Democratic Party

Democrat Haley Stevens Endorses GOP Candidate for US Senate, Mike Rogers

~ R. Stanton Scott ~ Leave a comment

I’ve studied politics for most of fifty years, and actively participated as a Democrat for most of the last 25. I worked in Kentucky politics right after retiring from the Army ran for the Virginia state legislature twice since 2019. I’ve never seen anything like the Haley Stevens endorsement of Mike Rogers for US Senate in Michigan.

Losing primary candidates have a few options with respect to how they play the general election. Most throw their support to the winner and ask their supporters to do the same because this is the best way to keep their position in the Party. This matters, because the Party (both the administrative establishment and its voters) has a lot of say over who gets future nominations and support.

After contentious primaries, a candidate may and often does profess support for the winner but doesn’t do a lot of work to get their supporters to show up and help the general election candidate win. They don’t appear at campaign events or help them raise money (for example by sharing donor lists or making calls on the winner’s behalf).

After Abdul El-Sayed won the Democratic primary for US Senate in Michigan, it appeared that Stevens would follow the second path. She conceded and congratulated El Sayed, but didn’t seem to take an active role in helping him win. This sort of makes sense after a fairly bitter primary during which El Sayed criticized Stevens strongly for her position on aid to Israel and her willingness to accept corporate political action committee (PAC) money.

Now she has decided to endorse Mike Rogers, the GOP nominee, two days before Election Day.

In Virginia, this amounts to formal resignation from Democratic Party committees, and I can’t imagine that significant numbers of Michigan Democrats would welcome someone who endorsed a Republican who consistently votes against protecting reproductive health care rights for women and supports fetal personhood.

In an interview with Anderson Cooper, Stevens cited “growing anger” from the El Sayed campaign as her reason for her decision, but this makes little sense given that she’d said the day before that she looked forward to appearing with him at a church service and later campaign event on November 1, the day she broke from the party. Instead, she attended a service at a black church in Detroit instead.

It looks to me like her decision has much to do with her position on Israel and influence from her fiancé, Jason Turkish.

Jason Turkish, the fiancé of former Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Haley Stevens, accused the party’s Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed of escalating rhetoric that makes Jewish people unsafe, deepening an intraparty feud days before the midterms.

The immediate fight centers partly on a digital advertisement produced by Rebellion PAC, an outside group supporting El-Sayed that describes itself as a movement that rejects “the corporate-driven status quo” and stands “against the establishment.”

The advertisement shows a couple grocery shopping and talking about putting back a carton of eggs because “we have to set that $7 aside for killing Palestinians,” before criticizing U.S. military assistance to Israel in its war in Gaza. Stevens, a U.S. Representative who lost to El-Sayed in the August primary, characterized the advertisement as antisemitic and called on him to condemn it.

I am not a fan of this ad because I think it muddles the message by failing to clearly connect the high cost of groceries to taxpayer funds sent to Israel. But it points out a key issue: that the US supports genocide in Gaza with taxpayer funds, and I’m not surprised that the Zionist crowd tries to frame this as anti-semitism rather than anti-genocide.

Turkish has pushed the “El Sayed is a terrorist with ties to the Muslim Brotherhood” narrative and endorsed Rogers on October 28. Further, Stevens is apparently converting to Judaism as their wedding approaches. And apparently, some of Stevens’ close circle have become concerned about her relationship with Turkish. It’s important to be careful about characterizing others’ relationships, but former Michigan governor Jim Blanchard, in an interview with Gongwer News Service (paywall), described Turkish pressuring Stevens at dinner to support Rogers, saying: “He was working her over.”

Much of El Sayed’s criticism of Stevens focused on her acceptance of millions of dollars in campaign funding from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which is Israel’s key lobbying organization in the US. El Sayed has pointed out many times that he believe the US should be spending taxpayer dollars on feeding American children, not bombing Palestinian children. He did not condemn the Rebellion PAC ad.

All of this makes me wonder if AIPAC leaders believe El Sayed is poised to win and wanted a hail mary endorsement from Stevens to see if they could get Rogers over the finish line in a very close election.

It also makes me wonder if AIPAC and the GOP promised her something in return, and what that might be.

Progressives Show Strength in Democratic Primaries

~ R. Stanton Scott ~ Leave a comment

It looks like Progressive candidates, all three with Mayor Mamdani’s endorsement, swept Democratic Party primaries in New York on Tuesday against candidates with Party support. (Paywall).

“Some of the night’s most potent victories for Mamdani’s branch of the party saw DSA-backed political newcomers Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier defeating establishment-endorsed candidates, signaling a potent fusion of Mamdani’s grassroots popularity with the DSA’s organizing machine. Avila Chevalier attended a pro-Palestinian rally in 2023 in New York City the day after the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel that was criticized for including speakers who appeared to justify the violence.”

“Elsewhere, former New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, also backed by Mamdani, soundly beat incumbent Rep. Dan Goldman in a heated election that also centered on U.S. policy toward Israel and the war in Gaza. Lander supports blocking military aid to Israel.”

