Haley Stevens’s Surprise Senate Endorsement in Michigan

0:29This episode is brought to you by Charles Schwab. On the pages of The Wall Street Journal, this is Potomac Watch. Democrat Haley Stevens shocks her party by endorsing Republican Mike Rogers instead of Democrat Abdul Al-Sayed in the Michigan Senate race on Sunday. the Democratic Party establishment denouncing Stevens as a traitor to the party, but she seems genuinely worried about the drift of her party on anti-Semitism. Will her defection influence the Senate race in Michigan at all? And what does the Democratic reaction tell us about the party as we look ahead to Congress in 2027 and certain policy decisions, as well as the potential of who could win the 2028 presidential election campaign for the presidency.

1:23Plus, how bad is it going to be for the Republicans this Tuesday? The polls don't look good for the GOP. These are our subjects today on Potomac Watch, our daily podcast for Wall Street Journal Opinion. Welcome. I'm Paul Gigo, and I'm here with Elliot Kaufman and Kate O'Dell. Let's start it off by listening to the Twitter post by Haley Stevens explaining her endorsement decision. Hey, Michigan. As you may have seen, our Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate, Abdul, said that I was no longer welcome in his campaign and that I should stay away. And he's right. And that's why I am endorsing Mike Rogers for the United States Senate today.

2:08I don't belong in Abdul's campaign. I do not stand with Hassan Piker, who gets trafficked on our college campuses. And what our students see, what our children see, and who we are as Michiganders is not hate and is not what we are getting out from our Democratic nominee right now. All right, Kate, a betrayal or an act of principle? Well, Paul, I mean, I think this was clearly required a degree of political courage to basically come out and say she's going to vote for Mike Rogers ahead of the election is certainly not something you would do if you're really minding your future career in democratic politics in Michigan, which she certainly was.

2:51Because let's remember, Haley Stevens was supporting him for months, even after losing to him quite narrowly in the primary earlier this year. What I think is remarkable about this so far has just been the reaction to it on the left, dismissing her as, you know, just one person who's obsessed with herself that doesn't represent anything. This is just sour grapes after a bad primary. I mean, she is a four-term congresswoman. She represents educated suburban part of Michigan and Bloomfield Hills and elsewhere. And she was down by 15 in that primary against LCAID and came back and came very close within 15 ,000 votes to compete with him.

3:29And so this represents a fracture in the Democratic Party, whether anyone on the left is ready to admit it or not. Yeah. I mean, Elliot, the key point about the damage this will do to her political career and democratic politics is clear. I mean, she's getting berated across the board here and she knew that would happen, which leads me to believe that this was actually an act of principle, that she is worried enough about the drift in the party towards anti-Semitism and towards apologizing for anti-Semitism that you see. She mentioned Hassan Piker, who El-Sayed has campaigned with during the primary, now has distanced himself a little bit during the general, but refuses to denounce what he says.

4:15And I think she's genuinely worried about it. She's not Jewish herself, but her fiance is, and she's talked about maybe converting. But she can see what's happening in the party. And I think that this has weighed on her during the primary, of course, but after the primary in incident after incident, wondering, can she keep up with this? Can she still stay on the same team? Was she part of that coalition and campaign, as she put it? And the most recent El-Sayed incident, which was this ad from Hassan Piker's uncle, basically saying, you're paying too much for groceries. It's Israel's fault. It's the Jews.

5:00Blame the Jews, okay, for whatever problem you have. Look there. Price of gas, price of groceries, you know, bad commute. It's the Jews. And so Haley Stevens, what was her reaction to this? It wasn't to flip on El-Sayed, but it was to give him an opportunity. Denounce this ad, okay? Say so clearly, and I'll be right there at the unity rally with you in the end, despite those clear reservations. And El-Sayed's response wasn't to say, sure, of course, I'll denounce that in a second. No, it was to say, Haley Stevens, for doing this to me, you are unwelcome. And don't come to the rally on Sunday. That's right.

5:41And I think the reason that she had to say that sort of thing and ask El-Sayed to say something about it is because his campaign reflected many of those same themes as the ad of saying, if you have worries about affordability in your city, at your stores, look to Israel, look to the Jews in so many words. Yeah, I think that's interesting. And now the reaction you mentioned to Kate earlier has been remarkable. And let me just quote the distinguished minority leader of the Senate, Chuck Schumer, who accused Stevens of an act of despicable betrayal, despicable betrayal. He also went on to say, Senate Democrats are united in our support of Abdul Syed.

