The unlikely player in contentious Michigan Senate race: Stevens's fiancé

Months before the high-stakes Democratic Senate primary in Michigan, Jason Turkish took such a hands-on role in Rep. Haley Stevens's campaign that her senior staff called a meeting without her to devise how to restrict his role, according to multiple people familiar with the meeting.

Turkish was seen as relatively new to Stevens's orbit. Most of the congresswoman's senior staff knew him as a top donor some had met earlier in the campaign, which launched in 2025.

By early June, Stevens and Turkish were said to be secretly engaged, according to multiple former campaign staffers who said the one-time donor had become Stevens's most important adviser. Stevens soon added him to private campaign text chains, one of the reasons staff called a meeting to figure out how to curtail his interactions with the team, according to one of the people familiar with the meeting.

Tensions between staffers and a candidate's spouse or significant other are not uncommon in a campaign's intense atmosphere. They tend to erupt in crisis moments, and Stevens was facing tough polling in her race with Abdul El-Sayed.

Now questions about Turkish's role in Stevens's primary campaign have been revived in the general election's closing hours, after the Democratic congresswoman's 11th-hour reversal of support for El-Sayed, the progressive Democrat who won the primary. This account is based on interviews with more than a dozen former Stevens campaign aides and other people familiar with the campaign.

Stevens, 43, said that "any campaign staff being directly quoted in this article, I was made miserable by working with them."

Asked whether she felt her campaign staff was trying to push out Turkish or limit his influence in any way, Stevens said, "I have nothing else to say about the campaign at this time."

Turkish, a 39-year-old disability lawyer and political fundraiser, would not comment on whether staff sought to curtail his role, but he provided to The Washington Post emails from June and July showing that staff continued to reach out and consult him on campaign matters. He declined to address specific claims by former campaign staff on the record.

"I was Haley Stevens's energetic and passionate supporter from the very launch of this campaign," he said. "And while the campaign ended in defeat, it also ended in our marriage. And along the path of that campaign, we spent thousands of hours together and around a campaign. And there were good days and bad days, but we lived it together, and we wouldn't trade it for anything."

Turkish lives in Huntington Woods, a suburb north of Detroit, and works in Southfield as a managing partner at Nyman Turkish, a litigation and disability law firm. The Detroit News reported that the two met after Stevens's 2022 reelection campaign through David Kramer, a mutual friend.

Stevens initially backed El-Sayed after their bruising primary, even telling people he was a "great candidate," but over the course of the general election, her public support for the candidate grew more strained, particularly as it related to El-Sayed's stance on Israel's war with Hamas, where he has become a leading voice denouncing U.S. support in what he labels a "genocide."

Turkish endorsed El-Sayed's opponent in the key Senate race, Republican Mike Rogers, days before Stevens shocked the political world by backing Rogers and appearing with him at church on Sunday with Turkish. In an interview revealing his choice, he told the Detroit News that he saw an "escalation" in the Democratic nominee's rhetoric around Israel.

Stevens's endorsement has led some close to her to express concern about Turkish's influence on her decision, including longtime friends, one who spoke with her as recently as Saturday night, mere hours before she backed Rogers on Sunday. The endorsement has effectively led Stevens to be excommunicated from her state's party, with the head of the Michigan Democratic Party writing that she was "not a current member of the Michigan Democratic Party, nor will she be in the future."

Stevens said "any suppositions that Jason Turkish influenced me on Israel or campaign positions is absurd."

Late Monday night, Stevens posted a lengthy explanation for her decision on X that lamented how "some critics have also dragged my fiancé into this, suggesting he or others must have made my decision for me."

"Think about what that says. A woman can serve in Congress, run statewide, and fight for her convictions, and still be told that when she makes a choice people dislike, someone else must be pulling the strings," she wrote. "That is sexism dressed up as political analysis."

One friend who spoke with Stevens said the congresswoman reassured her Saturday night that she would "never" rescind her endorsement of El-Sayed.

"That primary was particularly brutal. For all involved," the friend said. "I feel that there is like an allegiance to him because he was there for her during a particularly dark and stressful time."

But one aide said Stevens trusted Turkish and often valued his insight, particularly on Israel, because she agreed with him more than with her advisers, who were pushing her to be less supportive of Israel. After her endorsement of Rogers, many Israel supporters have applauded both Stevens and Turkish for what they view as a tough, gutsy stance.

"By the time I got to the place where I was ready to do it, I would have been living a lie to a lot of people and in community. ... There was no way to circle the square," Stevens told the Detroit News on Monday.

Stevens's senior staff first grew troubled by Turkish's campaign influence around June, people familiar with the campaign said.

According to multiple people familiar with the exchanges, Turkish started berating staff for their work, particularly perplexed that he, a Stevens supporter, was being served digital ads about the campaign. He wanted more spent on digital fundraising, and he summoned a senior digital campaign staffer to his law office and yelled at her over the kind of digital content and fundraising emails the campaign was creating, the people said. He told a press aide that she was "not serving Haley well," two people familiar with the conversation recalled.

Turkish would also send the congresswoman a list of hurtful tweets people were writing about her, four people familiar with Turkish's influence on Stevens said. Campaign staff also worried that when Turkish was the last person to speak with Stevens before an interview or event, she would stray from the campaign's talking points, the people said.

"He was not a calming presence, in a way that in hindsight should have been more alarming," said Caitlin Legacki, a former top adviser to Stevens's campaign. "It was very strange. I have never seen anything like it."

One former Stevens aide said campaign staff worked to prevent Turkish from showing up to events because of how he undermined staff. If he arrived, the person said, they would redirect cameras or reposition Stevens so that he could not draw the attention of the press. Before events, they said he often suggested rewriting talking points and insisted on joining Stevens's briefings before media appearances.

The team tried to control his influence with two guardrails, multiple people said: Making sure he was not the last person to speak with Stevens before a public-facing event, and outlining how he was only allowed to go directly through the campaign's manager, Sam Barrett, not directly to lower-level staff, according to multiple sources familiar with the guardrails.

"It did not work in the sense that he had any less influence on Haley," said Legacki, who left the campaign after it became public she was also working for the tech company Palantir while advising the campaign.

Stevens said in an interview for this article that Legacki "was fired" because "of undisclosed conflicts."

The changes meant Stevens's schedule was sometimes altered to ensure she spoke with a campaign staffer, and no one else, before certain events or calls, the people said.

"We would organize the schedule to make sure there was a staff member who would be the last person talking to her because she did an interview or a donor call," said a person familiar with the campaign.

Longtime friends say the couple grew even closer after her defeat.

The morning after Stevens's primary loss to El-Sayed - a closer result than the polls anticipated - former Michigan governor James Blanchard (D) called her, thinking she would need some consoling, he said. Instead, she sounded ebullient.

"I'm getting married!" she told Blanchard.