Democrat Haley Stevens Endorses Republican Mike Rogers in Michigan Senate Race as Trump Urges Her to Switch Parties

Democratic congresswoman Haley Stevens stunned American politics on Sunday by endorsing the Republican candidate in Michigan’s fiercely contested Senate race, just two days before voters go to the polls in midterm elections that will decide control of Congress.

Stevens, who represents a district outside Detroit, appeared alongside Republican nominee Mike Rogers at a church service in Detroit on Sunday and released a video announcing her support for him over her own party’s nominee, Abdul El-Sayed. The move, which came after a bitter public row between Stevens and El-Sayed over Israel, drew instant praise from President Donald Trump and furious condemnation from Democratic leaders.

“I do not belong in Abdul’s campaign,” Stevens said in the video, according to USA Today. “Our Democratic nominee for US 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.”

Trump, campaigning in Iowa on Sunday, called the endorsement “brave” and “a big move”, and urged Stevens to join the Republican Party. Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer called it “a despicable betrayal”. Curtis Hertel, the chairman of the Michigan Democratic Party, said Stevens had “abandoned everything she claims to care about”, and NBC News reported that Hertel later said she “is not a current member of the Michigan Democratic Party, nor will she be in the future”.

The endorsement landed in one of the closest and most consequential races of the 2026 midterms. Michigan’s Senate seat, vacated by retiring Democrat Gary Peters, is one of the very few held by Democrats that Republicans have a realistic chance of winning on Tuesday, 3 November. Polls have consistently given El-Sayed a small lead, but the race is well within the margin of error, and more than two million Michiganders — about 29 per cent of active registered voters — had already cast their ballots before Stevens made her announcement, according to The Times.

Stevens lost the Democratic primary for the seat to El-Sayed by just one percentage point in August. She had previously endorsed him and campaigned for him. Her reversal, two days before the election, is an extraordinary act of party disunity at the very moment Democrats are trying to hold a seat they cannot afford to lose.

How the split happened

The row between Stevens and El-Sayed had been building for weeks, and it centred on Israel, campaign advertising and the direction of the Democratic Party.

Stevens demanded that El-Sayed apologise for a television advertisement produced by an outside group, the Rebellion PAC, which blamed Israel for rising grocery prices. El-Sayed has said his campaign did not make the advertisement and that he disagrees with it, according to the Associated Press. Stevens also grew angry at El-Sayed for appearing alongside Hasan Piker, a provocative left-wing online influencer accused of making antisemitic comments, at campaign stops on college campuses. She further objected to an advertisement featuring El-Sayed with conservative commentator Tucker Carlson, which she publicly called an insult to Black and Jewish constituents, according to USA Today.

Despite the friction, Stevens continued to insist she would not withdraw her endorsement of El-Sayed, who told her she should not campaign alongside him. She was scheduled to appear with him at a so-called “unity” rally on Sunday. Instead, she met Rogers at a church in Detroit and posted her endorsement video.

Representative Debbie Dingell, a senior Democratic figure in Michigan who had helped organise the planned joint appearance, said she was the one who pulled it. “I’m the one who pulled it, because it had become way too distracting,” Dingell told CNN, according to The Times. “This is not how I was going to spend my weekend before the election, to be perfectly frank.”

In her video, Stevens said she did not stand with Piker, “who gets trafficked on our college campuses”, and argued that the tone of her party’s nominee was at odds with what Michigan voters wanted to see. “A dear friend of mine earlier today was saying that education is on the ballot, and she’s absolutely right,” she said. “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.”

She added: “I’m just letting you know where I am. I’m still a very proud Democrat. I still very much believe in everything I’ve voted for and said, and I’ve worked really hard and will continue to do so in all the ways life’s opportunities afford.”

Mario Morrow, a longtime Detroit-area political consultant who previously advised Stevens’s Senate campaign, told USA Today that he believed the two advertisements had weighed heavily on her. “I think these ads really got to her,” Morrow said. “Her decision has made her an easy target for loyal Dems. This is going to be a problem for her moving forward politically. People are not happy.”

Trump seizes the moment

Trump moved quickly to exploit the split. Writing on his Truth Social platform on Sunday, he praised Stevens in effusive terms. “Her following is huge, and the level of respect from the People of Michigan, especially our African American and Jewish populations, is virtually unparalleled,” he wrote, according to The Times. “Haley said what few people are willing to say. She showed great and almost unprecedented loyalty to the Great People of Michigan with what she did. It’s a thing called bravery.”

