Haley Stevens and Her Friends Explain What the Hell Just Happened
One morning in June, 2024, Jordan Acker arrived at his law office, in Southfield, Michigan, and saw red paint splattered across the sign above the door. On the windows, and on the sidewalk outside, in red-and-black lettering, messages read “DIVEST” and “FUCK YOU ACKER.” One night six months later, around 2 A.M., Acker’s family awoke at home to the sound of glass breaking. Two Mason jars, apparently filled with a noxious liquid, had been tossed through a window. One of their cars in the driveway was tagged with more graffiti. The incidents were investigated as hate crimes.
Acker, a forty-two-year-old Jewish Democrat, was in his first term as regent of the University of Michigan at the time. The role is a peculiarity of Michigan politics. Regents govern part of the state’s public-university system, but the position is partisan: candidates are nominated by their party, then elected in a statewide popular vote. Acker is a vocal supporter of Israeli statehood, and, after October 7th, his tenure in office quickly became mired in fraught campus-protest politics. He came to believe his treatment from the Party leadership was grounded in antisemitism. This spring, by the time he was up for reëlection, Acker was booed at the state’s Democratic convention, and a new candidate was nominated in his place. In the halls, he was taunted and, at one point, he told me, called “Jordan Epstein.” Afterward, once he was home, Haley Stevens was among the first to come over and check on him.
Acker has known Stevens, the forty-three-year-old congresswoman, since high school. One of his good friends went to summer camp with her. They soon embarked on “parallel lives” in the Party, starting out together on the Michigan Democratic Coordinated Campaign, in 2006, then working in the Obama Administration. Acker voted for Stevens in the U.S. Senate primary this year against Abdul El-Sayed—a race made painfully tense, at times, because of differences between the two candidates on the issue of Israel. As the general election approached, Acker still wasn’t sure if he would cast his vote for El-Sayed, who is critical of the Israeli state and its government, and who has failed to convince some Jewish voters that he is sufficiently sensitive to fears of rising antisemitism. But, about eight days before the election, when Acker heard that Stevens was thinking about switching her endorsement from El-Sayed to the Republican Senate candidate, Mike Rogers, he was baffled. (Acker said that, if he didn’t vote for El-Sayed, he would either write in a candidate or not vote; he would never vote for Rogers.) He called Stevens, a bit panicky. “You’re not actually considering this, are you?” he asked. “Haley, forget about the politics of this. Someone might try to kill you.”
Stevens had just taken issue with a pro-El-Sayed ad from an unaffiliated group called Rebellion PAC. The ad laid the blame for high grocery prices on U.S. support for Israel. El-Sayed had said that he had nothing to do with the ad, but Stevens wanted him to disavow it directly. Still, she reassured Acker that no, she wasn’t going to endorse Rogers. She wouldn’t do something like that. Then, two days later, Stevens’s fiancé, a lawyer named Jason Turkish, did endorse Rogers. That same evening, Stevens was scheduled to appear in a prime-time interview with Kaitlan Collins, of CNN. “What are you doing,” Acker texted her. During the interview, Stevens explained that, like many Americans, she lived in “a household divided.” But, she added, “I still very much want our Democratic nominee—his name is Abdul—to win this race.” Acker didn’t understand why Stevens seemed to be inserting herself back into a race that she had managed to depart with grace and good will just a few months earlier. Stevens had conceded the primary after losing by a closer-than-expected margin—13,792 votes—then quickly endorsed El-Sayed. The general election against Rogers was a critical piece of the Party’s plan to take back control of the Senate for the final two years of Donald Trump’s Presidency. Even with the concerns Acker had, he thought that endorsing Rogers would be “horrible” for the Party, the country, and the Jewish community.
That Friday, Acker drove to Columbus, Ohio, to take his daughters to an Olivia Rodrigo concert, where he disappeared into an arena with no cell service. (Perhaps, he theorized, owing to the proliferation of teen-agers attempting to stream the event. “Who is even watching that?” he asked. His thoughts on O-Rod, though: “Incredible.”) Around 11:30 P.M., he emerged to a cascade of messages from friends about Stevens. She had released a lengthy statement about an appearance she planned to make with El-Sayed and Representative Jim Clyburn, the Democrat from South Carolina, at a church on Sunday. But, ahead of the visit, she wrote, she expected El-Sayed to apologize for past statements that mirrored the same arguments in the Rebellion PAC ad. “He can begin by getting Israel out of his explanation for everything Michigan cannot afford,” Stevens wrote. “I say this with no race to run and nothing to gain.”
