Michigan State Sen. Mallory McMorrow warns DNC about Project 2025
Michigan State Sen. Mallory McMorrow brought a giant copy of Project 2025 to warn the 2024 National Democratic Convention about the Republican policy agenda.
- Michigan State Senator Mallory McMorrow announced her candidacy for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by retiring Democrat Gary Peters.
- McMorrow gained national attention in 2022 for her passionate defense of marginalized groups against Republican attacks.
- McMorrow’s fundraising ability and national profile could make her a strong contender in the race.
State Sen. Mallory McMorrow, a Royal Oak Democrat who flipped a GOP district in 2018 and once went viral for a speech she made, announced Wednesday she’s running for Michigan’s open U.S. Senate seat next year.
Her entry into the race — which she has teased in recent days on cable TV as she spoke about her book, “Hate Won’t Win: Find Your Power and Leave This Place Better Than You Found It,” in which she extols people to remain politically active — gives the race to replace retiring Democratic U.S. Sen. Gary Peters its first major candidate, one who can both raise substantial amounts of money and has developed a national brand as a passionate voice for her party.
“Michigan is beautiful,” said McMorrow, 38, an industrial designer who moved into the state years ago after making regular vacation visits. She lives in southeast Michigan with her husband, Ray Wert, a journalist who also worked on former Gov. Jennifer Granholm’s staff, and their daughter. “I’ve just never lived anywhere else that has so much going for it. … And as I look into 2026, we have to have a positive vision.”
McMorrow kicks off a race that could be a crowded one. While Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and former U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg are two high-profile Democrats who have passed on a run for the Senate seat, U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens, of Birmingham; U.S. Rep. Kristen McDonald Rivet, of Bay City; former state House Speaker Joe Tate, of Detroit, and Abdul El-Sayed, who announced he’s stepping down as Wayne County health director on Tuesday, are among those considering a run. Democratic State Attorney General Dana Nessel has also been mentioned as a possible candidate. Republicans considering a run include former U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers, of White Lake, who lost a close election to new U.S. Sen. Elissa Slotkin last year; U.S. Rep. Bill Huizenga, of Holland Township, and former Republican gubernatorial nominee Tudor Dixon, who is also considering another run for governor in 2026.
No Republican nominee has won a U.S. Senate race in Michigan since 1994, when Spencer Abraham was elected to a single term, but Rogers came closer than any in that time last year when he lost to Slotkin by about three-tenths of 1 percentage point, some 19,006 votes.
McMorrow told the Free Press on Tuesday that she’s not interested in a race that focuses only on the chaos she says President Donald Trump and his administration are sowing in Washington but on accentuating Michigan’s advantages and working to improve conditions for its residents after decades of economic struggles.
McMorrow recalled how, after researching online how best to run for a seat following Trump’s first election in 2016 and defeating Republican former state Sen. Marty Knollenberg in the 2018 election, voters she met at their doors told her “You remind me a lot of my daughter who left and went to name-the-place” and “What can we do to bring my kids back?”
“I’m going to be leaning into that story,” she said. “This idea that I’m calling the New American Dream as a direct counter to (Trump’s) Make America Great Again. I think Michigan voters were willing to vote for Donald Trump not because they liked him but because of this idea of going back to a time when we were great is a great vision.
“Yes, we’re going to be very critical of Donald Trump and (senior adviser) Elon Musk because I firmly believe that people did not vote for the chaos that we are seeing them unleash,” she said. “But that’s also not enough. … We want to lay out a vision of building what’s next, acknowledging that the status quo did not work for people and it’s on us to build something new.”
McMorrow’s campaign on Wednesday also released a video, however, which clearly indicated that a reaction to Trump will be part of her message, as it begins with a series of news clips detailing the administration’s attempts to slash government. It then shows McMorrow calmly saying, “There are moments that will break you. This is not that moment. This moment will challenge us. … If it all feels like too much, that’s their plan.”
The video then goes on to chart her political rise, first by beating Knollenberg — whose father, the late U.S. Rep. Joe Knollenberg, Peters coincidentally defeated for an Oakland County-based congressional seat in 2008 prior to being elected to the Senate — and her much-talked about response in April 2022 to a social media claim by state Sen. Lana Theis, R-Brighton.
Theis claimed McMorrow and two other Democrats who walked out on an invocation by Theis in the state Senate in which she prayed to defend children from LGTBQ+ books and teachings regarding white supremacy, were “outraged they can’t teach can’t groom and sexualize kindergartners or that 8-year-olds are responsible for slavery.”
McMorrow, in a five-minute speech, excoriated Theis and Republicans, passionately refusing to back down or accept GOP framing of the debate, explaining how her own values led her to defend marginalized groups.
“I am the biggest threat to your hollow, hateful scheme. Because you can’t claim that you are targeting marginalized kids in the name of ‘parental rights’ if another parent is standing up to say no,” the Free Press reported McMorrow saying at the time, as she occasionally looked directly at Theis.
“You say, ‘She’s a groomer. She supports pedophilia. She wants children to believe that they were responsible for slavery and to feel bad about themselves because they’re white,'” the speech continued.
“I am a straight, white, Christian, married, suburban mom who knows that the very notion that learning about slavery or redlining or systemic racism somehow means that children are being taught to feel bad or hate themselves because they are white is absolute nonsense,” McMorrow said. “No child alive today is responsible for slavery. No one in this room is responsible for slavery. But each and every single one of us bears responsibility for writing the next chapter of history … we are not responsible for the past. We also cannot change the past. We can’t pretend that it didn’t happen, or deny people their very right to exist.”
At a time when some Democratic pundits were beginning to recognize that so-called “wokeness” might be a political problem for the party, McMorrow, said strategist James Carville, was “enormously effective.” It led to her becoming a regular on cable TV, a speaking slot at the 2024 Democratic National Convention and more. She was able to raise some $2.7 million to help Democrats in state legislative races, becoming a key player in Michigan’s 2022 elections that saw the party recapture the state House and Senate for the first time in nearly four decades.
If McMorrow is able to bring that fundraising acumen and political passion to the Senate race, she will be a formidable candidate, even if the Democratic field is a crowded one. But several of those other Democrats mentioned could also be strong in their own right: Stevens for one, is a political powerhouse, an able campaigner and veteran fundraiser who has won several tough races, including flipping a Republican-leaning district in 2018.
Asked why she decided to enter the race for U.S. Senate versus running for governor next year, as she was also considering, McMorrow said she believes she can “best represent and deliver for Michigan” as a legislator.
“I’ve learned how to legislate in the minority. I’ve learned how to legislate in the majority,” she said and her campaign has already touted her status as the first woman to become Senate majority whip in Michigan history, as well as her efforts to strengthen union rights, increase wages, eliminate taxes on seniors and repeal the state’s 1931 abortion ban.
She made clear, though, that while she opposes the Trump administration’s methods of going about cutting government, some of its stated goals aren’t necessarily misguided. “I don’t think anybody would argue that we don’t need to root out fraud and make sure that things work,” she said, noting the billions spent by the Biden administration in the name of expanding broadband access and bringing semiconductor production back to the U.S. that have taken too long to show progress to Michigan.
“I think for too long Democrats have been celebrating the process of government without the oversight of, ‘Is this actually doing what it’s intended to do,’ and if not, what do we need to do differently,” she said. “It’s very necessary to lay out an alternative vision that does acknowledge, yes, the status quo did not work. It wasn’t working. A lot of the promises were not executed on, but that doesn’t mean you just slash and burn and take a chainsaw to it.”
Contact Todd Spangler: [email protected]. Follow him on Twitter@tsspangler.