When Democratic Representative Haley Stevens broke with her party on Sunday and issued an endorsement of Republican Mike Rogers in the Michigan Senate race, she cited a growing rift between her and the Democratic candidate, Abdul El-Sayed, and concern over his association with extremist political streamer Hasan Piker.
Stevens, who previously endorsed El-Sayed after he defeated her in the Democratic primary, said, “Who we are as Michiganders is not hate and is not what we are getting out from our Democratic nominee right now.”
Incensed that Stevens would abandon El-Sayed right before Election Day, left-wing pundits and Democratic operatives quickly decided she had actually lost her mind, ignoring the fact that El-Sayed made no attempt to accommodate Stevens and her supporters as part of his coalition.
Bill Kristol said Stevens “seems to have had some kind of breakdown or something.”
He went on to acknowledge that he doesn’t think El-Sayed should be in Senate leadership if he is elected and said that he would be “upset if a lot of people decide to follow in [El-Sayed’s] footsteps,” but he insisted nonetheless that it is a “little ridiculous” that “everyone is having a heart attack” that El-Sayed could be just one of several dozen senators in the Democratic coalition.
George Conway said Stevens needs to check herself into a mental hospital.
CNN’s David Axelrod suggested that she is “obviously struggling and I think trying to find her way through something that she hadn’t fully thought through.”
“There’s a lot of anger about what she did, but we’re all human beings and I think watching her made me think this is someone who is struggling and so I just don’t want to pile on right now,” he added.
Van Jones agreed, saying he had spoken to Stevens the day before and she seemed “at peace,” but “if you told her that today she’d be talking to Anderson Cooper and struggling just to get through a basic interview she would’ve said no way.”
“I agree with David, I’m not going to pile on or add to anything. That was a human being in a lot of pain tonight,” he added.
It’s true that Stevens struggled to express herself in her interview with Cooper, but that was at least in part due to Cooper’s combative approach and his hyper-focus on the timing of her decision.
In typical fashion, Zeteo editor in chief Mehdi Hasan said that Stevens is “clearly a disturbed, deranged, dishonest woman” and a “complete traitor.” He further claimed “Islamophobia” was “at the core” of her endorsement.
Democratic strategist James Carville took an even less tactful approach.
“Your political career is over,” Carville said of Stevens. “If you think that these Republicans are going to treat you as anything other than what they view you as — and that is, let me just break the news to you, a used condom. The Democrats don’t even think you’re worth a used condom.”
Conservative political analyst Scott Jennings offered Stevens an opportunity to respond to the attacks on his C-SPAN show.
“It’s just more the same of thinking I’m being forced into what … my conscience … is saying,” she said, pointing to how Democrats have treated Senator John Fetterman, who has also failed to bow to the party’s demands.
“They say the same thing about him,” she said. “They use the C word, you know, mental health. I mean, what are we getting at?”
You’d never know it now, but Stevens was once the favored candidate of the Democratic establishment in Michigan.
But while Stevens initially offered her endorsement to El-Sayed, her support began to waver after Rebellion PAC, founded by The Young Turks host Cenk Uygur, put out an ad in late October backing El-Sayed that tied grocery prices to aid to Israel. Critics called the ad antisemitic.
The spat between Stevens and El-Sayed tumbled into public view over the weekend after Stevens said she had heard that El-Sayed planned to condemn the ad and called on him to also recant his statements that she described as blaming inadequate schools, health care, and childcare in Michigan on American aid for Israel. El-Sayed has argued that money used for aid to Israel should be used for domestic policies “rather than dropping bombs on somebody else and their kids.
El-Sayed responded in a Friday statement saying that Stevens “seems intent on relitigating a primary that ended three months ago.” Asked on Saturday if he condemns the ad, El-Sayed would not use that word specifically. “You guys love to play the ‘condemn’ game,’” he told reporters. However, he noted that his campaign did not produce the ad and said, “I do not agree with the contents of that ad.”
As the pair quarreled over the ad, El-Sayed’s campaign apparently signaled that Stevens was no longer welcome at his campaign events.
“Our Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate, Abdul, said that I was no longer welcome in his campaign and that I should stay away, and he’s right,” she said in her endorsement of Rogers. “And that’s why I am endorsing Mike Rogers for the United States Senate today.”
El-Sayed sought to downplay the endorsement, which could influence moderate Democrats who are uncomfortable with the progressive, anti-Israel El-Sayed, to cast a vote for Rogers. “At the end of the day, I actually don’t think about Haley Stevens,” he told reporters at an event. “Because you know what? I’m just less interested in the politics of it all than I am in the policy of it all.”
