Representative Haley Stevens of Michigan stood up from her dining table, where the tuna fish and matzo ball soup sat half-eaten, and let loose about the moment she grew disillusioned with Dr. Abdul El-Sayed.
It happened this month, during her state’s first Senate debate between Dr. El-Sayed, who defeated her in a bitter Democratic primary in August, and former Representative Mike Rogers, the Republican nominee. Dr. El-Sayed, an outspoken critic of Israel, was asked if Iran or Israel posed a greater threat to the United States. He dodged the question, calling it a “ridiculous hypothetical.”
This was unacceptable to Ms. Stevens.
“He’s a good speaker,” she said during the lunchtime interview on Friday at her home in Birmingham, Mich., raising her voice and rising from the table. “He’s an orator. He is gifted. Then how does that happen? Come on!”
Since the debate, Ms. Stevens has sat for a procession of cable television interviews that have been increasingly critical of Dr. El-Sayed, her endorsement of him becoming shakier by the day. Their hug at a party unity brunch in August has faded into distant memory.
On Friday, Ms. Stevens announced that she would attend a Sunday church service in Detroit with Dr. El-Sayed, a peace offering brokered by Representatives Debbie Dingell of Michigan and James E. Clyburn of South Carolina. But Ms. Stevens’s statement came with a caveat: a demand that Dr. El-Sayed publicly disavow an ad that one of his allies posted online. She called the ad antisemitic because it blamed U.S. support for Israel for high grocery prices.
On Friday, Dr. El-Sayed pushed back.
In a blistering statement, he offered a reminder that he beat her in August and an assertion that “Congresswoman Stevens seems intent on relitigating a primary that ended three months ago.”
Whether their planned joint appearance on Sunday will go ahead seems up in the air.
Ms. Stevens said late Friday that she was not sure if the church event was still happening, or even if she was still invited. She said that no one from Dr. El-Sayed’s team had called her on Friday. She also said she had not retracted her endorsement of him and did not plan to.
“I haven’t had time to digest this,” she said. She added, “I don’t think this is a melodrama.”
Some other Michigan Democrats have been baffled by Ms. Stevens’s unsupportive media tour in the final days of the campaign, with Dr. El-Sayed serving as a key chess piece in the party’s push to take back the Senate. Polls show Dr. El-Sayed in a close race with Mr. Rogers. To win the chamber, Democrats need to retain Democratic-held Senate seats like Michigan’s and flip at least four states held by Republicans.
“I have no idea what the hell Haley Stevens is doing,” Mallory McMorrow, a state senator who also ran for the U.S. Senate in Michigan and dropped out a month before the primary, said on CNN on Friday. “This is a moment where we have to recognize the stakes.”
Dr. El-Sayed’s campaign declined to discuss Ms. Stevens’s commentary.
Ms. Stevens’s growing criticism of Dr. El-Sayed serves as a stark sign of just how fiercely resistant some moderate Democrats and Jewish voters remain to his candidacy.
Several times in the interviews, she returned to her anger over the online ad, made by Rebellion PAC, a left-wing group that backed Dr. El-Sayed, and his refusal to publicly disavow it. The El-Sayed campaign has said it did not make and is not responsible for the ad.
“Maybe it’s how you fund-raise, maybe it is what you want people to believe, but the reality is that we are not going to say that the cost of groceries is because of Jews and the Jewish state,” Ms. Stevens said. “We’re not going to say we don’t have health care because of Jews and the Jewish state.”
Ms. Stevens is not Jewish but has always been a pro-Israel Democrat. She attended a Jewish sleep-away camp as a teenager and now represents suburban Oakland County, which is home to a large segment of Michigan’s Jewish population. Tensions over Israel dominated her primary with Dr. El-Sayed, when the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s main super PAC spent at least $30 million backing her campaign.
She also now has a partner who may feel even more strongly about the issue than she does.
Her fiancé, Jason Turkish, a Jewish lawyer who has raised money for both Democrats and Republicans, has gone even further than she has in criticizing Dr. El-Sayed. He publicly endorsed Mr. Rogers and appeared at a campaign event with him on Wednesday.
Ms. Stevens said that in anticipation of her wedding next summer to Mr. Turkish, she had met with a rabbi to discuss the possibility of converting to Judaism.
Over lunch and in two subsequent phone calls, including one with both her and Mr. Turkish, Ms. Stevens said she felt compelled to speak out for Jewish constituents who are scared of the prospect of Dr. El-Sayed in the Senate.
“There’s people who are hurt and worried about a bunch of different things,” she said. “They’re making sacrifices because of affordability. Someone in the Jewish community said, — six months ago, it was during the primary — safety is our affordability issue because of attacks on Jewish elected officials’ homes, attacks to their lives, attacks on the synagogues.”
Ms. Stevens repeated her assertion that she supported all Democrats running, including Dr. El-Sayed, and that she planned to vote for him. But asked if she wanted him to win, she was more circumspect.
“I think he’s going to win,” she replied.
Asked again if she wanted Dr. El-Sayed win, she dodged again.
“I don’t know why you’d ask me that,” she said.
Pressed one more time about her public criticism of Dr. El-Sayed, she offered a little more.
“I ran for a Democratic nomination, intent in understanding that I wanted a Democrat to win,” she said. “We sat down for a long period of time, Abdul and I did, in the first quarter of ’25, before we both decided to run, making that commitment to each other, so of course.”
It was not a ringing endorsement.
But while Mr. Rogers has welcomed Ms. Stevens’s supporters, she said he had not called her.
Then there is the matter of Mr. Turkish.
Even as Ms. Stevens had lunch with a New York Times reporter, Mr. Turkish was sitting for his own interview live with TMZ. He said Ms. Stevens would pull her support from Dr. El-Sayed if he did not soon disavow the grocery prices ad.
“I don’t think she’s going to be supporting Abdul El-Sayed very much longer,” Mr. Turkish told TMZ.
After his comments aired, Ms. Stevens invited the Times reporter to call her back, and this time she had Mr. Turkish on the line.
She said that her fiancé had not caused her to change her positions on Israel or Dr. El-Sayed.
“I think I’ve changed his opinion,” she said. “He goes, ‘You’re more Jewish than me.’”
In the interview, Mr. Turkish said he had expected Dr. El-Sayed to “move to the middle” on Israel after the primary. He called Dr. El-Sayed’s response to the debate question about Iran and Israel “the tipping point for me” and declared that his own safety would be in jeopardy if Dr. El-Sayed were elected to the Senate.
“I think I’d be less safe on this planet if Abdul El-Sayed is the senator, if he is insisting on sticking to the current program,” Mr. Turkish said. “He is so unwelcoming to people who have reasonable anxieties about Jews being scapegoated once again, as they have been for thousands of years, that the idea that he will steer not just U.S. policy, but foreign policy globally, it makes me extremely, extremely anxious.”
Mr. Turkish said he believed Ms. Stevens, 43, still had a bright future in politics.
“I know there’s going to be other opportunities,” he said. “I think she can run for the United States Senate again if she wants to.”
Though he is a veteran fund-raiser and an accomplished lawyer, Mr. Turkish had not been a sought-after political surrogate. His endorsement had never made news before now.
But he said he felt compelled to make a public endorsement for Mr. Rogers and appear with him at a campaign event because he did not want his public image to be a late-night TV sendup of him and Ms. Stevens.
“My friends and family members are asking me what I’m doing,” Mr. Turkish said. “I think they wanted to hear more from me than what they got off of two spoofed appearances on ‘The Tonight Show.’”
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