As she sometimes
does, Mallory McMorrow sighed and paused just a beat to think before responding
to a blunt question with a pointed answer. Now that President Donald Trump’s
minions have arrested a Wisconsin judge in his crackdown on immigration, what
does McMorrow make of Trump’s increasing intimidation?
“It’s
scary,” said McMorrow, a charismatic 38-year-old state senator in Michigan who
is running for her state’s open U.S. Senate seat in the 2026 midterm election.
“I mean, every day, the decisions that he makes are scary. There is supposed to
be a separation of powers, and this is just Project 2025 come to life.”
McMorrow
said this on a recent Sunday morning in Plymouth, Michigan, in western Wayne
County, outside Detroit, where she gave a pep talk to young Democratic
staffers. Put out by the Heritage Foundation, Project 2025 outlined Trump’s
second-term blueprint even as he denied knowing about it.
At the
Democratic National Convention last summer, McMorrow was given a plum
assignment by the organizers: She was the first of four speakers on the
convention’s successive nights to try to impress upon the audience the dangers
of Project 2025. So, that Monday night, she carried on stage a massive mockup
of the Heritage book. Surprised by its size—she’d used a smaller book in
rehearsal—McMorrow said the prop weighed at least 30 pounds and she balanced it
on her hip the way she carries her four-year-old daughter. After slamming the
big book on the lectern, McMorrow spoke with prescience to the largest live
audience she’d ever faced.
“If Donald
Trump gets back into the White House, he’s going to fire civil servants, like
intelligence officers, engineers, and even federal prosecutors if he decides
that they don’t serve his personal agenda,” McMorrow predicted. “They’re
talking about replacing the entire federal government with an army of loyalists
who answer only to Donald Trump. Under Project 2025, Donald Trump would be able
to weaponize the Department of Justice to go after political opponents. He
could even turn the FBI into his own, personal police force.” You could say she
threw the book at him. Much of what she predicted has come to pass in Trump’s
first 100-plus days.
Now, with
the retirements of Democratic senators Gary Peters, 66, in Michigan and Dick
Durbin, 80, in Illinois, the Democratic Party may be nearing a generational
transition, at least in this neck of the woods.
And McMorrow
is not the only relatively youthful female candidate on the Democratic side.
Also vying for the nomination is Haley Stevens, 41, a fourth-term member of the
U.S. House of Representatives.
Compared to
McMorrow, Stevens is a centrist and an experienced Washington veteran. Filling
the progressive lane are McMorrow, in her second, four-year term in the state
capital of Lansing, and Abdul El-Sayed, 40, a former Wayne County health
director and TNR contributor, who ran for governor in 2018. A fourth possibility might be Joe Tate,
44, an African American who served as the speaker in the Michigan House before
Republicans took the majority last year.
On the
Republican side, the one declared candidate is Mike Rogers, a former congressman
who narrowly lost last year to Democrat Elissa Slotkin to fill the U.S. Senate
seat vacated by the retiring Debbie Stabenow, 75.
Although
less experienced than some primary rivals, McMorrow may be the most dynamic
presence, both in person and before television cameras. She speaks with
confidence and passion in a controlled tone that varies in the low register and
in volume but does not scold, as some Democrats are accused of doing. In some
ways, McMorrow’s style resembles that of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in terms
of her relative youth, her make-no-apologies speaking style, and her view of
Trump.
McMorrow has
long, red hair that she usually wears down, over her shoulders. Her skinny-fit
physique is that of a dedicated runner who trains three to five miles every day
to run in half-marathons. (She also goes on women’s yoga retreats.) But her
words carry weight, and she offered several heavy observations in an interview
in a coffee shop near Woodward Avenue in her Eighth District, which includes
several of Detroit’s northern suburbs in Oakland County. When asked about AOC, who
is touring with Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and hearing cheers from
progressives, McMorrow offered only limited praise.
“There’s
obviously a ton of energy they are bringing to the events, but what’s the
sustained power?” she said. “I would love to see them figure out how do we
actually leverage that power so that when they leave a stop there is sustained
energy.” McMorrow has often said time and money are best spent on humble local
races and not on national celebrities.
