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El-Sayed campaign reports record-breaking fundraising day after Stevens pulls endorsement
Abdul El-Sayed’s Senate campaign announced that it received $2.4m in donations on Sunday, the day that Haley Stevens announced she would now pull her support from the Democratic nominee and back Republican Mike Rogers.
El-Sayed’s campaign that the amount is a single-day fundraising record for his Senate bid. His staff also noted that more than 26,000 people contributed for the first time on Sunday.
In the four hours after Stevens defected on Sunday, Politico reported that El-Sayed’s campaign raised $1.2m, which was already its second-highest day of donations.
Key events
As I noted earlier, the latest polling from the New York Times/Siena College shows Democrats leading in key Senate races ahead of Tuesday’s midterm elections. One of the major battlegrounds is the competition in Texas, where Democratic state representative James Talarico has a seven-point lead against Republican challenger Ken Paxton, the scandal-ridden attorney general who has Donald Trump’s endorsement.
My colleague David Smith reports from Austin on Talarico’s meteoric rise, and how he stands a chance of winning a Senate seat that has eluded Democrats for almost 40 years.
Read his full dispatch here:
In an interview with CNN, Debbie Dingell, the Democratic congresswoman from Michigan, addressed the anger directed at Haley Stevens, her colleague, after the representative announced she would endorse Republican Mike Rogers in the state’s bitter US Senate race.
“I have been worried about her because I know it’s really hard to be in these kinds of circumstances. I talked to her multiple times last week,” Dingell said. “And I was shocked. I can’t lie about that.”
Various reports noted that just hours before Stevens made her announcement pulling her support for Abdul El-Sayed, she spoke to Dingell on the phone and assured her that she would still be backing the Democratic nominee in the upcoming election.
“I was very shocked at what she [Stevens] did, but the hate and the anger in this country right now is very scary and it’s coming from all sides,” Dingell added in the interview.
When asked specifically what was worrying Dingell about Stevens’ decision, the congresswoman said that it was clear “she has had some hurt feelings”.
Dingell added: “It’s very difficult to lose an election. There are many people that respect her. She was feeling torn. She has a very significant Jewish community that itself was torn on this issue. She’s had a lot of people saying many things to her.”
While Dingell said that she wouldn’t “speculate” about what changed for Stevens and why she ended up backing Rogers, she noted just how hard it has been to quiet the vocal frustration from within her party towards Stevens.
“I tried to get many of my colleagues to focus on tomorrow’s election because this is a distraction. It’s been a distraction for 10 days and focus on what the real issues are,” Dingell said. “But there are a lot of people that don’t understand what she did and are very, very angry and you’ve heard those words and seen those statements.”
She noted that the way the four-term congresswoman went out “has probably permanently hurt her” and her future within the Democratic party.
While Donald Trump will rally in Washington DC today, his vice-president, JD Vance, will be in Rome, New York, to stump for Republican House candidates in competitive races in the state.
This includes, Anthony Constantino, the sticker company exec and rapper trying to keep Elise Stefanik’s seat in Congress red, and Kailee Buller, who served as a senior official at the agriculture department and is trying to flip her district.
Vance will be joined by the president’s son, Donald Trump Jr, on the trail today, and the pair will head to Ohio later for another set of campaign events.
Chris Pappas is stopping himself from getting too excited ahead of Tuesday’s midterm election.
“I take nothing for granted,” said the four-term US representative and Democratic nominee for New Hampshire’s open Senate seat. “This is a very purple, competitive state. Elections are never in the bag here.”
The race to replace the retiring Democratic senator Jeanne Shaheen has emerged as a source of 11th hour anxiety for the party.
In their attempt to gain four seats and reclaim control of the Senate, Democrats can’t afford to lose one they already hold. But September polling showing Pappas virtually tied with his Republican opponent, former senator John Sununu, rattled party strategists and raised the prospect that New Hampshire could become an unexpected battleground.
The warning signs were striking in a state Donald Trump has lost in each of his three presidential bids.
While Pappas has regained a narrow advantage in most polls, and the Cook Political Report moved the race in early October from “toss-up” to “lean Democrat”, his closing message has focused heavily on tying Sununu to an unpopular president.
Trump’s approval rating sits at just 32% in the state, according to a recent University of New Hampshire poll, giving Democrats hope that voter frustration with the administration will ultimately benefit Pappas’s run.
