Country Over Party?

By Nick Catoggio

Monday, November 02, 2026

 

I would not vote for Abdul El-Sayed if I lived in Michigan. As it happens, neither will the Democrat who opposed him in the state’s Senate primary this year.

 

I have my reasons and Rep. Haley Stevens has hers, and the two are not the same—I think. But I can’t be sure, because Stevens’ shocking last-second switch on Sunday from supporting El-Sayed to endorsing Republican Mike Rogers is so mystifying as to be almost inscrutable.

 

To explain her defection, we need to look past rational political calculations and consider baser impulses. One strong possibility, to borrow a bit of internet slang: She’s butthurt.

 

Amid rumors last week that Stevens was wavering on supporting El-Sayed, Democrats reportedly brokered a planned joint appearance by the two at church on Sunday. She agreed, but surprised her colleagues by issuing a long statement on Friday calling on El-Sayed to condemn the loathsome new Rebellion PAC ad on his behalf blaming Israel for the high cost of living.

 

El-Sayed replied with his own statement criticizing Stevens for wanting to “relitigate a primary that ended three months ago” yet told reporters later that he disagreed with the contents of the ad (which is a lie, incidentally). Stevens appeared to be satisfied with that, per another statement that she released on Saturday night. But a plainly annoyed El-Sayed had had enough. He let it be known that he didn’t want her at his church event on Sunday after all.

 

According to the New York Times, she didn’t take the news well. “On Sunday morning, Ms. Stevens woke up angry about being told not to come to church,” the paper alleged. “She called Mr. Rogers and asked if they could attend church together, a gesture he immediately embraced, she later explained.” Appearing with Rogers after services, she complained that El-Sayed “chose to close his campaign by saying I wasn’t welcome.” Hours later, her resentment was still simmering when she grumbled during an awkward interview with CNN about El-Sayed’s “anger and lack of kindness.”

 

This isn’t the first time Stevens has held a grudge over being snubbed by some young progressive rising star, either. Last week she complained to Politico that she hadn’t been invited to a recent event held in her own district by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “Nobody wants the Democratic Party to feel like an exclusive club,” Stevens groused, adding that Ocasio-Cortez hadn’t answered one of her texts in more than a year. “It’s starting to feel like AOC comes in and it’s exclusive.”

 

Ocasio-Cortez phoned her last week to appease her as anxiety rose in Democratic circles that she might be about to jump ship on El-Sayed, a call that Politico pointedly described as an “intervention.” Other House colleagues have also hinted in the past 24 hours that Stevens’ unpredictable behavior might have more to do with her mental health than with political strategy or petty anger over a snub. “One Democrat close to Stevens suggested the congresswoman is ‘not well’ and expressed hope that she could ‘get away from this situation and get help,’” New York magazine reported. Whether that’s sour grapes talking after her eleventh-hour switcheroo or something more is unclear.

 

Another theory, related to the last, is that Stevens has been influenced by her fiancé, Democratic donor Jason Turkish. Turkish announced last week that he’s backing Rogers to protest El-Sayed’s chronic criticism of “Jews and Jewish-related associations” and was allegedly pressing his future wife to follow suit. Jim Blanchard, a former governor of Michigan, told a reporter that he had dinner with the couple on Friday and claimed that Turkish was “working her over,” telling Stevens that “everyone is disappointed in you” for having endorsed El-Sayed.

 

Jordan Acker, a regent at the University of Michigan and self-described friend of Stevens, chimed in later to say that he knows and respects Turkish but recently has “become deeply troubled by his behavior. I’ve heard serious concerns about his treatment of Haley’s staff, friends, and allies. My own experiences have only deepened those concerns.” Again, whether there’s something to that or whether furious Democrats are zeroing in on a convenient scapegoat in Stevens’ orbit who happens to have the wrong politics on the Middle East is anyone’s guess.

 

Crisis of conscience.

 

Or is all of that too cynical?

 

“Maybe Stevens was sincerely troubled by El-Sayed’s demagoguery and had a crisis of conscience that caused her to flip,” you might be thinking. “When Liz Cheney endorsed Kamala Harris in 2024, Democrats called it a heroic example of a Republican placing the best interests of her country over the best interests of her party. Isn’t Haley Stevens doing the same thing in reverse by opting for Mike Rogers over a postliberal left-wing gremlin?”

 

She is not.

 

In the first place, to believe that Stevens had an earnest crisis of conscience, you need to believe she’s a moron. Because only a moron would wait until two days before Election Day, during the last few hours of early voting, with more than 2 million ballots already cast, to decide that it’s unconscionable to support a candidate whom she had publicly supported for three months.

