WhatsappThe party establishment will ensure that the Michigan congresswoman will pay with her future career for her decision to oppose the openly antisemitic Abdul El-Sayed
No matter the outcome of the Michigan race, which many thought would end with her elevation to the Senate, the political career of Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich.) appears to be over. The reaction of the Democratic Party establishment and its media cheerleaders to her decision to endorse former Republican congressman Mike Rogers over Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, who defeated her in a party primary in August, seems likely to ensure it.
That this is so is not merely a remarkable reversal of fortune from the situation earlier this year when Stevens was the frontrunner for the Democratic Senate nomination. But the moderate, pro-Israel Democrat’s journey from that position to one of party pariah is a cautionary tale not merely about how quickly a fall from political grace can occur. It also speaks volumes about the Democrats’ tolerance of antisemitism from its “progressive” wing and its intolerance of anyone who would dare to call it out.
Choosing between the party and antisemitism
The savagery with which party leaders denounced Stevens for her last-minute defection from the otherwise solid support from Democrats for El-Sayed is in part a measure of their fury at the prospect of him losing and therefore possibly costing them a chance at control of the Senate.
For Democrats like Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), who labeled Stevens as having committed a “despicable betrayal,” the issue isn’t El-Sayed’s campaign, which largely hinged on labeling first Stevens and then Rogers as stooges of Jews trying to buy the election for Israel. They’ve demonstrated that their quest for power and thwarting U.S. President Donald Trump is not merely a higher priority than combating antisemitism within their own ranks.
We already know that in their eyes, the latter is of no consequence when compared to the former.
Nor will Stevens’ future depend on whether El-Sayed, who led every poll heading into the election, is upset by Rogers, whose prospects may be boosted by her help. Win or lose, Democrats are not likely to forgive her apostasy.
If El-Sayed wins, Stevens will be depicted as a bitter loser, who couldn’t accept that both her party and the Michigan electorate have accepted hatred for Israel and the Jews as mainstream discourse and the default position for political liberals.
But if Rogers wins and the GOP holds the Senate, it’s unlikely that Democrats will blame themselves for nominating someone like El-Sayed, who is not only an extremist but has credible connections to the Muslim Brotherhood. Instead, they will target Stevens, who is engaged to a Jew, and Jewish Democrats as being responsible for their defeat and therefore empowering Trump, whom they speak of as if he is the epitome of evil.
Either way, it paints a dismal picture of the future of the party as a home for Jews, who are not willing to cast aside a major element of their identity and peoplehood and join leftists in demonizing the Jewish state and its supporters.
By coming down so hard on Stevens, whose mental health pundits are questioning, with some on the left even threatening to remove her from their caucus during her last months in office as a lame duck member of the House of Representatives, they’re also setting a precedent for the future.
Theirs is a party that has largely been hijacked by the intersectional left and their democratic socialist allies in primaries in recent years. El-Sayed, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the growing ranks of the left-wing congressional “Squad” have been normalized.
That means Stevens won’t be the last person faced with this dilemma, and they want those who are put in a position of choosing between party loyalty and opposition to Jew-hatred to know that the price for choosing principle will be very high indeed.
Ironically, Stevens’ struggle to stay loyal to her party is being held against her.
Her initial reaction to her primary loss was to say that she would support El-Sayed, playing the part of a gracious loser. And she remained critical of Rogers, who she believed would be her general election opponent.
The difference between 2022 and 2026
Stevens was, after all, the favorite to win the Democratic nomination heading into 2026. She was first elected to Congress in 2018. In 2022, due to her state’s loss of a congressional seat after the census, she was forced into a primary against another Democratic incumbent, Andy Levin who had succeeded his father, Sander Levin, who served 18 terms in the House from 1983 to 2019. Levin was also the nephew of Sen. Carl Levin, a Democrat who represented Michigan in the Senate from 1979 to 2015.
The race against Levin in 2022 was a contest that pitted a left-wing Jewish opponent of Israel in Levin against a centrist non-Jewish supporter of the Jewish state in Stevens. Foreshadowing what would happen with El-Sayed, Levin sought to delegitimize Stevens by painting her as a puppet of the AIPAC pro-Israel lobby. But it didn’t work, as she easily defeated Levin by a 60%-40% margin.
That victory marked Stevens as a rising star in her party and seemingly set her on an inevitable elevation to the Senate when incumbent Sen. Gary Peters (D-Mich.) announced in January 2025 that he wouldn’t run for reelection. But a lot has changed in the last four years.
