Haley Stevens Is Not Alone

N o one can say that Democrats took Representative Haley Stevens’s surprise defection on Sunday morning in stride. Even with the political winds at Democrats’ backs, the party processed Stevens’s last-minute campaign trail appearance with, and endorsement of, Mike Rogers over Abdul El-Sayed as though it were a betrayal of Shakespearean proportions.

The representative’s decision to “dangerously betray” El-Sayed represented a “despicable” and “selfish choice,” the Democratic Party’s leading lights boomed. “Capitulating to fascism, islamophobia, and racism” must be punished. A growing number of Democrats want Stevens ousted from the party’s congressional caucus. Others, including the chairman of the state party, contend that she is already persona non grata. With nigh Stalinist alacrity, Michigan Democrats swiftly blocked Stevens’s access to state voter bases and purged her likeness from its website.

Throughout the day on Sunday, Stevens’s critics proposed one theory after another to explain the representative’s infidelity, each of which presumed that she was acting in bad faith. Maybe she was suffering from a crippling bout of existential anxiety, some posited, leading to an otherwise inexplicable maneuver “she hadn’t fully thought through.” If it wasn’t a mental breakdown, maybe Stevens is bewitched by her fiancé, who is himself blinkered by his association with Judaism. Or perhaps she’s just a narcissist whose pride never recovered from her narrow defeat in Michigan’s Senate primary.

Uncharitable as they may be, these theories would make more sense if Stevens were the only prominent Democrat in Michigan to express reservations over El-Sayed’s campaign — reservations they gave the party’s nominee every opportunity to address, but which he steadfastly would not. And yet, she is not alone.

Even though he, like Stevens, still called himself a “proud Democrat,” a longtime Democratic fundraiser and onetime finance chairman of Senator Elissa Slotkin’s Senate campaign, David Kramer, shared her qualms with the candidate. “I’ve made peace with voting for him because I do think that he at least does care about Jews being safe and participating in public life,” Kramer said of Rogers last month.

“I can’t vote for El-Sayed,” Detroit-area businessman and onetime Stevens backer Michael Horowitz concurred over the summer. In leading remarks following one of El-Sayed’s many pointed refusals to sufficiently distance himself from the antisemites in his orbit, Michigan Democratic Party Central Committee member Joan Lowenstein dismissed what she called “lip service.” The Democratic fundraiser Hannan Lis agreed. He, too, was “leaning strongly to Rogers” and reported that there were “many in the Jewish community who say they will be supporting Rogers.”

“El-Sayed aligns himself with people who want to purge the Democratic Party and American life of Zionists and, therefore, most Jews,” Democratic State Representative Noah Arbit said in a courageous October speech in which he declined to endorse his party’s Senate nominee. “That is unacceptable.” When El-Sayed declined even to recognize the third anniversary of the October 7 massacre, Michigan Democratic Jewish Caucus secretary Zach Nessel, the son of Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel, savaged El-Sayed’s “sorry” conduct, but perhaps it was all for the best. “I don’t think anything he would say would have been true to his values,” Nessel explained, “and probably would have been inflammatory.”

And on and on. If Stevens were motivated solely by her own high self-regard, she probably wouldn’t be in such voluminous company. Indeed, the Democrats who are beating their breasts over her betrayal appear to have missed the last several months in which El-Sayed bled support — with all apparent deliberation — from lifetime Democratic voters.

Those voters gave El-Sayed every chance to assuage their consciences. But the candidate has consciously chosen to make as few concessions as possible to his critics. A competent political campaign might not have antagonized its ostensible allies by refusing to condemn attacks on its own constituents — both the physical and rhetorical sort, including branding key neighborhoods bastions of racism that deserve only ostracism. It’s not Haley’s fault that El-Sayed refused to maintain the Democratic Party’s coalition. For that, blame the candidate.

Of all the rationalizations that have accompanied Stevens’s about-face, the notion that all this dissension within Democratic ranks might actually be good for the movement with which El-Sayed is aligned is the most preposterous.

Perhaps “Stevens’ stunt backfires,” left-wing polling analyst G. Elliott Morris opined. After all, she “validated all the progressive critiques of centrists.” If El-Sayed were to somehow lose on Tuesday night, the numbers-cruncher Nate Silver posited, “it will now be much harder to blame his progressivism since people can just blame Haley Stevens instead.”

This is precisely the kind of category error that proximity to an election encourages among partisans. What does El-Sayed’s pathological, obdurate, and entirely sincere hostility to the Jewish State and his reflexive impulse to evaluate terrorist attacks from the perspective of their perpetrators have to do with American progressivism? Since October 7, the left has allowed the activists in their midst to blur the distinctions between big government policy preferences and the foreign-inflected Palestinianism that has captured the European left. It’s not a package deal, and the Democrats who object to the hijacking of their movement are deferring to principle.

By definition, they are the brave ones in this equation. Stevens knew exactly what her decision would cost her. So, too, did her fellow Democrats who bucked partisan pressures to placidly consign themselves to homogeneity within the Democratic Party’s ranks. They, not those who have observed conformity on pain of retribution, have taken the harder course. And because the Democrats have themselves spent the last ten years arguing that ageless American principles should rise above partisan commitments, the party knows it.

The outsize reaction to Stevens’s maneuver is an expression of Democratic insecurity. Maybe El-Sayed will pull it out in the end. But no one pounds the table like this over one defection, even one as prominent as this. Democrats know that there are many more Haley Stevenses out there. How many is the question voters will answer on Tuesday night.