Speaking to reporters before a rally in Dubuque, Iowa, Trump called the endorsement “a big move” and said it was “a smart thing to do because [Michigan Democratic Senate nominee Abdul] El-Sayed would destroy our country”. He said he had contacted Stevens to thank her, and he urged her to join the Republican Party. According to USA Today, Trump also launched a series of attacks on El-Sayed’s faith during his remarks.

The praise from Trump put Stevens in an awkward position, since she has been a vocal critic of the president. In a CNN interview on Sunday night, she called Trump a dictator, even as she defended her decision to back his party’s candidate. “Republicans have shown they are really focused on just letting Trump be a dictator, and that’s not what the Democratic Party is, you know?” she told anchor Anderson Cooper, according to USA Today.

Asked whether she believed El-Sayed was hateful or an antisemite, Stevens replied: “I think some of the actions have certainly been anti-Semitic, but I’m just sick of who he stands with.” She said there were voters who wanted to support El-Sayed but remained unsure, and that they had wanted to hear from him. “They wanted to hear from him. They’re not trying to beat him up,” she said. “You know, I wanted to build him up, and he just kept coming back, and this is about a U.S. Senate seat… Are you actually listening to people in my state?”

She said she had decided to switch her endorsement after waking up on Sunday morning and having time to think. “This is a weight off my shoulders, I’m being straight with everybody,” she said, according to The Times. Cooper also asked whether she wanted Democrats to win the Senate, and she replied: “I absolutely do.”

Dingell, who spoke to CNN immediately after Stevens’s segment, described it as “one of the most painful interviews I have watched” and said she had been worried about Stevens all week.

Democrats react with fury

The reaction from Democratic leaders was swift and unsparing. Schumer, who had backed Stevens in the primary — she was the candidate of the Democratic establishment in Washington during that contest — issued a statement denouncing her. “This is a despicable betrayal from Rep. Stevens,” he said, according to The Times. “Senate Democrats are united in our support for Abdul El-Sayed, because we know he will fight for the economic interests of working families in Michigan, unlike Mike Rogers, who is a tool of Donald Trump and billionaire donors.”

Hertel, the Michigan party chairman, said Stevens’s decision “shows that she has abandoned everything she claims to care about”. He added: “We reject the attempts by Stevens and bad-faith actors to divide our party and undermine our momentum, and will not allow these 11th-hour distractions deter us.” NBC News later reported that Hertel said Stevens “is not a current member of the Michigan Democratic Party, nor will she be in the future”, although the party has not described a formal expulsion process.

The fallout reached Stevens’s own office. Her chief of staff and communications director appeared to have resigned on Sunday, according to The Times.

A group calling itself “Democrats for Mike Rogers” has meanwhile been gaining traction in the state, according to The Times, suggesting that Stevens’s discontent is shared by at least some Democratic voters in Michigan, even if party leaders have condemned her.

El-Sayed brushes it off

El-Sayed himself tried to play down the episode. Speaking in Detroit on Sunday, he called Stevens’s message a distraction and “some intrigue”, adding: “At the end of the day, I actually don’t think about Haley Stevens.” He said: “I think we should spend our tax dollars here … I am just less interested in the politics of it all than the policies of it all.”

Late on Sunday, in an interview on MS NOW, he reframed the race as a choice about Trump himself. “Mike Rogers is going to be a vote for Donald Trump,” he told host Chris Hayes, according to USA Today. “If you don’t believe me, just ask Donald Trump. He came here [to Michigan] last Sunday and said he is on the ballot – in the form of Mike Rogers.”

El-Sayed, a former Detroit health director, would be the first Muslim American elected to the United States Senate if he wins on Tuesday. He has campaigned heavily on affordability and on Medicare for All, arguing that the cost of living is the issue that matters most to Michigan voters.

The two candidates

Rogers, 63, is a former FBI special agent and a former congressman seeking to become the first Republican to win a Senate race in Michigan in more than three decades. He served in the US Army from 1985 to 1989, then as an FBI special agent in Chicago from 1989 to 1994, working on organised crime and public corruption cases. He served in the Michigan Senate from 1995 to 2001, including as majority leader, and then represented Michigan’s 8th Congressional District in the US House from 2001 to 2015, rising to chair the House Intelligence Committee from 2011 to 2015. After leaving Congress he worked as a national security commentator for CNN.