Of the
Democratic Party at large, she said, “We’ve kind of microtargeted ourselves to
death. So, if you’re a woman, you must care about abortion. If you’re Latino,
you must care about immigration.” Her party, she said, tried to “patchwork all
these policy ideas together and it didn’t have an over-arching vision” in last
year’s campaign. “The Democratic Party, too often, treats people like you need
it more than it needs you. The MAGA movement is successful because it treats
people like it needs them. I want to get back to a place where we’re not
patronizing to people.”
She said she
understands Trump’s success and why some see Democrats as out of touch. “What
Donald Trump has done really well is tap into people’s very rightful anger with
a system that has not worked for them,” McMorrow said. “What he’s done is
convince you it’s someone else’s fault. I think that microtargeting of policies
is almost an oversimplification of people. And I also want to make sure we’re
not just adding to the noise. I don’t think we need a Nancy Mace of the
Democratic Party.”
McMorrow
said she understands and feels empathy for the concerns of both the middle-aged
and the middle class. “I come at this being a millennial, having graduated from
college right into the middle of the recession, having tens of thousands of
dollars of loan debt, no health care, and I applied to hundreds of jobs,” she
said. “I talk to way too many people my age who would love to start a family
but just can’t afford it. And it’s too expensive to save for retirement . . .
People right now are just feeling helpless and want to feel like they have
agency in their own future.”
She also
listens to older generations who remember better days for her state’s economy
and prestige. “I had a lot of residents in my district saying ‘You remind me a
lot of my daughter who left and went to New York or Denver or Cincinnati,’’’
McMorrow said. “‘What can you do to bring my kids back?’”
As
Democratic whip in the Michigan Senate, McMorrow led the 2024 enactment of
Michigan’s Red Flag law, which allows authorities, with permission of a judge, to
take guns from a person thought to be a danger to themselves or to others.
Calling the recent mass shooting at Florida State University “just another day
in America,” McMorrow added: “I’m going to be leaning in very heavily on ending
gun violence.”
Among her
political motivations, McMorrow cited the first election of Trump in 2016 as
having filled her with “a sense of existential dread. I just felt so powerless.
Frankly, you get to a point where you wish somebody else would fix it. And then
you realize: Why isn’t anybody else fixing it? And I guess if nobody else is
going to fix it, why not me?”
McMorrow’s
current book—Hate Won’t Win—is more candid than most campaign
autobiographies. Subtitled “Find Your Power & Leave This Place Better Than
You Found it,” she chronicles sexual harassment from a fellow state senator in
her first year during a break in a class about—yes, really—sexual harassment.
“(My) body
entered fight-or-flight mode desperately seeking escape,” she writes of her
encounter with Peter Lucido, who is now the Macomb County prosecutor. “Grasping
my hand tight enough to indicate he didn’t want me going anywhere . . . he
pulled back slightly and looked me up and down, still holding both my hand and
low back. `I can see why,’ Lucido told me with a smirk after I’d felt his eyes
assess every inch of my body and score me in his mind like a purebred at a dog
show.”
Three years
later, McMorrow drew national attention after a fellow female state senator—a
Republican named Lana Theis—ridiculed McMorrow’s defense of sex education in
public schools as well as her support for LGBTQ rights and for teaching
accurate facts about the racial history of the United States. In campaign
literature, Theis wrote: “Progressive social media trolls like Senator Mallory
McMorrow (D-Snowflake) . . . are outraged they can’t teach, can’t groom and
sexualize kindergarteners or that 8-year-olds are responsible for slavery.”
McMorrow’s powerful
Senate-floor response went instantly viral. “I am the biggest threat to your
hollow, hateful scheme,” McMorrow said to Theis without naming her. “You are
targeting marginalized kids. You dehumanize and marginalize me. You say `She’s
a groomer. She supports pedophilia. She wants children to believe they were
responsible for slavery and to feel bad about themselves because they’re
white.’”