The next morning, Acker texted her once again to ask what she was doing. “What’s going on” he wrote. She replied: “Who the fuck knows. But love you.” By then, other Michigan Democrats were also starting to wonder what they were watching. One of Stevens’s other former opponents in the primary, Mallory McMorrow, a Democratic Michigan state senator, began a national-TV interview by saying, “First of all, I have no idea what the hell Haley Stevens is doing.” That same day, a Times story came out revealing that Stevens had granted three interviews to one of its reporters, to talk largely about El-Sayed, and also her plans to possibly convert to Judaism. She insisted once again that she still planned to vote for El-Sayed on Election Day.
When she called Acker amid this apparent media tour, he told her to stop doing press. “It’s gotten to a point where it’s a sideshow,” he recalls saying. “You’ve made your point about these ads. You need to move on.” By then, Stevens was having the same conversations with other Democrats, assuring them that she would support El-Sayed. That afternoon, however, El-Sayed told reporters that Stevens’s presence on the campaign trail would only be “a distraction,” suggesting that she should not come to the church event the next day.
Just before nine the next morning, Acker wrote to her, “Stop with the statements.” “No statement,” Stevens replied. “Everything good.” He wrote to her again, “Okay. Promise me no media today?” “Promise,” she wrote. “I am good and had peaceful night.” She added, in reference to antisemitism, “This is a cancer in our party.” Acker said he agreed.
“What do we do,” she wrote.
“It’s not being excised before Tuesday and probably not before 2028,” he told her. “Honestly? We have to start fighting this at a lower level first.”
“Yeah probably.”
Less than two hours later, around 11 A.M., Stevens showed up at a church—not with Clyburn, as planned, but at a different church, with Mike Rogers. “You’re at a black church with Mike Rogers???” Acker texted. “This is probably the opposite of lying low haley, what is happening.” She didn’t respond. Instead, she recorded herself in a car, from an off-kilter angle, and said that she was changing her endorsement.
I spoke with Stevens on Election Day, and she appeared to be doing many different things while she was on the phone. Her dad was coming over, and she had just come back from a polling place with her mom, where she appeared wearing a floppy, wide-brimmed straw sun hat. “Hold on, sweetie,” she said, putting the call on hold multiple times. “Oh, my gosh, yeah, it’s Election Day,” she said, back on the line, sounding cheerful and a bit wired, as she occasionally seemed to be talking to other people or reading a stray message on her phone. “O.K.,” she mumbled, “who the heck is this . . .” She told me that she was excited to talk about what she described as the “moment of clear conscience” that settled into her body and mind on Sunday morning, when she decided to accompany Rogers to church. As congresswoman, she explained, her mantra was “Listen, learn, and lead,” and she’d been hearing from more and more people with concerns about El-Sayed. One thing people didn’t know about that day: “I was invited to that church by Democrats,” she said, though she declined to specify which Democrats. Stevens went on: “I don’t have Mike Rogers’s phone number. Like, I think everyone thinks I’m in some sort of cahoot. I know it’s right before an election, but, like, we shouldn’t be mad if Democrats and Republicans are talking. That’s the whole point, right?”
The decision to so publicly back a Republican, and to have misled so many in the immediate lead-up to that decision, was seen as utterly out of character for Stevens, a self-cast team player who prided herself on being a member of the Democratic class of 2018, part of the election that brought in a new generation of leaders in response to Donald Trump’s first term. The writer Charlotte Alter chronicled Stevens in her book about that new generation, “The Ones We’ve Been Waiting For.” Where some of her peers were agitating for new ideological thinking inside the Party, Stevens was something closer to an earnest moderate. Alter describes her as a workhorse on the campaign trail who often positioned herself as “a woman in manufacturing”—a reference to her work on the Obama Administration’s auto bailout—and “Michigan’s first millennial federal representative.” On Sunday, Alter described her shock on X. “This is like a body-snatcher moment,” she wrote. “Absolutely wild to watch a political career implode in such a destructive way.”
Others were similarly flummoxed. What was Stevens doing? People who had known her for years speculated that the only thing that could explain such a turn would be a mental-health episode or a toxic relationship. “I’m very concerned,” Debbie Dingell, the Michigan congresswoman, said in a televised interview. Caitlin Legacki, Stevens’s former campaign adviser, posted on X that Turkish, Stevens’s fiancé, is “vaporizing Haley’s future so that he can be a main character in this moment.” She went on to describe him as an “extraordinarily toxic presence” who was “verbally abusive” to Stevens’s staff. Turkish is a disability-rights lawyer and a longtime Democratic fund-raiser. His relationship with Stevens was a surprise to much of her staff this year. “Suddenly in, like, May, this guy Jason shows up,” Legacki said, on the streaming show “Nobody Knows Anything.” “He was increasingly pressing her in the campaign to more forcefully defend Israel in a way that was bad politics for her, but also, just, like, didn’t make any sense for a Senate campaign,” she said. When we spoke, Legacki told me that she was worried Stevens was becoming increasingly isolated and that she did not seem to realize “the severity of the wound she has inflicted on herself.”
