Election Day in Michigan is Tuesday. On Sunday morning, Haley Stevens was supposed to be sitting next to Abdul El-Sayed.
That was the plan Democrats had worked all week to arrange. The two were going to attend a Souls to the Polls event at a church in Detroit. The moderate congresswoman and the progressive who beat her in August would appear side by side. They would look united, or close enough.
Instead, Stevens went to Perfecting Church, Pastor Marvin Winans’s congregation, and spent the morning worshipping with Mike Rogers, his wife, and her own fiancé, attorney Jason Turkish. Rogers is the Republican in the race. By late morning, she was standing next to him in front of reporters and endorsing him for the United States Senate.
You don’t see that every cycle. You might not see it again.
The break started with an ad. Stevens had demanded that El-Sayed condemn an outside group’s ad, one that critics accused of antisemitism. He didn’t do it her way. On Friday the two traded critical statements, and by Saturday his campaign had made clear she shouldn’t come to his events. A person familiar with the decision said the campaign was worried about distractions.
Rogers saw an opening. After El-Sayed’s campaign said Stevens wasn’t welcome, Rogers phoned her Friday night and said he’d be glad to have her support. She called him back Sunday morning to say she would endorse him, and told him she was still a Democrat.
Her explanation to reporters was short, and it sounded hurt. El-Sayed, she said, had made clear “he didn’t need me there, that he didn’t want me there.”
What’s striking is how long she held on.
On Wednesday, her fiancé told The Detroit News he was voting for Rogers. That same night on CNN she said her family was “a household divided” and that she was still voting for the nominee. Through Saturday night, she was telling fellow Democrats, including Debbie Dingell and Jamie Raskin, that she would not take back her endorsement. Former Gov. Jim Blanchard said he spoke with her Saturday night and she told him she was sticking with El-Sayed.
Then Sunday came.
The fallout was immediate, and some of it came from her own people. Justin German, her chief of staff of eight years, said in a statement that he and much of her staff had resigned and were “shocked and heartbroken.” The state party chair, Curtis Hertel, said she had “abandoned everything she claims to care about.” Neera Tanden, one of her biggest national backers in the primary, called it a betrayal. Rogers said she had shown courage by putting Michigan first.
And El-Sayed? He shrugged. “I don’t think about Haley Stevens,” he said.
That’s a good line. It may also be the whole problem.
Politics is supposed to be addition. Two days before an election, you don’t push away the woman who almost beat you, who represents suburban Oakland County, and whose voters you need. You find her a chair. You let her say something nice about you. You absorb a bad news cycle about an ad because the alternative is a worse one about a defection.
His campaign chose subtraction instead.
None of this makes Stevens a model of consistency. She once dismissed Rogers as a rubber stamp for President Trump. In a CNN interview Sunday night she had trouble explaining why she reversed after telling colleagues she wouldn’t. People will remember that, and they should.
But the numbers explain why both campaigns cared so much about one congresswoman. Rogers lost to Elissa Slotkin in 2024 by fewer than 20,000 votes. A Fox News poll had El-Sayed four points behind Rogers and running weaker than Kamala Harris did in 2024 among Black voters, women and suburban voters. Those are Stevens’s voters. That’s her territory.
So on the last Sunday of a close race, there were two church services in one city. They were roughly six miles apart. At one, a campaign had decided it didn’t need her. At the other, a campaign made room for one more.
Michigan decides Tuesday which of those two calculations was right.
