Former RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel talks about Haley Stevens endorsement of Mike Rogers

And welcome back to our election night preview. Of course, we were just a couple of days away, but the whole country is watching so closely what's happening here in Michigan. And we are actually joined by Sam Robinson, who's a great journalist who's been covering a lot of this race. And also on the phone now, we have Ronna McDaniel, the former RNC chair now with Michigan Forward, and she joins us now live on our air. And we thank you so much for being with us on the stream today. Ronna, what do you make of today's bombshell from Haley Stevens? Yeah, it's supposed to be an October surprise, but it was like a November bombshell. I mean, it was kind of crazy today. I think Haley followed her conscience. She's getting a lot of pushback from her party. Abdul didn't reach out to her. He didn't want to campaign with her. He basically uninvited her and her supporters. And I think this is a big boost for Mike Rogers heading into Tuesday. But Ronna, isn't it true? I mean, you've been in politics and your family has, of course, your uncle, you, all these folks. I mean, politics is a nasty game and people do things like say you're not welcome here right now. But to leave a party, that seems like a huge leap, wouldn't you say? Well, Haley said she's not leaving the Democrat Party and she was very clear on that. I was actually on State of the Union with her last Sunday in DC. I had never met her. She is very loyal to her party, but she is deeply troubled by things like Abdul not being able to condemn the IRGC or bringing Hassan Piker into the state. So this isn't about, oh, revenge. I think these are truly deeply troubling issues. And then I think the final straw was this ad that came out that was anti-Semitic put out by Hassan Piker's uncle That Abdul refused to denounce, basically saying that. That the Jewish Americans and Israelis are the cause of all the high gas and grocery prices that we're dealing with here in Michigan, which is just untrue. When you look at, look, you know, President Trump has, you know, has had his share of people say, you need to disavow this or disavow this person. You know, if Nick Fuentes or if Laura Loomer says something, you need to disavow it. And he's kind of, you know, he's a president. He's like, look, people are going to support me who I don't like and I don't agree with. Do you think that Abdul Al-Sayed is getting maybe too much of a burden to have to disavow and condemn everything because of his faith? I don't think it has anything to do with his faith, Ruben. You know, you and I both know we are such a diverse state, and we've grown up with many different faiths in our state, and that's part of what makes our... But Abdul brought his son back to Michigan, that was his choice. This wasn't just an outlier in his party that he's being held accountable for. He brought him multiple times, he's gone on his show. And Abdul says, I won't take money from corporations. Well, I will tell you this Rube, there's no amount of audience or size of audience that would make it permissible for me to sit with With a person who said we deserve 9-11 or the other horrible things that. Sam Piker said that we should bring back lynchings, that we should rape young women on college campuses. I mean, these are things that he has said. I'm not even exaggerating. And Abdul chose to sit with this person. The lynching comments are a little out of context, but he's suing Scott Jennings over those comments. He's saying that Scott Jennings defamed him. Those comments, yes, he is disavowing. He is standing against those comments. But, Ronna, your point is that people, just because you're saying it has nothing to do with his faith, It has to do with condemning... Statements and things that are said that are just objectionable. Yeah, I mean, it's not like Mike Rogers is bringing Nick Fuentes into the state. I condemn Nick Fuentes. I would never want anyone near Nick Fuentes and I condemn a candidate and my party if they brought Nick Fuentes into the state. Thank you, Jay. Abdul brought Hassan Piker and then he tries to say, well, I don't wanna talk about a streamer from California and he attacks the press and he says, this isn't a serious question and I only wanna talk about these issues. Well, you have to talk about these issues because you You chose to invite him to Michigan. That's why. It has nothing to do with his faith. What happens moving forward in the next two days? I'll let you go. I know you're courteous to bring us. Come on the call. I appreciate it. Well, of course, first of all, let's say go Lions. This is one thing that unites us all, right? And prayers to Jack Campbell right now. We're all thinking about him. You know, I think Haley's going to campaign with Mike. She's probably going to take a lot of heat. This is the final closing days and it's going to come down to turn out. Early voting ended today. So everything's going to come down to turnout. We're going to see if Abdul gets huge turnout on college campuses. That's what he needs to win. And Mike needs to carve into some of Abdul's base in the black community, the Jewish community, to win in a midterm year where Republicans are going against headwinds. Look, Ronna, you called me to talk about something else. And I happen to be on the streaming set. And you came on the stream with us. So for that, I thank you. And I promise, as soon as I'm off at 9, I'll give you a call back. Look forward to it. Thank you very much. Great talking to you. Thank you. All right, then. Bye-bye. Ronna McDaniel, the former chair of the Republican National Committee and obviously someone who knows a lot about politics, her uncle, Mitt Romney, and the president, she herself has done so much here at home with some strong statements about what we've seen unfold here. Certainly, as you say. This is something that Scott Jennings had made an allegation against and Hasan Piker is now fighting back and suing. That was heavily reported. Yeah, I mean, he was the lynching comment about black folks. He was reading a chatter in these Twitch streams. You got live chats going on. So you got people saying random things. And he was replying to one of those random commenters who was to his perspective saying anti-black stuff saying racist stuff so he was sort of mocking the comment he was being sarcastic um and immediately after that he said oh somebody's going to clip this to make it seem like i was saying this and that's what that's exactly what happened and so you got to be careful when you're doing a stream um and when you're talking right and i think this is somebody that is you know fast and loose talking and that's what we were we made it clear just now that that that allegation against Hasan Piker was false although he has He said about 9-11 what he said, and he says he regretted the choice of words, and I think Abdul has called it stupid as well when he said it. What do you make of the whole factor about the world we live in now? You're younger than I am, and you know that Twitch streamers, YouTube, Hasan Piker, YouTube, Twitter, or now X. And clips. And clips. They just go on. Social media on Instagram Reels or on Facebook Reels or on YouTube Shorts. You know, your kids know what YouTube Shorts is. If you guys don't know what YouTube Shorts is, you've probably been scrolling on it unknowingly for the past two years. But what is what's in your you're a political journalist. You care deeply about the truth. You believe in context. Yeah. What? Talk about the disconnect between what we're seeing there. The truth is that Abdul did invite Hassan Piker not just one time, as he said once. He invited him to Michigan, I think. Three or four times. I mean, I've met Hassan Piker. He was at Katab Cafe with Abraham Ayyash and others. And so he's a really popular figure on the progressive left. He's somebody that my peers grew up watching, not just on his Twitch stream, but just like as a character associated with the Young Turks. The Young Turks is Cenk Uygur's political... YouTube program. Jake Rieger is the uncle of Hasan Piker. Yes, and so they're related. I didn't even realize that as Hasan's coming here. I'm like, where are you from, man? He's from Turkey, but he was born in New Jersey. And so this is a guy who is a controversial figure. People on the left, the progressive left, a lot of people don't even like him. He's kind of just like a character. And so this whole to-do about Hasan Piker has been really interesting because it's not a lot of people that are my age that have the perspective of having Like, a decade of seeing Hasan Piker be a fool on social media. And that's his whole thing. He's like a jester. You're going out to doing serious journalism. Right. You're going out there and interviewing candidates, talking to people about what they feel about what they just saw. Yeah. And they're seeing all that, and then you see a clip that's like, you know, 18 seconds long, and people make decisions on how to vote based on that. They do. Does that bother you? Well, it's interesting. I talked to a garbage truck driver who told me that the Hasan Piker ads, 9-11 ads, Initially caught him off guard. He thought that that was Abdul saying that we deserve 911. He didn't even make the distinction that that was actually somebody else. And so I think the same could be said. Remember in the primary when we were talking about why are all these black voters lining up behind Haley Stevens? Because so many people saw the ads with Obama. People are getting like inundated with information. They just have the TV on right now, like right now. Right. Like you're just watching. Right. Like you're just you have your TV up. You're not listening. all the way and so like you know you say well they're listening to you well i tell you what you know a lot of people aren't because yeah you know the information is right there guys google is all on your phones um however i do think you know national media legacy media msm as they like to describe us right um it's losing a little bit of its influence when i do like a leftist progressive youtube program right and i'll be like nobody's watching this breaking Breaking Points, Majority Report, Drop Site News. I'm like, oh, this is such a Twitter thing. It's got 400,000 views on the YouTube video. And that's the reason why the Mike Rogers campaign has me go and be the only reporter with Christie Rogers because my Twitter is going to reach the same amount of people that Fox 2 would, is that right? Oh, I know about that. Yeah, no, maybe not. No, but the reason I say that is because your Twitter is really great. But I think what you have to see also, there's national news and there's local media. And I think the people, I don't know if you've seen this, but Pew Research Institute shows that more people trust local news media than they do the national press. And they do such a better job. The local news is doing such a better job right now. The reason Mike Rogers stopped by here today is not because he had nothing else to do too days before the election. He knew that it would get a lot of play. And not only are you doing the television, which is what we call linear audience, which is still a, you know, you have your 35, The 70-year-olds who are watching a lot of local news on linear TV. Then you have the streaming audience who's watching this, and that's the younger audience. And then you have the clips on the Fox 2 YouTube channel. So it's kind of a conversion of a lot of different media from the same brand. But your brand is very strong, and the reason you're standing with us right now is