Michigan’s Senate Seat Is Not For Sale— Not One More AIPAC Lackey

Haley Stevens Picks Her Donors… Will Michigan Pick Justice Instead?

In 2017 I took Haley Stevens and her mom out for dinner at Crossroads, the most wonderful vegan restaurant in Los Angeles. She had just moved back to Rochester Hills, a suburb north of Detroit in Oakland County. Confused GOP sophomore Dave Trott had just announced that he wouldn’t be running for another term, making MI-11 an open seat. Stevens was in L.A. drumming up campaign contributions. Although we gave her some positive coverage at DWT, I didn’t contribute and Blue America decided not to endorse her. She and her mom seemed like nice people, but progressive was not a word I could use to describe her. She won a contentious 5-person primary with about 27% of the vote the following year, was elected by 6 points, joined the corporate-aligned New Dems and Problem Solvers Caucus and cozied up to AIPAC, her all-time biggest donor, in a very big way. 

She’s running for the open Michigan Senate seat now, but instead of seeking out voters in Detroit, Grand Rapids, Warren, Sterling Heights, Ann Arbor, Lansing, Dearborn or Clinton, she’s… doing this instead:

I guess she’s counting on another $5 million dollar expenditure from AIPAC in return for this kind of shilling for genocide. AIPAC is her all-time biggest donor. The  most recent poll shows her ahead,within the margin of error, with just 24% against Abdul El-Sayed, the progressive choice, who has 22%. The biggest bloc of voters (42%) are undecided. She may be counting on Michigan having elected another conservative Democrat, Elissa Slotkin, to the other Senate seat last year.

Last week, Josh Kraushaar, reported for the Jewish Insider that, though a majority of Senate Democrats voted to cut off some military aid to Israel, Stevens said she would have voted with the Republicans against Bernie’s resolutions. El-Sayed, who has been endorsed by Bernie, would have voted for it and state Senator “Mallory McMorrow, who earlier this yea has been meeting with Jewish groupsr to reassure them of her pro-Israel bona fides, publicly broke with her past positions. ‘The United States has to stop providing Netanyahu with offensive weapons that do nothing but continue to extend this war,’ she said. At a campaign event last Wednesday, she slammed the Israeli prime minister further: “We cannot let this man tell us that what we are seeing with our own eyes is not what is actually happening.”

Five months after Biden— not Trump— was sworn in as president, El-Sayed wrote about American tax dollars subsidizing the destruction of Gaza. “We Americans are often told that our tax dollars are being used to support the ‘Middle East’s only democracy.’ But democracy is rooted in respect for the rule of law, the free flow of information and equal access to the ballot box. But Israel has been violating international law since at least 1967. Just last week, they knowingly bombed the offices of the Associated Press and Al Jazeera— a brazen attack on the freedom of the press. That after knowingly lying to the press to achieve a tactical advantage in their assault on Gaza. Additionally, there is the fact that occupied Palestinians do not have access to the ballot box at all. Decisions about Palestinian lives are made for them by a government captured by the very people attempting to displace them. What version of democracy are we supporting? … The Biden administration tells us that it’s carrying out ‘sensitive’ diplomacy to bring an end to the bloodshed in Gaza. President Biden voiced support for a cease-fire in a call with Prime Minister Netanyahu earlier this week. And yet the U.S. has vetoed U.N. Security Council resolutions for a cease-fire three times. We’ve been told that this is a ‘cycle of violence’ that it’s been happening for ‘1000s of years’ on ‘both sides’ and that all of this is about ‘making the world safe for democracy.’ Those words are used to normalize the violence and erase the asymmetry by which our money is being used to perpetuate an illegal occupation, forced displacement and targeted destruction of a group of people because of their ethnicity. It’s time we pay attention to our role in this and demand an end to our complicity.”

Do you agree? You can contribute to El-Sayed’s campaign here. There are way too many pro-genocide senators already, not just Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham and Tom Cotton, but also John Fetterman, Kirsten Gillibrand and Adam Schiff. No one needs another AIPAC pawn like Haley Stevens (or Republican Mike Rogers) in the Senate.

Voters in Michigan have a choice to make and it’s not just between candidates, but between visions of what kind of country we want to be. Do we want another Senate voice parroting AIPAC talking points while Gaza burns? Or someone with the moral clarity and courage to stand up to power and say: not in our name? Haley Stevens has made her priorities clear and they have nothing to do with peace, justice or the values the Democratic Party claims to stand for. If she wins this primary, it’ll be because too many people sat it out, tuned out or gave up. Let’s back someone who tells the truth when it’s hard, who listens to the voices that are too often silenced, and who’s not afraid to call out complicity— even when it comes from his own party. That someone is Abdul El-Sayed.