From what I can tell, the details on Haley Stevens’s last 36 hours, which I reported earlier this afternoon, have now been confirmed, re-reported by the Post and other publications. Appreciate the congrats. I think the best bet is that we, political obsessives, are overestimating how much this whole drama will affect the outcome in either direction. But if it has any effect, I think there’s a decent chance it will actually redound to Abdul El-Sayed’s benefit. One of the things that’s been hard to miss over the course of the day is the sheer intensity of the denunciations of Stevens from the highest ranks of the Democratic Party, including many of her one-time supporters. That has many sources — but one of the biggest is that, as I reported earlier, she told many of these people, person to person, last night that she was absolutely still going to vote for El-Sayed. So they feel personally very burned.
It also seems questionable to me that this plays that well with the state’s Black population, which is of course crucial for any Democratic candidate. I’m not picking that community out of a hat. This whole day was about two events at Black churches in Detroit. The whole drama turns on a visit by Rep. James Clyburn (D) of South Carolina, who was in the state to host a unity rally bringing Stevens and El-Sayed together on one stage. Stevens repeatedly lauded Clyburn as her mentor and hero in the statement she released placing conditions on El-Sayed late last week. But the net effect of all this has basically been to try to bigfoot and overshadow the whole effort and sort of humiliate him. I think it’s quite likely that backfires and actually creates a groundswell of anger which has no obvious point of release other than votes for El-Sayed.
Obviously things like this are very unpredictable. And I’m certainly no expert on the intricacies of Michigan politics. My point is really only that I wouldn’t go into this with the assumption that it’s obvious that this hurts El-Sayed and it’s only a question of how much. That’s not at all clear to me.
I will repeat, based on my own reporting, I think the last three or four days for Stevens is vastly more personal than any kind of behind-the-scenes strategy by anyone other than her and her fiancé.
One final point, a deep irony. Beyond the result of this race, there are important implications for factional rivalries in the Democratic Party. Many centrist players saw El-Sayed as too risky a nominee, apart from whatever particular policy disagreements they had with him. If he loses, they’ll say: see, you can’t run someone like this for Senate. For his supporters, it’s a major proof of concept. If he wins, they’ll say: Look! All that stuff about how you can’t run a progressive candidate wasn’t true. We tried it. It worked.
Obviously every race is specific. So the lessons you draw from a single race are always complicated and over-determined. But the test case aspect of this race has always been there. Stevens and her fiancé are obviously very much on the “too risky” side of this. The irony is that if El-Sayed loses, she will 100% be blamed. So even seen through the prism of her own factional interests, this was a major, major self-own. That’s not just because it sucks to get blamed for something, but the upside of this race for more centrist Democrats was always that if he lost they could say: I told you so. That’s really no longer the case. The answer will be: it’s Haley Stevens’s fault.
