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.”
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