It’s almost over, and on this special Election Eve edition of Stress Test, David Corn and Garrison Hayes deconstruct the manic final moments before America votes.
The big last-minute surprise was the 11th-hour bombshell out of Michigan.
Defeated Democratic primary contender Haley Stevens sent shockwaves through the political world on Sunday when she rescinded her support for Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed and endorsed Republican nominee Mike Rogers—a move that drew fierce condemnation from Democratic leadership and praise from Donald Trump.
What was especially odd was that Stevens could not clearly explain her rationale for this decision.
But she claimed she felt “hurt” by El-Sayed.
It was like a soap opera might determine control of the Senate.
“American democracy may hinge on who wins the Senate,” David observes, “and who wins the Senate may hinge on this little personal vendetta.” Garrison highlights the bitter irony of Stevens—who spent years cultivating a reputation as an “Obama-adjacent Black voter whisperer”—rolling out her GOP endorsement inside a Detroit Black church, leaving local Black voters feeling deeply blindsided and betrayed.
From there, the hosts examine the limits of late-stage polling and the preemptive legal battles being waged by the Trump administration over ballots in California and Alaska.
Garrison points out, “If confidence is to be measured by the way the Trump administration has been handling elections before votes have even really been counted, I don’t know if they’re showing very much confidence.” The early legal maneuvering may well be a prelude to the post-election fights to come.
Next, reporter Noah Lanard calls in from a car in upstate New York after trailing Vice President JD Vance’s last-minute rally for GOP sticker-magnate-turned-candidate Anthony Constantino, who has dumped $17 million of his own fortune into a House race.
Why is the GOP dispatching the veep to a deep-red district that Trump carried by 21 points? As Noah says,”If you told me a year ago this is where I would be on election eve, I would kind of do a spit take and immediately say, okay, something has gone horribly wrong for Republicans.” Noah describes the surreal scene of Constantino lambasting reporters as not the “fake news” but as the “evil news” who should be “deleted,” before riding off on a mobility scooter alongside an elderly veteran across an airplane hangar.
Before signing off, David and Garrison examine key races to watch on election night, including a bellwether House contest in Kentucky’s 6th congressional district, where polls will close at 6:00 p.m.
ET, as well as high-stakes showdowns in Pennsylvania, Kansas, Georgia, and Tennessee.
Stress Test will be back for an Election Night special to break down the returns in real time.
Until then, as David notes, “Every time American voters have had a chance to judge Trump’s performance in office… they’ve wanted to throw the bum out.” The midterms will show if that pattern holds.
The following transcript is generated using automated tools and may contain errors.
David Corn: Will the future of American democracy be decided by one sore loser? Garrison Hayes: And what are the key races that you should be watching here in the final moments of these midterms? DC: This is Stress Test from Mother Jones.
I’m David Corn.
GH: And I’m Garrison Hayes.
Welcome back to the show.
We are in quite literally, David, the final countdown, the last night or two, however, before we get results.
Obviously, some results will come in immediately, some will come in over the next few days, but we are so, so close.
DC: What a long, strange trip it’s been.
GH: Well, okay, this trip actually just got stranger.
It’s the thing that everyone is talking about.
It happened for us just yesterday, when Haley Stevens made news is probably the most boring way to put it, but she’s definitely in the algorithm.
Everyone’s talking about it.
I’m not sure if there’s much more to talk about, but David, bring us up to speed on what in the world happened in Michigan.
DC: Well, Haley Stevens, you might recall, lost.
She lost the Democratic primary to Abdul El-Sayed to run for U.S.
Senate in Michigan, and Mike Rogers is the Republican former congressman who’s running.
And things were testy during the primary.
She was supported by AIPAC, and he, of course, is a big critic of supplying U.S.
aid to Israel and to the current Israeli government.
But nevertheless, she promised to endorse him and to back him, and she has, despite all the ups and downs of the campaign, until this past weekend.
She was expected to be at a unity rally for Democratic candidates, and her staff thought she’d be there, but instead, she went to church with Mike Rogers and endorsed the Republican candidate.
This Democrat endorsed the Republican candidate in one of the pivotal races that will decide which party gets to control the U.S.
