Haley Stevens

Congresswoman Haley Stevens got a lot of attention from a viral video clip of her speaking to supporters in Ecorse.

It wasn’t necessarily good attention.

“I’m going to be telling the stories on our behalf,” she said in the 19-second clip, pumping her arms and smacking her fist into her palm, “and you better believe I’m going to be doing it with a little bit of joy, a little bit of enthusiasm, a little bit of energy and a little bit of stick it to ‘em.”

After RNC Research posted the C-Span clip on X.com a week ago, multiple users said it reminded them of Chris Farley’s motivational speaker sketch from Saturday Night Live, the one where his character Matt Foley was “living in a van down by the river.” Fox News host Jimmy Failla called her, “The world’s most aggressive life coach.” Daily Show writer Dan Amira said she sounded like a “baseball coach from the Great Depression.”

But Stevens, who is locked in a tight Democratic primary race with former public health official Abdul El-Sayed, leaned into it.

Four days after the RNC posted the clip, she tweeted out a photo of new campaign signs that said, “Stick it to ‘em.”

Stevens said in a Tuesday interview with MLive that she was unbothered by the insults.

“I don’t spend a ton of time on the Internet,” she said. “Look, I’m just fighting for Michigan and I’m doing it my way. I think it’s the Michigan way. I’m just myself out there. I don’t take it too personally.

“You get people making fun of me outside of Michigan because I sound like Michigan. Or I sound like myself. What’s going on here is I also sound like the people I’m talking to.”

Some of them, maybe. Stevens’ Michigan accent is far more potent than most.

Though the clip has been viewed on X.com close to 10 million times, pollster Richard Czuba said it’s unlikely to make much of a blip, even in a very close race.

“What we’re seeing is what I call a conversation amongst the Twitterati, a small group of partisans who frankly need more to do in their lives than sit on social media,” he said. “It does not broadcast to the larger electorate, because the larger electorate doesn’t pay attention to the political shenanigans on social media.”

What it does do, he added, is remind us that “Both parties have a problem with misogyny and how they treat female candidates, and Haley Stevens is just taking the brunt of it right now.”

The online mockery got bad enough that El-Sayed wrote in an email to his supporters saying it had “become impossible to ignore the way that people online make fun of my opponent for things that have nothing to do with her policies or politics.”

“It’s unkind and unhelpful,” he said. “If you support me, please stop.”

Czuba’s Glengariff Group released a poll last week showing that Stevens had a seven point lead on El-Sayed in the primary race.

He still believes it could be anyone’s race. Among people who said they were definitely voting for one candidate or another, Stevens and El-Sayed were tied. Stevens’ advantage came entirely from voters who weren’t quite decided yet.

“We saw 31% of voters could still shift or they were undecided,” Czuba said. “That’s a huge amount of people that are volatile.”

And the fact that it’s a primary race only complicates projections.

“People don’t normally vote in primaries, so the question goes back to how many really will,” he said.

One of the things he’s paying attention to is the get out the vote effort, where he said it looks like El-Sayed “has a leg up on the Stevens campaign because they have the troops to do the door knocking, phone calling, those kinds of things, and that could make a big difference in a close race.”

Stevens, on the other hand, has a huge advantage in terms of outside spending on her behalf, which has approached $50 million.

More than $28 million of that came from United Democracy Project, a PAC linked to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Close to $12 million came from A Stronger Michigan, a PAC that the money-in-politics watchdog Sludge has linked to the lobbyist Jeffries Murray, whose clients have included defense contractor Northrop Grumman and Facebook parent company Meta.

Outside spending on El-Sayed’s campaign has been less than $3 million.

Stevens has largely avoided discussing AIPAC on the campaign trail, though El-Sayed has hammered her on her support from the hawkish and influential pro-Israel lobbying group.

Asked Tuesday about the amount of money flowing into the race, she said it’s because “There’s a lot on the line for Michiganders and for our needs and our agenda in the nation’s capital.”

Michigan’s race is considered one of the few competitive U.S. Senate races in the country. Democrats will need to hold the seat, which is being vacated by Democratic Sen. Gary Peters, to have any realistic chance of retaking control of the Senate.

And many members of the Democratic establishment, Peters included, are lining up behind Stevens.

“It’s a question about how are we going to beat Mike Rogers to prevent him from rubber stamping Donald Trump’s agenda that hasn’t been serving us,” Stevens said Tuesday. “That answer is me.”