Rep. Haley Stevens, the Democrat who nearly won Michigan's Senate primary, is urging nominee Abdul El-Sayed to cut ties with far-left streamer Hasan Piker, a figure whose record of inflammatory remarks has fractured the party heading into November.
Stevens appeared on Fox News's "The Sunday Briefing" on August 12 and made the case plainly. El-Sayed, who defeated her by fewer than 15,000 votes out of more than 1.5 million cast, now trails Republican Mike Rogers by four points in a Fox News poll, and Stevens said shedding the Piker connection is an obvious first step toward closing that gap.
As Fox News Digital reported, Stevens told host Jacqui Heinrich:
"It certainly makes sense to get rid of this [Hasan Piker] affiliation."
She stopped short of withdrawing her support from El-Sayed entirely, backing him for the general election while insisting that Democrats like herself deserve a voice in the party. But her message carried an unmistakable warning: the nominee's association with Piker is costing him voters he cannot afford to lose.
El-Sayed's path to the nomination was anything but comfortable. The progressive former public health official, who has never held elected office, defeated four-term Congresswoman Stevens by just under one percentage point on August 5. He did it despite opposition from Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, retiring Senator Gary Peters, and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer, and despite more than $60 million in outside spending aligned against him.
Senator Bernie Sanders called it "the most extraordinary victory that I can think of in modern American politics." El-Sayed himself invoked Muhammad Ali: "We shook up the world."
The platform that carried him through the primary, Medicare for All, abolishing ICE, and cutting U.S. aid to Israel, now faces a very different electorate. Michigan is a swing state. The Senate seat being vacated by Peters is one of roughly a dozen races expected to determine whether Republicans keep their narrow majority. And El-Sayed's general-election numbers suggest his progressive brand is not translating.
The Fox News poll shows him underperforming with Black voters, women, and suburban voters compared to former Vice President Kamala Harris's 2024 presidential numbers in the state. Those are the exact constituencies a Democrat needs to carry Michigan.
On August 3, El-Sayed talked poolside with Piker at a party in Detroit for content creators supporting his campaign. That event crystallized a relationship that has dogged the nominee for months, and that his own party allies have publicly condemned.
Piker, a Twitch streamer with roughly three million listeners, said in 2019 that America "deserved" the September 11 attacks. He later walked the remark back, claiming it referred to U.S. foreign policy consequences. He has also been accused of dismissing Hamas's October 7 atrocities, according to the New York Post.
El-Sayed's handling of the controversy has been halting at best. In April 2026, he told Politico he was "not here to disavow people's views." He later shifted, telling NBC News that Piker's 9/11 comment was indefensible, but framed the broader criticism as "cancel culture" and declined to say whether he would stop campaigning with Piker, citing the streamer's audience as a valuable outreach tool.
El-Sayed's own words to NBC News:
"Of course it was a dumb statement, and of course I think Hasan himself would say that was a dumb statement."
That kind of reluctant, half-step disavowal is exactly what has alarmed Michigan's Jewish community, and centrist Democrats watching the race nationally.
Rabbi Aaron Starr of Congregation Shaarey Zedek in Michigan put the stakes in direct terms:
"If a right-wing politician were to platform a member of the Ku Klux Klan, we would be outraged. In the same way, when Dr. El-Sayed platforms Hasan Piker, we are outraged."
The rabbi's comparison reflects a community that watched El-Sayed respond to a terror attack on Temple Israel with a video suggesting "violence always begets violence", a framing Jewish critics interpreted as justifying the attack rather than condemning it. Joe Tigay, a Jewish Michigan voter, offered a simple benchmark: "If he says Israel has a right to exist, that would be great."
The fracture extends beyond Michigan. Democratic strategist James Carville declared on Fox News, "I am not going to be in the same party with Hasan Piker." Senators Elissa Slotkin and John Fetterman have also distanced themselves from the streamer.
Stevens, who identified herself during the interview as a "Zionist Democrat," pointed to her own strong performance with Jewish voters, Black voters, and Reagan-era Democrats during the primary. She described those groups as constituencies that need to "feel safe and to feel heard in the Democratic Party."
"I came really close [to winning the primary] and I'm still a Democrat. I'm still out here talking about my views and values. I want the people who share my views and values to feel safe and to feel heard in the Democratic Party."
Mike Rogers, the Republican nominee and former congressman, leads El-Sayed by four points heading into the fall campaign. The National Review noted that El-Sayed's primary margin was far tighter than pre-election polls predicted, surveys had shown him ahead by double digits just a week before the vote.
That gap between expectations and results suggests El-Sayed's progressive platform may carry more liability than his campaign acknowledges. A nominee who ran on abolishing ICE and cutting aid to Israel now needs suburban women, Black churchgoers, and Jewish voters in a state Donald Trump has won before.
Stevens's appearance on Fox News carried a dual message. She endorsed El-Sayed for the general election, the party-unity move expected of any primary loser. But she also made clear that the Piker affiliation is a self-inflicted wound the nominee can and should stop reopening.
Heinrich pressed Stevens on whether El-Sayed had done anything beyond winning the nomination to earn the support of the voters who backed Stevens. The congresswoman's answer circled back to the same point: cut ties with Piker, focus on Michigan, and give mainstream Democrats a reason to show up.
El-Sayed held a unity rally at Renaissance High School in Detroit on August 7, two days after the primary was called. Whether that rally, or anything since, has moved the voters Stevens is worried about remains an open question. El-Sayed has not publicly responded to Stevens's latest call to sever the Piker connection.
When your own party's primary runner-up has to go on national television to beg you to stop associating with a man who said America deserved 9/11, the problem is not cancel culture. The problem is judgment.
