopped a ride with the other ticket.

The Rogers camp, for its part, sounded less triumphant than startled. A spokesperson said Rogers was grateful for the endorsement and would not be asked follow-up questions about it, because no one on that staff could safely look into any microphone right now.

Democrats have responded the way institutions always respond to a member leaving: by insisting the member never really mattered and the institution is fine. What they have not done is explain why, if the party is fine, its best remaining strategy is pointing at the Republican and saying he has never personally insulted them.

Mitchell Research had El-Sayed ahead of Rogers, 51 percent to 44, with 3 percent undecided. As of Sunday night, none of the 3 percent had returned Stevens’s calls.