A lot of Democrats are out spinning Haley Stevens' decision to endorse Mike Rogers, but aside from a few short statements and an amazingly hostile interview, Stevens hasn't been given the opportunity to explain her decision at length.
She's been called a traitor, a quisling, a "used condom" by the ever-evil James Carville, and Mehdi Hasan has made very dark threats about retribution, which sure sound more Jihadi than simply political. Hasan Piker said she was in the pocket of the Jews, which to him seems to mean something like accusing her of being a klansman.
This is about a Democrat who led her freshman class, voted with Joe Biden over 90 percent of the time, and was the party establishment's favorite in the primary — which she almost won.
Nobody on her side of the aisle, except James Clyburn, seems to have taken her stated reasons for her decision seriously. Instead, they talk about her sudden bout of mental illness, which until yesterday was no reason not to vote for somebody.
In a move that should surprise nobody, one news outlet took the time to sit down with Rep. Stevens and actually ask her how she decided to buck her party. And it was a revealing interview.
EXCLUSIVE: I Interviewed Haley Stevens at 11 PM on Her Fiancé’s Couch. Here’s Why She Broke with Abdul El-Sayed. https://t.co/CNC1rNXpOF
— The Free Press (@TheFP) November 2, 2026
Unlike El-Sayed, who justifies terrorists attempting to kill children by saying "hurt people hurt people," Haley Stevens actually had rational reasons that any normal person could understand for why she ultimately rejected Abdul El-Sayed: he's a disgusting antisemite who hangs around with people who talk about America as the Great Satan.
“I was like, wait a moment, what am I doing?”
That is how Congresswoman Haley Stevens described her epiphany less than 24 hours earlier, when she realized she could no longer back Abdul El-Sayed—the Democratic darling favored to win Michigan’s open Senate seat.
It’s Sunday night at 11 p.m., and she’s seated on her fiancé’s couch at his home in the Detroit suburbs, fishing around a popcorn bowl while telling me how her discomfort with El-Sayed had been building ever since he beat her in the August primary by fewer than 14,000 votes.
“I wasn’t being honest with myself after a certain point,” she said with a shrug.
It was late September when the first doubts started to creep in, she said. El-Sayed refused to condemn Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, saying, “It is the responsibility of the people of Iran to decide what their leadership should look like.” Then came his debate against Republican Mike Rogers, in which El-Sayed declined to say whether Israel or Iran posed a greater threat to America. It started to fall apart about two weeks ago, she said, when a pro-El-Sayed PAC released an ad that blamed rising costs on the American funding of “killing Palestinians.”
“It was obsessive, obsessive, obsessive,” Stevens, 43, said of El-Sayed’s fixation on Israel.
She called some of his positions “anti-American” and added that Iran is the “opposite of our friend.”
El-Sayed, you recall, refused to say whether he backed Iran or America in the current war. While he hasn't quite pulled a Jane Fonda and manned an anti-aircraft gun for the Iranian regime, he has made it pretty clear that he sees Iran as at least morally equivalent to the United States. And Stevens, who is so far left that it would take a Republican version of El-Sayed — say, Tucker Carlson (who is in fact supporting El-Sayed) or Nick Fuentes — to get me to vote for her, finally couldn't stand with a man who hangs around with communists and Islamists.
“God, I wanted to vote for him, but he just kind of said ‘Forget it,’ ” she said about his perceived indifference to her coalition, which includes many—if not the majority—of Jewish voters. “I love the Democrats. I’m not trying to take anything from anyone or judge anybody or shame anybody,” she told me.
“I wasn’t being honest with myself after a certain point,” Stevens said.
Stevens condemned El-Sayed’s behavior in his campaign to fill a seat she said is supposed to be the “conscience of the Senate,” a reference to former Senator Philip Hart, who once occupied it and earned the nickname for his integrity.
“I’m just looking at this and I’m thinking, Wait a minute, I endorsed you. I tried to be positive,” she said. “I don’t like the inter-group fighting.” El-Sayed’s camp did not respond to a request for comment.
Stevens still calls herself a Democrat. She has the bona fides to prove it—she voted twice to impeach President Donald Trump and in support of codifying Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court ruling that established a constitutional right to an abortion. In 2018, at just 35, she flipped a suburban Detroit congressional district from red to blue. But none of that shielded her from the wrath of her own party.
It's important to realize that almost everybody condemning her outside the Islamist camp actually agreed with and supported her during the primary. It was glaringly obvious that the establishment wanted nothing to do with El-Sayed, and the people now trashing her arranged for Mallory McMorrow to leave the race in order to help Stevens defeat him.
But the taste of victory is sweet, and all these people smelled it this year, so they decided to swallow their pride and their foul-tasting bile that rose up when they thought of El-Sayed, and feel blindsided that Stevens could not.
Stevens was prepared to back El-Sayed herself until the man trashed her over her demand that he reject the most antisemitic of his supporters. But El-Sayed chose Cenk Uyger and Hasan Piker, neither of whom is a strong Democrat, over Stevens, putting the nail in the coffin of any potential support.
No doubt some of the sting was personal for Stevens, but less than you would think. What El-Sayed was doing here was a reprise of his finishing the primary with a day-long Hasan Piker tour: telling everybody that he hates America and is obsessed with destroying Israel.
Stevens seemed at ease, wearing pink fuzzy slippers with a drink in hand. She offered me a bourbon. Her fiancé, Jason Turkish, a disability rights attorney, sat next to her, scrolling through social media. When she mentioned the “chirping” online, Turkish piped up.
“I am like Mr. Hardcore Dem, right? So I never imagined. . .” he said, trailing off.
The posts that had gotten under his skin the most, he said, were the ones implying he was controlling Stevens—including one from Jordan Acker, a member of the University of Michigan Board of Regents, who wrote that Stevens deserves the “freedom to make her own decisions.” Turkish, a Jewish Democratic donor, announced earlier last week that he was voting for Rogers.
He told me that if anyone thinks he’s controlling his fiancée, “they’ve obviously never met Haley.”
Stevens said she’s been advising Turkish to stay offline.
As for how she is feeling, Stevens said she is “at peace with this.”
“I’m not wrestling with this,” she continued.
Now that she’s in the final few months of her career in Congress, she appears to accept that her political career is over. “I’m exiting stage left,” she joked. She sees a potential teaching gig in her future. She said she wants to be on a campus, somewhere with young people.
Before that, though, there are the final hours of the Senate race, which she said she’s eager to see wrap up, given how much it’s divided her state. On Monday, Stevens told me she’s considering attending a “Democrats for Rogers” rally.
Unlike the Never Trumpers, she hasn't switched sides. As Bill Kristol and Liz Cheney became hardcore leftists, turning on a dime, Stevens is still as liberal as she always was. She's just rejecting the lurch toward Islamofascism.
Which explains why I still wouldn't vote for her, despite admiring her willingness to toss it all away. Not many people would, even though it's obviously the right thing to do. We often come up with reasons to not do what is right, and reason backward from our decision.
In fact, Stevens admitted she did this for much of the campaign, and finally gave in to her conscience.
The thing is, it's obvious who El-Sayed is, just as it was obvious that Graham Platner was a scumbag. But Platner was defended by Democrats as a genuine star until his polls tanked, and most Democrats knew he was a scumbag and looked away.
Will Stevens' permission for fellow Democrat voters to change the outcome of the race? I'd say it's more likely than not, which is why so many establishment Democrats are freaking out. I wouldn't bet my life on it, and for that matter, I thought El-Sayed was more likely to lose than not, despite his good poll numbers.
But what do I know? Every election is tough to call, and this one more than most.
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