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GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — Haley Stevens is campaigning for Senate in the same mode that’s won her four terms in the House: No time for red-versus-blue partisanship, and lots of wide-eyed ardor for skilled labor.
“Helloooooooooooo!” she said as she rushed into a Teamsters hall on Tuesday morning. “This is awesome!” She zipped around the room greeting union members: “It’s like duck-duck-goose!” She found her seat at their roundtable and slapped it. “I brought my notepad, because I’ve got to bring all this back to Washington!”
National Democrats not-so-secretly want Stevens to defeat her three rivals for the nomination, favoring her over candidates who are far more critical of DC-based party leaders — and of US military aid to Israel. But during a cycle where even President Donald Trump has grown more critical of the war in Gaza, it’s not clear that Democrats are trending in Stevens’ direction.
In the party’s first seriously contested Michigan Senate primary since 1994, physician Abdul El-Sayed is reintroducing himself after a gubernatorial run as an unapologetic pro-Gaza, pro-Medicare-for-All progressive. State senator Mallory McMorrow is running as a pragmatic outsider who wants to flush the party’s DC leadership.
Both out-fundraised Stevens after entering the race. Both are also operating on the assumption that pro-Israel groups, which in 2022 helped Stevens beat a Democrat with more critical views of the Israeli government, will help her again. They are trying to make that a problem for her.
“If DC comes in and spends a lot of money to dictate what happens in this primary, I think Democrats are going to lose,” said El-Sayed, who entered the race with the support of Sen. Bernie Sanders. “I’m not surprised that they would go with somebody like Haley Stevens. I think that’s discounting just how complicated our state is.”
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Perhaps most surprisingly, Democrats’ battle here is not about generational change. Every candidate was born in the 1980s; Stevens or McMorrow, if elected, would become the youngest female senator. (A fourth candidate, former state House Speaker Joe Tate, is just 44, but he entered the race with little money or support after a Detroit mayoral bid fizzled.)
There has been a bigger focus on electability, a concept that Democrats are more confused about after their 2024 nightmare. No candidate is re-litigating last year, but McMorrow and El-Sayed are running as outsiders ready to shake up a party that MAGA Republicans have rolled right over.
Their argument against Washington experience as an asset comes as ex-Rep. Mike Rogers largely locks up the Republican nomination, getting a Trump endorsement after he defied expectations and nearly beat Sen. Elissa Slotkin last year.
“We’ve seen a deep frustration with people feeling like the party is making a choice for them instead of the voters,” McMorrow said in an interview. “If we’re going to hit the Republicans for doing it, for Trump clearing the field for Rogers, we’ve got to let this play out on our side.”
The party, for Stevens’ primary foes, is represented by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer’s campaign machinery, as well as AIPAC and pro-Israel groups. McMorrow and El-Sayed both supported two Senate resolutions last week that would have cut off aid to Israel until more humanitarian aid was allowed into Gaza.
In an interview, Stevens said that she would have opposed the resolutions: “We need a lasting ceasefire. We need long term peace for the Palestinian people and the people of Israel. We need to see Hamas surrender and the hostages come home.”
She did not support an effort to recognize a Palestinian state and declined to address whether that would hurt her in the Michigan Arab-American communities that swung to Trump last year.
“I’m not here to play pundit, but I am here to talk about Michigan’s future and advocate for Michigan’s middle class,” Stevens said. “I’m an incredibly transparent lawmaker, and I’m not running away from my record in terms of the war in the Middle East. It needs to come to an end.”
Her rivals believe that the Democratic base wants a different answer, and that the statewide math gets tougher if the party’s nominee does not break from a resolute pro-Israel stance. El-Sayed, who would be the first Muslim senator, suggested as much on Saturday, at a picnic hosted by Democrats in Troy, in Stevens’ district.
“Number One, anybody who’s not going to vote for me because my name is Abdul is not voting for anyone else who’s a Democrat,” El-Sayed said. “Everybody needs to understand that, all right? Number Two: There are a lot of people, a lot of people, who might just vote for me because my name is Abdul.”
Slotkin aligned against Stevens on the Israeli arms sales resolutions, complicating the issue in the primary. The first-term senator has also championed legislation that would ban corporations from forming PACs, underscoring that she never took and will never take corporate PAC money.
El-Sayed and McMorrow supported that same bill and now agree on corporate PAC donations; El-Sayed never took any in his 2018 bid, while McMorrow has foresworn it going forward.
Stevens has not waved off corporate PAC money and was less enthusiastic about Slotkin’s bill.
“I certainly support comprehensive campaign finance reform, and the legislation that I voted for in the past, in the House, I plan to support in the United States Senate,” Stevens said.
“I actually think it’s much more wide ranging than just one narrow set of PACs. It’s a lot of the dark money and things that don’t have transparency in them that need to be overhauled.”
David’s view
There are three clear theories of what will work in Michigan next year, embraced by each of the leading Democratic candidates.
Stevens has been telling the same story for eight years: She is the daughter of small business owners from the Detroit suburbs who will work with anyone to create jobs and doesn’t like ideological distractions. She doesn’t engage in thumbsucking over the branding or future of the party. She doesn’t deliver zingers on podcasts or give rousing speeches.
(The exception, a floor speech praising pandemic first responders that she shouted over the presiding officer to finish, pops up when Republicans or Israel critics want to attack her.)
El-Sayed’s theory is that the winning strategies of Bernie Sanders have never gotten a chance to breathe in Michigan. He holds well-advertised town halls outside the state’s Arab-American communities, to demonstrate that he’s not a factional candidate, excoriating corporate power and the creaky old Democratic establishment.
He calls what’s happening in Gaza “genocide” and knows that the likely primary electorate agrees — even if that’s not its top issue.
The McMorrow theory is that there is a larger lane between El-Sayed and Stevens. She offers a break from DC, corporate PACs, and automatic Israel support, without all of El-Sayed’s progressive stances. She also has her own middle-class Michigan story, but it starts when she moved to the state in her 20s.
So how much will primary voters, one year from now, want a break from their Democratic leadership? How much will they care about Gaza and funding for Israel?
McMorrow and El-Sayed hold a sturdy position now, when polls show even Democratic voters with record-low levels of esteem for the party. Stevens, on the other hand, is running as the sort of sleeves-rolled-up Democrat that Michigan’s historically sent to the Senate.
She’s betting against long-term change that would break that old model apart.
Room for Disagreement
The Rogers campaign declined to comment about the Democratic primary, but Adrian Hemond, a Democratic strategist in the state, said that Stevens was the strongest candidate with the most tested approach.
“She has actually had to raise real money before and run in a competitive general election before,” he said. (Like McMorrow, Stevens flipped a Republican seat in 2018, then was re-drawn into a safe seat with a fellow Democrat.)
“Mallory McMorrow is much better known in Washington, DC, than she is in Michigan.” El-Sayed’s clarity on Gaza did appeal to a bloc of voters, but Hemond doubted it would be definitive.
“Even most primary voters, who are the most politically engaged people, don’t care about foreign policy,” said Hemond. “Hell, half the time when American troops are getting shot at overseas, they don’t care about foreign policy.”
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