Haley Stevens

It’s almost over, and on this special Election Eve edition of Stress Test, David Corn and Garrison Hayes deconstruct the manic final moments before America votes.

The big last-minute surprise was the 11th-hour bombshell out of Michigan. Defeated Democratic primary contender Haley Stevens sent shockwaves through the political world on Sunday when she rescinded her support for Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed and endorsed Republican nominee Mike Rogers—a move that drew fierce condemnation from Democratic leadership and praise from Donald Trump.

What was especially odd was that Stevens could not clearly explain her rationale for this decision. But she claimed she felt “hurt” by El-Sayed. It was like a soap opera might determine control of the Senate. “American democracy may hinge on who wins the Senate,” David observes, “and who wins the Senate may hinge on this little personal vendetta.” Garrison highlights the bitter irony of Stevens—who spent years cultivating a reputation as an “Obama-adjacent Black voter whisperer”—rolling out her GOP endorsement inside a Detroit Black church, leaving local Black voters feeling deeply blindsided and betrayed.

From there, the hosts examine the limits of late-stage polling and the preemptive legal battles being waged by the Trump administration over ballots in California and Alaska. Garrison points out, “If confidence is to be measured by the way the Trump administration has been handling elections before votes have even really been counted, I don’t know if they’re showing very much confidence.” The early legal maneuvering may well be a prelude to the post-election fights to come.

Next, reporter Noah Lanard calls in from a car in upstate New York after trailing Vice President JD Vance’s last-minute rally for GOP sticker-magnate-turned-candidate Anthony Constantino, who has dumped $17 million of his own fortune into a House race. Why is the GOP dispatching the veep to a deep-red district that Trump carried by 21 points? As Noah says,”If you told me a year ago this is where I would be on election eve, I would kind of do a spit take and immediately say, okay, something has gone horribly wrong for Republicans.” Noah describes the surreal scene of Constantino lambasting reporters as not the “fake news” but as the “evil news” who should be “deleted,” before riding off on a mobility scooter alongside an elderly veteran across an airplane hangar.

Before signing off, David and Garrison examine key races to watch on election night, including a bellwether House contest in Kentucky’s 6th congressional district, where polls will close at 6:00 p.m. ET, as well as high-stakes showdowns in Pennsylvania, Kansas, Georgia, and Tennessee.

Stress Test will be back for an Election Night special to break down the returns in real time. Until then, as David notes, “Every time American voters have had a chance to judge Trump’s performance in office… they’ve wanted to throw the bum out.” The midterms will show if that pattern holds.

The following transcript is generated using automated tools and may contain errors.

David Corn: Will the future of American democracy be decided by one sore loser?

Garrison Hayes: And what are the key races that you should be watching here in the final moments of these midterms?

DC: This is Stress Test from Mother Jones. I’m David Corn.

GH: And I’m Garrison Hayes. Welcome back to the show. We are in quite literally, David, the final countdown, the last night or two, however, before we get results. Obviously, some results will come in immediately, some will come in over the next few days, but we are so, so close.

DC: What a long, strange trip it’s been.

GH: Well, okay, this trip actually just got stranger. It’s the thing that everyone is talking about. It happened for us just yesterday, when Haley Stevens made news is probably the most boring way to put it, but she’s definitely in the algorithm. Everyone’s talking about it. I’m not sure if there’s much more to talk about, but David, bring us up to speed on what in the world happened in Michigan.

DC: Well, Haley Stevens, you might recall, lost. She lost the Democratic primary to Abdul El-Sayed to run for U.S. Senate in Michigan, and Mike Rogers is the Republican former congressman who’s running. And things were testy during the primary. She was supported by AIPAC, and he, of course, is a big critic of supplying U.S. aid to Israel and to the current Israeli government.

But nevertheless, she promised to endorse him and to back him, and she has, despite all the ups and downs of the campaign, until this past weekend. She was expected to be at a unity rally for Democratic candidates, and her staff thought she’d be there, but instead, she went to church with Mike Rogers and endorsed the Republican candidate.

This Democrat endorsed the Republican candidate in one of the pivotal races that will decide which party gets to control the U.S. Senate. And there seemed to be a very personal side to this in a lot of ways. She felt rebuffed from El-Sayed, who at one point didn’t want her to campaign with him, and her fiancé has connections to AIPAC, and according to many stories, he’s gotten way too involved in her campaign and into her political decision-making.

So what we’ve seen here, Garrison, is not just a political development. It’s been a goddamn soap opera.

GH: It is a bit of a soap opera. The thing that’s really been interesting to me is kind of the immediate response that we’ve seen from a few different factions, and I want us to dig into those. We’ll have to listen to a little bit of Haley in a moment, but I want to talk at least a little bit, David, about the way Democrats across the kind of big-tent party political spectrum that Democrats represent, how are they responding to this?

I’ll tell you, I saw a statement from Chuck Schumer that, in some ways, even though there’s been a bit of tension between the Abdul El-Sayed kind of camp and version of Democratic politics and the Chuck Schumer, you know, brand, there’s been a bit of a gap between the two, but they came together, and he called this—I can’t exact remember the exact language, but he condemned Haley Stevens for her move.

DC: Well, I don’t know what he said publicly, but I’m pretty sure I know what he said privately, because all he and the other Democrats care about at this stage, once primaries are done, is winning the majority. And if they need El-Sayed to give them the majority, they’ll take it. And they’ve been supportive of him. Kamala Harris came out and campaigned with him, Barack Obama’s campaigning. So the whole party’s behind this.

And they basically tossed Haley Stevens out of the party. The Michigan Democratic Party said, so long, goodbye, you’re not one of us, rip up your card, your Democratic Party card. And it’s been very, very, you know, unified in that sense that nobody out there on the Democratic side is defending this, while Donald Trump and Republicans are embracing her and thanking her.

But, you know, it’s just been so weird and bizarre this whole way. And she went on Anderson Cooper the other night and tried to explain this and really couldn’t. He kept asking her what had changed since hours before she announced this endorsement, she had told others that she was gonna stick with El-Sayed. So let’s look at her performance—I think that’s the best way to put it—with Anderson Cooper on CNN.

DC: She felt hurt. You know, we just saw Haley Stevens throughout that whole interview with Anderson Cooper. He kept asking her to explain what had changed in the 8, 10 hours between when she said she was sticking with El-Sayed and when she announced she was endorsing Mike Rogers, and she couldn’t explain it. She could say, I felt hurt, I’m doing what I’m doing, I’m an honest person. And there’s something, you know—we’ll get the story one day, but something rather bizarre behind all this.

And to me, the big picture is, you know, moving back from whatever motivated her to do this, is American democr