Instead of
conceding the moral high ground to the “evangelicals” of the religious right,
McMorrow stressed her Catholic faith and said her mother sometimes missed
Sunday mass to work instead at a soup kitchen. Christianity, McMorrow said,
means serving the community, not just filling up a pew one day per week. “So
who am I?” McMorrow asked in her speech. “I am a straight, white, Christian,
married suburban mom . . . Call me whatever you want. We will not let hate
win.”
Reflecting
on the overwhelmingly positive national reaction to her Senate speech in the
coffee shop interview, McMorrow said: “The reason that speech resonated was I
was able to puncture through the culture wars.”
McMorrow
grew up in Whitehouse, New Jersey, before heading out to Indiana for college
and graduating from Notre Dame. She worked in industrial product design, with a
passion for automobiles. Ray Wert, the then-editor of Jalopnik, a website about
car culture, ran a story about her when, he said, “She designed a concept car
that was carved out of clay live on stage at the L.A. Auto show.” After Wert
took a high-ranking job at Gawker, he reconnected with McMorrow at a San Diego
convention for Comic-Con. “I didn’t know whether to hire her or marry her,”
Wert said in a telephone interview. So he did both.
In that they
are both auto buffs, McMorrow said Wert won her hand with an offer she couldn’t
refuse. “My husband proposed to me with a 2014 Cadillac CTSU Wagon,” she said. “It
was one of two, in blue, with red brake calipers with a manual transmission. So
it was rare.” He offered her a package deal. “It was, `Look at this car,’” she
recalled. “‘Will you marry me?’”
They were
wed in 2017. Although they lived in both Los Angeles and New York, both said
McMorrow urged them to settle down in Michigan, Wert’s home state, where he now
works as vice-president for communications and marketing for Radiant Nuclear, a
company that builds micro reactors.
Among other things, McMorrow said she was charmed by the state when she
and her husband visited it each summer, joining fellow travelers for 1,000-mile
road rallies around The Mitten. They bought a house in Royal Oak, a suburb north
of Detroit, to raise their daughter, Noa.
That name is
Israeli, McMorrow said, and her husband is Jewish. She acknowledged the irony
of living in a suburb famously remembered as home of “The Radio Priest,” Father
Charles Coughlin, who preached anti-Semitism over the air to a national
audience in the 1930s. Back then, McMorrow said, she and Wert probably could
not have bought a home in Royal Oak because of their mixed marriage. Now, she
said, they observe both Passover and Easter and teach their daughter to be
open-minded.
“I was very
nervous for many years to talk about my religious upbringing,” McMorrow said.
“My relationship with Catholicism is complicated, like a lot of people’s is. On
top of that, I’m married to a Jewish man. But I realized when we don’t talk
about it, we leave the vacuum for Republicans to really have a monopoly on
religion.”
McMorrow
said she raised a million dollars on the day of her announcement, with
donations from all 50 states and all 83 counties in Michigan. “What I am most
proud of,” she added, “is that it was from more than 12,000 individual donors.
The response is incredible. People are reaching out from all over the state.”
Her campaign
theme, thus far, is “The New American Dream” because, she said, “I think about
that as a direct counter to ‘Make America Great Again,’ this idea that we can
go backwards. We can’t go back to the past.”
One of the
lessons she learned from the last election, she said, is that “it is not enough
to be anti-Donald Trump. What I heard from voters is `We know who he is. We
don’t know what you stand for or what you’re going to do for us.’” In that
Trump’s troops are now capturing immigrants with no due process and imprisoning
them in foreign countries while verbally attacking many judges, McMorrow vowed
to campaign in part on “fundamental civil rights. You will not be targeted and
discriminated against or sent to a foreign prison because of who you are.”
Reflecting
on Trump’s executive orders and other shock waves emanating from the White
House, McMorrow said the best way to fight back is not to complain to each
other in social media silos but rather to get out, organize and work. “For too
long, too many of us took for granted that the framework of the country and the
Constitution itself would protect it,” she said. “But they are just words on
paper. If we don’t actively participate, we’ve seen it (the Constitution) is
not going to protect itself.”
The post Mallory McMorrow Wants Power—and Yes, That Is a Good Thing appeared first on New Republic.
