Trump Urges Haley Stevens to Join the Republican Party as the Justice Department Meets Election Day With a Host of Legal Challenges
Campaigning in Iowa on Sunday, President Donald Trump called Rep. Haley Stevens 'brave,' said he had thanked her for endorsing Mike Rogers and would love her to join the Republican Party — while his Justice Department, which has sued states and threatened election officials, appealed the Alaska ballot ruling the same day.
The fallout from Sunday's cross-party endorsement kept building through the evening. At his rally in Dubuque, Iowa, President Donald Trump praised Rep. Haley Stevens, the Michigan Democrat who endorsed Republican Senate nominee Mike Rogers hours earlier, calling her "brave," per USA Today's live file. Before the rally, Trump told reporters the endorsement was "a big move": "Nobody expected that, but it's a smart thing to do," he said. "I thought that was fantastic." Trump said he had contacted Stevens to thank her, told her "she did the right thing," and added that he would love to have her join the Republican Party. House Speaker Mike Johnson, traveling with the president, said he sent Stevens a note saying "she's standing for truth." The live file also reported that the president launched a series of attacks on Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed that the file characterized as Islamophobic, repeatedly referring to El-Sayed with a label the file reported as false; El-Sayed has disavowed the Muslim Brotherhood, the group the president suggested he belonged to, per the same account.
Democrats answered in kind. Mario Morrow, a former adviser to Stevens' Senate campaign and a longtime Detroit-area political consultant, told USA Today her decision makes her "an easy target" for the Democratic Party: "I think these ads really got to her," Morrow said, pointing to the outside ads Stevens had demanded El-Sayed denounce. "Her decision has made her an easy target for loyal Dems. This is going to be a problem for her moving forward politically. People are not happy." New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani said Stevens had "betrayed" working-class voters by endorsing "the very Republican she said she wanted to run against." El-Sayed himself kept his distance, campaigning in Detroit with Rep. James Clyburn and Sen. Angela Alsobrooks and asking reporters to keep questions on the issues Michiganders care about.
The endorsement fight ran alongside a second Sunday story: the legal one. The Trump administration meets Election Day with a host of legal challenges, USA Today's 07:54 PM ET entry reported: the Department of Justice "has sued states, threatened election officials, and arrested green card holders it suspects of voting illegally" — moves the file described as a significant escalation of the administration's campaign to intervene in the midterms, during a period when the department has historically refrained from such actions, though no official prohibition exists. On Sunday the administration also appealed the federal court decision that threw out its Alaska lawsuit seeking to prevent certification if Sen. Dan Sullivan loses by fewer votes than a namesake candidate receives — the dispute the president, at the same Iowa stop, called "voter fraud at the highest level," a characterization carried here as his own words. This story follows SQ-20261101-053, this station's file on the endorsement itself, and SQ-20261101-049, its file on the Alaska dismissal.
