Rep. Haley Stevens got engaged less than three months ago. Now, her fiancé is going on Fox.Finn Gomez/Getty
In August, Representative Haley Stevens lost Michigan’s Democratic senatorial primary to Abdul El-Sayed, who now holds a narrow lead over the Republican candidate, Mike Rogers.
Most losing primary candidates either endorse their opponent or wait out the remainder of the election cycle before reentering politics.
But Stevens, in recent weeks, has made her way back into the conversation. Or, more accurately, her recent fiancé Jason Turkish has done so. Turkish, who announced his engagement to Stevens less than three months ago, has spent the past several days loudly condemning El-Sayed on every platform available to him, while announcing that he plans to vote for Rogers due to El-Sayed’s criticism of Israel.
Turkish, a Democratic donor living in Michigan who has also given to GOP candidates, attended a campaign event for Rogers Wednesday night. While there, he called El-Sayed antisemitic. Then, as Stevens sat for an interview with the New York Times on Friday, Turkish went on TMZ and, on his fiancée’s behalf, said “I don’t think she’s going to be supporting Abdul El-Sayed very much longer.”
Stevens, however, has repeatedly insisted she is still supporting El-Sayed. “I ran for a Democratic nomination, intent in understanding that I wanted a Democrat to win,” she told the Times.
Stevens has criticized one advertisement that was released in support of her former primary opponent—an ad that was not made or endorsed by El-Sayed or his team. Stevens called the ad antisemitic because it blamed U.S. support for Israel for high grocery prices. She demanded that El-Sayed publicly disavow it as a precondition for appearing at an event with him on Sunday; it is not clear whether the event will go forward.
Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, a prominent Democrat who also competed against Stevens and El-Sayed in the primary, said on Friday that she has “no idea what the hell Haley Stevens is doing.”
“This is a moment where we have to recognize the stakes,” she said, urging party unity. (“Cut the shit. Lock in. Knock doors. Get out the vote. That’s it,” she added in a statement Saturday.)
Turkish, meanwhile, is continuing his media tour. On Saturday morning, he went on Fox and Friends to assert that El-Sayed’s criticism of Israel “puts Jews at risk.”
Stevens’ fiancé, a lawyer and fundraiser, was not previously a sought-after political surrogate. As the New York Times delicately put it, “His endorsement had never made news before now.”
According to Politico, El-Sayed is currently asking Stevens to keep herself and her fiancé as far away from his campaign as possible. As a statement El-Sayed’s campaign released on Friday put it, “Congresswoman Stevens seems intent on relitigating a primary that ended three months ago.”
