Mallory McMorrow doesn’t claim to have all the answers for the Democratic Party. But as the 38-year-old Michigan Democrat gears up for a likely Senate run this month, she says generational change is needed — including at the leadership level.
In an interview with POLITICO Magazine, McMorrow, a state senator, said it wasn’t clear to her that Chuck Schumer could continue in his role as Senate minority leader, and that she would not vote for him as leader should she ultimately win a highly-contested primary and general election.
“I think it is” time for Schumer to step back, McMorrow said. “There’s still this idea that Democrats and Republicans are still abiding by the same rules and still believe in the same norms and systems and structure. There seems to be a lack of recognition that this is no longer the Republican Party. This is a MAGA party. And the same approach is not going to work.” (A Schumer spokesperson declined to comment.)
It’s not the first time McMorrow delivered a difficult message to someone she respected.
President Joe Biden had reached out to McMorrow in 2022, leaving the young lawmaker a congratulatory voicemail aftershe went viral with a speech responding to vicious, false attacks calling her a groomer.
But last July, days after Biden had self-immolated in his debate with Donald Trump and failed to clean up the performance in an interview with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, McMorrow sent a private letter to the president urging him to step down from the ticket — which was viewed by POLITICO Magazine and hasn’t been reported until now.
Biden’s argument for staying on, McMorrow wrote to him, “feels, sadly, like the rhetoric we are used to from Donald Trump, a man who tells us that he alone can do this, and anyone who dares challenge him must stand down or be destroyed.”
Now, as her political memoir Hate Won’t Win releases Tuesday, and ahead of a potential Senate run, McMorrow has some more advice for Democrats as they do battle with Trump.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Democrats have been struggling to find their footing since Donald Trump won in November. Is there an ideological shift that needs to take place?
I don’t know that it’s ideological, more just the approach. I think that what is very clear — was clear in 2024 throughout the election cycle, and even still now — is there are a lot of people who don’t know what Democrats stand for, and what Democrats can and will do for them in a way that gives them a vision of something that they want to vote for. That transcends political ideology, but it’s just back to basics. How do you approach this moment? How do you respond to a Trump presidency, and the fact that Elon Musk has access to basically all of the government, and they are very comfortable rapidly tearing it down?
I think it’s less ideological and more: Are you willing to fight for a future, and what is that future? And can you clearly articulate that to people?
The operative axis, you’re saying, revolves less around whether Democrats should move left or right, but around whether they should fight or accommodate?
Right. It’s fighting. Because right now, what people see is Donald Trump and Elon Musk and everybody who’s in there right now are more than comfortable paring down the government piece by piece. The checks and balances no longer exist. So you either fight for a future or you don’t. And that isn’t about whether a party moves left or right or center. It’s just, is there a future or not, and how do you fight for it?
As you’ve weighed a Senate campaign to replace Sen. Gary Peters, did you reach out to Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer at all for advice or input, or did he reach out to you?
No, we haven’t connected yet. We’ve reached out to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee to let them know that I was exploring. I’m somebody, every time that I’ve run for anything, I don’t like surprising people. I want them to know who I am and how to get a hold of me.
When did you reach out to the DSCC?
Quickly after Gary made his announcement that this was something I had always thought about as a next step in my future. I don’t think I knew that it would be this year. I think Gary surprised a lot of people and I think he surprised himself too on the decision, but I’m really proud both of [former Democratic Sen.] Debbie Stabenow and of Gary for showing what it looks like to come from a state where we’ve built up a great bench, and seeing the moment and recognizing when it’s time to step back and enjoy a retirement — something that I think is part of the American dream — that I wish more people in our party would model.
Is it clear to you that Schumer knows when to step aside?
I don’t think it is. And I think that what I’m seeing in elected leaders, frankly, in both parties, who it almost feels like stepping back is a sign of weakness and a failure. I don’t know if that is just the pressures of the job, but I think it’s a strength. I think it’s like anything: You work really hard, Chuck Schumer has dedicated his life to public service and fought a lot of really great fights, and it can be time to step back. And those things are not mutually exclusive.
Is it time for him to step back?
I think it is. There’s still this idea that Democrats and Republicans are still abiding by the same rules and still believe in the same norms and systems and structure. There seems to be a lack of recognition that this is no longer the Republican Party. This is a MAGA party. And the same approach is not going to work.
If you were elected to the Senate, would you vote for him to be the leader?
I would look for other leadership who understands that it’s a different moment. I have a tremendous amount of respect for Nancy Pelosi, who, similarly, while still in Congress, recognized it is time to have new leadership who can build up that muscle to respond to the moment.
Without getting into your possible Senate primary opponents, how do you see yourself as best positioned to win a primary and general?
This feels like a very unique moment where we have to reshape our party, and what it means to be a Democrat and what Democrats mean to people.
