Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow is jumping into the race to replace retiring Democratic Sen. G Peters, planting her flag in what’s expected to become one of the highest-profile Senate races of the 2026 midterms.
McMorrow, a Democrat, made the announcement Wednesday morning in a direct-to-camera video that evokes the breakneck pace of news out of the Trump administration, telling supporters that “there are moments that will break you. This is not that moment.”
“They want to make you feel powerless, but you are not powerless,” she says in the video, evoking her 2018 state Senate victory over a Republican incumbent, her viral speech forcefully pushing back against a Republican colleague’s attacks, and recent Democratic electoral and legislative successes in the state.
Her announcement video also features a heavy dose of not just President Donald Trump but also billionaire CEO Elon Musk.
“There’s a lot of fear and anger and uncertainty right now about people in power who, frankly, have no business being there. So you know what won’t fix it? The same old crap out of Washington,” she adds.
A handful of state senators have made the jump straight to the U.S. Senate in recent years, including Joni Ernst, R-Iowa, and an Illinois Democrat by the name of Barack Obama. But McMorrow — who gained a measure of national prominence thanks to that viral speech in 2022 — is stepping into what is likely to be the toughest election of her life.
It’s unclear who will join her: McMorrow is the first major candidate to officially jump into the race to succeed Peters, but a host of other Democrats are considering running, including Reps. Kristen McDonald Rivet and Haley Stevens, while Attorney General Dana Nessel said this year she hadn’t ruled a Senate bid out. On the Republican side, former Rep. Mike Rogers, the 2024 Senate nominee who narrowly lost last year, has been floating a bid along with a handful of other prominent Republicans in the state.
Faced with the prospect of running statewide against candidates with more federal electoral experience, McMorrow doubled down on her call for a new generation in Washington in an interview ahead of her launch.
She pointed to her experience in Lansing and her work helping to elect Democrats across the state and argued that as a millennial, she is running a campaign to push “the message of ‘The New American Dream’ as a direct counter to ‘Make America Great Again,’ the idea that you should be able to afford the life you wanted if you’ve done everything right.”
“One of the things that I’m really excited about in this campaign is to show a very different example, because I’m not from Washington,” McMorrow said, pointing to the “strong track record” she and Democrats in the Legislature have had in recent years on issues like reproductive health and abortion-rights protections.
“Yes, we need not only a new generation of leadership, but a new generation of Democrats who, when they get power, are actually going to do the things they said they’re going to do,” she said.
McMorrow hasn’t thought just about how she’ll position herself in a competitive race. She has thought hard about the challenges the Democratic Party faces after it lost the presidential election.
She said voters repeatedly made it clear they didn’t “know what the Democrats stood for and why they would affirmatively vote for Democrats” when she campaigned for Vice President Kamala Harris last year, adding that voters really understood only that the party was “anti-Trump.”
Throughout the interview, she repeatedly called for the Democratic Party’s elder leaders to step aside and let a new generation step up, saying her party has been worse off because of its inability to pass the torch: “We are not bringing in new ideas and a new approach and a new mix of people in a way that has really hurt us.”
That sentiment led her to announce before she launched her campaign that she wouldn’t vote for Democratic Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York to continue as the party’s Senate leader in 2027 if she’s elected. (She also acknowledged she sent then-President Joe Biden a private letter asking him to step aside as a presidential candidate last year, as Politico reported last week.)
In her interview with NBC News, McMorrow stressed that her position on Schumer is “not a personal knock at all” and that it isn’t specifically over a disagreement with his decision to support a GOP-authored spending measure to avoid a government shutdown.
Instead, she disagreed with what she characterized as Schumer’s slow-and-steady strategy (he said on NBC News’ “Meet the Press” that “by 2026, the Republicans in the House and Senate will feel like they’re rats on a sinking ship because we have gone after Trump”).
McMorrow criticized “the idea that we’re just going to wait and get them in the midterms, instead of recognizing that Donald Trump has completely remade this party and the priority of the MAGA party is to burn the government and institutions down and to dismantle it piece by piece.”
“And that is not the same reality that, I think, President Biden and Sen. Schumer have spent most of their life operating in. So, you know, I don’t even think it’s necessarily anybody’s fault.”
But McMorrow is careful not to hold Democrats across different levels of government to the same standard. Asked about Michigan Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer’s approach to Trump — Whitmer is one of the few Democratic governors who has met with Trump, even as she vocally disagrees with his tariff plans — McMorrow said she is under different pressure from other Democrats.
“We’ve seen Trump withhold funding and threaten other governors who dare to speak out against him just for personal vengeance. I don’t want to speak for the governor, but what it feels like she is doing is making sure that she does not, through her own personality and personal feelings, say or do anything that’s going to cause him to seek vengeance on her by hurting the residents of the state of Michigan,” McMorrow said.
McMorrow announced her campaign about a week after she released her new book, one that’s part a politician’s memoir and part a guide for Democrats looking to become more politically engaged.
In it, she repeatedly invokes her 2022 speech (“The Speech,” she calls it), in which she pushed back against Republican attacks declaring that she is “a straight, white, Christian, married, suburban mom” who wants “every kid to feel seen, heard and supported — not marginalized and targeted because they are not straight, white and Christian.”
“People who are different are not the reason that our roads are in bad shape after decades of disinvestment or that health care costs are too high or that teachers are leaving the profession,” she added.
Three years later, there are deep divisions among Democrats about transgender issues, particularly when it comes to participation in sports, after Republicans launched a bevy of ads attacking Democrats over their support for transgender people. Prominent Democrats like California Gov. Gavin Newsom have sided against allowing transgender girls to participate in women’s sports, and polling in recent years tends to show a majority of Americans agree.
McMorrow said that “sports should be safe and fair, and the right governing body to make those decisions is the governing body of the sport itself. This is not a role where politicians should be involved,” warning that GOP attempts to police transgender participation in women’s sports could mean girls who do not “look or sound feminine enough based on somebody’s subjective opinion” could be “subject to genital exams to play sports.”
“There is a massive difference between running cross country and, let’s say, D-1 [Division I] rugby or chess or e-sports, because that’s another conversation that’s come up. I don’t mean to be deflective, but that’s why I say that the sport’s governing body is the best place to make these decisions in a way that recognizes that, depending on when an individual may have transitioned, maybe there is a biological advantage, maybe there isn’t. Is that fair? That is not a place for me to decide or politicians in Washington to decide,” she said.
More broadly, McMorrow argued that the debate illustrates her party’s messaging issues. She wrote in her book that progressive activists’ “well-intentioned” ideas of using “inclusive language” like “birthing persons” can be counterproductive if the ultimate goal is to enact policy to support the LGBTQ community.
She said in the interview: “We have to talk to 99% of people, which means language that they understand, using examples that they understand, because you need a majority of people on your side to have the votes to move the policy that you want to move that gets to the end goal.
“I want to have the fight on my own terms, and I refuse to let Republicans paint me into a corner on the fight they want me to have,” she added.
