A Democrat Endorsed the Republican in Michigan's Senate Race: Haley Stevens Backs Mike Rogers Over Her Own Party's Nominee

The strangest endorsement of the midterm's final weekend landed in Michigan. Haley Stevens, the Democrat who ran against Abdul El-Sayed in the state's U.S. Senate primary, has endorsed the Republican nominee, Mike Rogers, over El-Sayed — a cross-party move the Associated Press reports stunned Democratic party officials when it became public on Sunday. The AP reports that Stevens endorsed Rogers after attending a Detroit church service with him, and that the endorsement came after she had been uninvited to a joint event the same day with El-Sayed.

The race she stepped into is not a local quarrel. The AP frames Michigan's Senate contest as an election that could determine the balance of power, and Rogers carries President Donald Trump's endorsement. A defeated primary rival crossing over in the final 48 hours gives the Republican nominee the one credential money cannot buy in a close race: a Democrat's name, on the record, saying the Democrat should not win. The AP's reporting describes Democratic tensions boiling over in the days before the election; the endorsement is both a symptom of that fight and, now, a fact of the race itself.

For Florida voters watching the Senate map from Orlando, Michigan is one of the seats that decides what kind of Senate the next two years run through — the same map on which Florida's own Senate race closes tomorrow. Endorsements rarely move many votes on their own. What they move is the story a campaign gets to tell in its last two days, and on the final Monday of the 2026 midterms, the story out of Michigan belongs to the Republican — delivered to him by a Democrat.