6:30We Democrats are equally united in our total revulsion at the racist, Islamophobic, and over-the-top false attacks on Abdul by Republicans. So Schumer had endorsed Stevens in the primary, but he was quick to endorse Abdul after the primary. But this is fascinating to me because, okay, you think, all right, they're supporting El Syed. Fine. For partisan reasons, he won the primary. But then why go so viciously to attack the Stevens? And what's especially fascinating about this is the Democrats have spent more than a decade berating Republicans for not policing their extreme voices enough. And there have been some of them.

7:14And we've criticized them. And in particular, saying you must abandon Donald Trump. And now somebody makes an actual act of principle at cost to her personal political future. And what do they say? She's a traitor. It's remarkable. Paul, I mean, it's even uglier than that. I mean, Democrats are saying, oh, her fiance was pushing her to do this. Her fiance, Jason Turkish, is a Michigan lawyer and a Jewish Democratic donor and saying, oh, you know, she's just listening to him. You know, some party of female empowerment, everybody. Listening to her fiance, not even married yet. And she's already taking dictation.

7:52Yes. And on the Schumer point, I mean, remember, you know, where was this kind of rhetoric when Liz Cheney endorsed Alyssa Slotkin in 2022? She did so because she said the Republican Party is outside my window of convictions and I'm going to endorse this other person. And so now to send the word despicable into battle seems absurd, especially for Schumer. But I do think one reason the response is so over the top is because there is weakness in El Saeed's campaign. He should be running away with this. I mean, Trump won Michigan only by a point and a half. Gas at Costco in Brighton, which is north of Ann Arbor, 459 today.

8:27Not great. The president's approval rating is 38 percent. And Michigan has not sent a Republican to the Senate since 1994. And so it's a Democratic year and it should be favorable to the Democrats. And I think Saeed has some fundamental weaknesses in that the race has tightened in the past couple of weeks as voters learn more about him. And now, if you hadn't heard about this banana ad that is out there, you hear that Haley Stevens now is endorsing a Republican and you start to look into it and ask why. I think that is going to wake up more voters. I don't think blaming the Jews for high grocery prices.

9:01I don't think that's what I support. And so I think the part of the Democratic overreaction is because they really do think this could hurt, say. But the poly market, the prediction market for who's going to win hasn't really moved that much against El-Sayed since this news came out. And notably, among the big newspapers in Michigan, only the Detroit News put this event on the front page. Free Press and others simply did not. They buried it. So the question is how many voters will actually see it? It's true. And also, I mean, the other thing to mention here is we've made this point before, but because of early voting, a sizable share of the electorate has already cast their ballot in Michigan.

9:35I think this is another reminder that that long voting window sometimes denies voters from making a fully informed choice. But even so, some of those voters who are undecided are going to vote on Election Day. And so I think that this is up to the level of Mary Petola in Alaska and her decoy Dan catching up with her in the sense that I do think it does have an impact on voters' judgments about Saeed and his character and his suitability for office. Petola being the Democratic nominee in Alaska, and she recruited Dan J. Sullivan to be on the ballot to run against the incumbent Republican Dan S.

10:08Sullivan in a notable dirty trick that's now been exposed by much reporting. And we'll see how that affects that race. But in the Michigan race is really fascinating to me. I think along with Maine, they're the two most important Senate races if I had to pick. Dan Sullivan in Alaska being the third because of his stalwart positioning on national defense. But if you think about El-Sayed winning and in the Senate, he's going to have a big platform. We know from his personality and history, he's going to use that platform and he's going to prosecute a campaign against U.S. support for Israel. He's going to make it a crusade of a sort, if I can use that word in this context.

10:49He's already said if one of his first jobs will be to run John Fetterman out of the Senate, if not early, then maybe in a primary in 2028, so he loses. This is going to shift the balance of debate in the party, is it not? It will. And I think he will be hailed by the party's progressive wing as a major national figure, as a sort of leader of that movement in the Senate, and even a potential presidential candidate down the road and as a sort of new Obama for a new generation. That is the way that they are already positioning him. And it'll be on foreign policy, but it'll also be on Medicare for all and down the line on the progressive list of priorities.

11:41He is, in a sense, very useful because he is not officially a democratic socialist. He's just spent a lot of time with the democratic socialists for years and been their favorite in Michigan. But he will still walk out there and say, don't worry about me. I'm a capitalist. I just want to do everything that the democratic socialists of America support. Well, yeah, don't tell Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez that he's not a socialist. For them, they campaigned hard and long for El Saeed. They've also campaigned for Troy Jackson, the Democrat in Maine, that and the billionaire referendum in California.

