Centrist, pro-Israel Democrats helped Stevens undermine Abdul El-Sayed for months. Now they are reaping the consequences.
Michigan Representative Haley Stevens likes to tell the world what she’s dreaming about. Sometimes, she even overshares a little bit, as in her notorious December 2023 statement that “Israel comes to me in my dreams.”
On Saturday, Stevens dipped into her well of nocturnal visions in a bid to calm the waters she’d started churning up over her clear antipathy toward Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic Michigan Senate nominee who defeated Stevens in a bitter primary in August. Responding to concerns that she might break with her party and endorse El-Sayed’s Republican rival, Mike Rogers, Stevens reportedly texted a Michigan Democrat, “I am voting straight Dem!!!! I had a dream last night we won. And I believe he will win! P.S. it was a happy dream.” She reportedly said much the same thing to multiple friends and congressional colleagues up until early Sunday morning—until, without warning, she appeared with Rogers at a Detroit church and announced that she was endorsing him.
The drama of Stevens’s life over the last few weeks has been a battle between these competing dreams. Her pro-Israel politics were in tension with her partisan identity after she lost the primary in August to El-Sayed, who is strongly critical of Israel. AIPAC spent more than $30 million dollars supporting Stevens. After her loss, AIPAC and allied groups such as the United Democracy Project have continued to pour tens of millions of dollars into the effort to defeat El-Sayed, although the full spending on the race hasn’t yet been tabulated. Stevens, meanwhile, kept insisting that her dream of a Democratic Senate outweighed her dreams of Israel, even as she demanded that El-Sayed denounce anti-Israel ads he had nothing to do with. (El-Sayed complied.)
Now we know which dream ultimately won out. When Stevens made her announcement, one of the people in the background was Abigail Ronson, described by Drop Site News as not only a Rogers spokesperson but “a registered foreign agent for the state of Israel.” Not surprisingly, AIPAC repeatedly posted celebratory retweets of Stevens’s endorsement of Rogers.
Stevens has a personal connection to Zionism as well. Her fiancé, Jason Turkish, is strongly pro-Israel and a megadonor to both political parties. He has donated more than $24,000 to the campaign of Maine Republican Susan Collins. Last week, Turkish announced that he is voting for Rogers. (A friend of Stevens told The Washington Post on Sunday that Turkish had been “really working her over” to endorse Rogers, including by saying that she was betraying Jewish voters by backing El-Sayed.)
In declaring her own support for Rogers, Stevens claimed, “Who we are as Michiganders is not hate, and it is not what we are getting out from our Democratic nominee right now.” This claim is absurd, since El-Sayed has not been running a hateful campaign, while Rogers and other Republicans have targeted the Democrats with vile Islamophobia. In fact, after welcoming the support of Stevens, Rogers referred to El-Sayed as a “jihadist.”
Current Issue
The journalist Ray Wert, who is married to Mallory McMorrow, who was also bested by El-Sayed in Michigan’s Democratic senatorial primary, offered some insights into Stevens in a long post on X.com that emphasized her personal flakiness and speculated on the role her fiancé might have played in the decision. According to Wert:
I’ve known Haley Stevens for a long time. Until now, she has always had staff to protect her, prop her up, and keep her safe from her own irrational behavior. What we’re seeing now? This is just raw, unfiltered Haley.
The Haley who flip-flops and goes from thought to thought without rhyme or reason. The Haley that calls you at 3 AM to yell at you, and then calls you back at 5 AM oblivious to the fact that she even spoke with you at 3 AM. The Haley who bends to the last and loudest voice that tells her something.
More often than not that last voice is now her fiancé. And…that appears to potentially be a really troubling relationship.
This account of Stevens’s personal instability is plausible enough, and other emerging accounts reinforce this narrative. So too will the train wreck of an interview that Stevens gave to CNN’s Anderson Cooper on Sunday night, in which she appeared erratic in the extreme and failed to give any coherent reason for her last-minute endorsement of Rogers.
But Stevens’s personality is only part of the story. Donald Trump is also weird, but his weirdness is amplified and given direction by his ideology as well as pressure from those around him.
In Stevens’s case, hardline pro-Israel ideology is key to understanding her decision. Danielle O’Byrne, a political strategist who has worked for Stevens as well as Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, wrote bluntly about the ideological dimensions of Stevens’s actions:
In 2022, I worked for Haley Stevens’ campaign. Over my time working there I quickly learned that she was bought and sold by AIPAC. A Democrat from the middle of America, obsessed with foreign interests and willing to sell herself and us out for it. We won that race by 20 points. With over $10 million in outside spending by AIPAC to oust another Jewish Democratic member, @andylevin, all because he wasn’t kowtowing to them.
It’s precisely because Stevens was a fierce pro-Israel warrior that she had the support of the Democratic Party establishment. In the primaries, she was the preferred candidate of Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader. After she lost the primary, Stevens started making comments that were clearly designed to sabotage El-Sayed. But this didn’t put her beyond the pale, since other party leaders such as former House speaker Nancy Pelosi and Neera Tanden (head of the Center for American Progress) were saying much the same thing.
In retrospect, centrist Democrats such as Pelosi and Tanden were playing a dangerous game. They were clearly intent on reducing El-Sayed’s margin without fatally wounding his campaign. The goal was to make sure that even if El-Sayed won, they could argue that he underperformed because his version of progressive politics—particularly when it came to Israel—was too extreme, thus making it easier to ideologically discipline him in office.
Stevens was playing the same game, but on Sunday, she went too far by actually endorsing Rogers. This robbed establishment Democrats of their plausible deniability in hamstringing the El-Sayed campaign.
Popular
“swipe left below to view more authors”Swipe →
Stevens also made herself toxic among Democrats. She still has a few defenders, such as Todd Richman, head of Democratic Majority for Israel. But her longtime chief of staff Justin German has quit and says many of his colleagues are also resigning. Party leaders—notably Schumer, Pelosi, and Tanden—who previously supported Stevens are now decrying what Schumer described as a “despicable betrayal.”
But the lamentations of these powerful centrist Democrats ring hollow. They sound like Dr. Frankenstein wringing his hands over the havoc wreaked by the monster he created. The monster, of course, deserves punishment—and there is already a move to expel Stevens from the Democratic Party’s congressional caucus—but so do the doctors.
The best-case scenario for the Democrats might be that they win a large enough supermajority that they can afford to expel a few wreckers within the party, not just Stevens but also Senator John Fetterman.
But Stevens is merely a symptom of a deeper problem. Even as voters are becoming more wary of the US alliance with Israel, Democratic Party elites are top-heavy with figures closely aligned to the pro-Israel lobby. Any reckoning with the Stevens fiasco has to also include radically weakening this lobby.
More from The Nation
At one of his final midterm rallies, the president showed just what a spent political force he has become—and what little grip on reality he still has.
The Minnesota representative tells The Nation that her targeting is “a deliberate attempt to distract the American people from the failures of this administration.”
The stakes are high. Control of the Senate and the House are on the line. Make your voice heard. Vote November 3, 2026.
Where with a little bit of luck—and a ton of grassroots organizing—decency has a fighting chance.
In this week’s Elie v. U.S., our justice correspondent asks why the media is obsessing over Obama’s Cheesecake Factory joke while largely ignoring allegations of Trump’s sexual as…