And there seemed to be a very personal side to this in a lot of ways.
She felt rebuffed from El-Sayed, who at one point didn’t want her to campaign with him, and her fiancé has connections to AIPAC, and according to many stories, he’s gotten way too involved in her campaign and into her political decision-making.
So what we’ve seen here, Garrison, is not just a political development.
It’s been a goddamn soap opera.
GH: It is a bit of a soap opera.
The thing that’s really been interesting to me is kind of the immediate response that we’ve seen from a few different factions, and I want us to dig into those.
We’ll have to listen to a little bit of Haley in a moment, but I want to talk at least a little bit, David, about the way Democrats across the kind of big-tent party political spectrum that Democrats represent, how are they responding to this? I’ll tell you, I saw a statement from Chuck Schumer that, in some ways, even though there’s been a bit of tension between the Abdul El-Sayed kind of camp and version of Democratic politics and the Chuck Schumer, you know, brand, there’s been a bit of a gap between the two, but they came together, and he called this—I can’t exact remember the exact language, but he condemned Haley Stevens for her move.
DC: Well, I don’t know what he said publicly, but I’m pretty sure I know what he said privately, because all he and the other Democrats care about at this stage, once primaries are done, is winning the majority.
And if they need El-Sayed to give them the majority, they’ll take it.
And they’ve been supportive of him.
Kamala Harris came out and campaigned with him, Barack Obama’s campaigning.
So the whole party’s behind this.
And they basically tossed Haley Stevens out of the party.
The Michigan Democratic Party said, so long, goodbye, you’re not one of us, rip up your card, your Democratic Party card.
And it’s been very, very, you know, unified in that sense that nobody out there on the Democratic side is defending this, while Donald Trump and Republicans are embracing her and thanking her.
But, you know, it’s just been so weird and bizarre this whole way.
And she went on Anderson Cooper the other night and tried to explain this and really couldn’t.
He kept asking her what had changed since hours before she announced this endorsement, she had told others that she was gonna stick with El-Sayed.
So let’s look at her performance—I think that’s the best way to put it—with Anderson Cooper on CNN.
[Clip plays.] DC: She felt hurt.
You know, we just saw Haley Stevens throughout that whole interview with Anderson Cooper.
He kept asking her to explain what had changed in the 8, 10 hours between when she said she was sticking with El-Sayed and when she announced she was endorsing Mike Rogers, and she couldn’t explain it.
She could say, I felt hurt, I’m doing what I’m doing, I’m an honest person.
And there’s something, you know—we’ll get the story one day, but something rather bizarre behind all this.
And to me, the big picture is, you know, moving back from whatever motivated her to do this, is American democracy may hinge on who wins the Senate, and who wins the Senate may hinge on this little personal vendetta or whatever it might be.
And we don’t know exactly what the impact’s gonna be.
Most voters in most races have made up their minds by now.
There’s been a lot of early voting.
I just wonder, Garrison, if there are some Democratic voters or independent voters in Michigan who have felt reluctant to vote for El-Sayed for all sorts of reasons, and now has she given them permission either to vote for Rogers or just not vote at all and not feel bad about feeling reluctant? GH: You know, I lived in Michigan for about three years, and Michigan voters know that they are important.
That was one of the first things that I kind of really started to pick up on back in 2016, 2017.
People really are very aware that they have a say, that their vote really, really matters.
And so by this point in the election, I think certainly someone will be swayed by Haley Stevens.
I think that is a very small number of people.
The thing that I found most interesting in all of this is that Haley Stevens has positioned herself as a person who’s almost a Black voter whisperer in Michigan.
She’s kind of positioned herself in proximity, some Obama adjacency in proximity to the Black community.
Much of this went down in a Black church in Detroit.
And so there’s this real kind of connection that she has almost telegraphed to the Black community.
But when Black voters were asked about this just immediately following the event at the church in Detroit, many of them were confused.
In many ways, this is a betrayal, I think, of Democratic voters who would have chosen her or El-Sayed.
Many of them see the MAGA agenda and Mike Rogers specifically as a dangerous force.
In fact, Haley Stevens called Mike Rogers dangerous; he would advance the dangerous MAGA agenda.
