Michigan Really Dodged A Bullet

Everyone in Detroit has a responsibility to keep Haley Stevens away from the Gordie Howe Bridge today, because at the rate she's going, she'll burn that one, too. An outgoing House rep and failed Democratic candidate for Senate who lost to Abdul El-Sayed in a hotly contested Michigan primary earlier this year, Stevens has made the news cycle in the lead-up to Tuesday's general election all about her. While she initially absorbed her August primary defeat without entering into a gigantic public meltdown, over the past several days she has shuffled, then walked, then full-on sprinted toward Republican candidate Mike Rogers, officially endorsing him to the ire of Dems everywhere. Even Chuck Schumer, who never met a centrist he couldn't make excuses for, called it a "despicable betrayal."

What exactly happened to cause Stevens to explode like this? An easy target for blame here is Stevens's delectably named fiance, Jason Turkish, who has gone on a media tour of his own, trying to tie El-Sayed's campaign to antisemitism. But Stevens is 43 years old, so the "it's because of a boy" excuse feels insufficient, and downright rude for depriving her of agency when it comes to detonating her career. A more compelling, though still quite sad, explanation is just that she's a sore loser who thought she was owed a Senate seat, and still can't accept that she didn't get it despite tens of millions of dollars backing her in the primary. In this view, her crash-out is not just malicious—though it definitely is—but also immature.

In an Anderson Cooper CNN interview Sunday evening, Stevens seemed like she was thinking through her ideas about 10 seconds after they left her mouth. She somehow attempted to square the idea that she wanted Democrats to win control of the Senate, even while rooting and voting against El-Sayed in a critical election to that whole endeavor. This interview was nothing close to an ambush, and yet Stevens, given repeated chances, couldn't come up with a message that made even a lick of sense. That nasally Michigander accent sure sounds a lot better when I hear it at Culver's than when it's being used to try to sabotage the future of the country.

The full transcript of the 15-minute interview is here, and it's not less painful than the video. "I thought that was very, very sad," David Axelrod said in the discussion that followed. "Haley Stevens is obviously struggling, and I think trying to find her way through something that she hadn't fully thought."

Not long after the interview ended, it appears that Stevens and whatever remains of her camp scrambled to find a sympathetic platform for her incoherent stance. They found a partner in one of media's most awkward, self-sabotaging figures—a match made in heaven.

I promise you that you don't have to read Reingold's story. Stevens, wearing pink fuzzy slippers and "fishing around a popcorn bowl," flails some more and comes up with El-Sayed's refusal to condemn the Iranian Revolutionary Guards(?) as a reason to turn a blue seat red. Bourbon is drunk. A weird time is had by all. Meanwhile, El-Sayed raised a new one-day high in campaign donations on Sunday.

I'm crossing my fingers that there will be a few more chances to be gleefully mean to Stevens about this after the polls close and the results come in. And then she can fuck off forever.