Haley Stevens is a disgrace. There are no two ways about it. This woman has conducted herself like a disgusting, abhorrent piece of shit, and I believe she deserves to be stripped of every congressional committee assignment she possesses. The Democratic Party should make her persona non grata. If Stevens wants to play footsies with MAGA, Republicans can have her. Hell, somebody gift-wrap her and include a receipt. I suspect they’ll be asking about the return policy before Christmas.
Trust me, the last fucking thing I wanted to do twenty-four hours before Election Day was write another article about a Democratic political turncoat. I should be discussing competitive Senate races, preparing for media appearances, and reminding Americans what is at stake Tuesday. Instead, I’m sitting here examining the political self-immolation of a woman who lost a primary three months ago and has spent the final days of the general election demanding that everybody else participate in her emotional recovery. I already devoted substantial attention to Stevens in my Lincoln Square article, * The Name of the Game Is Power*. I figured that would be sufficient. Evidently, Stevens looked at that article and decided I hadn’t suffered enough.
I have spent years studying political behavior, and one thing continues to fascinate me: the capacity of politicians to confuse their personal grievances with matters of national importance. Millions of Michiganders are approaching an election that will help determine the composition of the United States Senate. Stevens has approached the same election like a woman demanding to speak with the manager because somebody forgot the complimentary breadsticks.
Make no mistake about it. I believe Stevens was thinking about herself and only herself. She wasn’t thinking about the Black voters whose interests she repeatedly invoked. She wasn’t thinking about the Jewish Democrats who continued supporting Abdul El-Sayed, even when they disagreed with him about Israel. She wasn’t thinking about the Muslim community watching another Muslim candidate navigate an extraordinary amount of religious suspicion. She was thinking about Haley Stevens, the emotional welfare of Haley Stevens, and the intolerable injustice of Haley Stevens being expected to accept the outcome of an election.
And the worst part is that she initially demonstrated she knew how to behave.
In August, Stevens lost Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary to El-Sayed. She had received substantial support among Black primary voters, but it wasn’t enough to win the nomination. She initially endorsed El-Sayed, appeared willing to help unify Democrats, and encouraged voters to support him. Plenty of us praised her for moving quickly. I was pleased because accepting the result of a primary is a basic obligation of democratic politics, and I genuinely thought we had one less intraparty dispute to worry about.
Then came Cenk Uygur.
An outside organization, Rebellion PAC, released an advertisement linking Americans’ grocery bills to military assistance for Israel. The ad drew condemnation from Jewish community leaders, who regarded its message as antisemitic. I thought the advertisement was tasteless and deplorable. And while I have a very low opinion of Cenk Uygur’s political judgment, I wasn’t particularly surprised to see his organization manufacturing controversy.
The man seems determined to behave like an aspiring political kingmaker who never received the memo that voters are supposed to be involved in the process. He can take an issue requiring serious discussion, run it through his personal publicity machine, and produce something that leaves his supposed allies wondering whether they should disconnect the electricity to his studio. Should El-Sayed win, I expect Cenk to find a way to award himself a substantial portion of the credit. His self-congratulation could probably be measured on the Richter scale.
But El-Sayed’s campaign did not make that advertisement. It was produced by an outside political organization, and his campaign publicly disavowed it.
El-Sayed had also been making inroads with Jewish Democrats, including people who disagreed with his views on Israel. Whatever one thinks of his foreign policy positions, building those relationships required political work. Deliberately blowing them up with an offensive advertisement would have made absolutely no strategic sense. I recognized that immediately, and I didn’t consider the controversy particularly complicated once the campaign rejected the ad.
Stevens, however, decided the matter required further proceedings.
She wanted additional statements. She wanted more apologies. She wanted El-Sayed to address his broader rhetoric. She continued demanding concessions after his campaign had already disavowed material it didn’t produce.
Jesus Christ, Madam Stevens, would you like Abdul El-Sayed to give you a foot massage, too? Perhaps draw you a warm bath, light some scented candles, and apologize because the water is two degrees below your preferred temperature? Should he peel your grapes? Fluff your pillows? Hire a string quartet to accompany his next statement of regret?
At some point, the demands began to resemble a five-star hotel guest complaining that the ocean was making too much noise.
