Rep. Haley Stevens of Michigan, the Democrat who lost her party’s Senate primary to Abdul El-Sayed in August, endorsed Republican Mike Rogers on Sunday, less than 48 hours before polls open in one of the most closely watched Senate races in the country.

The winner on Tuesday will succeed Democratic Sen. Gary Peters, who is not seeking another term.

Stevens announced her decision in a video of less than two minutes posted to social media after she appeared with Rogers at a Sunday service at Perfecting Church in Detroit.

“As you may have seen, our Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate, Abdul, said I was no longer welcome in his campaign and that I should stay away, and he’s right,” she said. “And that’s why I am endorsing Mike Rogers for the U.S. Senate today.”

How a unity event came apart

The endorsement reversed months of public pledges by Stevens to back the Democratic ticket. As recently as last week, she was scheduled to join El-Sayed and Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina at a Detroit church on Sunday, an event meant to show a party coming together before the vote.

The relationship had been fraying for weeks. Stevens had argued that El-Sayed was not doing enough to reassure the Jewish and Black voters who backed her in the primary. Tensions sharpened after her fiancé, Jason Turkish, a Huntington Woods disability rights lawyer and past Stevens donor who holds no public office, said he planned to vote for Rogers.

The breaking point was an ad from an outside group by Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks that blamed Israel for high grocery prices in the United States. Stevens called the ad antisemitic. On Friday she set a condition for attending the Sunday event: that El-Sayed reject the ad and apologize for rhetoric she considered inflammatory.

El-Sayed’s campaign said it had nothing to do with the ad and criticized its content on Saturday. He also accused Stevens of being “intent on relitigating a primary that ended three months ago.” By Saturday, his campaign had asked her not to attend its events. “I don’t want any distractions,” El-Sayed told reporters after a get-out-the-vote stop in Sterling Heights.

The Clyburn event went ahead Sunday without her.

Israel divides Democrats

The clash between the two Michigan Democrats reflects a wider rift in the party over Israel and the language used to discuss it.

In her video, Stevens pointed to El-Sayed’s joint appearances during the primary with Hasan Piker, a left-wing streamer. “I don’t belong in Abdul’s campaign. I do not stand with Hasan Piker, who gets trafficked on our college campuses,” she said, referring to those campus events. “... What our students see, what our children see, and who we are as Michiganders is not hate, and is not what we are getting out from our Democratic nominee right now.” In August, after Piker suggested that Jews’ support for Israel puts them at risk of violence, El-Sayed said Piker did not speak for his campaign but stopped short of disavowing him.

In the video, Stevens said she was “still a very proud Democrat.” “I stood with my party, and I was booed off the stage,” she told reporters after the church service. “This was a personal and private decision.”

Rogers welcomes her, El-Sayed shrugs

Rogers said he received her call Sunday morning and was “honored” to have her vote.

“This is more a statement about standing together against hate and the future of this state and this country than it is anything else,” Rogers said. He added that Stevens reminded him at the end of their call that she was still a Democrat.

El-Sayed, speaking outside a “Souls to the Polls” event in Detroit, said he does not think about Stevens and that voters do not either. “None of this matters,” he said, turning to families he said were worried about feeding their children and paying the bills if a child gets sick.

President Donald Trump went further than Rogers. At a rally in Dubuque, Iowa, on Sunday, he said: “She was very brave in doing it. So I don’t know Haley, I’ve never met Haley, but Haley said what few people are willing to say.” He added, “I’d love her to join the Republican Party actually. I think that could happen maybe.” He told reporters he had called her to thank her: “She did the right thing.”

Stevens is not on Tuesday’s ballot. Having run for the Senate rather than re-election, she leaves the House when her term ends in January. She has given no public sign of switching parties.

Party leaders and staff respond

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, who backed Stevens in the primary before endorsing El-Sayed, called the move “a despicable betrayal” and said Senate Democrats were united behind the nominee. Michigan Democratic Party Chair Curtis Hertel wrote that Stevens “is not a current member of the Michigan Democratic Party, nor will she be in the future.”

The fallout reached Stevens’ own office. Her longtime chief of staff, Justin German, said in a statement that he and many members of the team had resigned, and urged voters to back El-Sayed. Her communications director’s email auto reply says he no longer works for the office as of Sunday.

Polls and ballots before Tuesday

The final New York Times/Siena poll of 1,011 likely Michigan voters had El-Sayed at 53% and Rogers at 42%, with a margin of error of 3.8 points. Interviews ran from Oct. 23 to Nov. 1, so the poll’s final day of calls overlapped with the day of the endorsement.

Polls open across Michigan at 7 a.m. Eastern, 6 a.m. CST, on Tuesday, Nov. 3, and close at 8 p.m. Eastern, 7 p.m. CST, in most of the state.

Many votes are already in. More than 2 million ballots had been cast in Michigan before Sunday’s announcement, according to NBC News data.