Haley Stevens

Former U.S. Sen. Debbie Stabenow has endorsed U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens in the Democratic primary race for U.S. Senate, saying the Oakland County congresswoman stands the best chance of defeating Republican Mike Rogers in November.

“The stakes have never been higher,” Stabenow said in a video released Tuesday, “and Haley Stevens is the right person at the right time for Michigan.”

Stevens said in a statement that Stabenow “knows what it takes to win in Michigan and deliver for Michigan” and that she was “honored and humbled” to have the former senator on her side.

Stevens is competing in a tight three-way primary with state Sen. Mallory McMorrow and former public health official Abdul El-Sayed.

That primary is being viewed as a sort of referendum on the future direction of the party, pitting the more centrist Stevens against the unabashedly progressive El-Sayed and against McMorrow, who is running, somewhere in the middle.

Both McMorrow and El-Sayed’s campaigns responded to the endorsement by saying, in essence, that Stevens isn’t the future.

“With nothing but respect for the former senator, she is supporting the type of campaign that may have won in Michigan in decades past,” a spokesperson for McMorrow’s campaign said, “but we are in a different moment and we need new leaders who are ready to meet it.”

El-Sayed’s communications director Roxie Richner said, “The establishment is going to establishment.”

“And Michigan voters are going to vote for candidates who fight for them,” she said, “not the corporate and special interest-backed politicians who have told them what they can’t have and shouldn’t fight for all these years.”

Stabenow said in an interview that she’s not convinced the political landscape has shifted so dramatically.

“The same values that I brought to the Senate are still the same values that the majority of people want to see in Michigan: a fighter, somebody who understands who we are, somebody who has the courage to stand up to Donald Trump, but also the experience and the capacity to work across the aisle to get things done when it’s possible to do that,” she said.

Recent polls don’t show a clear frontrunner in the primary.

April polls from the Glengariff Group and Data for Progress showed Stevens slightly ahead of her opponents, though in both cases her lead was within the margin of error. A third poll, from Emerson College, showed McMorrow and El-Sayed tied for the lead.

In each poll, at least a third of respondents said they were undecided.

The November contest is projected to be one of the few competitive Senate races in the country this year and a crucial race for Democrats if they hope to retake the Senate.

They would need to pick up four seats to do so. That’s all but impossible without winning Michigan.

Which is likely why the Senate Leadership Fund, a Republican super PAC, pledged $45 million to help Rogers, the likely Republican candidate, win the seat.

And it’s why Stabenow chose to make an endorsement at all, she said.

“What’s at stake is the entire country, our democracy,” she said. “What’s at stake is whether or not we’re going to have any check on the chaos and the corruption of this administration.”