Haley Stevens endorses the Republican rival to her own party's Senate nominee, who wins anyway and becomes first Muslim senator.

…(cont) Step two, if there is one. The Michigan congresswoman who lost that primary to the man Manchin was talking about endorsed the Republican herself. Not a shrug, not a no comment — a video, posted on the eve of the election, which The Guardian called "an extraordinary rebuke of her party's nominee." Her fiancé had already gone on record the same week saying he was voting for Rogers too. What's a person supposed to do with that, if they're the one keeping the folder?

Step three. October 31st, the nominee she wouldn't endorse asked her, through reporters, to stop coming to his own campaign events. "I don't want any distractions," he said. Does that read like distance, or does it read like the opposite of distance?

That's as far as I'd gotten before the mechanic came out from under the car, wiping his hands, and asked me to finish it, because he wanted to know how it turned out. Here's how it turned out. The Associated Press called the race shortly after 2:25 Wednesday morning — after, not by, I checked it twice. Michigan elected its first Muslim senator. In Detroit he thanked, by his own count, "everybody who knocked a door, made a call, sent a dollar, posted a story," and said they'd given him "your stake in democracy." He said the race was about "money out of politics." That same Wednesday's reporting said tens of millions in outside spending, including an AIPAC-linked super PAC, had gone to the other side of that same race.

The mechanic wanted one more thing before I paid him for the belt: if the sitting congresswoman spent the last six days of the race telling Michigan not to trust its own nominee, and the nominee won it before three in the morning anyway, what exactly was all that for? I told him I had the folder, not the answer. He said that's usually how it works. I still owe him for the belt.