As if the 2026 midterm election season needed another surprise, Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich.) welcomed in November by endorsing the opposite party’s candidate, Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Mich.), for U.S. Senate. “I am endorsing Mike Rogers for United States Senate today,” Stevens said on X. Stevens was scheduled to campaign with the Democratic nominee, Abdul El-Sayed, over the weekend; instead, she was seen at Perfecting Church, a Detroit-area Pentecostal body, alongside Rogers.

Stevens’ surprise announcement came after losing the Democratic primary in August, when Stevens had offered El-Sayed her “full support as we work to defeat Mike Rogers this November.”

However, the El-Sayed campaign pushed Stevens away in the final days before Election Day. El-Sayed said he did not want his primary rival at a party unity event on Sunday, and the campaign made it clear Stevens was not welcome at other events either. Stevens finally concluded that El-Sayed “made very clear that I was not welcome in his campaign, that he didn’t need me there,” she explained. “I stood with my party, and I was booed off the stage.”

Stevens already had little reason to love the El-Sayed campaign after the primary contest’s fiasco of fake polling. Most polls in the contest showed El-Sayed enjoying a double-digit lead over Stevens (from 10 to 19 percentage points), including polls from SoCal Strategies and Wedgewood Polls, firms later shown to be fraudulent. In the final vote, Stevens lost by 1.0% of the vote — a margin of victory small enough to be caused by polls suggesting that El-Sayed’s campaign had all the momentum.

In any event, The Wall Street Journal editors assess that “El-Sayed has himself to blame for this party rupture. He has made little effort to court Democrats who opposed him in the primary, or even to ease concerns about his nasty views about Israel and the American Jews who support it.”

El-Sayed’s failure to condemn anti-Semitism is what ultimately led Stevens to break with her fellow Democrat. Not only has El-Sayed’s campaign repeatedly deflected inquiries about his 2012 support for the Muslim Brotherhood-aligned regime in Egypt, but it has also failed to condemn more recent associations with anti-Semites, such as podcaster Hasan Piker. “We can’t stand with hate, we can’t stand with Hasan Piker,” insisted Stevens.

The moment when Stevens reportedly broke with El-Sayed was when a pro-El-Sayed group aired an ad blaming America’s affordability problems on its support for Israel. “This type of fearmongering about Israel is wrong. It is not a winning strategy for any state,” she declared. “Do we need to lower costs by building more homes, securing people’s health care, and creating a fairer federal tax code? Yes, we do!! How we do so is not by blaming the high costs of our goods on the only Jewish homeland in the world.”

Stevens’s decision, broadcast only 48 hours before the election, reportedly surprised even her own staff. Following the announcement, Stevens’s Chief-of-Staff Justin German led an exodus from her office. “As of this morning, many members of our team have resigned, including myself,” he wrote. “I speak on behalf of our team in wholeheartedly supporting Abdul El-Sayed for Senate. … We are shocked and heartbroken by Congresswoman Stevens’ decision to support Mike Rogers.”

Washington Democrats also fumed over what they saw as a “betrayal.” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) called Stevens’s endorsement of Rogers “a despicable betrayal” and affirmed that “Senate Democrats are united in our support for Abdul El-Sayed. Former Biden White House official Neera Tanden also exclaimed that “standing with Mike Rogers is a betrayal of everything Haley Stevens has fought for her entire career. It’s also a betrayal of all of her supporters that believed in her.”

Stevens broke with El-Sayed because she believed that endorsing anti-Semitism represented a betrayal of the Jewish people. But many fellow Democrats in Washington placed greater importance on not betraying the “D” next to his name.

“I’m still a very proud Democrat. I still very much believe in everything I’ve voted for and said,” Stevens pleaded. But “this is the conscience of the Senate right now, and our Michigan moment.” She added that “who we are as Michiganders is not hate, and [it] is not what we are getting from our Democratic nominee right now.”

For his part, El-Sayed sought to avoid answering questions about the uncomfortable topic of Stevens endorsing his opponent. “I’m not in the business of driving clicks for you. I’m in the business of trying to solve problems for people in my state, so if you want to ask questions about the issues that the people in my state are facing, I am happy to answer them,” he told a gaggle of reporters after the news became public. “If you want to ask me questions about some intrigue and about two folks who aren’t here right now, I’m going to be less interested in answering them. Just putting it out there.” When a reporter asked anyway, El-Sayed responded curtly that he “doesn’t think about Haley Stevens.”