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HUNTINGTON WOODS, MICH. — She’s Miss Independent.
Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich). made the decision to buck her party and endorse Republican Mike Rogers independent of her fiancé, the congresswoman’s mother told The Post.
Jewish Democrat and disability rights advocate Jason Turkish was first to denounce Democrat Abdul El-Sayed, saying his rhetoric puts the safety of Jews at risk. Stevens had backed El-Sayed up until Sunday when she made the dramatic endorsement outside a Detroit church.
Reached at Turkish’s home on Monday, Stevens’ mom denied conspiracy theories that her daughter was “brainwashed” by her soon-to-be husband.
“We’re not the kind of women to be brainwashed,” Maria Marcotte told a Post reporter who knocked on the door.
Turkish declined to be interviewed but Maracotte defended Stevens, saying no one pressured her daughter into anything.
She blasted such talk as “misogyny.”
Former Michigan Gov. Jim Blanchard, a Democrat, told a local news outlet that Stevens “snapped.”
He told Gongwer News Service about a dinner he had with Stevens and Turkish, who is a descendent of Holocaust survivors, a few days before her announcement, where he claimed Turkish was pressuring Stevens to swap sides. El-Sayed has taken strong positions against Israel.
“He was working her over,” Blanchard said of Turkish’s behavior.
“The way he was saying it was, ‘Everyone is disappointed in you, they did everything they could to help you and then immediately after you lose the primary, you endorsed him,’” Blanchard said.
Stevens said her decision was based partly on El-Sayed’s obsession with Israel.
“It was obsessive, obsessive, obsessive,” Stevens told the Free Press in an interview published Monday.
Stevens added that upon reflection, she “wasn’t being honest” with herself in continuing to support El-Sayed.
“I was like, ‘Wait a moment, what am I doing?” she asked. “God, I wanted to vote for him, but he just kind of said ‘Forget it.’”
Her shock endorsement came two days before the midterm elections, in which Rogers is hoping to become the first Republican elected to the Senate from Michigan since Spencer Abraham in 1994.
Tension has been heavy between Stevens and El-Sayed since he beat her in the August Senate primary.
But things reached a boiling point when El-Sayed had declined to denounce a video ad by Rebellion PAC, created by “Young Turks” host Cenk Uyghur, that showed a couple discussing how they’d have to “put those eggs back” on the grocery store shelf so they could “set that $7 aside for killing Palestinians.”
Both Stevens and her fiancé Turkish decried the ad. Turkish claimed El-Sayed was making Jewish Michiganders feel “unsafe.”
“Every time he talks about genocide, Jews get death threats,” he said of it. National Democrats went ballistic over Stevens’ decision to endorse the Republican candidate. Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) called it a “despicable betrayal.”
