Michigan — 11th District

While allies of Rep. Haley Stevens are attacking her opponent in the upcoming Michigan Democratic primary as a carpetbagger, property records show that Stevens appears to have made a strategic home purchase just weeks after new congressional district maps were proposed in order to land herself in her current district. One such attack on her opponent, Rep. Andy Levin, had a coordinated feel to it: An article in Politico last week was built around several members of Congress questioning why Levin, who is facing Stevens in a rep-on-rep primary after Michigan redistricting, is running in the newly drawn 11th District, rather than the 10th, which contains some of his former constituents. Rep. Ann Kuster, D-N.H., who has endorsed Stevens, accused Levin of refusing to “work hard” and “roll up [his] sleeves” by declining to run in the 10th — which, after redistricting, now leans red. Unmentioned by Politico is that while Levin has lived in what is now the 11th for decades, Stevens put in an offer on a house in the district in the fall, just weeks after draft congressional maps were released. Until November, Stevens lived in Rochester Hills, a community that now rests in the newly drawn 10th District — the same district her allies claim Levin should be running to represent.

Knocking Levin as a carpetbagger in Michigan is unlikely to land, when instead the opposite charge might hit harder: He is part of a local political dynasty in a populist era hostile to such power arrangements. His father, Sandy Levin, served in the House for nearly three decades, and his uncle, Carl Levin, long represented Michigan in the U.S. Senate. The dynamics of the 11th District primary are rare, given how uncommon it is for incumbents of the same party to face off in a primary. While the members have similar voting records, Levin is a staunch liberal who touts national union support and endorsed Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., for president in the 2020 primary. Stevens is a swing-district Democrat who endorsed Michael Bloomberg in 2020 and has aligned herself with conservative foreign policy groups who continue to attack former President Barack Obama’s signature foreign policy achievement, the Iran nuclear deal. Levin has long supported key progressive planks like Medicare for All and the Green New Deal, while Stevens has distanced herself from those policies. Stevens is a member of the moderate New Democrat Coalition, while Levin serves as deputy whip of the Congressional Progressive Caucus. Stevens’s campaign has downplayed the ideological gap between the two candidates, but the outcome of this primary will demonstrate the power of conservative and progressive interest groups hoping to defend incumbents they support. The map that was ultimately adopted, which was dubbed “Chestnut” by the Michigan Independent Citizens Redistricting Commission, was widely seen as the likely eventual map among political insiders at the time Stevens purchased her new home in late November. And the map that Levin and Stevens both advocated for, “Birch,” also put Stevens’s new home in the 11th and old home in the 10th. In an admirably candid conversation with The Intercept, Stevens’s communications director, Larkin Parker, did not dispute that Michigan political operatives expected the Chestnut map to be adopted at the time of Stevens’s home purchase, but pointed to Stevens’s marriage in September to explain her relocation to the 11th Congressional District.