And so all of this is really a betrayal of what she’s kind of stood up for and even the voters that she’s claimed to represent.
And so I am interested in seeing how this will bode for her, obviously among Democratic leadership, but I get the sense that voters themselves feel very betrayed by this move from her.
DC: Well, I’m gonna pivot here, because up to this point in time, the Democrats are feeling really good, not just about the House, but about the Senate.
And they still may be feeling good.
But the recent poll that came out from The New York Times and Siena showed that the Democrats were basically ahead in all the races that we’re watching, in Iowa, Kansas, North Carolina, and so on, close to tied in Maine, but by and large were in a really good position.
And they would have been, I think, feeling rather delighted with themselves had this Haley Stevens soap opera drama, melodrama not emerged.
So the polls are strong, but there’s something also very interesting about the polls this year, Garrison, and that again and again, media organizations that are putting out these polls—and I’m thinking primarily of The New York Times and The Washington Post—have also put out kind of warnings, caveats, buyers beware.
As they’ve released polls, they’ve also said and have admitted they’ve had trouble figuring out how to get the right samples.
Now, this is the whole key to polling.
You have to have a group of people in your polls that you think reflects what the electorate is going to be like.
So you base it on what happened last time, but also you have to sort of base it on what the voters are telling you about who’s likely to vote and who’s not likely to vote.
And if you don’t get that right, your poll can be way off.
So they’re out there saying, we’re trying as hard as we can to calculate the right samples, but don’t blame us if we get it wrong.
GH: Yeah, no, that’s real.
I mean, polling has consistently underestimated Republican voters in the Trump era, which has been the reason why you’ve seen so many of these kind of big shock moments, I think, over the last several years for voters who’ve kind of relied on polling to get a vibe.
And so I guess the question then is, how would you advise voters? I would say go out and vote.
You can’t actually—let’s start there, right? You can’t actually, you know, rely on polls.
Polls don’t vote; people vote, so go vote.
That’s the main thing that I’d say.
DC: And I would tell people right now to don’t bother for the next, you know, few hours, whatever, with polls.
We’re gonna know soon enough.
I’ve never been a big fan of obsessing with polls.
They can be right; they can be wrong.
But the great thing is eventually we get the actual numbers.
And there’s one thing that I have been thinking about in these final hours, Garrison, and that is every time American voters have had a chance to judge Trump’s performance in office—not his performance as a candidate, but his performance in office—they’ve wanted to throw the bum out.
If you look at what happened, in 2016 he won, but he was running as a candidate.
But in 2018, voters said, we don’t like what you’re doing.
And then in 2020, they also said, we don’t like how you managed COVID, we don’t like what you’re doing, and they’ve rejected him.
In 2024, when he was back to being a candidate, they voted for him.
But now it’s 2026, and his record is back on the ballot, as he says.
He’s been saying over and over again, I’m on the ballot.
So twice in a row, they’ve said no to his performance.
Let’s see what happens on this Election Day.
GH: Well, you know, if confidence is to be measured by the way the Trump administration has been handling elections before votes have even really been counted, I don’t know if they’re showing very much confidence.
Of course, we know that there are several funky little things, is how I’ll describe them here, that the Trump administration— DC: That’s a good song, right? Funky Little Things.
GH: Funky little things they’ve been trying to do, particularly in Alaska and in California.
Now, David, I want to get your take on this, but I’ll give the people a little bit of an overview here, that the Trump administration has brought these kind of schemes to California and Alaska, particularly.
They were trying to kind of preemptively challenge the results of the U.S.
Senate race in Alaska because of, I think, the name situation that was happening there with two Dan Sullivans on the ballot.
A federal judge dismissed that entirely.
So that’s one update.
The second update is that the federal appeals panel actually denied a request to order California officials to comply with this Trump order to set aside 20,000 mail-in ballots that the Trump administration has claimed, I believe without evidence, were sent in by noncitizens.
David, I want you to kind of respond and, of course, give a little additional context to these two orders from the courts around what the Trump administration is trying to do in this election.
DC: These are both outlandish moves by the Trump administration and the Justice Department.
And judges, as you’ve just noted, have....
