Michigan’s key Senate race devolved into open fighting Friday night, with warring statements from progressive Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed and Rep. Haley Stevens, the more centrist Democrat who lost the primary.
The fighting, mere days before Election Day, shocked other top Michigan Democrats, who have spent recent days trying to bridge the divide between El-Sayed and Stevens.
“Michigan could very well be the state that flips control of the Senate. … That’s what’s on the line. Nothing less. And Michiganders know it,” State Sen. Mallory McMorrow, who dropped out of the Democratic Senate primary, said in a statement. “Cut the shit. Lock in. Knock doors. Get out the vote. That’s it.”
The recent fighting between El-Sayed and Stevens centers on whether the duo would try to put their acrimony in the past and campaign together this weekend.
El-Sayed’s campaign on Friday asked Stevens to stay away from its events in the closing days of the campaign after Stevens released a lengthy statement calling on El-Sayed to shift his rhetoric on Israel and more forcefully disavow a commercial made by someone else. Stevens was scheduled to appear Sunday at a Black church in Detroit, alongside Rep. James E. Clyburn of South Carolina .
Stevens, in a text message to The Washington Post, declined to talk until after the election “when we have our democratic Senator-elect (my prediction!).”
Stevens and El-Sayed hold sharply different positions on U.S. policy toward the Israeli government and the war in Gaza, which El-Sayed has called a genocide.
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