Party Repercussions Follow Stevens’s Rogers Endorsement

Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said most Democrats and most Michiganders opposed Rep. Haley Stevens’s endorsement of Republican Mike Rogers over Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Michigan. The dispute puts party discipline in the open: Stevens backed the opposing party’s candidate, and Buttigieg said that attacks between party members can bring repercussions.

Buttigieg made the remarks during an Election Day interview Tuesday with Fox & Friends host Lawrence Jones. Jones asked why Stevens was unwelcome in the party after voicing objections to a candidate. “She can do and say whatever she likes,” Buttigieg said. “But I think most Democrats and most Michiganders disagree with her, just like most people in this country right now disagree with the president.”

A Party Draws Its Lines

Stevens faced criticism after making a last-minute endorsement of Rogers, President Donald Trump’s pick for Michigan’s U.S. Senate seat. Before that endorsement, she had warned that Rogers would rubber-stamp Trump’s agenda. The sequence leaves the party’s internal conflict plain: a member criticized the Democratic nominee, then endorsed the Republican candidate she had previously warned against.

The endorsement followed vocal criticism of El-Sayed by Stevens’s fiancé and a dispute over an ad that El-Sayed’s team didn’t produce and has since distanced itself from. El-Sayed’s campaign team ultimately told Stevens to avoid future events. She endorsed Rogers not long afterward.

Jones said the party had threatened to remove Stevens from her committee. That was Jones’s description of the dispute; the interview account does not provide further details about the alleged threat. Asked why Stevens wasn’t welcome because she had objections to one of the candidates, Buttigieg replied: “I mean, look, if a member of a party attacks another member of the party, sometimes there are gonna be some repercussions to that.”

The Ad at the Center of the Fight

Jones described El-Sayed’s primary loss as “razor-thin” and said Stevens was following the candidate who narrowly lost. He also referred to her objections to antisemitic comments. Jones told Buttigieg he “can't approach this conversation in good faith,” citing the ad Stevens interpreted as antisemitic, and asked why Buttigieg was discussing a campaign of hate while Rogers remained a candidate.

Buttigieg answered that El-Sayed had rejected the ad and did not produce it. “Sure, Abdul rejected that ad. It's that simple. He didn't produce it,” he said. He added that El-Sayed rejected its contents when asked about them. The exchange put the dispute over responsibility for the ad at the center of a public argument between a television host and a former Cabinet secretary.

The Campaign’s Stakes

Buttigieg said the ads El-Sayed was producing, as far as he could tell, were about Rogers voting to cancel the Affordable Care Act. He described himself as “Somebody who gets a lot of ads on TV when you're just trying to watch a football game in Michigan.” The ad issue and the party dispute unfolded against a Senate election in which Rogers was the Republican candidate and El-Sayed the Democratic nominee.

Stevens struggled to explain her change of position in an interview with Anderson Cooper on Sunday. She later posted a lengthy essay on social media amid the fallout. Jones said Stevens faced a possible committee penalty; Buttigieg described repercussions for a member who attacks another party member. His claim that most Democrats and most Michiganders disagreed with Stevens was his assessment, not a result or poll cited in the interview. “That's definitely not something that my relatives and neighbors in Michigan are talking about,” he said.