Haley Stevens recounts pain and hope during bailout
Haley Stevens was chief of staff for the Obama’s auto task force.
Todd Spangler, Detroit Free Press
- U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens, a Democrat from Michigan, announced her candidacy for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Sen. Gary Peters.
- Stevens has a background in manufacturing and played a key role in the 2009 auto rescue.
- Stevens emphasizes her Michigan roots and her focus on protecting Michigan jobs.
U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens, a former Obama administration official who worked with the task force that rescued General Motors and what was then Chrysler from financial doom in 2009-10 and went on to flip a previously reliably Republican congressional district based in Oakland County in 2018, is running for Michigan’s open U.S. Senate seat.
Stevens’ formal entry into the race on April 22, which was widely expected, makes her the presumptive early favorite for the Democratic nomination next year to replace U.S. Sen. Gary Peters given her record of winning tough races, her ties to party powerbrokers and Michigan manufacturing, and a proven ability to raise campaign cash.
“My life has been defined by moments when Michigan is either in crisis or facing a whole host of uncertainty,” Stevens told the Free Press, saying the current circumstances see Republican President Donald Trump issuing “shoot-from-the-hip” tariffs that could cripple the state’s all-important auto industry and Trump adviser Elon Musk issuing threats against Social Security and other guaranteed benefit programs. “Just as I did when I worked on the U.S. auto rescue and put up my hand to serve Michigan, I am putting up my hand once again.”
Stevens, who lives in Birmingham, joins a Democratic race that is already getting crowded, with state Sen. Mallory McMorrow of Royal Oak and former Wayne County health director Dr. Abdul El-Sayed already announced, former state House Speaker Joe Tate of Detroit eyeing the race and state Attorney General Dana Nessel talked up by pundits as a possible candidate.
But Stevens can claim a substantial amount of congressional experience and legislative acumen − she helped write the law that led to substantial new investments in U.S. semiconductor manufacturing following the supply chain shortages created by COVID-19, for instance − that the others can’t. Michigan also hasn’t elected a U.S. senator who hasn’t come from the U.S. House since 1994, when Spencer Abraham, a former state Republican Party chairman, won a single term.
Abraham is also the last Republican nominee to win a U.S. Senate seat in Michigan, though the margin between the parties has been closing in recent elections. On April 14, Republican former U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers of White Lake announced his candidacy for the open seat next year, having lost to Democratic former U.S. Rep. Elissa Slotkin last year in another open-seat U.S. Senate race by three-tenths of a percentage point, or about 19,000 votes out of some 5.6 million cast.
A native Michigander who grew up in Rochester Hills and attended Seaholm High School in Birmingham, Stevens, 41, worked for both former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama’s campaigns in 2008, prior to Obama’s election as president. With GM and Chrysler teetering on the edge of financial collapse during the Great Recession, she joined Obama’s auto task force as de facto chief of staff under so-called auto czar Steve Rattner. The group went on to develop a financing and structured bankruptcy process widely credited with saving both and staving off what were predicted to be far larger losses in the auto industry.
Stevens went on to work in creating training programs for advanced manufacturing and running a STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) initiative with public schools before jumping into a race for a seat formerly held by U.S. Rep. Dave Trott, R-Birmingham, in 2018 in which she emerged from a six-person primary field and beat Republican Lena Epstein. She’d go on to win a surprisingly close race in 2020 over Eric Esshaki and then, in a newly drawn and more Democratic-leaning district in 2022, defeat fellow U.S. Rep. Andy Levin, D-Bloomfield Township, in a divisive party primary en route to winning a third term.
She declined to run for the seat being vacated by former U.S. Sen. Debbie Stabenow in 2024, instead easily defeating Republican Nick Somberg, 58%-40%, in her U.S. House race. Through those runs, Stevens established herself as a strong campaigner and able fundraiser, pulling in nearly $6 million for her 2020 campaign and $5.6 million in ’22. Already this campaign cycle, her U.S. House committee had raised $1.16 million, according to Federal Election Commission reports.
In a two-minute-long video released along with Stevens’ campaign launch, she talked up her Michigan roots − which El-Sayed has done as well, with both apparently trying to draw a contrast with McMorrow, who is originally from New Jersey but has lived in Michigan for years − and her pride in the state’s auto industry, flashing the original keys to her first car, a used Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme.
“It meant more to me than just freedom, it meant I had a piece of Michigan,” she says in the video. “You know, the Michigan that helped build this country. The Michigan that shaped me. It’s not just what I sound like. It’s who I am.”
She also takes the fight directly to Trump and Musk in the video, saying the new administration’s “chaos and reckless tariffs are putting tens of thousands of Michigan jobs at risk,” given the threat many auto industry officials and others say they could pose to the state.
“Donald Trump says he couldn’t care less if auto prices rise,” she says. “Well as someone who has spent my time in Congress fighting for Michigan jobs, Michigan families and Michigan workers, I couldn’t care more.”
Ideologically, Stevens has been a reliable Democratic vote throughout her tenure in Congress and a staunch supporter of abortion rights, though she is seen as a member of the party’s more centrist mainstream than as taking more vocally and aggressively progressive positions. She has voiced support for an optional government-run health care plan members of the public could buy into. In the last Congress, which was led by a Republican majority, she had the highest score among Michigan Democrats in the House from the Center for Effective Lawmaking, a joint project between the University of Virginia and Vanderbilt University scoring legislators based on the success or failure of measures they pass.
In the current Congress, Stevens proposed legislation to block access to taxpayers’ personal information by anyone who is not a civil servant and meets certain other criteria, a move intended to limit the scope of information available to Musk’s new Department of Government Efficiency workers, who media reports have claimed could be gaining access to those records.
Stevens’ pro-manufacturing leanings could be a boon to her in any general election campaign in Michigan, particularly if Trump’s tariffs result in a financial hit to the state’s industries in the short term. But she may also face opposition from certain factions inside the Democratic Party, especially from younger voters and voters in the state’s Arab-American and Muslim communities, who chastised Democratic former President Joe Biden’s administration for not actively opposing Israel’s counterattacks on Hamas in Gaza.
Although that opposition to Democrats has quieted somewhat, especially with Trump talking about moving Palestinians out of Gaza altogether, Stevens could still see some opponents try to hit her for her vocal support of Israel’s right to defend itself from aggression and the financial backing from the pro-Israel American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) she has received. Stevens, it should be noted, also urged a ceasefire in Gaza and an exchange of hostages, as well as arguing for a two-state solution to protect Palestinians and bring peace to the region.
“I’m squarely focused on earning the votes of Michiganders and meeting people where they are,” Stevens told the Free Press. “I plan to campaign everywhere in the state… going into neighborhoods, knocking on doors and connecting with the voters.”
Contact Todd Spangler: [email protected]. Follow him on X @tsspangler.