Friends and a former aide of Michigan Representative Haley Stevens are questioning the role of her fiancé, disability rights lawyer Jason Turkish, in her decision to endorse Republican Mike Rogers two days before the midterm Election. Stevens, a Democrat, lost her party's August Senate primary to Abdul El-Sayed by about 1 percentage point. She endorsed the nominee and pledged to help him defeat Rogers.
On Sunday, she appeared with the Republican and said she was backing him instead. The decision surprised Democrats, some of whom she had told she would not make the switch. Former Michigan Governor Jim Blanchard, a Democrat and friend of Stevens, told Gongwer News Service that Turkish criticized her during a dinner on Friday for endorsing El-Sayed.
"He was working her over," Blanchard said. Stevens has insisted the decision was hers. Turkish said on X that he could not be prouder of her courage.
Newsweek reached out to Stevens for comment on Monday. Turkish, 39, lives in Huntington Woods, Michigan, and is president and managing partner of Nyman Turkish, a litigation and disability rights law firm with offices in California, Florida and Michigan and about 150 employees. The firm was founded in 1980 as the Law Offices of William Turkish.
Legally blind since birth, he earned a bachelor's degree in political science from the University of Michigan and a law degree from Northwestern University. One of his best-known cases involved Angelo Binno, a blind man who could not complete the Law School Admission Test's (LSAT) logic games section because it relied heavily on diagrams. A 2019 settlement with the Law School Admission Council led to the section being dropped for all test-takers beginning in August 2024.
The Michigan Supreme Court appointed Turkish to the state's Attorney Discipline Board in 2022. He previously chaired the Michigan Barrier Free Design Board and in 2024 co-founded the Alliance for America's Promise, a disability benefits advocacy group. His father was born in Haifa, Israel, and his grandparents were Holocaust refugees.
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