Rising Star Mallory McMorrow Tells Democrats to Leave the 'Bulls***' Behind

In the aftermath of George Floyd's murder, a photo of Democratic members of Congress went viral. In it, then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, among others, took a knee in the Capitol while wearing African kente cloths.

That image, and the efforts behind it to address racism in America, is everything wrong with the party, according to one of it rising stars.

"That's not the way to respond," Michigan state Senator Mallory McMorrow told Newsweek in a Friday interview. "I don't know that I've spoken to anybody who says, 'Yes, I'm so glad they did that. I feel seen.'"

At 38 years old, McMorrow is a fresh face in a political world that's often likened to a gerontocracy. But that's not the only thing that makes her a rarity. For a party that has struggled again and again with its messaging, McMorrow is known as an extremely effective communicator.

That skill is what landed her on the stage of the Democratic National Convention last summer, where she appeared with a comically enlarged copy of the conservative blueprint known as "Project 2025." It is also what got her invited to the Gridiron Club Dinner two years prior, in December 2022, where she became the first state lawmaker to speak at the event since Barack Obama did almost two decades before.

And it's propelled her into the race for Michigan's U.S. Senate seat, which she confirmed to Newsweek on Friday that she is "very seriously" considering entering.

A Viral Beginning

But before all of that was the speech that put her on the map. It was a speech that earned her a congratulatory call from then-President Joe Biden, was retweeted by the likes of Hillary Clinton, and brought Michigan Democrats a windfall of $2.35 million in fundraising — ultimately helping them flip the state Senate for the first time since 1984 (making it the first time Democrats have wrested control of the chamber since McMorrows been alive).

In 2022, after a Republican state senator accused her of trying to "groom and sexualize kindergartners" in a fundraising email, McMorrow addressed those claims directly on the Senate floor in Michigan.

"I am a straight, white, Christian, married, suburban mom," she said in her speech.

McMorrow told Newsweek the reason she identified herself the way she did was not to get her point across to the people who had already been advocating for LGBTQ youth rights, it was to get it across to people like her — "white, suburban, middle-class moms" — and to tell them, "We do not have to do this. There is another way. We do not have to attack people who are different than us to get ahead."

'A Popularity Contest'

For Democrats who want to recreate her success, McMorrow says it's time to give up the gimmicks, like the Kente cloths.

"People are really attuned to bulls---, and they can sniff it out pretty quickly," she said, adding that voters are not going to support "you if you are just pretending to be something you're not, or just speaking in broad generalizations of supporting a group of people without actually showing them who you are."

That includes understanding who the audience is. Democrats, who have long championed themselves as being inclusive to all Americans, are widely seen as having missed the mark by trying to keep up with the latest neutral or "woke" terminology that many centrist and swing voters find alienating.

"When you try to be so inclusive that you sound just weird to most people, you're not actually being inclusive," McMorrow said. "You are excluding everybody."

She said what Democrats fail to grasp is that elections are, at their core, "a popularity contest."

"And if people don't know who you are, they're not going to support you."

It's a strikingly similar mentality that is behind Donald Trump's own political wizardry.

"When I ran [for office] the first time, having flipped a district, I would have people who I'd be at their doorstep, and they would be like,'You know what? I voted for Donald Trump because he says it like it is and I'm also voting for you,'" McMorrow recalled.

"We have to be willing to not be afraid of stepping into any conversation and not being so polished all the time," she said. "People will trust you more if you don't sound like a sound bite all the time."

Democrats, in McMorrow's view, are playing games by trying to individually identify the one issue to talk to each voter about. That's because McMorrow has learned that, at the end of the day, "People vote for people they like and trust, and sometimes that's just how you talk to them."

Speak Normal

The other obstacle hindering the party's ability to communicate effectively is their struggle to get out of what McMorrow calls "Washington speak."

"Most people do not speak in bills or continuing resolutions or House resolutions," she said. "When Democrats say, 'We're fighting,' it's always behind a podium and it's in front of the Capitol and it's talking about procedural things. That's not how people live their everyday life."

"Talk about any issue that we are working on like you would talk to your friend at a bar, which means be excited when there's things to be excited about," she said.

"Speak in simple language that you know—when you are conveying a story— everybody from your grandma to your friend to a fifth grader to your neighbor who never watches the news should get it."

So, what does that actually look like?

McMorrow, who has been a champion for reproductive rights and gun control legislation in Michigan, said that it means telling the stories of constituents. When she talks about her push for background checks for gun buyers, she avoids listing horrific statistics about gun violence.

Instead, she tells people what happened to two women in her district—Mary, whose brother, a former combat veteran, eventually died by suicide with a firearm, and Karen, who lost two of her children in a murder-suicide on Mother's Day. Both stories unfolding despite the women's efforts to warn police and local gun shops.

"Those two things are so much more powerful than any chart is ever going to be. And I think these exist everywhere," she said.

The reality McMorrow wants Democrats to grasp is that "you can't make people care about other people." She said while it may seem counterintuitive, trying to humanize whoever is under attack rarely works.

"People are inherently selfish, and I don't think that's because they don't care about other people, but they have to survive. They care about their own lives and their own kids and their own safety," she said.

It's why in her viral 2022 speech, the state senator argued that transgender kids were not the reason healthcare remained unaffordable for Michiganers, why roads in the state were still in disrepair and why teachers were leaving education en masse. The message boiled down to, "Say this legislation in Michigan were to pass, it would do nothing for 99.9 percent of people in the state. It wouldn't make their lives any better [but] it would devastate the lives of two kids in a state of 10 million people."