This is an extraordinary result, and it’s not confined to New York:

“Progressives have romped through Democrats’ spring primaries, notching a series of wins across both safe and competitive districts and upending House and Senate Democrats’ battleplans. Left flank candidates Randy Villegas and Matt Dunlap trounced the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s preferred picks in a pair of battlegrounds in California and Maine.”

Two of the winners are aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America, and Brad Lander defeated an incumbent Congressman, Dan Goldman, who held the seat since 2022 and was on the impeachment prosecution team. Lander defeated him by 2-1 with support for Israel the main issue.

Continue reading →

An Observation on the State of the Democratic Party

~ R. Stanton Scott ~ Leave a comment

Isaac Chotiner has a podcast at Slate called “I Have to Ask,” and this week he interviewed Michelle Goldberg, now a New York Times columnist.  They cover lots of topics, including Omarosa and the Russia investigation.  But this bit caught my eye:

“Whenever I’m in New York, I can work myself into this state of really bleak despair, and then I go out and travel and meet … it’s not even necessarily Democratic Party activists as much as Indivisible activists or Democratic Socialists of America chapters or these sort of grass-roots groups that have sprung up since the election and are just doing so much work. And it always makes me feel so much more hopeful about the future.

You hear the same story over and over again of these kind of middle-aged women who, they voted, but they didn’t necessarily pay super close attention to primaries, maybe they had to look up what congressional district they were in, and who woke up the day after the election and were so shattered and looked around for somewhere they could go and found either an offshoot of Pantsuit Nation or a local Indivisible meeting.

And you meet these women, and they go to meetings now four or five nights a week. They have all new friends. They are just astonishing organizers, and they’re kind of using this intense local knowledge that they have. You can’t replicate that when it comes to canvassing, somebody who just knows everyone on the block. So you see that being deployed everywhere, and that I think is why you’re seeing these numbers in some of the special elections, these swings that are even bigger than the swings you see on the generic ballot.”

I can tell you that I saw the same thing all over Virginia’s First Congressional District during the primary campaign this spring, and these folks don’t seem to be tiring.  So I’m more optimistic than some of my fellow Progressives that we’re really about to see a Blue Wave in November.

Go listen to the podcast or read the transcript.  Lots of good stuff.

#TrumpWillNeverBePresident II

~ R. Stanton Scott ~ 1 Comment

A couple of takeaways from “Trump Orders Surrogates to Intensify Criticism of Judge and Journalists” at Bloomberg Politics:

@realDonaldTrump is a terrible leader and manager of staff.  He had no idea which staff member had sent the memo telling surrogates not to discuss the Trump University lawsuit.  Then he threw her under the bus, telling people on the call to “throw it out,” and asking if there were “any other stupid letters.”  “…you guys are getting sometimes stupid information from people that aren’t all that smart,” he told supporters (including Jan Brewer and Scott Brown) on the call.  He seems to forget that he’s the incompetent executive who hired “people who aren’t all that smart” in the first place.

@realDonaldTrump hasn’t the foggiest idea what it takes to run a Presidential campaign or to assemble a winning political coalition.  He has no idea how to build and run the organizations and teams necessary to win the Oval Office.  If someone constructed it for him he would jerk it out of their hands like a toy he covets and start throwing it at the ground just to watch pieces fly off.  He doesn’t understand who does what (communications, organizers, fundraisers) or how these people achieve success (data analysis, volunteer recruiting, media plans).  He apparently doesn’t realize that political campaigns are highly specialized endeavors with a handful of professional experts who know how it’s done.  He has no use for either a sound strategic plan or expert guidance for the detailed tactical work needed to identify and motivate supporters.

@realDonaldTrump doesn’t understand that bullying your way through the storm after saying something offensive won’t help him expand his universe of potential supporters.  He can’t seem to help categorizing and referring to people as members of groups (Muslim, “the blacks,” “the Hispanics,” Mexican).  People hear this as a claim that tribal membership is the most important quality people have – it drives their behavior.  This is, of course, the very definition of racism – and I believe his willingness to say some of these things out loud has driven his popularity among many Republican primary voters.  At this point, however, it’s begun to offend his now wider audience.  Rather than back off this rhetoric, he’s asking surrogates to emphasize it.  This, by the way, puts people like Jan Brewer and Scott Brown in a tough position – they want to elect a Republican President, but probably don’t want to earn reputations as racists in the process.

#TrumpWillNeverBePresident.  He’s a terrible leader and can’t manage subordinates except through fear.  He calls junior staff “stupid” in front of other senior people.  He hasn’t the smallest clue what it takes to put together the national political coalition needed to win the US Presidency and apparently believes he can win simply by saying silly things on television so people pay attention to him.  And when he says silly things on television and the people around him advise reticence, he lacks the temperament to realize he’s in over his head.

This is all very good news for Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party. #TrumpWillNeverBePresident.