I’m very clear about the fact that polling shows that the Democratic Party is not popular right now, and there’s a massive disconnect between Donald Trump’s popularity now being under 50 percent and people increasingly being angry about the overreach of the second term, and not connecting that with the positive view of the Democratic Party. Both things are underwater, and that is a big red flag for me that signals the same Washington-based approach is not going to work in this moment.
I’ve built up my chops in the state legislature, but I’m not from Washington. I am an outsider who has built a name for myself or a perception of being able to cut through the noise and fight when we need to fight, and also work to deliver for people.
I leveraged that speech in 2022 and the attention and the spotlight not just to have 15 minutes of fame that I definitely didn’t want, but to use it and to raise millions of dollars for other state Senate candidates that helped us get the first Democratic trifecta in Michigan in 40 years, and then using that to deliver on policy like gun violence prevention and eliminating the retirement tax on seniors, and expanding preschool and child care and all of these things that we’ve been able to do here.
I think people are hungry for something like that, where it isn’t just going to be a Washington anointed candidate. It’s going to be somebody different who sounds different and acts different. And in a state like Michigan, maybe we reshape the party from this race and from this state.
Do you think that you could win a general election in Michigan where Trump won in November?
I do. I won a district in 2018 that my predecessor Republican [state] Senator Marty Knollenberg won by 16 points in 2014; I won by four. So we swung the district 20 points.
And there were certainly lifelong Republicans who maybe had never voted for a Democrat before and looked around at who Donald Trump was, and said, “That’s not my party, and we’re looking for something else.” I turned around in 2022 and won a D-plus-29 district and a Democratic primary. That’s now the bluest district in the state, and includes a significant portion of the city of Detroit. My approach has very broad appeal, because I don’t focus so much on where I fall in the political spectrum. I’m pragmatic and I’m practical, and I love people, and I get out there, and my approach is to try to be responsive to people, identifying what the issues are, figuring out what the solutions are, and then showing how we can get that done.
That’s an approach that I bring from my industrial design background that I feel is really lacking in politics and that people in a place like Michigan, where we make things, respond really positively to. So I feel optimistic going into a potential race, and a place where we’ve already seen some polling that if the election were held today, Kamala Harris would win.
But we also can’t forget that this is a state that, yes, elected Donald Trump and elected Elissa Slotkin. So there it is. Not one party over another. People want [someone] practical and pragmatic and solution oriented.
When we have talked over the years, you’ve been pretty optimistic about being part of the local state solution, being in a trifecta state for the first time since 1984. Three years later, now you’re looking at the U.S. Senate. Do you think Michigan Democrats under Gretchen Whitmer squandered the trifecta?
I think we learned a lot, all of us. We took both chambers and especially in the statehouse, 56 out of 110 members were brand new, not even to the majority, but brand new to the legislature.
I hope to continue to do so no matter what is on the horizon for me, and I think a lot about how do we continue to support staff? What we found and what we learned is staff were very new in figuring out how to run a committee and how to run a budget and how to prioritize and how to move legislative priorities. It was a lot, all at once with a very, very narrow, very fragile majority. Something that I would hope to do in stepping up to to a federal office is being a real partner in this work and understanding how the state budget process works, how the legislative process works, and being a real partner for candidates and for Democratic state-elected officials.
But do you think that Gov. Gretchen Whitmer used the trifecta to its fullest potential?
I think we can Tuesday morning quarterback a lot of things. We got a ton done. And, I think that here in Michigan, we’re really hard on ourselves. We came into office and at a very rapid pace, passed more legislation that benefits people that had been blocked for decades than I think anybody thought possible. Red flag laws. My first bill ever signed into law.
It took me five years to work on that, and we just got the first report back about how it’s functioned as a law for the first year, and it’s been used a little over 300 times. It has certainly saved lives. There are four incidents where it’s been used even with law enforcement officers who are in the midst of a mental health crisis with domestic abuse situations.
This is something that people were screaming for, asking for, for years and years and years that Republicans refused to take up and we got it done. Could we have done more? Especially serving in the Senate and looking at the Statehouse during lame duck, of course, but I think for me, rather than kind of point fingers and blame, I’m very forward thinking on what do we do when we get that trifecta back so that we keep delivering for people and we don’t lose it again.
Slotkin won Michigan. Kamala Harris did not. Why?
Kamala ran the best campaign she possibly could have, given the situation
I was at the airport hangar rally in Detroit, which is unlike anything I’d ever seen. Energy really was there. And when you look at the results, everything was so close. Donald Trump only won by 1.5 percent. It was very narrow. Elissa won by just about the same margin against Mike Rogers, but there was a vote drop off.
