Midterm Live: Haley Stevens Backs Republican Mike Rogers Over Democrat Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan Senate Race

Two days before the midterm vote, Representative Haley Stevens appeared beside Republican Mike Rogers at a church service in Detroit. She then posted a social media video announcing she was backing him for the Michigan Senate seat, over Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic nominee and her former primary rival.

The break had been building for weeks. Stevens, a centrist, and El-Sayed, the progressive in the race, came out of a bitter August primary that he won by less than a percentage point. The tension sharpened when Stevens demanded an apology for his recent comments criticizing Israel. El-Sayed then publicly asked her not to attend a party unity event planned for Sunday in Detroit, saying he wanted to avoid distractions.

The immediate trigger was an advertisement from an outside group, not from his campaign, which links Americans' financial struggles to US assistance for Israel. Stevens issued a statement urging him to denounce it. On Friday night, El-Sayed replied that she seemed intent on relitigating a primary that ended three months ago. Speaking to reporters in Sterling Heights on Saturday, he said his campaign had no involvement in the ad and added, "I do not agree with the contents of that ad." He also said he did not think any of the dispute mattered to voters worried about the cost of living. According to CNN, he has not spoken to Stevens in months and has no plans to before Election Day. "I'm here trying to beat Mike Rogers," he said.

Elsewhere, California Governor Gavin Newsom sent a letter on Saturday to the state's four federal chief district judges. He asked them to look closely at any request for a search warrant to seize election materials before the results are certified. California law, he wrote, already protects potential evidence of ballot wrongdoing, and the only reason to take ballots or counting equipment would be to interfere with a lawful count. He said he knew of no such request at the time of writing. He pointed, though, to threats of prosecution by Justice Department officials against election workers who resist federal demands about ballots cast by people suspected of being noncitizens.

That letter lands in an escalating fight between the Trump administration and California over efforts to identify noncitizen voters. On Friday, a federal judge issued an emergency order barring the administration from threatening election officials with prosecution, or taking other steps to threaten, intimidate or coerce them into changing ballot-processing procedures based on claims that voters were ineligible. The Justice Department has appealed.

In Texas, Democratic Senate candidate James Talarico said more than $300 million is being spent to stop him, which he called the most of any Senate race in American history. "They are scared. They are terrified," he said. The claim about the total and its historical ranking was not independently established.

President Trump, speaking at an October 30 rally in Florida alongside gubernatorial candidate Byron Donalds, said he had thought it would be his last stop. "28 days of this crap is a lot," he said, joking that his voice was at 49.2 percent. He still plans appearances in Iowa and Kansas this weekend.

A report from ICICI Bank gives Democrats a 63 percent probability of winning both chambers, with 90.9 percent for the House and 64 percent for the Senate. It says a Democratic win would likely bring more oversight and legislative disputes, plus greater risk of a shutdown and a debt ceiling standoff, but not an automatic end to the tariff framework, since the president can veto legislation and keeps some tariff powers. It also says the toss-up states account for only about 15 percent of US data center capacity. Separately, long absentee voting lines in Mississippi have raised Republican worries about holding a Senate seat, though lines alone do not show who benefits. Votes are cast on November 3.