 

Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin alleged that he spoke to her at around 10 p.m. on Saturday night, 12 hours or so before she endorsed Rogers, and she told him she was still backing El-Sayed. Politico saw text messages that Stevens sent to a Michigan Democratic Party official on Saturday afternoon in which Stevens wrote, “I am voting straight Dem!!!! I had a dream last night we won. And I believe he will win! P.S. it was a happy dream.” Reportedly, when some of her own staff checked in with her last week to encourage her not to endorse Rogers, Stevens answered, “Omg why would you think I would do that?!!”

 

Even the video of her endorsing Rogers reeks of impulse—recorded on her phone, in the front seat of her car, instead of the sort of glossy production Republicans surely would have arranged for her if they’d had a tiny bit of notice. Genuine crises of conscience tend to gestate for a while, not result in seemingly spontaneous birth as this one did.

 

If Stevens harbored doubts about El-Sayed’s fitness for office so profound that she deemed it worth immolating her career to try to defeat him, one would think those misgivings would have crystallized for her before voting began. Especially since his demagoguery toward Israel wasn’t some late surprise in the campaign that she failed to anticipate—if anything, he’s toned it down since their primary, when he bludgeoned her daily with accusations about being a tool of the Zionist lobby.

 

Maybe she is a moron, though. By coming out against El-Sayed so late in the race, she’s placed herself and other pro-Israel centrist Democrats in a no-win position. It’s probably too late for her endorsement to move many votes, and it will certainly fail to make the difference for Rogers if the latest polling is accurate. Even so, if El-Sayed romps to victory on Tuesday, he can now point to Stevens’ betrayal as proof that progressives are strong enough to win in swing states even when pro-Israel Democrats stand against them. That’s precisely the lesson the far-left wants the party to learn from this race ahead of 2028.

 

If, on the other hand, Rogers pulls off an upset on Tuesday, El-Sayed now has a convenient way to shift blame for the defeat away from himself and his faction and onto “normie” Democrats. We would have won, he’ll say. We were on track to win. But then Haley Stevens and the Zionists decided they’d rather have another Trump apparatchik in the Senate instead of a member of their own party with whom they agree on everything except the campaign in Gaza. Again, the lesson will be that progressives are strong enough to win in swing states—unless they’re sabotaged by treacherous “uniparty” establishment Democrats, you see.

 

There’s another problem with interpreting Stevens’ machinations as a case of putting country over party, though. And it’s a big one.

 

Quite simply, there is no “country over party” argument for Mike Rogers. Or for any other Republican as long as Donald Trump is president.

 

On the ballot.

 

The president has spent the last month urging voters to pretend that he’s on the ballot, but they don’t need to pretend. He is on the ballot. The quisling Republicans in the House and Senate put him there.

 

The shining lesson of American politics since January 2025 is that a vote for the GOP is a vote for autocracy. That’s how congressional Republicans wanted it, spending two years effectively forfeiting their votes to Trump on matters ranging from tariffs to war to oversight to letting federal law enforcement be converted into a tool of political intimidation. So that’s how voters should treat their choice tomorrow.

 

If candidates from the president’s party desired some “distance” from him this fall, the time to start creating that distance was 19 months ago, on “Liberation Day,” not by dodging appearances at his rallies this month. By behaving like members of the Russian Duma rather than the U.S. Congress, they made themselves indistinguishable from the authoritarian they serve. To vote for one is to vote for the other.

 

That’s especially true for Mike Rogers, a man who’s disgraced himself repeatedly in his second act in politics. As a member of the House from 2001 to 2015, he was known as a quintessential Bush-era national-security hawk; as an aspiring senator in 2026, he’s remade himself as a Trump-friendly election denier presiding over what must be the most demagogic anti-Muslim campaign in American history. It’s hard to lose the moral high ground to a guy who once reacted to an attack on a synagogue by saying “hurt people hurt people,” but Rogers and his various Republican surrogates, starting with the president, have done their level best.

 

In a race between two demagogues, Haley Stevens has somehow ended up endorsing both—but not on equal terms. Jonathan Chait asks a good question: After making various demands of El-Sayed to denounce bigotry, why didn’t she make any of Rogers before endorsing him?

 

Next year, if not sooner, the president is likely to escalate the Iran war without congressional approval, impose a raft of new tariffs, nominate a bunch of postliberal hacks to the federal bench, issue pardons to his henchmen to try to shield them from Democratic investigations, and possibly egg on an effort to deny some victorious Democrats their seats in the House and Senate when Congress’ new session begins on January 3. As early as tomorrow night, he’ll set about trying to tear America apart by discrediting Republican electoral defeats as products of cheating—a scenario so certain that activist groups began “wargaming” their various legal responses months ago.

