Haley Stevens lost a primary. Then she endorsed a Republican.
Not a Republican who shares her views on health care, labor or abortion, because Mike Rogers doesn't. She endorsed a Trump-aligned former House Intelligence chairman who would help keep a Republican majority in charge of the Senate. Her stated reason was her opposition to what she called hatred, and to El-Sayed's association with the commentator Hasan Piker. Everyone is entitled to a conscience. But a Democrat who looks at this choice and picks Rogers should at least admit what she is choosing.
Piker can be crude and provocative, and it is fair to ask El-Sayed where he draws lines. A candidate who wants to lead a broad coalition should answer that question plainly and not make voters guess. The Left has a bad habit of treating every hard question about a podcaster as a loyalty test from the right-wing press. Some of these questions are legitimate, and El-Sayed will be a stronger nominee if he meets them head on.
But the legitimacy of the question does not make Stevens' answer proportionate. The Senate is not a character reference. It decides who sits on courts, whether Medicaid is cut, whether tariffs and executive power go unchecked, and whether anyone in Washington is willing to say no to Donald Trump. Measured against that, who one nominee has appeared with online is a small thing to put on the scale. Stevens put it there and let it outweigh everything else.
Then look at the voters in this race. Tom Wright, a lifelong Republican, told the reporter he voted for El-Sayed despite disagreeing with many of his positions, because he opposes Rogers' alignment with Trump. That is how a coalition is supposed to work. Wright is a conservative who disagrees with El-Sayed on plenty and still sees the larger danger. Stevens is a Democrat who presumably agrees with El-Sayed on a great deal and defected anyway. One of them is doing more for democratic accountability than the other, and he is not the one who held office as a Democrat.
The Gerald case is the other warning. He plans to vote for Rogers and for Jocelyn Benson, citing "allegations he had heard" about El-Sayed. That is how a smear works. A vague sense of menace gets attached to a candidate, and no claim ever has to be proven. Democrats like Stevens give it credibility. When a member of his own party vouches for the idea that El-Sayed is beyond the pale, the voter is told he can safely believe it. The Republican campaign gets that for free.
The establishment Democratic argument is always electability. Choose the safe candidate, soothe the swing voter, avoid the scary left-winger. Michigan Democrats just held an election, and their own primary voters chose El-Sayed with full knowledge of who he is, who endorses him, and who his critics say he is. Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez backed him, and they did not hide it. If the party's elected officials can't live with a primary result, then their commitment was never to the voters. It was to their own place in the party's order.
People on the Left are right to be impatient with this. Democrats spent years telling voters that the stakes are existential and that a vote against Trump's allies is a vote for the republic. Michigan voters have taken that seriously, including Republicans like Wright. The people who set the standard should live up to it. If you think a Trump-aligned Senate majority threatens working families, you do not endorse the man who would give it another vote.
El-Sayed has to earn the general election. He should talk about prices, health care, jobs, and the plain facts of Rogers' record, and he should answer the Piker questions in a sentence or two without flinching. Stevens, for her part, has to explain why her grievance deserves more weight than the Senate itself. I doubt she has an answer that the voters in Petoskey will find persuasive.