So one of the things that we saw happen, and I had people anecdotally tell me this, some people who are on Michigan State’s campus on Election Day saw young men, college students in MAGA hats who would show up and vote for Donald Trump and nothing else. So I think that we have to acknowledge Donald Trump is a very unique figure that voters here did not necessarily tie to the Republican Party because they weren’t voting for Republicans all the way down the ballot. They were voting for Donald Trump. So I hope that we don’t over course correct on lessons from 2024. I think that Democratic values and Democratic priorities, especially compared to the chaos that’s being unleashed by Donald Trump right now, are still popular with voters. We just have to be better messengers and better advocates for people
You sent a private letter to President Joe Biden after his debate disaster and his interview with George Stephanopoulos where you asked him to step down from the ticket. Why?
It was really hard to write, and it was a really hard decision. I have a tremendous amount of respect and gratitude for President Biden and his lifetime of public service, especially having gone through so much family pain and trauma, to use love and affection for this country, to dedicate his life to the country. That is true, and it remains true to this day.
But what I saw from the debate performance, and I think all of us have been through this with a family member who we love deeply, age does not discriminate. It happens to all of us. It will happen to me. It will happen to you. Even from the phone call that I had with him in 2022 to that debate performance, it sounded and looked like somebody completely different. And then the interview with George Stephanopoulos, I was so concerned that what I heard from Joe Biden didn’t sound like Joe Biden. To me, it sounded like Donald Trump, where he was saying, “I alone can do this, and I’m the only one who’s beaten Donald Trump and nobody else can step up.”
And as a Democrat, that didn’t sound like a Democrat to me, we are a big tent party. We are a party that is a team. We work together, especially in a state like Michigan, where we have Gretchen Whitmer and Dana Nessel and Jocelyn Benson and this Democratic trifecta that we had, we show people that we work together and we work as a team.
Once I heard that, I felt it was important to do what I could. At the same time, I also didn’t think it was good for for Democrats or for the country, for me to air that publicly, because if he decided he was going to run again, me publicly expressing my disagreement with that decision would do nothing but add to media, news and clicks and stories, but wouldn’t help the cause of supporting the team. I had constituents asking me to reach out and call the president. I knew that I had contacts in the campaign, and maybe if I sent this in, that somebody would read it and care. So that’s what I did.
You came to national prominence fighting the culture wars. Do you think Democrats have lost the culture wars to Republicans?
Not yet. We haven’t lost the war, maybe a battle. We’ve lost the battle. I don’t think we’ve lost the war.
Throughout history, there has always been a scapegoat, and nothing about that is different. Now, whether it’s in Nazi Germany with Jews, whether it’s the pushback against desegregation and unwillingness to integrate our schools, to attacks on the LGBTQ community.
What’s been frustrating for me is I think Republicans are very good at setting traps, and Democrats too often take the bait. One of the reasons I think that my 2022 speech resonated the way that it did, in that speech, yes, it was responding to an attack that is typically leveled against LGBTQ people, but that’s not what I talked about in my speech at all. I talked about growing up in the Catholic Church, and I talked about my mom, and I talked about service and said very plainly, “People who are different are not the reason why health care costs are too high or why their roads are in disrepair.” And it was being able to see the trap and blow it up and call it out as the bullshit that it is, that, I think, is what resonated. Because it framed the issue in a way that 99 percent of people can relate to, because I talked about everyday issues, and the fact that the attention on such a small portion of our population was not doing anything to solve these issues.
Democrats too often take the bait and are having the debate Republicans want us to have, instead of pointing out that for all of the time and energy — these executive orders, these bills that are being introduced, the bill signing on girls and sports — none of that actually does anything to improve most people’s lives, and it’s just another scapegoat.
If culture is upstream from politics, how can Democrats win back cultural cache where it most matters?
That’s real. Democrats have to start being unafraid to go everywhere and meeting people where they are. No, I don’t think the answer is just to go on Joe Rogan because it’s Joe Rogan, but a lot of people listen to Joe Rogan. Instead of snubbing your nose at those people, which is the perception that a lot of people have of Democrats, is that we’re elitist and we’re academic, and we look down on people who don’t watch traditional Hollywood movies or engage in mainstream media — that’s the perception, and that’s why people are turning against Democrats. You have to be willing to go into spaces that may feel a little bit uncomfortable, and be willing to have maybe three-hour long podcast conversations, or go into a dive bar or go into a bowling alley.
I know authenticity is overused, but I think it’s true. People have really good bullshit detectors. They can tell when you’re giving talking points and you’re trying to be buttoned up. And this is a moment where I think people want to vote for people that they like and people that they trust, and they’re not going to like you or trust you if they don’t feel like they know who you are, and that’s much bigger than just your job or your title.
That’s why I’m so open about talking about being a mom and what I’m doing with [my daughter] Noa, and that I have ADHD, I say that in public in front of people. I said this at my book event, and I had multiple people thank me, because they don’t hear people talk about having divergent brains in public.
Just be yourself and go and find the communication tools to be yourself in front of as many people as possible.
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