In the wake of the Hamas-led Palestinian Arab terror attacks on Israeli communities on Oct. 7, 2023, there has been a global surge of antisemitism. Demonization of Israel and its Jewish supporters has spread around the United States enabling the rise of an already potent left wing of the Democratic Party. That was made clear in 2024, as the party’s base turned on President Joe Biden and then Vice President Kamala Harris for being insufficiently hostile to Israel, despite the administration’s efforts to hamstring the war against Hamas. Post-mortems of Harris’s defeat by Trump put the onus for the party losing both Congress and the White House on the Democrats being too soft on the Jewish state.
With polls now showing that the overwhelming majority of Democrats no longer support the Jewish state and/or believe the blood libels about it committing “genocide” in Gaza, that trend continued throughout 2026 as pro-Israel Democrats have been defeated by anti-Israel opponents in primaries. As a result, it was a given that Stevens was bound to face a stiff challenge to her senatorial ambitions.
At first, that challenge was thought to come from state senator Mallory McMorrow, who was beloved by her party for her defense of its positions on gender ideology and other liberal stands. But as the campaign went on, it was clear that El-Sayed, whose only previous try for office had been a failed campaign for governor of Michigan in 2018, better represented the zeitgeist of Democrats in 2026.
His obsession with AIPAC and chasing the vast majority of Jews who are pro-Israel out of the public square hit the sweet spot of Democratic Party politics in a way that Stevens’ traditional emphasis on bread-and-butter issues and support for the Jewish state and even McMorrow’s hard-core liberalism did not.
Not drinking the Kool-Aid
Stevens’ primary loss need not have ended her career. At only 43, there was no reason to believe she couldn’t try again for any number of high offices in the future. But the price for that meant backing El-Sayed despite his campaign that rested on the claim that she was nothing but a hireling of Jewish interests.
Nevertheless, Jewish Democrats, like Schumer, Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-Mich.) and state attorney general Dana Nessel, had no trouble lining up behind El-Sayed. Nessel even claimed that his election was more important than the survival of Israel or even of the Jewish people.
But though Stevens appeared to try to do the same, she just couldn’t force herself to drink the party Kool-Aid on El-Sayed.
Was it the growing evidence of his ties to the Muslim Brotherhood? Or was it the antisemitic pro-El-Sayed video produced by Cenk Uygur? Uygur is the uncle and mentor of the Jew-hating streamer Hasan Piker, who has campaigned with El-Sayed. In the advertisement, the Jews are blamed for the price of bananas and eggs, because America was helping Israel kill Palestinians. But the Democratic candidate hesitated to disavow or condemn it.
Last week, Stevens asked that El-Sayed take a firm stand on such Jew-hatred and also apologize for the way he had demonized her. But as he had demonstrated since the primary, he had no interest in moving to the center in order to mollify mainstream Democrats like her. Instead, and with the help of liberal media like The New York Times, he tried to turn the issue around on Stevens.
Much of the media went along with his effort to claim that those who condemned his extremism and Jew-hatred were Islamophobic bigots and that he was the second coming of President John F. Kennedy and an avatar of religious tolerance.
Her refusal to let his extremist stands go was interpreted as obsessive behavior on her part. And in a classic trope of antisemitism in which Jews and those linked with them are viewed as pursuing their own agendas at the expense of others, the Times decided to bolster the claim that her reluctance to go along with the rest of her party was due to her engagement to a Jewish man and the possibility that she will convert to Judaism prior to their marriage next year.
Her fiancé, Jason Turkish, is a lawyer with a record of fundraising for Democrats and has endorsed Rogers. But when El-Sayed not only wouldn’t apologize but doubled-down on his anti-Israel stands and said she wasn’t welcome at a campaign rally, she decided to publicly back Rogers.
A political obituary
This probably would have gone a bit better for Stevens if she had never said she would back El-Sayed. But even if she had stated her terms for an endorsement of the primary winner from the start, it would have still been held against her by most Democrats and likely would have been brought up in future campaigns.
Still, the personal attacks on her as mentally unstable and a traitor to her party from fellow Democrats have little to do with her character and everything to do with the bargain they have made with the antisemitic left. The choice facing her was one of sacrificing her career or her principles and though she dithered over it for months, in the end, she made the only choice a decent person could. It’s obvious that her future in a party in which hostility to Israel and opposition to immigration law enforcement have become the organizing principles is over.
As legal analyst and retired Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz has pointed out, political liberals like him and many other Jews, who have loyally supported the Democratic Party throughout their lives, aren’t the ones who have changed. They’ve been abandoned by a party that has embraced open antisemites. And have made falling in line with that disgraceful position a litmus test of party loyalty. That’s a warning that the diminishing number of pro-Israel Democrats like Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, who has maintained a cautious silence on El-Sayed, cannot ignore.
Her political obituary that is being written in the wake of her endorsement of Rogers illustrates the truth of a disturbing yet undeniable fact. In denouncing her, Democrats are telling us that, win or lose on Election Day, people like Abdul El-Sayed are the future of their party and those like Haley Stevens are its past.