12:22These are the two big Senate races. And in Michigan in particular, Kate, I mean, the argument will be if El Saeed wins, they'll say, see, a left-wing Democrat can win even in a state that Donald Trump carried. It may be that that catalyzes AOC, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, to run in the Democratic primaries. So this is a very significant race, I think. Do you agree with that, I guess? And what do you think is going to happen? I mean, do you think that Rogers can still pull this out? Well, I mean, Ocasio-Cortez has said about El Saeed, if he can win in Michigan, anybody can win anywhere. And if I'm a Republican, I'm playing that as an ad all over the air, because that is the message that Democrats are going to take away from this, which is that there's no ceiling on some of their more unpopular views, including outlying private health insurance.

13:13Do I think Rogers can win? Look, I think it's an uphill climb for all the reasons I laid out. It's a Democratic year. The electorate is unhappy. I do think he deserves credit. I think he was quite sophisticated in seeing the political opportunity of welcoming Haley Stevens into his coalition, accepting her call, inviting her to come to church with him instead of Abdul. I also think, you know, one response that I noted to this episode from Jim Clyburn, who was supposed to be at the unity event with the Stevens. He's the South Carolina black Democrat. Right. Exactly. Thank you. And, you know, he did not use the word despicable the way that Chuck Schumer did.

13:49He said, you know, I understand her reasons basically is what he said. And so I do think that Saeed, as it's getting tighter as voters start to actually pay attention to the election, what's going on. And I think Haley Stevens, in the primary, she did better with Jewish voters, better with Black voters. Even in that Democratic coalition, Abdul is trying to shrink it. I mean, Stevens didn't have a lot of great choices here. Abdul basically ran her out of his event and said, I don't want you in my coalition. And so that's not a great, it's not a compelling argument for winning an election. I think that's the question.

14:25We don't know how large that constituency is of the voters that are coming out on Tuesday. But I think there's reason to worry that it's a significant part of the voting bloc needs to win. We are going to take a break and when we come back, we'll talk about the implications of a potential El-Sayed victory for the Democratic presidential nomination fight in 2028 when we come back. A T-shirt and jeans, mac and cheese. Some things in life are an obvious match, like RIAs and Schwab Advisor Services, the number one choice for independent advisors. The difference is so obvious, it's Schwabius. Learn why at schwabius.com.

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15:40There's a lot of fun stuff in the newsletter that you can only read in the newsletter, and I don't want you to miss any of it. Sign up for free expression today. We'll see you in your inbox. Welcome back. I'm Paul Gigo here on Potomac Watch with Kate O'Dell and Elliot Kaufman. The question, if you kind of step back a little bit, Elliot, and say, all right, what would an al-Sayed victory mean for the Democratic coalition and their views on Israeli questions, but also the drift towards more hateful anti-Semitism in the form of some of the comments that we see from internet figures. And in Congress, very big movement against military aid for Israel, for example.

16:23They're gonna have a vote, I assume, to cut it off pretty quickly in the next Congress. If Democrats take the House and whether or not they take the Senate, they'll have votes. And then I think what's fascinating is to contemplate what does it mean for the nomination contest in 2028 for the Democrats. So, you know, we're going to have a field. I think the last figure I saw was 26 different people have said that they might run or are considered running. But one of them is Josh Shapiro, the Jewish governor of Pennsylvania, likely to have a big victory here on Tuesday and be a prominent member of the Whisperer Club as a potential nominee.

17:03Rahm Emanuel, Jewish, has said he's likely to go for it. Can one of those even win the nomination now? can a Jewish Democrat now win the presidential nomination unless he totally throws Israel over the side? It's become a real question. And I think Rahm Emanuel's answer to that has been to be more anti-Israel's prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and more eloquent and more knowledgeable in doing so than any other Democrat can be. Um, but that's, what if they lose a Bibi Netanyahu as their foil there? It's a real, it's a real problem, a real challenge for those types. Uh, and even that may not be enough to, you know, just be anti Netanyahu when Abdul El Syed and company want to go so much further.

