VIDEO: “One of the Most Impressive Democratic Candidates I Have Met in Recent Years”

Today, political analyst Chris Cillizza published a Substack piece recapping his recent conversation with Michigan Senate Majority Whip and U.S. Senate candidate Mallory McMorrow. In it, he heaped praise on McMorrow, calling her “someone with one of the best answers I have heard to the ‘who gives a shit about me’ question.”

Key Interview Excerpts

McMorrow on needing leaders in Washington who are connected to communities

[...] “I came from a very different background before I ran for office… I'm not a political science major. This is not what I always wanted to do when I grew up. It's just I saw problems and I'm an industrial designer. Industrial designers see problems, and they come up with 1000 ideas, and they test them, and we focus group them, and we get feedback, and then we try stuff, and if it doesn't work, we try something else. So I think bringing that approach to this work is important, and it's also, I think, valuable that I am a State Senator, so I am closer to the ground right now, and I'm in my community, and I'm in my district.

[...] “So there's a lot of value in having your finger on the pulse of what's going on, being on the ground, having your daily life be in the state that you hope to represent, and trying to bring that with you to Washington instead of starting there.”

McMorrow on the importance of listening 

[...] “Your lived experience matters, and I'm able to connect with people who feel like ‘I've done everything right and I'm still getting screwed,’ and they don't see a way out. They don't believe that the American Dream is possible anymore. Which I think is different from a lot of, I think, messaging and leaders in the Democratic Party, where I think the perception is Democrats are only fighting Donald Trump, but they're fighting to just go back to the way that things were.

“They want to restore all of the damage. But you have a lot of people who look at everything that's happening and they're like, but it wasn't working for me before. So why would I want to go back to that? And so I do think age and lived experience matters, and I can bring a lot of that into our race in a way that connects with people in a very different way.”

McMorrow on her RedZone ad and offering something better

[...] “[The ad is] me in, like, jeans and my T-shirt that I've had for 15 years, like in my grocery store t-shirt, right… We have to meet people where they are, not expect them to come to us.

[...] “People are so exhausted and burned out, and Donald Trump talks about Donald Trump all the time. People don't want other people to talk about Donald Trump all the time. We want a break from Donald Trump. We want to get away from Donald Trump. So I think voters want to know, like, how do we beat this? And it can't just be talking about Donald Trump all the time, because that doesn't give people a window into what else is possible.”

Watch the full episode of Cillizza’s show with McMorrow here. Read Cillizza’s full post on McMorrow here: