This year’s midterms are being cast as a battle for the soul of the Democratic Party, and progressives and moderates alike believe they’ve got the answers.
Michigan’s Aug. 4 Democratic U.S. Senate primary will test those theories, in a purple state with a crucial role in determining which party controls the U.S. Congress, and wins the presidency in 2028. The top Democratic vote-getter will advance to the Nov. 3 general election.
Three Democratic primary candidates are articulating very different arguments about what it will take to win the primary, and hold this seat for their party.
Farthest left of the trio is former public health official Abdul El-Sayed. He’s a proponent of policies like Medicare For All, an 8% tax on billionaires, abolishing U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement and halting U.S. arms sales to Israel. He doesn’t accept campaign contributions from corporate political action committees, and says that any candidate or elected official who has is compromised. El-Sayed is banking on populist anger against systemic failure, rising oligarchy and America’s bellicose posture abroad, and elevated turnout among young voters ‒ historically, a risky prospect ‒ to carry the primary.
The most moderate of the three is U.S. Rep. Haley Stevens, who takes a more cautious approach to policy. Stevens is an intuitionalist who supports the extension of Affordable Care Act subsidies and has recently endorsed a public option, believes ICE can be reformed and accepts corporate PAC contributions, along with dollars from AIPAC (the American Israel Public Affairs Committee), a flashpoint in this year’s elections for its unstinting support of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s devastation of Gaza and continuing regional aggression. Stevens is running a traditional campaign, courting older voters and counting on Michiganders to behave as they always have: When push comes to shove, reliably choosing the moderate.
Poised between the two is state Sen. Mallory McMorrow. McMorrow supports a public option for health insurance while working toward universal health care, believes ICE funding should be halted while the agency is rebuilt to focus solely on preventing illegal border crossings, hasn’t accepted corporate PAC dollars in this race, opposes arms sales to Israel and says Israel and the United States, like every other nation, must follow international law. McMorrow is talking to the rest of Michigan, hoping that voters here will choose a senator who bridges the ideological gap.
McMorrow combines the best of El-Sayed’s impassioned activism and Stevens’ technocratic policy chops. She understands that change happens incrementally, but that the path toward progress doesn’t end after the first step. And in this race, she is uniquely capable of representing Michiganders who don’t fall neatly into El-Sayed’s progressivism or Stevens’ centrism.
In Michigan’s Democratic U.S. Senate primary, MALLORY McMORROW gets our nod.
Incrementalism that works
“I didn’t spend my entire life thinking that I would be in politics. I Googled ‘how to run for office’ after the 2016 election,” McMorrow, 39, told the Free Press Editorial Board in a June endorsement interview.
Eight years in, she said, she loves the work.
“I love meeting very different people. I love finding solutions where they don’t exist. I love building coalitions. I love constituent services. I like being able to be the one phone call for somebody who hasn’t been able to access unemployment or a city service for six months, and being able to help get it done,” she said. “And as I look at the state of the country right now and what this president is doing to tear every single institution down to the studs, I’m running because I have a track record of fighting and winning tough races, but also I know how to build real power, how to govern and how to actually deliver for people.”
You might call McMorrow’s approach “pragmatic idealism.”
Take health care. While single-payer, universal health care is the goal, McMorrow said, Michiganders ‒ like a constituent who canceled her health insurance plan when ACA subsidies expired ‒ need help now.
So McMorrow supports a public option, by effectively allowing opt-in to Medicare regardless of age. Three states have implemented state-level public options, she said, essentially reducing the uninsured rate to zero and driving down the cost of private health insurance, and she believes Medicare expansion can be funded by moderate increases to corporate taxes and systemic cost savings; reducing uncompensated care alone yields significant savings.
But, she said, that’s just the first step: “I always start with the goal, and I back into, how do we get there as quickly as possible? The idea that we can actually get to a place in this country, and for Michiganders, where we have universal health care is a big idea. Now, how do we build the coalition to get it done?”
On foreign conflicts, McMorrow displays a nuanced understanding of both the limits and obligations of American military power.
Our current involvement in overseas conflicts is dictated, she said, by a capricious president who lacks guiding principles: “This is a president who, on an Easter Sunday brunch, demanded $1.5 trillion for the war in Iran while telling us we can’t afford day care and we can’t afford Medicare and we can’t afford Medicaid.”
Each American intervention, she said, requires a clear understanding of the desired end result, compliance with international law ‒ and an exit strategy.
“It does not benefit Michiganders to be entrenched in this conflict in a way that has bombed Gaza out of existence, that has encouraged increasing settler violence in the West Bank, has now displaced a million people in Lebanon, which directly impacts many Michiganders,” she said, in response to a question about American overseas involvement. “And with Ukraine, I think it’s got to be, going in with the mindset of how do we stop Putin? Because the idea that he would just take a small piece and not continue is incredibly dangerous, but it also can’t be a forever war.”
On autos, McMorrow said she’d push to restore the $7,500 electric vehicle tax credit, pointing to losses posted by Ford Motor Co. and Stellantis after its elimination, when automakers had spent billions to retool their production lineup. “We have to empower the Big Three, not to dictate to them what types of drivetrains they should make. … But we need to empower them to compete with what China is doing, and that means having a diverse product portfolio.
“… And we need to recognize that (Chinese automaker) BYD is eating our lunch right now.”
McMorrow believes ICE funding should stop while the agency is refocused on border security, and has cosponsored state-level legislation to limit its operations in schools, hospitals and courthouses, to restrict data sharing between ICE and other police agencies and to bar masked raids. As majority whip, she brought other senators on board.
McMorrow also introduced state legislation this month to regulate data centers, strengthening protections for workers and the environment, and barring nondisclosure agreements like the one that obscured key details about a hyperscale data center in Saline Township.
McMorrow says the bills would establish “the most robust protections” in the Midwest, and that comparable policies should be adopted at the federal level.
(McMorrow caught criticism earlier in the campaign because her husband had been employed by a company developing small-scale nuclear reactors for data center usage. He has since resigned.)
When asked about mistakes she has made, McMorrow’s response was frank and self-aware. After redistricting added portions of Detroit to her Oakland County district, McMorrow said she allowed her own sense of post-pandemic burnout and the exhaustion of being a new mother to curtail her community presence. “My mindset then was, I know I’m a workhorse. If I just put my head down and do the work, that’ll be enough.”
And while she has a solid track record of delivering dollars to neighborhoods in Detroit, Oak Park and Royal Oak Township, she said what she heard again and again from constituents was, “We didn’t know you did any of that, because we didn’t see you.” Now, she said, she’s trying to change that, meeting with constituents with no agenda, just there to listen.
“I’ve been open with people to say, I recognize I’m making up for some lost time, and I have to earn that trust and respect.”
‘The right mix of policy nerd and street brawler courage’
McMorrow was a successful designer and creative director for businesses like Gawker, Mattel and the magazine “Road & Track” before seeking elected office. After relocating to Michigan more than a decade ago ‒ her husband is a native Michigander, and the couple is raising their daughter here ‒ she ran for state Senate in 2018, flipping a longtime Republican seat by 20 points.
“After the election in 2018, I was reading a long piece about the interesting races around the country, and I saw there was this race in Michigan, not only a red to blue, but a really red to blue, where people told the candidate she couldn’t make it, don’t even try, but she waded in there and punched above her weight, day after day after day, and flipped that seat,” said U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, who has endorsed McMorrow. “I thought, ‘I want to meet that woman.’ “
In the Senate, McMorrow quickly gained a reputation as a hardworking lawmaker who could deliver for her constituents, said Senate Majority Leader Winnie Brinks, who has endorsed McMorrow, and under whom she served as majority whip.
McMorrow shot into the national spotlight in 2022 after a Republican state senator sent out a fundraising email calling her a “groomer” for her support of LGBTQ+ rights. Her floor speech in response reached a national audience, and prompted a fundraising boom; McMorrow took in $1 million in campaign contributions in the following reporting period. Speaking at the 2024 Democratic National Convention, she sounded the alarm bell on Project 2025 long before it was on most Americans’ radar.
On the most significant legislation passed during Michigan’s short-lived Democratic trifecta ‒ safe storage and red flag gun reform laws ‒ McMorrow “was part of that conversation from its inception,” Brinks said. “Even when Democrats were in the minority, she did a lot of communicating with House members about settling final bills, talking to everyone to ensure the votes were there. … The thing I got to understand about her is that it’s not about getting something done and getting credit, but getting it done.”
McMorrow’s experience and temperament, Warren says, are what the U.S. Senate needs.
“She has the right mix of policy nerd and street brawler courage. We need both, desperately, in D.C.,” Warren said. “We have some good policy nerds ‒ some, but not enough ‒ and we have a few street fighters, but not enough to make the changes we need to make. We have a sclerotic, embedded system in Washington that’s not working for the American people. It’s working great for Elon Musk, but it’s not delivering for working people, and the problem has gotten worse and worse. … We need people who will come into this fight who are principled, who have good, pragmatic solutions and have the courage to fight for them.”
