Michigan Senate candidate defends her deleted posts after CNN report: ‘People are desperate for authenticity’

By Alison Main, CNN

(CNN) — Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, a candidate in the state’s competitive Democratic US Senate primary, made the case for her “authenticity” while responding to criticism she’s facing after an investigation by CNN’s KFile revealed she deleted old social media posts criticizing the rural Midwest and praising California.

McMorrow told CNN’s Manu Raju on “Inside Politics Sunday” that she is “not somebody who wanted to be in office or wanted to be in Congress when I was in diapers.”

“I started my career as a car designer, and then I worked in a very different career and wasn’t thinking about it,” she said. “I tweeted normal things like a normal person, and people are desperate for authenticity, so that is what we need in November.”

The Michigan Democrat, who has said she would not back Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer to lead the caucus, said voters are “responding” to her call on the campaign trail for “new leadership in the Democratic Party that recognizes — not as a lifelong politician, but as an American and as Michiganders here — what’s actually at stake here.”

McMorrow pointed to Maine, where Democratic leaders’ handpicked candidate, Gov. Janet Mills, dropped out of the Senate race last week after failing to garner the momentum needed to raise money in the Democratic primary against Graham Platner, a progressive who has also come under fire for his old online posts.

“We just saw what happened in Maine. I think the bigger liability is somebody who’s been so concerned that one day they might run for office that everything about them is manufactured, and if that is what you’re looking for, there are two other opponents in this race who fit that bill,” McMorrow said.

The roughly 6,000 deleted posts resurfaced by CNN’s investigation reflect a range of McMorrow’s views, from support of the Black Lives Matter movement to comparing President Donald Trump and his supporters to Nazis.

In January 2017, when a user on X wrote, “California should have its own diplomats” to “make sure we don’t get nuked because of morons from the other side of the country,” Morrow responded, “There are days like these that make me miss California even more.”

McMorrow has since branded herself as the pragmatist in the crowded Michigan race.

On Sunday, she stood by past posts in which she implied rural Americans should learn from coastal elites, saying, “Trump has succeeded in weaponizing us against each other, convincing us that we are each other’s enemies. I’ve lived all over the country. I’ve met a lot of different people, and I stand by that.”

“Was it the most eloquent tweet I’ve ever tweeted? No, I’ve tweeted thousands of times,” she continued. “There is a level of authenticity and just grappling in the wake of the 2016 election, of how somebody like Donald Trump could have been elected.”

Rep. Haley Stevens, another candidate in the Michigan Senate race favored by some establishment Democrats, told Raju on Thursday she thinks McMorrow’s posts were “a little tacky” and “very out of touch with what our state is all about.” She warned they could be a liability in the general election against former Republican Rep. Mike Rogers, who narrowly lost to Sen. Elissa Slotkin in 2024.

“Why litigate that in a general election when we know we’re in a swing state?” Stevens said, later adding that the potential risk McMorrow’s past statements posed was “very concerning.”

McMorrow told Raju on Sunday she did not delete hundreds of her past tweets because she was concerned that they would become a political liability, but rather because of “a decision to delete everything to 2021.”

Abdul El-Sayed, another of McMorrow’s primary opponents, also removed several old controversial social media posts as part of a larger purge, including some aligned with the “defund the police” movement. He has since clarified his position, telling Raju in Michigan last month he supports “investing in the things that are going to keep us safe.”

McMorrow says car post was foreshadowing ‘a dark future’

McMorrow, who previously worked in the auto industry as a designer and writer, explained to Raju that a post of hers declaring “cars are dead” was part of a broader “conversation with a number of automotive journalists bemoaning the way that tech CEOs were talking about eliminating cars with autonomous vehicles and ride-share programs.”

“That was me thinking about a dark future where there are no cars and at a moment where Big Tech is taking over everything,” she said.

The Michigan Democrat also did not back down from past comparisons of the Trump administration to Nazi Germany, telling Raju, “it is deeply concerning that we see an authoritarian slide.” She added that “dividing people against each other to convince people that if you’re not doing well economically, it’s somebody else’s fault, is an incredibly dangerous place for us to be in.”

Raju also pressed McMorrow on the discrepancy between her claim in a recent book that she “permanently relocated” to Michigan from California in 2014 and her own deleted posts suggesting she still lived and voted in California as late as June 2016.

McMorrow said she and her husband decided to move to Michigan in 2014, though “like a lot of millennials, moving takes time” and she was not fully settled in Michigan and did not change her voter registration until later in 2016.

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