Rogers was the Republican nominee for Michigan’s other Senate seat in 2024, losing to Democrat Elissa Slotkin by fewer than 20,000 votes — a margin of just 0.3 percentage points. He was unopposed in the Republican primary on 4 August, and the Cook Political Report rated the race a toss-up as of 20 August.

His platform includes bringing manufacturing back to Michigan, including by putting “a shop class in every high school”, cutting taxes for working families, increasing homeownership through reduced regulation and incentives for housebuilding, protecting Social Security and Medicare, forcing price transparency from hospitals and insurers, and expanding the Trump Rx programme offering cheaper prescription drugs, according to The Times. Rogers, who in Congress was an advocate of free trade, has also questioned the tariff regime, which is especially unpopular in Michigan, a state that borders Canada and whose car industry relies on an integrated supply chain with Ontario.

El-Sayed, by contrast, is a progressive who ran for governor in 2018 with the backing of Senator Bernie Sanders, losing the Democratic primary to Gretchen Whitmer, who is now in her second and final term as governor. He won this year’s Senate primary by a single percentage point against Stevens, the establishment-backed candidate, and has led Rogers in most polls since the summer, though often narrowly.

The seat is open because Peters, a moderate Democrat who has held it since 2015, announced in 2025 that he would retire at the end of his term. Democrats already hold the seat, which makes it one of the few they must defend against a serious Republican challenge. Republicans currently hold a 53-47 majority in the Senate, and 35 Senate seats are being contested in this election.

The race in numbers

Polling has consistently pointed to a tight race. The moving average of polls has given El-Sayed a small lead over Rogers since the summer, though many surveys are within the margin of error, according to The Times. The RealClearPolitics average put El-Sayed ahead by 3.5 percentage points, according to USA Today. A Detroit News/WDIV-TV poll of 600 likely voters conducted from 19 to 22 October by the Glengariff Group found El-Sayed on 51.4 per cent and Rogers on 45.1 per cent, with 3.6 per cent undecided, according to USA Today.

But polls in Michigan have misled before. In the 2024 Senate election in the state, the polling average put Slotkin 2.3 points ahead of Rogers; in the end she won by only 0.3 points. That history will encourage Rogers’s campaign to believe the race is winnable, and it will worry Democrats who remember how close the last contest was.

More than two million people had already voted in Michigan before Election Day, either by post or at in-person polling stations, according to The Times. That means Stevens’s endorsement can only influence the minority of voters who have yet to cast a ballot — though in a race this close, even a small shift could matter.

The stakes extend well beyond Michigan. Democrats need to flip four Republican-held seats to win control of the Senate. If they lose Michigan, they would need to flip five instead, according to The Times. That arithmetic is why the setback in Michigan also raises the pressure on Democrats in Alaska, where another last-minute row has derailed the party’s campaign: a federal judge on Sunday threw out a Justice Department lawsuit seeking to block certification of the Alaska Senate race, in which Democrat Mary Peltola is challenging Republican incumbent Dan Sullivan.

The midterm backdrop

The Michigan drama is unfolding on the eve of elections that will decide who controls Congress for the final two years of Trump’s presidency. All 435 seats in the House of Representatives are on the ballot, along with 35 Senate seats, and most polls show Democrats well positioned to pick up the three House seats they need to win control of that chamber. The Senate picture is tighter, with seven races polling within a narrow margin.

Trump spent the final weekend campaigning hard. He held his 30th and final rally of the midterm campaign in Salina, Kansas, on Sunday night, appearing for incumbent Republican Senator Roger Marshall, who faces a competitive challenge from Democratic megachurch pastor Adam Hamilton. Trump told the crowd: “All I’m asking you to do is one thing: get out and vote because if you do, we’re going to have tremendous success.” He again urged voters to “pretend I’m on the ballot”, a line he has used repeatedly in the closing days.

He also repeated a campaign promise that if Republicans win both the House and the Senate, he will give every adult American citizen $5,000. “If Republicans win the House of Representatives and the Senate, I am going to give all adult citizens in the United States of America $5,000,” he said, according to USA Today. He said the distributions would cost about $1 trillion, but that the country could cover it with “the wealth of the United States that we’re taking in”.

Trump’s approval rating stands at 36 per cent, according to the New York Times poll tracker cited by USA Today — the lowest for any president heading into a midterm election in 80 years. In a preview of a New York Post podcast interview aired on Fox News on Sunday, Trump acknowledged that he might have to become “Mr. Veto” if Democrats win a majority on Tuesday, a rare admission that his party may lose. “They’ll be sending stuff up, you veto it,” he said.