Stevens told me that her relationships in the Party remain intact: “I’m still in touch with all my friends,” she said. “And, look, I love Jordan. He’s a friend,” she said of Acker, “but he was not involved in this decision.” (Later, she said, “The stuff he’s saying is false,” though she did not specify what statements he’d made that were inaccurate.) By Sunday evening, much of Stevens’s team had resigned, some doing so publicly. Former McMorrow staffers started piling on with tales of their dealings with Stevens during the primary. When I asked Stevens whether it was disorienting and difficult to see so many staff resign and, in some cases, comment publicly on her relationship with Turkish, she said, “No, absolutely not, as a matter of fact.” She told me that the people attacking Turkish—whom she described as “the amazing and the one and only Jason Turkish”—did not understand their “amazing relationship.” Turkish, she added, was her campaign’s No. 1 supporter. “It just could not be further from the truth,” she said of the criticism of her fiancé. According to Stevens, at least one person still remains in her office in Washington, D.C.: “one gal,” Stevens said, who does back-office compliance. “She texted me and was, like, ‘Still here.’ I’m like, ‘great.’ We’re, like, ‘O.K., should we shut off the water?’ ” Stevens laughed. “I guess there’s a water foundation thing they have in the office.” Still, not since John Fetterman have so many staff-level Democrats spoken out openly against an elected official. On Sunday, the Democratic Party in Michigan removed Stevens’s name and photo from its list of elected officials, as if she had died.
At El-Sayed events on Monday, he and his surrogates made vague reference to what Stevens had done. Stevens continued to do interviews, though none of her explanations seemed to create a deeper understanding of why she had done what she did. She invited a Free Press writer to Turkish’s house, where she sat on the couch in pink fuzzy slippers and offered the reporter bourbon as Turkish scrolled through social media. She spoke with Anderson Cooper for fifteen minutes, in an interview that ran in circles, until Cooper said, “You’re not really answering any of my questions—so it’s somewhat frustrating.”
There was soon speculation that Stevens would appear at a press conference outside Detroit, for a contingent of Democrats, Jews, and Black voters supporting Rogers. The event was held at an office park that felt deserted, in a small gathering space on the second floor. Several elderly women in American-flag garb were seated in the audience, and, next to a podium, a sign read “ABDUL EL-SAYED OFFERS SAFE HARBOR TO TERRORISTS.” Along the wall, a hand-drawn poster read “Thank You Haley Stevens,” with space below for signatures. Stevens didn’t show up at the event. Ted Goodman, the organizer of the press conference (who currently works both for Rudy Giuliani and as the communications director of the Michigan G.O.P.) told me she had never planned to come at all, but that her support for Rogers hadn’t been a “spur-of-the-moment” decision. He spoke of her as a hero.
Around the same time, highway billboards suddenly appeared with pictures of Stevens and Rogers, next to the words “COUNTRY OVER PARTY.” For some who know Stevens well, this was the most disturbing fallacy of what she had done. There may be a serious conversation to be had about the experience of Jewish Democrats, especially those who believe in the State of Israel. But Stevens’s stand against El-Sayed had instead become a spectacle. “There should be room in any political party for disagreeing on core issues,” Michael Simon, a Michigan Democrat who has worked on various Democratic campaigns with Stevens and went to high school with her, told me. “I don’t think this was a cogent, county-over-party, principled play.” Simon is on a long-running text thread with other Michigan Jews. He said the reaction “was very much, like, ‘Oh, fuck, we don’t need this.’ ”
When we spoke again, on Monday evening, Acker told me he was heartbroken. Now that the first wave of disbelief had passed, he was arriving at new questions. What had any of this accomplished? What would Stevens’s life look like when this was over? Soon, the House of Representatives would return to Washington, D.C., for a lame-duck session—her final days as a member of Congress.
After a period of silence, Acker finally heard back from Stevens. He spoke with her several times on the phone, and found her explanations perplexing. She asked if he knew of anyone in P.R. who could help her with press. He told her he didn’t. ♦