Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic Senate nominee in Michigan, said Saturday that he did not want Representative Haley Stevens, his former primary rival, to join him at a party unity event in Detroit on Sunday.
“I don’t want any distractions,” Dr. El-Sayed told reporters after a campaign rally in Sterling Heights, Mich., outside Detroit. He added, “It seems as though other folks are more interested in making this race about things that it’s not about.”
Ms. Stevens and Dr. El-Sayed, who have been publicly quarreling for days, were initially expected to attend the Sunday event together, part of an effort by Representatives Debbie Dingell of Michigan and James E. Clyburn of South Carolina to broker a peace between the feuding Democrats on the eve of a critical election.
It was not immediately clear if Ms. Stevens would abide by Dr. El-Sayed’s request that she stay away from the event.
Ms. Stevens, a centrist who lost to the progressive Dr. El-Sayed by less than a percentage point in a bitter August primary, had said late Friday that she had not been told that she was unwelcome at the event. She did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Saturday.
Mr. Clyburn said Saturday that he had “no idea” if Ms. Stevens would attend. An adviser to Mr. Clyburn, Antjuan Seawright, said Ms. Stevens was still invited, and rejected any notion that Dr. El-Sayed could pull her invitation.
“This is not Abdul’s event,” Mr. Seawright said Saturday afternoon, adding, “The invitation still stands.”
Ms. Dingell, who had said Friday that she had secured the participation of Dr. El-Sayed and Ms. Stevens at the event, did not immediately respond to a request for comment Saturday.
Politico previously reported that Dr. El-Sayed’s campaign did not want Ms. Stevens at its events.
Dr. El-Sayed did not say at the rally in Sterling Heights whether his campaign had relayed the request directly to Ms. Stevens.
A schedule for the Sunday event, at a church in the North End of Detroit, said that speakers would include Mr. Clyburn, Dr. El-Sayed and Mayor Mary Sheffield of Detroit. Their remarks were set to be followed by a march to the offices of the Detroit Election Department, the schedule said.
Ms. Stevens was not listed as a speaker, though there was no indication she had ever been expected to deliver remarks.
Opinion polls show that Dr. El-Sayed and Mike Rogers, the Republican Senate nominee in Michigan, are locked in a tight race that could determine control of the Senate.
Ms. Stevens and Dr. El-Sayed differ over their positions on Israel. Ms. Stevens is a strong supporter of the country, and Dr. El-Sayed is a fierce critic.
Their unusual clash has become a flashpoint in Democrats’ broader debate about Israel, and some Democrats are anxious that infighting in the final days of the race will damage Dr. El-Sayed’s chances.
His relationship with Ms. Stevens was not always so tense. Ms. Stevens quickly endorsed Dr. El-Sayed after the primary, pledging to campaign with him, and they appeared together at a unity breakfast two days after the primary.
But they have not been seen together in the final stretch of the race, and Ms. Stevens made a series of recent appearances on cable TV in which she criticized Dr. El-Sayed’s outreach to Black and Jewish voters, two groups that Mr. Rogers has aggressively courted.
Ms. Stevens said in an interview Friday that she had been set off by a moment in a debate this month in which Dr. El-Sayed declined to answer a question about whether Iran or Israel posed a greater threat to the United States.
On Wednesday, Ms. Stevens said she would not campaign with Dr. El-Sayed again before the election, and her fiancé, Jason Turkish, a Jewish Democrat, said he was backing Mr. Rogers, citing Dr. El-Sayed’s positions on Israel.
Ms. Dingell, frustrated by the intraparty conflict, said she reached out to the warring Democrats and Mr. Clyburn, one of the highest-ranking African Americans in Congress, and asked them to appear together. By Thursday night, Ms. Stevens was saying that she would join Dr. El-Sayed at the event on Sunday.
But the efforts to make peace crumbled Friday, after Ms. Stevens issued a statement calling on Dr. El-Sayed to apologize for comments he had made about Israel and to denounce an ad from an outside group that suggests U.S. aid to Israel was making life in America more expensive. (The ad shows a shopper telling a man not to buy eggs because “we have to set that $7 aside for killing Palestinians.”)
Dr. El-Sayed responded to Ms. Stevens’s statement with a statement of his own saying that she seemed “intent on relitigating a primary that ended three months ago.” He called on her to “focus on the task at hand.”
On Saturday, Dr. El-Sayed told reporters that he did “not agree with the contents” of the ad from the outside group. But he also said she wanted to “talk about” issues that he did not want to focus on in the final days of the campaign.
As of Friday, Mr. Turkish said he planned to attend the church service.
On Saturday afternoon, he said he wanted to spend Sunday “however my fiancé, Haley, wants to spend her day.”
But, he added, he did not know if that would include the service.
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