 

America’s Trumpist civic nightmare will get worse, not better, once the last electoral restraint on the president’s behavior dissolves. There’s no reason to believe Sen. Rogers would be any less willing an enabler of that nightmare than his new Republican colleagues have been.

 

And because there isn’t, there’s also no argument that casting a vote for him amounts to placing “country over party.” America is not served by empowering a government of fascist cretins and cowardly accomplices, as Haley Stevens used to understand. As unforgivable as it was for anyone to support Trump’s return to office in 2024, after he’d proved in the final months of his first term what he was capable of, it’s that much more unforgivable to support the political status quo in 2026, after nearly two years of disgrace upon disgrace upon disgrace.

 

Yet here Stevens is, doing just that. I don’t understand why her allegedly troubled conscience wasn’t more troubled by the implications of a Republican victory.

 

But I do understand why it was troubled—if it was troubled—by the implications of a Democratic one.

 

Europeanization.

 

El-Sayed is a demagogue and I don’t vote for demagogues. I would have left my ballot blank in Michigan, as Stevens could have, rather than pick my postliberal poison.

 

It’s true that the Democratic nominee has made some gestures of conciliation toward Jewish voters since the primary, most notably by ensuring that his friend Hasan Piker stays very far away from the race. But I see no reason to believe he’s in earnest. He’s saying what he needs to say to play to the center in a general election, as politicians routinely do. If he wins, I expect it won’t be five minutes before he starts framing his victory as a blow to Zionism’s Svengali-like hold over America.

 

El-Sayed “elevated anti-Zionism into the centerpiece of his primary campaign, treating the Israel lobby as the singular force lying behind every economic and political problem afflicting America,” Chait, a Michigan native, complains. “As the American left has grown more fixated on Gaza, it is becoming more common for progressive organizations and cultures to treat Zionism in any form—including liberal Zionism that harshly criticizes Israel’s government—as a racist ideology, and to ostracize anybody who refuses to renounce it. American Jews rationally fear that El-Sayed is not only willing but eager to import this norm into the Democratic Party, functionally excluding the overwhelming majority of the Jewish population.”

 

Indeed. An El-Sayed victory tomorrow would cause Americans to revisit all sorts of assumptions about what is and isn’t viable at the polls, a hard shove to the proverbial Overton window. Some will treat it as proof of concept that demonizing the Jewish state is a winning electoral strategy. And that will make U.S. politics—and its many grassroots participants—more comfortable with demonizing Jews.

 

Another way to put that is, just as Donald Trump’s win in 2016 “Europeanized” the American right, El-Sayed’s win would go a ways toward further “Europeanizing” the American left. Trump proved that Ronald Reagan’s party of small government could triumph as an ersatz National Front obsessed with purging foreign undesirables from the country’s blood and soil. El-Sayed’s triumph would prove that a Clinton-Obama party of neoliberals can triumph as a Mélenchon-esque socialist faction obsessed with ending “settler colonialism” abroad.

 

Or at least, one very specific example of “settler colonialism.”

 

And so, even for a staunch Never Trumper, the case for an El-Sayed victory tomorrow is really no stronger than this: It would somewhat mitigate an urgent national threat from the postliberal right while meaningfully raising a longer-term threat from the postliberal left. America will gain an extra vote in the Senate against Donald Trump’s abuses of power at the price of considerably weakening the stigma against scapegoating Israel and its American supporters for domestic problems among the Democratic base. And maybe not just the Democratic base.

 

If that feels familiar, there’s a reason. “We must vote for this scumbag demagogue to save America” is a movie we’ve all seen before, and it sucked. It doesn’t end with America being saved either, as millions of angry voters are poised to make clear tomorrow. It ends with a senescent idiot mumbling, on the eve of a cost-of-living election, about the new pipes at the Lincoln Memorial’s Reflecting Pool.

 

And so, as important as it is for the country that the GOP be smashed electorally, my alliance of convenience with Democrats will never be so cozy that I offer “Flight 93” rationalizations for leftists whose politics will, soon enough, create a cockpit crisis of their own. The next senator from Michigan will be a demagogue, one way or another, and we’ll pay for it one way or another. If Americans cared about “country over party,” we wouldn’t be forced to choose between such people in the first place. But then, a lot of things in 2026 would be different if Americans cared about that.