As Republicans touted Democratic Rep. Haley Stevens’ 11th-hour endorsement of GOP Michigan U.S. Senate candidate Mike Rogers, Democrats downplayed its impact and pointed to the fundraising surge it generated for Democratic candidate Abdul El-Sayed.
President Donald Trump called it an “act of bravery” and that it showed “great loyalty to Michigan.” GOP House Speaker Mike Johnson said, “I think Haley did a heroic and important thing for the country.”
But El-Sayed’s campaign said it brought in $2.4 million in the hours after Stevens’ endorsement, its best-ever fundraising day.
“This haul will go towards ensuring Abdul’s message -. money out of politics. money in your pocket, an. Medicare for All — reaches every Michigander in every corner of the state during this critical final stretch,. El-Sayed’s campaign said in a statement.
The campaign said the record haul came from more than 65,000 donors, nearly half of them contributing for the first time.
Rogers said in an interview on Fox News on Monday that “We did not know until we were on our way to church when we got a phone call that said she had made the switch. Remember, this is Abdul’s doing. I know Democrats are thumping their chest saying she has done something other than courageous. It was nothing but courageous.”
Stevens’ shocking endorsement came after months of tension between her and El-Sayed since he defeated her in the Democratic primary in August by 1 percentage point after a bruising primary filled with personal attacks.
Though they appeared together in the initial days after the primary, Stevens never appeared with El-Sayed on the trail. On Sundaym she praised Rogers’ outreach to Black voters.
In recent days, things came to a boil after Stevens’ fiancé Jason Turkish announced he would vote for Rogers and attended an event with Rogers and GOP Sen. Ted Cruz last week and Stevens called on El-Sayed to disavow a pair of ads that she said were offensive to Black and Jewish voters.
El-Sayed said one of the ads was not run by his campaign and said he did not agree with it.
There appeared to be initial agreement for Stevens to appear with El-Sayed at a unity event at a Black church in Detroit alongside Democratic Rep. James Clyburn and Democratic Sen. Angela Alsobrooks, but those plans fell apart, with a source telling ABC News that the El-Sayed team had disinvited her, although Michigan Rep. Debbie Dingell said she was the one who told Stevens not to attend.
On Sunday, just before that event was to begin, Stevens instead showed up to for church services with Rogers at another Detroit Black church just a few miles away and posted a video on X endorsing Rogers.
Stevens told ABC News that endorsing Rogers was motivated largely by stopping the Democratic Party from moving in a direction that she finds dangerous, saying “but someone in the Democratic Party has got to say that this crap has got to stop” and that the party “is just not going to have this socialist, far extreme, hateful division.”
El-Sayed dismissed the endorsement’s impact on the race, telling reporters, “At the end of the day. I actually don’t think about Haley Stevens,” and added later, “None of this matters.”
In an interview with ABC News Live on Monday, Dingell said she spoke to Stevens repeatedly over the past week and that she and others were “worried” about her.
“She’s been under a lot of stress. I knew that a number of people were trying to push her to do this. She’s my friend. She’s a human being. I talked to her a lot last week, multiple conversations every day.”
Dingell said she spoke with Stevens on Saturday night and was assured that she would not support Rogers, only to wake up Sunday and see that she had.
When pressed about who pressured Stevens to support Rogers, Dingell brought up the “strong Jewish community in her district,” and described the vitriolic and racist rhetoric in ads attacking El-Sayed.
Virgie Rollins, chair of the Democratic National Committee Black Caucus said in a statement that she was “dismayed that Congresswoman Haley Stevens has revealed herself to be a sellout who used Black Michiganders for a political stunt.”
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries said Monday that Stevens “made a terrible decision, blindsided everyone and isolated herself from the House Democratic caucus.”
“We will have a discussion about appropriate next steps upon our return,” Jeffries said. “At the moment, we have one mission and that’s to win on Tuesday. Democrats must take back control of the House of Representatives and the Senate.”
A CNN poll last week found about 75% of Black voters saying they were backing El-Sayed and 10% said they were backing Rogers.
A CNN poll conducted in October showed El-Sayed with a 49%-42% margin over Rogers while a New York Times/Siena poll conducted over the last week of October and released Sunday showed the race 53%-42% El-Sayed.
El-Sayed largely dismissed the poll results, saying, “I don’t take polls very seriously after the primary,” when polls showed him leading by a comfortable margin before votes were cast.
The most concrete impact of Stevens’ endorsement appears to be the effective end of her career in the Democratic Party.
Curtis Hertel, the chair of Michigan’s Democratic Party, said Stevens’ endorsement “shows that she has abandoned everything she claims to care about” and that she “is not a current member of the Michigan Democratic Party, nor will she be in the future.”
Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer called the move “a despicable betrayal” and several of her House Democratic colleagues suggested she should be expelled from the House Democratic caucus.
Stevens told ABC News that she “fully represents” and is “fully in” the Democratic Party.
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