Personal Politics - Democrats Divided

Midterm season in the USA is always tense, but halfway through a controversial second term for President Donald Trump, the pressure has reached a fever pitch. The Democrats seem to have a new sense of energy, with notable figures like Zohran Mamdani (mayor of New York City), James Talarico (senate hopeful in Texas), and Abdul El Sayed (prospective senator for Michigan) taking the internet by storm, advancing a more radically left-wing political programme than has historically been fought for by traditional democratic senate candidates.

The current candidates have all run on principled opposition to the excessive influence of high political spenders, and have faced fierce primaries against more establishment-entrenched candidates as a result. However, whilst Mamdani and Talarico have both received endorsements from former democratic candidacy rivals Brad Lander and Jasmine Crockatt, El Sayed has recently lost the endorsement of Haley Stevens, whom he beat in the Michigan democratic senate primary, on the same day she was due to appear alongside him at a public campaign event. Stevens, having said just this week that she would support El Sayed and other democratic candidates, has now endorsed Republican Mike Rogers and put out a lengthy statement denouncing El Sayed as antisemitic. This has incurred wide condemnation from across the Democratic party, even from the peak of its establishment, such as democratic senate leader Chuck Schumer calling Stevens’s actions a ‘despicable betrayal’. With her actions seeming to result in total alienation from her own party, the question remains why Haley Stevens would make a choice that seems to spell the end of her own political career?

The answer is complicated, but, I suggest, deeply personal. The issue of Israel continues to be a decisive political wedge on both the left and right. Stevens is no exception, famous online for saying “Israel comes to me in my dreams”, and is both a staunch defender of Israel and staunchly defended by pro-Israel pressure groups, with $30 million being spent in Michigan by AIPAC to secure her position as a candidate over El Sayed. This division over the issue of Israel, referred to by El Sayed as an ethnostate, has defined their contest, not just in the money spent against El Sayed, but also in potentially swelling his support base as pro-Israel sentiment becomes increasingly controversial within the Democratic party. Evidently, a significant part of Stevens changing her mind is down to the issue of Israel, but that does not mean there are no other factors at play. 

Earlier this week, Stevens’ fiancée Jason Turkish came out in support of Rogers over El Sayed, even as Stevens continued to publicly affirm her former intention to support democratic candidates, saying she was in a ‘house divided’. Not even a week later came the announcement from Stevens that she would be voting the same way as Turkish. Whilst we cannot know the inner workings of the minds of either Stevens or Turkish, it is not an unreasonable assumption that this disagreement played a role in Stevens’s sudden u-turn. We enter unstable political ground here. Whereas the issue of Israel and SuperPAC money on its behalf is a point of political contention between El Sayed and Stevens, the potential involvement of domestic disagreements in Stevens’s decision is significantly more personal. 

Personal factors have always been important in politics, but not usually this publicly, or this controversially. It only gets worse when taking a look at Stevens statements since changing her endorsement. Stevens has not given an in-depth explanation of what caused her change of heart, but did mention that El Sayed and his team said she was not needed in their campaign, and that this, to her, exposed “hatred” and “anger” in the El Sayed camp. In response to the growing controversy, El Sayed simply said “I don’t think about Haley Stevens at all”. It is not a leap of the imagination to conclude that perhaps Stevens interpreted this as an insult, thereby revealing another personal vector of her decision. Rejection by El Sayed’s campaign might have pushed Stevens to change her mind, and El Sayed was unlikely to be eager to accept a pro-Israel rival into his support base. Coupling this with Stevens's divided household, we can begin to picture what might have caused this stunning political reversal. It was an intensely personal decision, as much about politics and campaign money as about perceived slights and family dynamics, and has played out publicly in a way political decisions have rarely done so in the past. 

So what does this tell us about the political zeitgeist? Perhaps that, increasingly, personal moralities and public politics are becoming one and the same. What lies deep in the heart: convictions, family dynamics and relationships between political figures, is now no longer hidden, but presented to the public and easy enough to follow and dissect in a few hundred words by an observer an ocean away. Haley Stevens represents the internet age, with her contradictory video interviews plastered across the web and her statements appearing on social media without warning, completely throwing her position within the Democratic party into chaos. She is the interior made exterior, and it has caused a political mess, but one that doesn’t seem at all unexpected or shocking. This has become the new norm, and I suspect it will only continue as politics becomes ever more public facing under the eternally watchful eyes of social media.