“Sununu has spent most of the last year on team Trump, and now that we’re getting within range of the election, he’s recognizing how unpopular the president is,” Pappas said as he traveled the state in the final days on the trail, often joined by party heavyweights, like Arizona senator Mark Kelly and former vice-president Kamala Harris.
Sununu, however, has spent much of the campaign arguing that independence, not loyalty, defines his political record.
The former senator has emphasized his criticism of Trump’s trade war with Canada, which has affected several industries in the state, and in a recent campaign advertisement, he even claimed to have “never met” the president.
The former senator’s anti-Trump bona fides do have some roots. In 2024, he voiced his support or Nikki Haley in an op-ed during Republican primary campaign, and also branded Trump a “loser”.
Read my full dispatch from New Hampshire here:
El-Sayed campaign reports record-breaking fundraising day after Stevens pulls endorsement
Abdul El-Sayed’s Senate campaign announced that it received $2.4m in donations on Sunday, the day that Haley Stevens announced she would now pull her support from the Democratic nominee and back Republican Mike Rogers.
El-Sayed’s campaign that the amount is a single-day fundraising record for his Senate bid. His staff also noted that more than 26,000 people contributed for the first time on Sunday.
In the four hours after Stevens defected on Sunday, Politico reported that El-Sayed’s campaign raised $1.2m, which was already its second-highest day of donations.
New polling shows El-Sayed with lead in Michigan Senate race
The latest and final New York Times and Siena College poll before the midterm elections also shows Abdul El-Sayed leading Mike Rogers in the US Senate race in Michigan by 11 percentage points, outside the margin of error.
The survey took place before Democratic Congresswoman Haley Stevens announced that she would back Rogers in the contest – a vital seat for her party to retain in their quest for control of the Senate.
Democrats are leading in all of the seven battlegrounds this cycle, including midwest states like Kansas and Iowa that have become newly competitive in recent months.
Stevens on 11th-hour endorsement of Mike Rogers: ‘This is just a weight off my shoulders’
After Haley Stevens announced her decision to back Mike Rogers in the Michigan US Senate race, she defended her move in an interview with CNN on Sunday.
“This is just a weight off my shoulders. Abdul [El-Sayed] has been getting angrier and angrier,” she said, referring to the Democratic nominee. However, anchor Anderson Cooper pressed Stevens on what had changed, considering there were reports that just hours before pulling her support, the congresswoman had told Democratic colleagues that she was still backing El-Sayed.
After evading the question, Stevens said that she “had some time to, you know, think”, but still didn’t provide a specific answer to what about El-Sayed’s candidacy over the last 12 hours led her to endorse Rogers.
Many of the issues Stevens eventually gave were historic concerns, including El-Sayed’s decision to campaign with leftwing streamer Hasan Piker.
Cooper pressed Stevens further: “Those things that you cited, though, were from a while ago, and it seemed like those were OK for you up until some point yesterday, and then the only really new development was the disinviting to you know a campaign event or a church service that seems to be the crucial kind of turning point? Is that correct?”
But the representative – who narrowly lost the August primary to El-Sayed after a bitter contest that saw her campaign boosted by millions of dollars from the pro-Israel lobby – didn’t expand on her reasoning and sought to downplay her defection.
“I’m just casting my vote this one way. In Michigan, there’s a lot of people out there voting,” she said.
When asked how she squares a vote for Rogers – when she has blasted him for being a “rubber stamp” for Trump’s “Maga agenda” – Stevens instead said that she was unhappy voting for a Democratic nominee who is “injecting” this “anger and lack of kindness”, without offering any specific recent examples.
Nancy Pelosi: Stevens’ ‘horrific’ endorsement of Republican ‘dangerously betrays’ Michigan
As we continue to bring you more on the fallout of Haley Stevens’ decision to endorse Republican nominee Mike Rogers in the US Senate race in Michigan, the chorus of anger and frustration at the Democratic congresswoman continues to grow.
On Sunday, Nancy Pelosi, the outgoing US representative, former House speaker, and once the party’s kingmaker-in-chief, said that Stevens has “chosen to dangerously betray Michigan families’ healthcare, freedoms and future with her horrific endorsement [of Rogers]”.
In the homestretch of the election, Donald Trump will be in Washington today, after a weekend of campaigning in Iowa and Kansas. He’s set to deliver remarks at 2pm ET by the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, after which he’ll take part in several tele-rallies from the White House.
We’ll bring you the latest lines as that gets under way.
