The AIPAC Democrat Who Endorsed a Trump Man

A lobbying empire that bankrolled one of its own is now watching her cross over to the other side.

"What's been clear to us all along is now plain to see: AIPAC and its candidates, including this failed primary one, are committed to electing Republicans."

— American Priorities, the political action committee formed to counter AIPAC's spending

On Sunday, in a Detroit church hall, a sitting member of Congress stood beside a Trump-allied Republican and told reporters exactly how she would vote in Tuesday's election. A bystander in the crowd called her a traitor. By the time the cameras packed up, her chief of staff and the rest of her operation had already resigned.

"Abdul was very clear. He said, 'Don't come,'" Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich.) said, standing next to former Rep. Mike Rogers. "When it really comes down to it, this is how I'm casting my ballot." Asked why she was backing a man who champions the very policies she spent her career opposing, she answered, in effect, that nothing's perfect.

In the final days of the most consequential Senate race of the 2026 midterms, the candidate built by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee decided that a pro-Trump Republican was the better vehicle. Michigan, a seat that may decide whether Democrats can rein in a president polling at historic lows, now has a Democrat working both sides of the argument. One is running for the office. The other is working from the Republican bench to make sure he never gets it.

Stevens' walk is not a spontaneous flip. It is the endpoint of three months of sabotage.

During the primary, she spent weeks attacking El-Sayed for campaigning with the streamer Hasan Piker, a vocal critic of the war in Gaza. After losing in August, she demanded that El-Sayed apologize for a $4,000 social media ad produced by an outside group he had nothing to do with. The ad tied soaring grocery prices to U.S. military aid for Israel. The Anti-Defamation League, which has made a practice of attacking progressive politicians who criticize U.S. support for Israel, denounced the ad as antisemitic.

Her Friday statement went further. It "celebrated" her decision to appear with Rep. Jim Clyburn alongside El-Sayed, and then attached conditions. She demanded that he apologize for suggesting "that Israel is the reason Michigan cannot afford schools, healthcare, and childcare." "Abdul promises to get money out of politics," she wrote. "He can begin by getting Israel out of his explanation for everything Michigan cannot afford."

Journalist Ryan Grim had a name for the demand. "Stevens is essentially asking El-Sayed to lie to voters," Grim said. "The US government itself, in its official explanation, says that we launched the war on Iran in significant part to defend Israel. Marco Rubio said it out loud too." Since that war began, Americans have paid an estimated $101 billion in extra gasoline costs, an average of $856 per household.

Even inside the establishment, a line was drawn. Rep. Debbie Dingell made clear Saturday that she, not El-Sayed, was the one who asked Stevens to stay away from the candidate's events. "I'm the one," Dingell told CNN. "I am the one that talked to Haley. And I am the one that said this isn't working."

Translation: the woman the party installed in the primary to protect the seat had been running, all along, against her own nominee.

The money behind the attack on that nominee is now documented in detail.

The Intercept's new analysis finds that AIPAC, whose brand has "become politically radioactive" according to the president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, has gone underground in 2026. It no longer officially endorses or contributes directly to candidates. Instead it spends through its super PAC, United Democracy Project, and through a web of pop-up PACs that register days before a primary and vanish after the votes are counted. The result: AIPAC or its super PAC touched 333 of the 473 House and Senate seats on the ballot this year, with more than $120 million in combined known direct and independent spending.

The lobby's single biggest investment of the cycle was the Michigan primary. United Democracy Project spent more than $30 million on ads attacking El-Sayed or boosting Stevens. It is now spending just over $500,000 against El-Sayed in the general election.

Stevens was, in the Intercept's words, an "enthusiastic AIPAC cash recipient" who famously told a room that "Israel comes to me in my dreams." Her operation was built on that pipeline, and it is now in ruins: the same day she endorsed Rogers, her chief of staff and other aides quit.

American Priorities, the PAC that tracks AIPAC-aligned spending, was blunt about what the pipeline means. "Every Democrat should be crystal clear on what AIPAC is and is not: It is an outside interference in Democratic politics, not a legitimate stakeholder in the party's future," the group said.

The strategic logic is clear enough, too.

In a Marist poll released in late October, 95 percent of Michigan Democrats said they support El-Sayed. There is no split in the state's base. CNN polling gives Democrats a lead in Michigan, and a Senate majority is within reach. The fight is happening at a higher, ideological level, on a national stage.

The target has never been El-Sayed's domestic record, which sits closer to Elizabeth Warren's than to the party's radical fringe. It is his opposition to the war in Gaza, a position now shared by a majority of Americans and, per a Washington Post poll, by 61 percent of Jewish Americans, who said they believe Israel's US-backed military has committed war crimes. The establishment's answer to that polling is not to change its position. It is to punish its carrier.

The smears come from both flanks. Trump and Rogers have waged anti-Arab, Islamophobic attacks against the candidate from Detroit, and the president himself has called the man who could become the first Muslim US senator a "jihadist." From inside the party, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi said on a podcast that opposition to Israel's existence as an "apartheid ethnostate" is "more than concerning, it's wrong." Sen. Cory Booker, a consistent pro-Israel voice, declined to endorse El-Sayed by name.

And the man Stevens endorsed on Sunday? In a recent radio interview, Rogers affirmed his support for a national abortion ban. "You don't even have to think about it twice," he said, citing his 100% pro-life record in Congress. The woman who built a career defending reproductive rights in the House is now endorsing the man who would ban them nationwide. On the same church-hall visit, she claimed he would champion investments in Black-owned businesses, a ploy that Colorado congressional candidate Melat Kiros called a scheme to use Black voters "as a prop to embrace a racist who will do nothing but rubber stamp this fascist administration."

The party's own commentators have stopped pretending the maneuver was about the vote.

Jesse Brenneman of the podcast Know Your Enemy put it plainly. "The Democratic establishment is not primarily concerned with winning elections," he said. "It is concerned with preserving its power and pushing certain outcomes. They are usually more subtle than this, but when push comes to shove they will explicitly blow things up to serve this end." History professor Keith Orejel called it a ratfuck of the party's own nominee. "I have never seen so many Democrats attempt to ratfuck their own candidate in the final stretch of a campaign," he said. "Absolutely insanity." At The Nation, Jeet Heer wrote that Stevens handed the GOP "one glimmer of hope," evidence that corporate Democrats are "addicted to self-sabotage."

El-Sayed, for his part, seems to have seen this coming. "At the end of the day, I actually don't think about Haley Stevens," he said. "I'm just less interested in the politics of it all than I am in the policy of it all." Rep. Rashida Tlaib, the only Palestinian American in Congress, supplied the eulogy for the episode. "Let's make sure Haley loses to Abdul twice."

The machine that built her is already moving on. AIPAC's brand is radioactive, but its playbook, the pop-ups, the pass-throughs, the candidate who says Israel comes to her in her dreams, is unchanged. The only thing that has changed is that the receipts are, for once, public.

The question was never whether Stevens would lose. The question is whether the machine learns anything from watching its best investment get called a traitor by the crowd it was supposed to be leading. Money has never cared which party wins an election. It only cares which side wins the war.