The Memorial Day parade in Eastpointe, a Detroit suburb, is a dependably wholesome, all-American affair, with Odd Fellows, Elks, library friends, and firefighters marching past flag-bedecked telephone poles and bunting-laden ranch houses. Eastpointe is in Macomb County, the birthplace of the fabled Reagan Democrat, and it’s been a popular destination for politicians for more than four decades. This year, Haley Stevens, a four-term Michigan congresswoman who’s running for U.S. Senate, paid a visit. But, unlike seemingly every other elected official in the city for Memorial Day—the mayor, a county commissioner, city councillors, and school-board members—she decided not to march in the parade. Eastpointe is situated in a congressional district that neighbors her own and, while Stevens told me that she’d have no qualms about joining a Fourth of July or Labor Day parade in a city that she doesn’t represent, she believed that marching in a Memorial Day parade outside of her district was “a little taboo.” “This isn’t my community and the parade is for the fallen,” she said. “So you go and support it, but you don’t walk in it.” Once she becomes a senator, she added hopefully, “I can do this parade.”
Last year, after the Michigan Democratic senator Gary Peters decided not to seek a third term, Chuck Schumer, the Senate Democratic leader, tried to persuade Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer to run for the seat, according to a person familiar with Schumer’s thinking. After Whitmer declined, Schumer attempted to recruit Pete Buttigieg, the former Transportation Secretary, who’d recently moved from South Bend, Indiana, to Traverse City, his husband’s home town. Buttigieg said no, as well. Schumer then turned his attention to Kristen McDonald Rivet, a first-term congresswoman who represents Flint. It was only after McDonald Rivet decided not to run that Schumer anointed Stevens as his—and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee’s—preferred candidate for U.S. Senate.
Even as a fourth choice, there was a lot for Schumer to like about Stevens. She is a strong fund-raiser and, unlike other Democrats, she has never called to defund the police or to abolish ICE. It would be difficult for the Republican candidate, Mike Rogers, a former Michigan congressman who narrowly lost the 2024 Michigan Senate race to Elissa Slotkin, to portray her as soft on crime. Stevens also seemed to be an especially good character fit for Michigan, whose Democratic senators in the past four decades have tended to offer more substance than style. “Carl Levin looked like a used-furniture salesman, Debbie Stabenow was everyone’s hardworking aunt, and Gary Peters was as dry as an accountant,” a prominent Michigan Democrat told me. “Michigan elects workers.”
Stevens, who is forty-three and speaks with the type of thick Michigan accent that some predicted would be extinct by now, another casualty of deindustrialization, considers her own lack of flash an asset. “I call myself Michigan’s workhorse,” she told me. She grew up in Oakland County, outside Detroit, left for college at American University, in Washington, D.C., and broke into politics as a staffer for Hillary Clinton’s 2008 Presidential campaign. During the Obama Administration, she was an aide to the car czar Steve Rattner as he orchestrated the rescue of the Big Three U.S. automakers. Officially, Stevens was Rattner’s chief of staff; in practice, she was a factotum who was occasionally called upon to provide a Midwestern perspective to the distinguished economists—the “propeller heads,” Barack Obama dubbed them—who were determining Detroit’s future. Stevens told me that, during one session, when Rattner and the others were batting around the idea of liquidating Chrysler, she spoke up. “No one asked, but I’m sitting in the room,” she recalled. “And I said, ‘Hey, that won’t be a rescue.’ ”
