You know the meme. A young girl grins at the camera while a house burns behind her, and the joke implies that the impish, cute girl is the arsonist.
That was Haley Stevens on Sunday morning, in a pew next to Mike Rogers, before calling herself a “proud Democrat” who “can’t stand with Hasan Piker.” Everyone read the picture the same way. Some will see fire in my ham-fisted Photoshop version above as burning Abdul El-Sayed’s campaign, and the grin belongs to the woman he beat. But I think it’s worth looking again at what exactly Stevens burnt down, beyond her own political career.
On late Saturday evening, Stevens reportedly told her fellow Michigan representative Debbie Dingell that she wouldn't endorse Rogers. By 11 AM Sunday, she had, on camera, with the Republican nominee beside her. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had spent 25 minutes on the phone with her earlier in the week trying to talk her out of it. Her chief of staff and many other aides quit in mass protest hours later. The state party chair said she "lied to me."
By Sunday evening, she appeared on CNN to explain her decision. Anderson Cooper prompted a simple explanation, and she sat in silence for about seven seconds before answering, "Was that a question, Anderson?" It was one of the most public acts of political career suicide ever committed on live television, and she came across as petty, impulsive, and, frankly, full of shit. Three months ago, she went on Fox News to say she'd back El-Sayed because "that's called democracy" and you don't join a party to "hold a grudge."
But everyone is looking at the wrong mistake. Sunday ended her political career, and that's what people are talking about because it’s so rare to see self-immolation unfold, live and in a stunningly satisfying way. Rarely do we see something schadenfreudetastic™.
The much bigger mistake is what she did to her own side's argument, which was the whole reason she was in the race in the first place. The Michigan primary was the cleanest test the Democratic establishment had of its theory of the party. Stevens made this argument back in March, when El-Sayed scheduled rallies with Piker at Michigan and Michigan State. "We have to be serious here about who's going to be the best general election candidate," she said, and argued that a Democrat who campaigned with Piker couldn't win the state.
That was a large part of her campaign. She was running as much to prove that a far-left candidate like El-Sayed would lose in November. And as uncomfortable it may be for some to read me mention it, she ran with AIPAC-aligned money behind her, in a purple state, with the Senate on the line. But her establishment Democratic argument lost the primary to the progressive by 13,792 votes.
Tuesday's election would theoretically settle whether she was right, but then she impulsively mean-girl’d her endorsement of Mike Rogers. If El-Sayed loses, nobody will be able to say with clear confidence whether he lost because a progressive couldn’t win Michigan … or because Haley Stevens made sure he didn’t.
The argument that progressive Dems cannot win general elections in battleground states is the argument every centrist in the Democratic Party has been making since 2024. Michigan became the laboratory, the one place to get the cleanest answer. Stevens's bizarre pivot effectively removed the clean answer her centrist Democratic coalition desperately needed. And if El Sayed still wins despite her backstabbing? The progressive candidates will have achieved a much more important win than it would’ve been just two days ago. Oops.
The headline says everyone is missing it, which isn’t quite true. Nate Silver made a similar point Sunday. “It will now be much harder to blame his progressivism since people can just blame Haley Stevens instead,” he wrote. She went to church Sunday morning to sink him. Within four hours, El-Sayed raised $1.2 million off her heel turn.
What’s most revealing is who is actually angriest, and curiously it’s not the progressive who raised a ton of money. The fury is coming from Dingell, who called her appearance on CNN “one of the most painful interviews I have ever watched.” It's coming from Jamie Raskin, the state party chair, and her advisers who quit. Yes, the effect on Senate math plays a major role here, but that doesn’t entirely get you to “painful.” The “grown-ups” in the party just watched one of their own prove the left’s point about the establishment, on election eve, in the very race they picked to prove the opposite. Stevens didn’t just reopen the primary debate she and centrist Dems lost in August, but she made the eventual result worse for the establishment either way.
Stevens’ grin in the picture above is taken from Sunday morning. The seven awkward seconds with Cooper last night had everyone seeing an ill-prepared politician bad on television. But if you watch it again, you might see someone turning around to find out that the house that’s burning behind her isn’t just her own, but she just lit the centrist Democrat's house on fire too.