Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich.) has something to celebrate less than a month after her Michigan Senate primary loss to Abdul El-Sayed – her engagement to longtime friend-turned-partner and campaign donor Jason Turkish.
The couple first met in 2022, through Stevens’ Senate campaign chair David Kramer, but their relationship really blossomed during the congresswoman’s primary battle against El-Sayed.
“We’ve been friends for a very long time, and it was kinda obvious to a lot of other people around us before it was to us,” Stevens, 43, told the Detroit News, which first reported her engagement to Turkish.
“We just fell in love. We had years of just friendship and conversation, and we have a lot of shared values and commitment to family and friends in Michigan,” she added.
Turkish, who is legally blind, is the managing partner of Nyman Turkish PC, a law firm that focuses on disability and discrimination claims.
Since 2023, he has donated more than $50,000 toward Stevens’ congressional and Senate campaigns, Federal Election Commission records show.
Turkish is also the grandson of Holocaust refugees, and the couple plans to travel to Israel, where Turkish’s father was born, in the coming days to meet with survivors of the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack.
“This campaign really has been an eyes-wide-open moment for the Jewish community and for me,” Turkish told the outlet.
On the campaign trail, El-Sayed criticized Stevens for the nearly $30 million in support she received from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s (AIPAC) super PAC.
Stevens was also booed off stage by far-left activists at the Michigan Democratic Party convention over her pro-Israel positions – a moment Turkish, who is Jewish, described as an act of “anti-Zionist hate.”
“If you were in that room, you would think she had no support within the Democratic Party. And yet she almost won this election, losing by just 1 percentage point,” Turkish told the Detroit News. “The loudest voices in that room didn’t represent the truth.”
The couple hasn’t yet set a wedding date.
If they tie the knot, it will be Stevens’ second marriage. She divorced her ex-husband Rob Gulley in 2022.