Roque Planas
Donald Trump railed against Democratic US Senate hopeful Abdul El-Sayed at a campaign event in Iowa Sunday, repeatedly referring to the Michigan progressive as a “jihadist”.
Trump’s comments aimed to influence a neck-and-neck race that will play an outsized role in determining which party controls the Senate after Tuesday’s midterm elections.
The president bashed El-Sayed, a practicing Muslim, in brazenly racist terms, saying that Congress would have to “get a special metal detector for Abdul” if he were elected. “If you vote for this jihadist lunatic that wants to destroy you, you’re crazy,” Trump said.
The Michigan race has drawn national attention in recent days, as Hayley Stevens, who lost to El-Sayed in the August primary election, declined to campaign with him, while demanding that he publicly disavow an outside group’s political ad that posited a link between rising prices and US military support for Israel’s war on Gaza.
El-Sayed responded by telling Stevens to stay away from a campaign event at which they were supposed to appear together on Sunday. Stevens turned around and endorsed Mike Rogers, El-Sayed’s Republican opponent. Stevens’s high-profile defection in the waning hours of the tight race drew the condemnation of Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, who is Jewish.
Trump, on the other hand, heaped praise on Stevens for turning against El-Sayed, urging her to join the GOP.
“It was an incredible thing,” Trump said. “I’d love her to join the Republican party. I think that could happen.”
Cris Seda Chabrier
Immigrants who have been granted release from detention after winning habeas corpus petitions in court are being re-arrested by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
The Guardian has identified at least 20 cases nationwide relating to people who were detained after being released on habeas corpus petition in the last year, according to court records, attorneys and media reports.
Increasing arrests and detentions have led to immigrants filing more than 91,000 habeas petitions as they seek to challenge their detentions, according to research by ProPublica. More petitions have been filed since 25 January than during the past three presidential administrations, including Trump’s first term, combined, the outlet found.
A petition of habeas corpus – Latin for “you shall have a body” – challenges in a federal court the government’s right to hold someone in custody while their main legal case is proceeding.
But in a new development, people are winning their release only to find themselves quickly detained again.
“We’ve seen a very, very sharp increase in people who are released on habeas petitions, only to be very rapidly re-detained, often in violation of the federal court’s order,” said Bridget Pranzatelli, an attorney with the National Immigration Project.
George Chidi
Two years on from her devastating presidential election defeat, Kamala Harris was greeted like a rockstar as she took the stage before a rapt audience at Georgia’s Clark Atlanta University.
When a politician is greeted by a friendly crowd, they often hear chants of their name. But at Clark, an historically-Black college (HBCU), students instead delivered a school spirit chant for the Atlanta University Center, celebrating an HBCU alumna – and the country’s first female and first Black vice-president – as one of their own.
Harris is “big sister general”, said Sanaiya Archer, a sophomore at Spelman College in Atlanta. “I’m able to see myself in her. Not that I personally relate to her, but she went to an HBCU, she’s an HBCU alum, I’m at an HBCU. And it’s just amazing to see a Black woman that I can see anywhere else in my life on a presidential scale.”
That scale has yet to reach the Oval Office. In 2024, following the reluctant withdrawal of Joe Biden, Harris launched a 107-day campaign for the White House which again brought to the US tantalizingly close to electing its first female president. She lost.
Donald Trump’s return left Democrats reeling – again. Even as it contests this week’s midterm elections, the party has yet to settle on who could lead it back into power, and how.
El-Sayed: ‘At the end of the day, I actually don’t think about Haley Stevens’
In his first public comments since Stevens’s endorsement of Rogers, El-Sayed told reporters at a press conference outside of a rally he held on Sunday, the very same rally that Stevens had earlier been disinvited from attending, “At the end of the day, I actually don’t think about Haley Stevens.” He added, “I’m just less interested in the politics of it all than I am in the policy of it all.
“If you are somebody who believes that we should stand up to hate, and you have watched this last campaign, I think we probably would not want to support Mike Rogers and Donald Trump and JD Vance,” he said.
But Stevens’s political pivot earned her praise from Donald Trump, someone whose policies she has an entire page on her website dedicated to denouncing.
Trump, during his rally in Iowa, heaped praise on Stevens for turning against El-Sayed, urging her to join the GOP. “It was an incredible thing,” Trump said. “I’d love her to join the Republican party. I think that could happen.”
