Haley Stevens’s Chaotic Comments on Her Endorsement of Mike Rogers
The New Yorker · Ruby Cramer ·
Ruby Cramer writes about Haley Stevens’s surprise decision to endorse Mike Rogers instead of Abdul El-Sayed in the U.S. Senate race in Michigan.
Acker, a forty-two-year-old Jewish Democrat, was in his first term as regent of the University of Michigan at the time. The role is a peculiarity of Michigan politics. Regents govern part of the state’s public-university system, but the position is partisan: candidates are nominated by their party, then elected in a statewide popular vote. Acker is a vocal supporter of Israeli statehood, and, after October 7th, his tenure in office quickly became mired in fraught campus-protest politics. He came to believe his treatment from the Party leadership was grounded in antisemitism. This spring, by the time he was up for reëlection, Acker was booed at the state’s Democratic convention, and a new candidate was nominated in his place. In the halls, he was taunted and, at one point, he told me, called “Jordan Epstein.” Afterward, once he was home, Haley Stevens was among the first to come over and check on him.
Acker has known Stevens, the forty-three-year-old congresswoman, since high school. One of his good friends went to summer camp with her. They soon embarked on “parallel lives” in the Party, starting out together on the Michigan Democratic Coordinated Campaign, in 2006, then working in the Obama Administration. Acker voted for Stevens in the U.S. Senate primary this year against Abdul El-Sayed—a race made painfully tense, at times, because of differences between the two candidates on the issue of Israel. As the general election approached, Acker still wasn’t sure if he would cast his vote for El-Sayed, who is critical of the Israeli state and its government, and who has failed to convince some Jewish voters that he is sufficiently sensitive to fears of rising antisemitism. But, about eight days before the election, when Acker heard that Stevens was thinking about switching her endorsement from El-Sayed to the Republican Senate candidate, Mike Rogers, he was baffled. (Acker said that, if he didn’t vote for El-Sayed, he would either write in a candidate or not vote; he would never vote for Rogers.) He called Stevens, a bit panicky. “You’re not actually considering this, are you?” he asked. “Haley, forget about the politics of this. Someone might try to kill you.”
Stevens had just taken issue with a pro-El-Sayed ad from an unaffiliated group called Rebellion PAC. The ad laid the blame for high grocery prices on U.S. support for Israel. El-Sayed had said that he had nothing to do with the ad, but Stevens wanted him to disavow it directly. Still, she reassured Acker that no, she wasn’t going to endorse Rogers. She wouldn’t do something like that. Then, two days later, Stevens’s fiancé, a lawyer named Jason Turkish, did endorse Rogers. That same evening, Stevens was scheduled to appear in a prime-time interview with Kaitlan Collins, of CNN. “What are you doing,” Acker texted her. During the interview, Stevens explained that, like many Americans, she lived in “a household divided.” But, she added, “I still very much want our Democratic nominee—his name is Abdul—to win this race.” Acker didn’t understand why Stevens seemed to be inserting herself back into a race that she had managed to depart with grace and good will just a few months earlier. Stevens had conceded the primary after losing by a closer-than-expected margin—13,792 votes—then quickly endorsed El-Sayed. The general election against Rogers was a critical piece of the Party’s plan to take back control of the Senate for the final two years of Donald Trump’s Presidency. Even with the concerns Acker had, he thought that endorsing Rogers would be “horrible” for the Party, the country, and the Jewish community.
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