A distinguished Democratic field
El-Sayed, 41, is a visionary, a gifted communicator with a gift for making complex things sound easy. He’s a deft social media user, and has built a groundswell of support among young and progressive voters, engaging with Michiganders who don’t always feel seen. A Michigan native and a doctor by training, the bulk of El-Sayed’s professional work has been in public health ‒ he has led the health departments of Wayne County and the city of Detroit, where he launched initiatives to connect children with free eyeglasses and reduce medical debt ‒ accompanied by stints in political podcasting. He ran for governor in 2018, losing to Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in the Democratic primary.
We admire El-Sayed’s focus on the collapse of the American health care system, but at times, his rhetoric borders on disingenuous: In El-Sayed’s narrative, the U.S. lacks a single-payer health care system only because of corporate PAC money and the corruption he says it engenders. But El-Sayed is too intelligent to truly believe that’s the only or even the biggest obstacle standing between America and single payer, and this oversimplification increases mistrust in the political system without offering a path to implement the system he has made the centerpiece of his campaign.
When asked, if elected, how he planned to build support among his colleagues for the sweeping reforms he envisions, El-Sayed responded that he’d travel to other senators’ districts and build support among their constituents. That’s not practical, nor would such a tactic be particularly effective.
El-Sayed has called Israel’s military campaign in Gaza a genocide, although his views on Israel are more nuanced than his detractors suggest. He supports ending arms sales to Israel, saying that American military support must not violate international law.
El-Sayed is running a divisive campaign, casting his opponents as morally compromised. It’s a dangerous game, one that risks handing the Senate seat to presumptive Republican candidate Mike Rogers; whichever candidate emerges from the Aug. 4 primary will need a broad coalition of Democratic voters to win.
Stevens, 43, previously served as chief of staff for the Obama administration’s auto bailout. She was elected to the U.S. House in 2018. She has been an effective member of Congress, working to pass the CHIPS Act, boosting America’s ability to produce semiconductors to compete with China. Politics are in Stevens’ DNA: her aunt is political PR legend Marcie Brogan, and her mother was the longtime COO at Brogan & Partners.
Her enthusiasm for the business of legislating is apparent, and admirable. She’s not afraid of tackling tough subjects that require specialized knowledge and attention to detail. And she’s a genuine extrovert who thrives on connection.
Stevens is running the same sort of campaign that has seen her elected to Congress and reelected in each subsequent election cycle. It’s a tried-and-true approach, but in 2026, Stevens’ campaign lacks a sense of urgency. On Gaza, for example, Stevens called Israel’s violence against civilians and particularly children “unthinkable,” saying she would not vote for Netanyahu if she were an Israeli because he does not “share my views.” But in response to questions about Gaza, she focused on the need for humanitarian aid, without addressing the circumstances that created the humanitarian crisis.
In an hour-long interview, she proposed a plan to lower the age for Medicare enrollment to 55 or 60, but didn’t offer details about the public option she says she supports. Many of her answers to the editorial board’s questions pointed to a track record of accomplishment rather than plans for the future.
Still, all three candidates are accomplished, qualified professionals. Each of the three could capably represent this state in the U.S. Senate.
McMorrow has a difficult path ahead. As a state senator, she began the race with lower name recognition than El-Sayed or Stevens. Polling in this race is scattered; each has, at times, seemed to lead. But we believe that McMorrow can cross the finish line, and point the way forward for Democrats in the process.
How to vote
Local clerks mailed absentee ballots to Michigan voters June 25. Registered voters may cast ballots early, in person, in some Michigan communities starting July 6, and statewide from July 25 to Aug. 2 — check with your local clerk for your city’s early voting start date, location of early voting sites and absentee ballot dropboxes for absentee. And, of course, you can vote — and register to vote — in person on Aug. 4, Election Day.
Free Press Senior Editor Jewel Gopwani, a member of the editorial board, did not participate in this endorsement because of a personal conflict.
Submit a letter to the editor at freep.com/letters, and we may publish it in print or online.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: Freep’s pick for Michigan Dems in U.S. Senate primary | Endorsement
Reporting by Detroit Free Press Editorial Board, Detroit Free Press / Detroit Free Press
USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
By Detroit Free Press Editorial Board, Detroit Free Press | USA TODAY Network