Stevens had lost by a close margin in this year’s primary, and for months had refused to openly campaign for El-Sayed, as had his other opponent Mallory McMorrow.
Some of the people who worked for Stevens’s campaign also reportedly quit following her Rogers endorsement.
Her long-time chief of staff, Justin German, and her communications director, Logan Basch, were among those who left, according to CNN correspondent Manu Raju.
German later released a statement on behalf of Stevens’ campaign team endorsing El-Sayed:
As Haley Stevens’ Chief of staff for eight years, I speak on behalf of our team in wholeheartedly supporting Abdul El-Sayed for Senate. This election is too important to sow division or stand on the sidelines.
We are shocked and heartbroken by Congresswoman Stevens’ decision to support Mike Rogers.
Democrats condemn Haley Stevens’ ‘betrayal’ following Republican endorsement
Hello and welcome to the US politics live blog.
Democratic politicians have condemned congresswoman Haley Stevens, who lost the Michigan Democratic Senate primary to Abdul El-Sayed, over her endorsement of his Republican rival just days before the midterm vote.
Stevens’ extraordinary endorsement of Mike Rogers was the culmination of an escalating feud between the former primary rivals – primarily over support for Israel – that has roiled one of the most fiercely contested Senate contests of the cycle.
As one might expect, top Democrats have been quick to express their outrage at the congresswoman’s “betrayal”.
California governor Gavin Newsom said on the political talkshow 2WAY that Stevens “went another 180 degrees overnight, so something was going on there”. “She’s been successful at taking our eye off the ball and that’s why I understand party leadership condemning it … This may be curiously the October surprise of sorts,” he added.
Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer also responded negatively to the endorsement. Schumer’s campaign account called it a “despicable betrayal” from Stevens in a statement, but continued to push for unity among Democrats. He said:
Senate Democrats are united in our support for Abdul El-Sayed, because we know he will fight for the economic interests of working families in Michigan, unlike Mike Rogers, who is a tool of Donald Trump and billionaire donors. We Democrats equally united in our total revulsion at the racist, Islamophobic, and over-the-top false attacks on Abdul by Republicans.
These attacks are evidence of the total bankruptcy of the Republican Party today, who resort to ugly and un-American fearmongering because they have nothing to offer on the problems that concern people today.
Meanwhile, Michigan’s Democratic party chair Curtis Hertel said:
Haley Stevens’ decision to campaign with Rogers – a man who has repeatedly sold out Michigan’s working class, wants to pass a national abortion ban, and has pledged to be a loyal vote for Trump’s agenda – shows that she has abandoned everything she claims to care about. We reject the attempts by Stevens and bad-faith actors to divide our party and undermine our momentum, and will not allow these eleventh-hour distractions deter us.
Bernie Sanders joined the controversy, attacking Stevens for what Democrats view as an extraordinary betrayal after Stevens accepted El-Sayed’s narrow victory over her in Michigan’s Democrat senate primaries.
“Rep. Haley Stevens’ staff is right to resign in disgust,” Sanders posted on X. “They understand that the election in Michigan is far more important than Haley’s fragile ego and that all of us must stand together to elect Abdul, defeat Rogers and end the Republican rubber-stamp control of the Senate.”
Zohran Mamdani, the New York City mayor, said Stevens had “betrayed” working class people “by endorsing the very Republican she said she wanted to run against”.
Read our full report here:
In other developments:
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Donald Trump railed against Democratic US senate hopeful Abdul El-Sayed at a campaign event in Iowa Sunday, repeatedly referring to the Michigan progressive as a “jihadist”. The president bashed El-Sayed, a practicing Muslim, in brazenly racist terms, saying that Congress would have to “get a special metal detector for Abdul” if he were elected. “If you vote for this jihadist lunatic that wants to destroy you, you’re crazy,” Trump said.
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A judge has dismissed the Donald Trump-backed lawsuit seeking to block certification of Alaska’s US Senate race if Republican incumbent Dan Sullivan loses. Trump said on 23 October that he had ordered the justice department to file the lawsuit in a move that voting rights experts called an “unprecedented intervention” by the federal government with control of Congress in the balance.
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Democratic US Senator Chris Murphy has been hospitalized after suffering a stroke. Murphy, 53, started feeling numbness in his arm while attending his son’s hockey game on Saturday, according to the Connecticut senator’s chief of staff, Allison Herwitt. A hospital visit confirmed that Murphy had experienced a stroke.
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