17:57You mentioned U S military aid to Israel. I think that is finished. It's finished from all sides, by the way, because even prime minister Netanyahu says, Israel is now a far stronger country, a far wealthier country than it was in the past. It no longer needs it in that way. He wants to phase it out. What we are now talking about is, should there be any U.S.-Israel defense relationship? That is, forget aid. Should Israel be able to buy American weapons, American stealth fighters, let's say? Does the U.S. want to work with Israel on important aspects of military technology? And if you're thinking about this question from the standpoint of national interest, I think the answer is pretty clear.

18:45You look at Israel, you see a high-tech, defense-tech superpower that learns and has a habit of learning from its rather frequent combat experience. It seems like the ally you might want as part of America's great power competition with China, where the U.S. military has to stay on the frontier of so many different technologies. But if you're looking at it not from a national interest standpoint, but from a position of how can we punish Israel and really look for punitive action so that Israel feels pain for supposed wrongs and moral failings, well then it is an entirely different question and you could end up hurting the United States military just to punish Israel.

19:38I agree with you it is coming, but at some point I don't necessarily agree that Israel has all of the wherewithal, particularly on specific weapon systems, to go it alone. They're going to need some bomb deliveries, you know, at some point here if they get into a new conflict, particularly defenses against Iranian missiles in the future. But that position, Kate, do you agree? I mean, what do you think? Do you think that, let's say, can a Josh Shapiro get the nomination if he is willing to say, well, Netanyahu is a problem, but I still think Israel is an ally? I think that's going to be very difficult if the Democrats don't do a larger reckoning on the issue right now.

20:22I mean, Abdul El-Sayed, in his debate this cycle with Mike Rogers, couldn't answer a question about whether Israel or Iran posed a bigger threat to the United States and declined to do so. We are kind of way past, to Elliot's point, should we sell them weapons or should we, you know, give them to them? I mean, it's just there's been a fundamental kind of detachment and frame of reference of what who the U.S. friends and enemies are that I think Democrats will have to confront now. I think if Shapiro were to try to run and make an issue of it, I think there's some appetite for that in the Democratic Party.

20:58The question is just with the increasing energy of young voters who are, you know, almost completely in Al-Sahid's camp in Michigan. I mean, that's his coalition is really in the younger voters. It's just hard to do. And the arrogance of the Democratic Socialists is also just really striking. And I also see a lot of it in the Saeed campaign, too. Just, you know, we don't have to explain our views to anybody. We don't have to make our tent larger to include other people in it. I mean, it's just a steamrolling operation in the Democratic Party at this point. So, yes, without some kind of larger reckoning, it's hard to see a Shapiro figure being able to win the nomination.

21:34What I don't see, Elliot, is any signs of that pushback, that reckoning. I really don't. I mean, even among the, well, notably among the Democratic intellectuals, okay, let's look at the New York Times, say. Have they pushed back on El Zayed at all? No. Have they pushed back on some of Mayor Zoran Mamdami's statements and actions, threats to arrest Netanyahu, for example? No. We have seen none of it. Take the Democrats over at the Atlantic. Take it across the spectrum online. None. They're all 100 percent behind El-Sayed. And then Barack Obama comes in on behalf of El-Sayed to rally black voters who, as Kate suggested, weren't as supportive of El-Sayed as they were of Stevens in the primary.

22:22And he comes in and says, laying out of hands, and says, vote for El-Sayed. So the party is moving in his direction in a significant way. It absolutely is. And what I see is liberal left-wing intellectuals being able to rationalize more and more by saying, it's just about Israel. Don't even bring anti-Semitism or anything Jewish into it. It's just a policy dispute about Israel. And where I think that stopped working for, say, Haley Stevens was actually far earlier on in this, when there was this terrorist attack, a Hezbollah-inspired terrorist driving a truck laden with explosives into a synagogue daycare.

23:07Okay? A hundred children inside, Jewish children. Now, a normal person can just say, that's horrible, that's wrong, end of story. Okay? And you don't have to get into Israel or anything. Abdul El-Sayed came and said, well, you have to understand here that hurt people hurt people. Because this Hezbollah-inspired terrorist had a brother who was a real Hezbollah commander whom Israel had killed in the live war over there. And so he found a way to make the targeting of children another example of that too can be used to sort of bludgeon Israel and prosecute that point, turn the entire story on its head.

23:53At a certain point, I think you have to say that's no longer just Israel when you're doing that, when it's Jewish children in Michigan. And then you have Hassan Piker pointing at that same Jewish area in Michigan and saying that's like a KKK neighborhood based on absolutely nothing. You're talking about mild liberal people, astonishing things going on there, and who is pushing back against it? Instead, they're finding ways to rationalize it. All right, we're going to go to break. And when we come back, more on Potomac Watch. If you're an RIA, Schwab Advisor Services is the Watson to your homes.

