Mallory McMorrow is the best candidate in Michigan’s Senate primary
Haley Stevens doesn’t think Democrats should be doing big things and that is the wrong strategy for winning elections
The Democratic Senate primary in Michigan is probably the most interesting primary race in the country. Some primaries are big multi-candidate fields; some are hotly contested two way races. But the Michigan race has three legitimate candidates running:
Rep. Haley Stevens, the Schumer-backed candidate who has received major support from the crypto industry, AIPAC, Wall Street, and Pharma
Abdul El-Sayed, the candidate backed by the Bernie Sanders wing of the party (including Bernie himself)
Mallory McMorrow, who galvanized progressives across the country with her anti-hate speech in the Michigan legislature in 2022.
The polls have gone up and down, lately Stevens and El-Sayed have led the field, but a pro-McMorrow super-PAC just got a big new surge of money, so I expect this race will be competitive right down to the end.
The candidate who I think is least likely to win what will be a very competitive general election is Stevens. She is your classic establishment Democrat, with a mushy message, careful not to be too populist, so that she doesn’t offend all her big business donors. But the biggest problem with Stevens is that she doesn’t want to think big in terms of solving the real problems people have right now.
Stevens called me a while back to ask me for money. I like money calls, because it allows you to have conversations with candidates and really hear their best pitch. She volunteered the observation that Democrats should not be looking to do big things right now. She said we need to be modest in our policy goals: “not try to pass big programs like Social Security.”
I think Congresswoman Stevens is deeply wrong on that topic. It is those Democrats who lack ambition to make working-class voters’ lives better in a big way that give the Democratic Party its weak brand problem. Voters want seriously lower drug prices and health costs; they want corporate monopolies broken up; they want the cost of housing, utilities, gas, groceries, and child care to go way down. And you know what: not only would voters be glad to see politicians pass big ambitious legislation like Social Security again, they would like see Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid benefits expanded.
I like the other two candidates a lot: they are both strong progressives running on a pro-working families, anti-big money agenda. But in the end, I have come to believe McMorrow has the best chance to win. She is the only one of the three who has over-performed in a historically Republican district. Michigan has a great affinity for women candidates, they have elected a lot of them over the years, and the swing voters in the state tend to be women — both middle and upper middle income suburbanites and working-class White women in small and medium Factory Towns throughout the state. I suspect both of those demographic groupings would be more drawn to McMorrow than to El-Sayed.
This is such an important race in our party’s battle to win over the Senate. We have to hold our swing state Senate seats. We need to have our best candidate on the ballot this November. Please give what you can.