McMorrow's ability to talk like "a normal person" is what makes her "hands down one of the best communicators in the Democratic Party," veteran political operative Lis Smith told Newsweek.

Smith previously served as a communications adviser for McMorrow, getting her TV spots that would help the state senator capitalize on her viral fame and become a nationally-recognized name. Smith also famously helped make "Mayor Pete" Buttigieg a household name.

"I had this viral speech in 2022, and then two weeks later, people were still calling and asking for interviews. We were kind of like, 'Oh crap, we don't know what to do.' So, my husband DM'd [Smith] and said, 'Hey do you want to talk to my wife?' We got on a Zoom and we hit it off right away," McMorrow said.

McMorrow said the best thing about working with Smith was that the strategist "never tried to alter who I am or how I sound like or how I need to present."

"She gets, very intuitively, that if she did that, that would be inauthentic, and people would realize that's bulls***," McMorrow said.

Smith said what the Democratic Party needs are more candidates who are "willing to just go out and say what they mean and not run it through all the usual filters of staff, polls, and political correctness that dilute what so many Democrats say into total gibberish."

People like McMorrow.

"She's smart, fearless, and she never speaks in mushy political talking points—she talks like a normal person," Smith said of the state senator. "That's something that's gotten a bit lost in Democratic politics—we need more normal people."

McMorrow's first foray into politics did not come until after Trump was elected the first time. A Notre Dame graduate, she completed her bachelor's degree in industrial design in 2008 before going to work in product design and advertising with automaker Mazda, toymaker Mattel and Gawker Media for a decade.

It was only in 2017 that McMorrow kicked off her political career, having joined the Women's March in Detroit and sending postcards opposing the Trump administration to then-Education Secretary Betsy DeVos. She ran for state Senate the year after, flipping the GOP seat in November 2018. Her election was part of the blue wave that ushered in a number of Democratic female candidates into office.

Connecting With Gen Z

But 2018 was a different time. It was "cool" to be politically active. These days, Gen Z's youngest members seem to want nothing to do with politics. So, how is McMorrow re-engaging these voters?

She said it's a matter of engaging them in the right way. Besides meeting them where they spend their time, on social media, McMorrow said a lot of young people probably look to her generation and feel an overwhelming sense of despair looking at the protests that dominated the zeitgeist in the first Trump term and then realizing where the state of the country is today.

"I don't think it's that young people don't want to have an impact or protest or make change. I think they're just really trying to figure out what is the most effective way to do that," she said. "When they look at the Women's March or, Occupy Wall Street, or all these kind of big movements, women have since lost reproductive rights in the wake of that, income inequality is the greatest it's ever been."

She is also trying to do the same thing. That's why she hosts AMAs (ask me anything) regularly on her Instagram, a series she started after Trump won in November. Through the AMAs, she hopes to be able to reach more young voters and voters who consume news on social media to help break down politics into "bite-sized pieces."

"It's kind of changing the narrative, which is why I think people are frustrated with Democrats," McMorrow said. "If I hear any elected official ever say again, 'This is the most important election of our lifetimes," I will pull my hair out because it just implies if we all just get together [and] we vote for this one person, everything is going to be fixed. And then, it's not."

More young people are coming into positions of leadership within the Democratic Party. The DNC elected David Hogg, their first Gen Z vice chair last month, but McMorrow is looking for more than just a symbolic position. She wants the party to hear from these voters. It is something she herself has tried to do since running and winning her first race seven years ago.

"A lot of the people who volunteered with me and for me were retired teachers and high school kids," she recalled. "I got an email one day from a group of high school students right after the Parkland shooting, who said, 'We see that you're running for office. Do you want to get together at a Starbucks this Sunday and talk about it? We want to know what you're going to do about it.'"

McMorrow went to meet them, sharing her own story about how her best friend's older brother was killed in the Virginia Tech shooting, and committed to bringing them along with her if she were to win.

"I have always maintained relationships with these kids who have now gone to college—many of them are out of college—to bring them along on this journey and show that, 'I hear you and we're actually delivering,'" she said.

"They learn with me how to do this, and it empowers them. And I think that is what we all have to do to actually make this a party that young people believe in and want to be a part of," she added.

"It is teaching them how to be effective, and then showing when we all do this, change is actually possible. It might not happen right away, but here are all the steps, and we kind of celebrate the progress together."

It was actually thanks to a young Michigander that McMorrow exploded onto the national scene. After the grooming accusations were lobbied against her, the state senator's first instinct was to not give the baseless accusations any oxygen.

But then that same day she was scheduled to visit a high school in the district.

"There was a high school student who asked me, 'Why are there all of these bills attacking the LGBTQ community?' She said, 'For us, 15-, 16- and 17-year-olds, we don't care. We don't care about your gender identity, or how you dress, or how you identify, and we can't understand why politicians are making this such a big issue,'" the state senator recalled.

"And she finally said 'I'm queer. Why does my own state hate me?'"

"I realized in that moment I'm not actually under attack, but she is, and she can't stand up for herself," McMorrow said. "There were people who had advised me to sue my colleague for slander or libel, and I'm sure I would have had good standing to do that, but that would have protected me. It wouldn't have protected this kid in my district."

"Deciding to respond in that moment, it was recognizing that for a long time, we had been ignoring these attacks and trying to brush them off, and it did not make them go away," she said. "It just allowed them to get stronger."