And when I consider Stevens’ behavior, I keep returning to an argument advanced by Ashley the Baroness, who has discussed replacing the language of white supremacy with the concept of white narcissism. Her argument emphasizes the expectation that white people’s perspectives, emotional comfort, and sense of entitlement should occupy the center of political and social life.
I find that framework useful in examining what Stevens did.
Look at the sequence. She lost the primary. She initially accepted the result. Then she began asserting increasingly elaborate expectations about what the victorious candidate needed to say, how he needed to apologize, and how much accommodation she was owed. When the campaign resisted, she presented its response as further evidence that she had been mistreated.
That pattern resembles what political psychologists call self-serving attribution: explaining adverse outcomes primarily through other people’s conduct while minimizing responsibility for one’s own choices. It is especially corrosive when political actors begin interpreting ordinary limits on their influence as personal attacks.
Stevens had every right to object to the advertisement. She had every right to disagree with El-Sayed. But she had no right to assume that the Democratic nominee needed to spend the final days of his campaign submitting to an indefinite series of personal demands.
This woman lost a primary. She behaved as though the result entitled her to a supervisory position.
Then she started invoking Black voters.
Stevens had received substantial support from Black Michiganders during the primary, and she used concerns about those voters to question El-Sayed’s handling of the controversy. But winning support from a community during one election doesn’t grant a politician permanent authority to speak for that community. Black voters possess their own political judgment, their own interests, and their own ability to decide which candidate they support.
I suspect Stevens thought she could carry some of those voters wherever she decided to go politically. Perhaps she imagined herself leading a grand procession of Black Michiganders through Detroit like some suburban Pied Piper with a congressional parking permit.
Black people are perfectly capable of deciding whom to support without waiting for Haley Stevens to emerge from her house and point toward the promised land.
The dispute eventually engulfed a planned Democratic unity appearance involving El-Sayed and Representative Jim Clyburn. Debbie Dingell had helped organize the event, but the disagreement between the campaigns had become so contentious that El-Sayed’s campaign asked Stevens to stay away from its remaining appearances.
Now, I don’t know everything that happened behind closed doors, and I won’t manufacture conversations to fill in the gaps. What we do know is that Stevens had become sufficiently distracting that an appearance intended to demonstrate Democratic unity was no longer considered workable.
Most politicians would recognize that as an excellent opportunity to stop talking.
Stevens chose a different strategy.
On Sunday, November 1, she appeared at Perfecting Church, a predominantly Black congregation in Detroit, alongside Republican Mike Rogers. Afterward, she publicly endorsed him for the United States Senate.
The fucking audacity.
Stevens had spent days raising concerns about whether El-Sayed was adequately respecting Black voters, then appeared at a Black church to announce her support for Donald Trump’s preferred Senate candidate.
Well, thank you, Congresswoman Stevens! On behalf of Black America, please accept our deepest gratitude for your extraordinary contributions to civil rights. Harriet Tubman helped enslaved people escape to freedom, Rosa Parks refused to surrender her seat, Martin Luther King Jr. marched on Washington, and Haley Stevens showed up at Perfecting Church to endorse Mike fucking Rogers.
What a magnificent legacy. I trust the National Museum of African American History and Culture has already begun preparing the exhibit. Perhaps they can display her congressional identification beside a plaque reading, She Once Received Some Black Votes and Mistook Them for a Lifetime Membership.
I especially appreciate her willingness to explain the political interests of Black Michiganders to Black Michiganders. Clearly, we have been struggling through centuries of political participation because nobody thought to ask Haley Stevens for instructions.
I no longer attend church, as many of you know, but I cannot imagine any of the Black churches I attended providing this sort of setting for a Trump ally and a politician I regard as willing to accommodate racist political appeals. Black churches have historically served as organizing institutions during some of the most consequential struggles for civil rights and political representation in American history. Their importance extends far beyond Sunday worship.
Which brings me briefly to Pastor Marvin Winans.
I don’t know the man’s character, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. I do remember the 2025 controversy involving a woman who offered a substantial church donation and was publicly corrected because it was less than the amount being requested. The woman later defended Winans and explained that the viral footage lacked context. I respect that explanation, although the incident still struck me as uncomfortable.