More than 49 million Americans had already voted early before Election Day, according to the University of Florida Election Lab, and the Senate will have at least 16 members elected for the first time — an unusually large turnover that rivals the high-water mark set amid the financial crisis in 2010. Eight senators retired, including Republican Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the longest-serving party leader in Senate history, and Democrat Dick Durbin of Illinois.

Analysis: Why It Matters

On the surface, this is a story about one congresswoman, one endorsement and one Senate race. Look closer, and it touches almost every fault line in American politics in 2026: the Democratic Party’s internal divisions over Israel, the limits of party loyalty in the age of Trump, the arithmetic of a Senate majority, and the question of whether a late endorsement can move votes that have mostly already been cast.

A seat Democrats cannot afford to lose

The simplest reason this story matters is arithmetic. Democrats need a net gain of four Senate seats to take control of the chamber. There are only a handful of Republican-held seats they have a realistic chance of winning — in Texas, Maine, North Carolina and a few others — and Michigan is one of the few Democratic-held seats Republicans can plausibly take. Losing it would not merely cancel out a Democratic gain elsewhere; it would raise the bar for the whole night from four flips to five, according to The Times.

That is why Democratic leaders reacted with such fury, and why Schumer — who had personally backed Stevens in the primary — used language as strong as “despicable betrayal”. It is also why the setback in Michigan immediately increases the pressure on Democrats in Alaska, where the party’s hopes rest on a race that has itself been thrown into turmoil by a dispute over a candidate with the same name as the Republican incumbent.

The Michigan seat has been Democratic for decades, but the state itself has become steadily more competitive. Rogers came within 20,000 votes of winning the state’s other Senate seat in 2024, and Trump carried Michigan in the presidential election that same year. The Democrats’ hold on the seat was never as secure as the party’s incumbency suggested, and Stevens’s endorsement is a reminder that the ground in Michigan has been shifting for years.

The Israel divide inside the Democratic Party

The deeper reason this story matters is what it reveals about the Democratic Party’s unresolved argument over Israel — an argument that has now cost the party a Senate endorsement two days before an election.

The immediate trigger was advertising: an outside group’s commercial blaming Israel for rising grocery prices, and El-Sayed’s appearances alongside an online influencer accused of antisemitic comments. But the underlying divide is about something larger. El-Sayed is a progressive who has been openly critical of US support for Israel’s war in Gaza, and his candidacy has been embraced by the party’s left. Stevens is a mainstream Democrat whose politics were shaped in the party’s establishment wing, and who has heard, directly and repeatedly, from Jewish voters in her district who feel the party has drifted away from them.

What makes the episode so damaging for Democrats is that both sides have a point, and neither can concede it. El-Sayed is right that he did not produce the advertisement and that he has said he disagrees with it. Stevens is right that a candidate’s associations and silences are read by voters as signals, and that Jewish voters in Michigan wanted to hear more from him than they did. The party has no settled answer to the question of how much criticism of Israel is legitimate within its ranks, and Michigan — with its large Arab-American population in Dearborn and its significant Jewish community in the Detroit suburbs — is the place where that unresolved question is sharpest.

Stevens’s decision to cross the line publicly, rather than simply stay silent, turns a private disagreement into a public wound. It also hands Republicans a talking point they will use far beyond Michigan: that the Democratic Party is so divided over Israel that its own elected officials are endorsing Republicans.

Trump’s closing argument, delivered by a Democrat

The third reason this matters is the gift it hands to Trump on the eve of the election. The president’s closing message has been that he is on the ballot, that the midterms are a referendum on him, and that a vote for any Democrat is a vote against his agenda. Stevens’s endorsement allows him to make the same argument from the other side: that even Democrats recognise the Republican case.

Trump understood the value of the moment instantly. He praised Stevens, thanked her personally, urged her to switch parties and used her endorsement to attack El-Sayed — all within hours. The endorsement also gave Trump something he has struggled to find in the closing days: a piece of good news that is not about him, but about his opponents’ disarray.

There is a paradox here that Stevens herself seems to recognise. In her CNN interview she called Trump a dictator and insisted she still wants Democrats to win the Senate. She is, in effect, arguing that her endorsement of a Republican is compatible with her opposition to the president that Republican supports. That is a difficult position to hold, and it is one reason her interview was described by a fellow Michigan Democrat as painful to watch. But it is also a measure of how personal the dispute with El-Sayed had become: for Stevens, the argument was no longer about parties at all, but about a candidate she felt had shut her out.

