In Michigan, Haley Stevens Did a Lot More Damage Than She Expected—to Herself

Politics In Michigan, Some Are More Than Mad at Haley Stevens. They’re Embarrassed for Her. By Enter your email to receive alerts for this author. Sign in or create an account to better manage your email preferences. Unsubscribe from email alerts Are you sure you want to unsubscribe from email alerts for Aymann Ismail? Nov 03, 20262:41 PM Haley Stevens. Finn Gomez/Getty Images Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. Patricia Coleman-Burns grew up on Clairmount Street in Detroit. I had met her at Fellowship Chapel here during the Senate campaign this fall, where she’d told me about her years of knowing and advising Rep. Haley Stevens, who has represented Michigan’s 11th Congressional District since 2019. She had admired the congresswoman enough to appear in her primary campaign ads. Now she felt personally “betrayed.” “People are hurt,” she told me. Since Stevens’ announcement that she was rescinding her endorsement of Abdul El-Sayed and backing Republican Mike Rogers for Senate, Coleman-Burns has been fielding calls from other Black women voters. Some had invoked Susan B. Anthony’s opposition to the 15th Amendment, which extended voting rights to Black men but not women. To them, she said, it recalled the pain of watching “folks who said they were with us, when it came down to the wire, abandoned us.” Nationally, Democrats are furious about Stevens’ move. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who had backed Stevens in the primary, called it a “despicable betrayal.” But here in Michigan, the initial anger gave way to embarrassment and bafflement on Stevens’ behalf. Coleman-Burns thought Stevens was badly misreading her Black supporters if she expected them to follow her into the Republican column. Some Black voters who had supported Stevens in the primary had been so disappointed by El-Sayed’s victory that they were considering staying home, she said. But Stevens’ endorsement of Rogers had changed the conversation. Now, Coleman-Burns told me, parents were telling their children to get to the polls. “And I venture to say, it’s to vote for Abdul,” she said. If that’s true, Stevens’ attempted blow to El-Sayed might actually be helping him. Anne Soffin, a Jewish woman from Grosse Pointe who had known Stevens since she was a child, said she opposed El-Sayed and hadn’t been moved to vote for him—but she found the whole situation sad. “Haley was my camper. I was her counselor. She was 9 years old, and I was 18,” she said. Soffin had watched that little girl grow up and eventually become a member of Congress. She supported Stevens in the primary and donated to her campaign. When the news broke Sunday, she was scrolling through her phone. “I saw, like, two headlines, and I shut my phone off. I was like, ‘I can’t even believe that I’m reading that.’ I was absolutely beyond stunned.” She wasn’t furious with Stevens. She seemed genuinely heartbroken for her. “I’m embarrassed for her. And that sounds like pity, and I don’t mean it in a pitiful way,” she said. Then, a little later, she added, “I can’t be in her corner. I just can’t.” Soffin left the Senate race blank on her absentee ballot, and she stood by that. She couldn’t bring herself to vote for El-Sayed, but she couldn’t vote for Rogers either. Across town on Monday, I was at Nemo’s, a Detroit pub, for a birthday party crowded with old friends, all of them lifelong Democrats. Some had spent decades working professionally in Michigan politics. Many had broken against El-Sayed themselves. Lon Johnson grew up Downriver and chaired the Michigan Democratic Party until 2015. He had been making a similar argument as Stevens for weeks, though he wasn’t willing to go quite so far as to cross party lines. In October, Johnson and Democratic strategist David Kramer co-wrote an opinion piece in the Detroit News encouraging Democrats who couldn’t support El-Sayed to leave the Senate line blank rather than vote for either candidate. Kramer has since announced that he plans to vote for Rogers. Johnson, though, still believed there was a constituency of Democrats who couldn’t stomach either choice. When we spoke, Johnson didn’t have much sympathy for the idea that Stevens alone had created this mess. “There are just so many ways [El-Sayed] could have kept her on board,” he said. “You can only begin to think that this guy doesn’t want to unite this party, or doesn’t think he has to, or doesn’t want to.” And yet, when I asked whether Stevens’ endorsement would actually move votes, even Johnson wasn’t convinced. “Endorsements barely work in a race like this,” he said, suggesting that Stevens had torched her political career for little in return. He said El-Sayed really needed to worry about the Democrats who felt the same way as Stevens but declined to talk about it in public. Indeed, I spoke to a couple at this party who said they were voting for Rogers but declined to speak about it on the record. “These are Democrats,” Johnson emphasized. “There are a lot of people that will not express that they don’t support. They’re so afraid of being called Islamophobic. And that’s why people just shut down and shut off. They’re lying to people. They’re afraid,” he said. “I think Abdul’s going to run 5 to 6 points below what a typical Democrat will run in Michigan. This race is going to be close, and it didn’t need to be that way.” Elections Voting Michigan 2026 Midterms