24:31Smart, dependable, always has your back. With all the wealth services, technology, and support your firm needs, the difference is so obvious, it's Schwab-vious. Follow the clues at schwab-vious.com. Don't forget, you can reach the latest episode of Potomac Watch anytime. Just ask your smart speaker. Play the Opinion Potomac Watch podcast. That is, Play the Opinion Potomac Watch podcast. From the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal, this is Potomac Watch. Welcome back. I'm Paul Gigo here with Elliot Kaufman and Kate O'Dell. Chuck Schumer has prided himself across his entire career as being the most anti-anti-Semitic senator in the U.S.

25:18Congress, with the prospect of a Senate majority before him, basically tosses that whole reputation out and he's going along for the ride. And it's really something to behold. I guess the question is about the voting blocs, Kate. There's a question about whether or not Jewish American voters are finally going to separate themselves from their longstanding attraction to the Democrats and association voting. And they vote overwhelmingly for Democrats. Is that breaking up? Some evidence that there is. Our colleague Zach Kessel wrote about this. Some evidence that that's happening in places like New York.

25:57But even if it does, right now, there are more Muslim Americans in New York than there are Jews. And there are more, many more Muslim voters in Michigan than there are Jewish voters. Yes, that's true. But this is still going to be, I think, a very important test case for the Democratic Party in understanding what kind of coalition they can build in 2028. I mean, the last New York Times poll had Saeed up 53 to Mike Rogers 42. That strikes me as a little wide of a margin. I'll just go out on a limb and predict it's going to be a little bit narrower than that, I think, because you can capture more easily the enthusiasm for El Saeed among certain constituencies.

26:39That's very real. And in Michigan, you're seeing El Saeed signs not just in kind of the more progressive strongholds, But even in up in northern Michigan, outside of Traverse City, some of that is the kind of polarized populist horseshoe times that he is getting some support kind of in those areas. So that enthusiasm is well captured, I think, in the polling. And it does exist. And like I said, it is among younger voters. It's among Arab American voters. But what's harder to pin down and what we're going to get some real data and information on tomorrow is just what about the reticence for supporting him among Jewish Americans, among particularly older black voters?

27:15Does that exist and is it a problem for 2028? And I think, look, yes, Haley Stevens' decision to endorse Rogers, yes, I think that took a lot of courage. And I think it was a choice of conviction that she had gone back and forth on for a long time. But I also think it suggests she sees a coalition issue there and is flagging that, that maybe the polling is not catching. And what's going to be interesting, I mean, Stevens' vote didn't show in the polling before the primary day election. It showed up and she almost won. All the polls had suggested it was going to be a runaway for El-Sayed. We'll see if something similar like that happens.

27:52But man, it's really, I think, this change in the Democratic Party is notable. Now, we should also, before we go, say that there's an anti-Israel segment of the Republican electorate that's growing, and it's certainly leeching into anti-Semitism. Tucker Carlson is a classic example, hosting Nick Fuentes, the Nazi fanboy, and tremendous hostility to Israel in that kind of certain online segment. That might also increase if there's a big wipeout for the Republican Party on Tuesday, because some of those elements are going to blame Israel and the war in Iran for the wipeout. And I mean, you can't deny that increasing gas prices have hurt the Republicans in the wake of the war.

28:45But President Trump made the decision. Netanyahu did not make the decision for Donald Trump. Yeah. And it's interesting because it's Abdul El-Sayed who says America is in this war at the behest of Israel, that it's all Netanyahu. And yet you hear that same argument being offered from elements of the right, especially those elements who have in the past presented themselves as President Trump's biggest fans and supporters, all of a sudden handed off in the same way. That's what that right-wing, you could say far-right anti-Israel posture is all about, giving permission to especially younger right-wing voters to adopt the now socially easier left-wing narrative on Israel.

29:35And you can say, no, it's actually even harder right if you just join it to some paranoia about Jewish subversion, about Netanyahu's control, or something like that. But what's really happening is that's the far left's narrative on Israel, and it is being adopted on elements of the right. All right. Thank you, Kate, and thank you, Elliot. I won't put you guys on the spot to try to nail on your exact Senate count, but well, no, I won't. All right. Thank you for being here. Thank you all for being on Potomac Watch. We're here every day and we'll be here chronicling the election and the results through the remainder of the week.

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