What it says about party discipline in the Trump era

Stevens’s move is also a test of how much party discipline still means in American politics. In an earlier era, a congresswoman who endorsed the opposing party’s Senate candidate two days before an election would have been expelled, or at least would have expected to be. The Michigan party’s response — Hertel’s statement that she is no longer a member — suggests that instinct survives. But the fact that Stevens did it anyway, and that her own staff resigned rather than stay, suggests something else too: that for some elected officials, the costs of breaking with the party now feel lower than the costs of staying loyal to a candidate they cannot support.

That calculation is shaped by Trump’s transformation of American politics. Party labels have become less reliable guides to behaviour, and individual politicians increasingly build their own brands, their own followings and their own relationships with voters. Stevens, who lost a primary by one point and watched her party’s nominee tell her she was not welcome in his campaign, may have concluded that her political future lay in independence rather than obedience. Whether that calculation proves right will be judged by Michigan voters on Tuesday — and by her own constituents when she next faces re-election.

There is also a warning here for both parties. Democrats have spent the Trump era presenting themselves as the party of norms, institutions and unity. An endorsement like this one undermines that presentation at the worst possible moment. Republicans, for their part, should note that the endorsement was not a conversion: Stevens called Trump a dictator on national television on the same day she endorsed his party’s candidate. The alliance is one of convenience, not conviction, and it may not survive the election.

The limits of a late endorsement

Finally, it is worth asking how much this endorsement will actually change. More than two million Michiganders had already voted before Stevens spoke, and the race has been stable for months, with El-Sayed holding a small but persistent lead. Endorsements rarely move large numbers of voters, and this one comes from a politician who lost the primary to the man she is now opposing — a fact El-Sayed’s campaign will not hesitate to point out.

But in a race where the polling average has El-Sayed ahead by about three and a half points, and where the last Senate race in the state was decided by three-tenths of a point, a small shift could be decisive. The endorsement’s real power may lie less in the votes it moves directly than in the story it tells: that the Democratic campaign in Michigan is divided, that its nominee has alienated a prominent member of his own party, and that the momentum in the final hours belongs to Rogers. In a low-turnout, high-anxiety election, narratives like that can matter as much as the numbers.

The other limit is time. Stevens made her move on Sunday; voters go to the polls on Tuesday. There is little time for the endorsement to be tested, challenged or absorbed, and little time for El-Sayed to respond beyond the dismissal he has already offered. That compression is part of what makes the episode so volatile: it is a grenade thrown into the final hours of a campaign, and nobody — not Stevens, not El-Sayed, not Rogers and not Trump — can be sure where the pieces will land.

What to Watch Next

1. The Michigan result on Tuesday night. If El-Sayed wins comfortably, the endorsement will be remembered as a footnote. If he loses narrowly, or if Rogers wins, it will be treated as a turning point — and the argument over who is to blame will shape Democratic politics for months.
2. Whether Stevens switches parties. Trump has urged her to join the Republicans, and she has insisted she remains “a very proud Democrat”. Her next moves — and whether the Michigan party takes formal action against her — will show whether this was a one-off protest or the start of a realignment.
3. The Senate arithmetic. Michigan is one of several races that will decide control of the chamber. Watch Texas, Maine, North Carolina and Alaska: if Democrats lose Michigan, they will need to win more of those races than they had planned, and the Alaska result becomes even more important.
4. El-Sayed’s margin among Jewish and Arab-American voters. The dispute that drove Stevens away was fundamentally about how the Democratic nominee speaks to two communities in Michigan. Exit polling and precinct-level results in Oakland County and Dearborn will show whether her concerns were shared by voters, or whether they were hers alone.
5. The Democratic reckoning over Israel. Whatever happens on Tuesday, the party will have to confront the divide that Stevens’s endorsement exposed. If El-Sayed wins, the left will argue the party should have trusted its nominee. If he loses, the establishment will argue it should have listened to Stevens. Either way, the argument is not going away.

Sources

• USA Today — Trump urges Stevens to switch parties after Rogers endorsement: Election updates
• The Times — Disgruntled Democrat endorses Republican in crucial Senate race
• The Times — Michigan Senate race polls: who will win the 2026 election?
• USA Today — El-Sayed, Rogers trade blows over Iran war in Michigan Senate debate
• USA Today — El-Sayed leads Rogers in final days of Michigan Senate race, poll shows