because you are. I appreciate that. You're just joining us as Sam Robinson. He's talking a lot about what... We've seen in the last few hours unfold a shocking surprise for a lot of people in the political world. I want you to take us through the next few days. What is it, in your mind, in terms of the ground game, that we're going to be seeing both from Rogers and El-Sayed? Well, you just heard Rana say that she expects Haley Stevens to actually appear again with Mike Rogers. I think that would be pretty noteworthy. We're going to see Mike Rogers around Metro Detroit. I've been trying to peel away black voters who might be, for whatever reason, hesitant to support Abdul El-Sayed. Maybe he's too far left. Maybe it's that, you know, they're Christian religious psychosis. Maybe they're racist. I hear all kinds of reasons that people who are reliable Democratic voters aren't going to line up for Abdul El-Sayed. And it's really interesting because on the other side, you know, you talk about the Hassan Piger controversy. Haley Stevens said today she has to stand up to hate, right? Stand up to what she feels like. I feel like a lot of Democrats, a lot of people who are in Metro Detroit, even some Republicans even, might say, man, the amount of Islamophobia that's on my television, like right after this segment, we're on the online now, but you know, you got your TVs on and you're hearing messages that are. It's insulting about a specific group of people. I don't think that's fair. No, and obviously not. I mean, you want to talk about policy and you want to talk about issues and you want to actually really hone down on stuff, but when people feel that there's a culture war that's brewing in their neighborhood, they take part in it sometimes inadvertently because they believe the things that are out there, again, on some of these channels. And there is racial tension in Detroit, metro Detroit neighborhoods. You know, we know. The narrative about the gas station and the liquor stores, I don't have to repeat it for the millionth time. However, you know, we do have great relationships, too. We do have interfaith, interracial. I mean, I know so many people. I have so many Muslim, black, Christian, interfaith marriages that have children together, people that are business owners. I was just at Amir Makhled. He's a regent candidate for the University of Michigan. His law firm in Dearborn is actually, you know, Owned among, with a legacy black Detroiter. You know, he hires black Detroiters. There is some unity in Metro Detroit's black and Arab community. It's not all negative. But Sam, I know it's not all, but, and again, I personally believe just. Most of my friends don't work in our industries, they're not politics people, they're not television people or media people, they're people who work in other businesses, and when I tell them things like, oh, there is a divide that people don't know about often who live in the suburbs between Arab Americans and some Arabs and black Americans, and they go, what do you mean? And. I don't think everyone knows. I think you know because you're out on the streets. You're out, your hand on the pulse. I think I know because I cover it. I get emails. I get calls. But the majority of people on the other side of the camera, I don't know if they know that. And what I think is noteworthy is that Abdul Al-Sayed told our own Josh Landon in an interview he did last week, Hey, you know what, Josh? I realize that people who look like me have often been not as kind to people who go to their gas stations and whatnot. He recognized that, and I think that was a really important move. Josh asked him about the... Attack against a black woman by a bunch of Arab men. Ned Zeke on Instagram. Isaiah Williams. Zeke Williams. You guys know him as the leader of New Era Detroit. Today, he made a statement because Dems for Rogers, a outside group that is spending money to say that Democratic voters in Michigan are going to swap and vote for the Republican candidate. They put up an ad featuring one of my videos featuring a video that included Zeke Williams himself. He said that he did not authorize the use of himself in this ad, that he is going to sue the blank. Out of this group. So I don't know about that. I don't know. Cease and desist. I kind of just let it go. But yeah, it's been a lot made about this conversation with the Arab kids. A bunch of them were teenagers. There were some men in there, too. But this poor black woman got attacked when she got in a car accident on the west side. And so, yeah, it is an ongoing conversation. Abdul condemned it and said that anyone who's bad like that. He's acknowledged it so well. I mean, Abdul knows our issues, right? He's the Wayne County Health Director, Detroit Health Director. He's a Rhodes Scholar, so you can imagine his ability to retain information is crazy. And when he talks about black issues, it's like to the level of... Somebody that you would think is in our community every day. But Mike Rogers said to me today that he just today had someone stop him and say, thank you for coming into our neighborhood, into our area. We recognize your presence here. That's also important for Rogers to do the same thing, the same outreach that Abdullah El-Sayed is doing. Yeah, they feel like they can peel away voters. And if Mike Rogers wants to win in this negative environment for Republicans, right? Gas is $5. The war in Iran is not popular. All right, so. Republicans all across the state face an uphill battle, John James, and in those down-ballot races, Democrats really feel like they could take back what they had in 2022 with a trifecta, right? You know, they could control all branches of government, the state House, state Senate, which they currently control, and the governor, attorney general, and secretary of state offices. Well, Sam.