But the church appearance with Stevens and Rogers raises another question about judgment. I don’t know whether Winans was aware that Stevens intended to endorse Rogers. Publicly welcoming candidates and knowingly facilitating a political endorsement are different circumstances.
Nevertheless, the whole spectacle reminded me of vampire folklore.
You remember the rule, right? In many vampire stories, a vampire can’t enter a house unless somebody inside invites it in. The house is protected until someone makes the catastrophic mistake of opening the door. After that, the family spends the rest of the movie trying to figure out why Grandpa is hanging upside down in the pantry.
Well, on Sunday, Perfecting Church ended up hosting two political vampires. Rogers arrived with Trump’s blessing. Stevens arrived with a grievance large enough to require its own pew.
I can’t tell you who knew what in advance. But if you’re running a house of worship, it might be wise to examine the guest list before Count Dracula and his political companion start rearranging the furniture.
Rogers’ positions also matter here. He opposed the Affordable Care Act during his congressional career and co-sponsored restrictive abortion legislation. His campaign has made unsubstantiated insinuations about El-Sayed and the Muslim Brotherhood. He has aligned himself politically with Donald Trump.
Those are substantive disagreements affecting the lives of Michigan residents. Stevens could have made her objections to El-Sayed known without lending her political standing to a Republican candidate whose record presents a very different set of policy consequences.
And Donald Trump complimented her, because of course he did. Trump has never encountered another person’s self-inflicted political disaster without wondering whether he could turn it into a ribbon-cutting ceremony for himself.
If Stevens imagined her endorsement would earn gratitude from the Republican establishment, James Carville had a few thoughts about that.
But first, let’s discuss Debbie Dingell.
Dingell said Stevens assured her late Saturday night that rumors of an impending Rogers endorsement were untrue. The next morning, Stevens endorsed Rogers.
That contradiction became central to Stevens’ Sunday interview with Anderson Cooper, which I watched Monday morning. Good Lord, what an interview.
Cooper asked a straightforward question: Dingell said Stevens had assured her the previous evening that she wasn’t switching sides. What changed?
Stevens began by disputing the timing. She suggested the conversation might not have occurred at midnight.
Fine. Maybe it was eleven forty-five. Maybe it was eleven fifty-nine. Maybe somebody’s kitchen clock was running six minutes fast. Anderson Cooper wasn’t asking Stevens to establish the official atomic time standard for North America.
He wanted to know whether she had spoken to Dingell and what she’d told her.
Stevens proceeded to discuss her personal reflections, El-Sayed’s alleged anger, her love for Michigan, her relationships with Democrats, and the emotional relief she felt after making her decision.
Cooper kept asking.
At one point, he asked whether she’d spoken to Dingell the night before, and Stevens moved into another explanation about how much she respected Michigan Democrats. Later, when he returned to Dingell’s account, Stevens complained that he was editorializing.
Anderson Cooper was trying to establish whether a telephone conversation had occurred. Stevens treated the question like he’d asked her to reveal the launch codes.
I’ve seen witnesses under congressional questioning who were more eager to explain themselves. I half expected Stevens to ask whether she could invoke executive privilege over her own phone bill.
When Cooper expressed frustration that she wasn’t answering the questions, Stevens suggested he was upset with her. That was a particularly remarkable maneuver. The reporter asks what changed, the politician avoids answering, and suddenly the reporter’s emotional condition becomes the issue.
By that point, I wasn’t sure whether I was watching a political interview or a customer service dispute involving a woman demanding that CNN apologize for having questions.
Dingell subsequently described the interview as painful to watch. That’s a remarkably charitable assessment. The interview left me wondering whether Stevens had prepared any explanation that could withstand a follow-up question.
And if I were a guessing man, I’d say Haley Stevens is a sore fucking loser.
The reaction from people who know her politically has been extraordinary. Her longtime chief of staff, Justin German, resigned, along with numerous other members of her staff. Former campaign personnel publicly rejected the endorsement. Democratic colleagues who had supported her expressed disbelief, and some House members began discussing removing her from the Democratic Caucus.
Think about what that means. A politician’s closest staff members work through long hours, public controversies, demanding schedules, and the constant possibility of electoral defeat. They understand that disagreements come with the profession. Yet more than half of Stevens’ staff…