Uygur has defended the Rebellion PAC ad that started it all and now says Stevens endorsed Rogers because “her only source of power is the Israeli lobby” and “she has no popular support, just AIPAC money.”
Hasan Piker, meanwhile, said Stevens is “weirdly obsessed with Israel.”
Piker said on X: “haley stevens is not the spokesperson for democrats, she’s not the spox for jewish people or black people. she’s a self interested striver who’s weirdly obsessed with israel and has been paid handsomely for this strange obsession. this race is about solving the affordability crisis, defending democracy, fighting back against the racialized violence all communities have faced since trump came into power and serving michigan. haley and mike rogers serve trump, and trump serves the epstein class. the choice is clear.”
Keith Olbermann said he didn’t want to “downplay Haley Stevens’ vermin-like betrayal of her party and her constituents and her nation” but asked, “given her track record as a clownish loser, do we really believe any who will now follow her weren’t already going to vote for the Fascist?”
MS NOW host Antonia Hylton had Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams on her show to criticize Stevens for over four minutes, while Hylton herself said she was “heartbroken” over the fact that the endorsement happened at a black church.
Hylton’s MS NOW colleague Jacob Soboroff called the endorsement an “Earth-shattering moment” in Democratic politics.
“The Democratic loser of the primary election in Michigan, Haley Stevens, who had said she would endorse Dr. Abdul el-Sayed, a Rhodes scholar, an epidemiologist who won the primary election in Michigan, has now withdrawn her support and has endorsed the Republican Mike Rogers in the election,” Soboroff said. He added that while Rogers “invoked Jews in Michigan, talking about anti-semitism and fears that Jewish people in Michigan have — he did not mention, unless I missed it, the incredible amount of Islamophobia and bigotry that has been put forward in this race, including by him himself, using euphemisms and at some points, specific words like ‘terrorism’ and ‘terrorist; in talking about Abdul el-Sayed, the candidate, the Democratic nominee for senate in the State of Michigan.”
Headline Fail of the Week
Last week, while most political reporters worth their salt were focused on the upcoming midterm elections, the Daily Beast was apparently struggling to find something worth writing about. The outlet dedicated at least two separate articles to coverage of President Trump’s hair: “Trump, 80, Suffers Horror Hair Moment at Last-Gasp Rally” and “Trump Brutally Mocked as His Hair Goes Flying.”
The “horror hair moment”? A “nasty case of hat hair” during a rally in Salina, Kan.
“Removing the baseball cap revealed his once-iconic do had formed a neat, domed nest underneath. Crumpled and disturbed, surprising patches of scalp were visible while the top of his hair lapped awkwardly over the back and sides,” the report informs readers.
Two days earlier, the Daily Beast had helpfully offered another bit of hair-related news when Trump’s “carefully maintained hairdo failed the stress test Friday as he climbed aboard his Qatari-gifted Air Force One at Joint Base Andrews to depart for Daytona Beach, Florida.”
“A blast of wind sent the hair at the back of his head scattering, revealing the thinning hair he admitted earlier this month leaves him ‘depressed,’” the article says.
Media Misses
• Law professor Josh Blackman criticized the New York Times for labeling him as a “conservative law professor” in two articles while the paper almost never acknowledges the political leanings of liberal law professors and legal analysts — and a standards editor at the paper agreed. Blackman said the Times’ uneven use of political descriptors reinforces a perception that the liberal position is a neutral one whereas conservatives are outliers.
Patrick Healy, the assistant managing editor for Standards and Trust at the Times, told Blackman during the Sound Off podcast that “I think there’s real truth to your critique and it’s something we need to do a better job on.”
“It can come off like The Times treats liberals as normal and conservatives as unique and worthy of labeling,” Healy said. “In the legal academy, there are a lot of liberals, but that doesn’t justify it. I think we need to be more discerning about it.”
• Mali native Moussa Diawara was featured on 60 Minutes on Sunday as a loving husband and father who was deported from the U.S. after living here since 2001. But the DHS said that, while the segment made Diawara the “poster child for what it claims are wrongful deportations,” he had falsely claimed he was homosexual on his asylum application in an act of immigration fraud.
“The ‘60 Minutes’ sob story tonight highlighted an illegal alien and his wife and two children. One problem. The illegal alien claimed he was a HOMOSEXUAL in order to try and dodge deportation to Mali,” ICE posted on X.