When she called Acker amid this apparent media tour, he told her to stop doing press. “It’s gotten to a point where it’s a sideshow,” he recalls saying. “You’ve made your point about these ads. You need to move on.” By then, Stevens was having the same conversations with other Democrats, assuring them that she would support El-Sayed. That afternoon, however, El-Sayed told reporters that Stevens’s presence on the campaign trail would only be “a distraction,” suggesting that she should not come to the church event the next day.
Just before nine the next morning, Acker wrote to her, “Stop with the statements.” “No statement,” Stevens replied. “Everything good.” He wrote to her again, “Okay. Promise me no media today?” “Promise,” she wrote. “I am good and had peaceful night.” She added, in reference to antisemitism, “This is a cancer in our party.” Acker said he agreed.
“What do we do,” she wrote.
“It’s not being excised before Tuesday and probably not before 2028,” he told her. “Honestly? We have to start fighting this at a lower level first.”
“Yeah probably.”
Less than two hours later, around 11 A.M., Stevens showed up at a church—not with Clyburn, as planned, but at a different church, with Mike Rogers. “You’re at a black church with Mike Rogers???” Acker texted. “This is probably the opposite of lying low haley, what is happening.” She didn’t respond. Instead, she recorded herself in a car, from an off-kilter angle, and said that she was changing her endorsement.
I spoke with Stevens on Election Day, and she appeared to be doing many different things while she was on the phone. Her dad was coming over, and she had just come back from a polling place with her mom, where she appeared wearing a floppy, wide-brimmed straw sun hat. “Hold on, sweetie,” she said, putting the call on hold multiple times. “Oh, my gosh, yeah, it’s Election Day,” she said, back on the line, sounding cheerful and a bit wired, as she occasionally seemed to be talking to other people or reading a stray message on her phone. “O.K.,” she mumbled, “who the heck is this . . .” She told me that she was excited to talk about what she described as the “moment of clear conscience” that settled into her body and mind on Sunday morning, when she decided to accompany Rogers to church. As congresswoman, she explained, her mantra was “Listen, learn, and lead,” and she’d been hearing from more and more people with concerns about El-Sayed. One thing people didn’t know about that day: “I was invited to that church by Democrats,” she said, though she declined to specify which Democrats. Stevens went on: “I don’t have Mike Rogers’s phone number. Like, I think everyone thinks I’m in some sort of cahoot. I know it’s right before an election, but, like, we shouldn’t be mad if Democrats and Republicans are talking. That’s the whole point, right?”
The decision to so publicly back a Republican, and to have misled so many in the immediate lead-up to that decision, was seen as utterly out of character for Stevens, a self-cast team player who prided herself on being a member of the Democratic class of 2018, part of the election that brought in a new generation of leaders in response to Donald Trump’s first term. The writer Charlotte Alter chronicled Stevens in her book about that new generation, “The Ones We’ve Been Waiting For.” Where some of her peers were agitating for new ideological thinking inside the Party, Stevens was something closer to an earnest moderate. Alter describes her as a workhorse on the campaign trail who often positioned herself as “a woman in manufacturing”—a reference to her work on the Obama Administration’s auto bailout—and “Michigan’s first millennial federal representative.” On Sunday, Alter described her shock on X. “This is like a body-snatcher moment,” she wrote. “Absolutely wild to watch a political career implode in such a destructive way.”
Others were similarly flummoxed. What was Stevens doing? People who had known her for years speculated that the only thing that could explain such a turn would be a mental-health episode or a toxic relationship. “I’m very concerned,” Debbie Dingell, the Michigan congresswoman, said in a televised interview. Caitlin Legacki, Stevens’s former campaign adviser, posted on X that Turkish, Stevens’s fiancé, is “vaporizing Haley’s future so that he can be a main character in this moment.” She went on to describe him as an “extraordinarily toxic presence” who was “verbally abusive” to Stevens’s staff. Turkish is a disability-rights lawyer and a longtime Democratic fund-raiser. His relationship with Stevens was a surprise to much of her staff this year. “Suddenly in, like, May, this guy Jason shows up,” Legacki said, on the streaming show “Nobody Knows Anything.” “He was increasingly pressing her in the campaign to more forcefully defend Israel in a way that was bad politics for her, but also, just, like, didn’t make any sense for a Senate campaign,” she said. When we spoke, Legacki told me that she was worried Stevens was becoming increasingly isolated and that she did not seem to realize “the severity of the wound she has inflicted on herself.”
