This is a lightly edited transcript of the December 3 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.
Perry Bacon: This is The New Republic show Right Now I’m the host, Perry Bacon. I’m honored to be joined this morning by Mallory McMorrow. She’s a state senator from the great state of Michigan. She joined the State Senate in 2019. As you probably know, she’s now running for the U.S. Senate, one of three leading Democrats in what’s going to be an open seat, big race, big swing state. So, welcome. Thanks for coming here.
State Senator Mallory McMorrow: Happy to be here. Hi everybody.
Bacon: So I’m going to start off not in Michigan but in Tennessee, where on Tuesday this week we had this special election for the House in a seat that was very, very pro-Trump. Strong candidate for the Democrats, and she lost by a much—much—smaller margin; I think it was like seven or eight in a district that was going to be 25 points pro Republican. So the question I’m asking is: Are we in a moment where we can be a little bit happy that whatever we felt like this time in November last year, the country has seen Trump govern and the country is not necessarily that happy about that? Do you see that in Michigan too—signs of some kind of buyer’s remorse, maybe?
McMorrow: Oh, absolutely. Between the elections across the country from a few weeks ago to the results in Tennessee to what we’re feeling on the ground in Michigan, first of all, the answer is yes: We are allowed to be happy. Happiness is a form of resistance, but we also can’t throw our arms up before we run through the finish line. I feel like that’s something that we do a little too often. So, people are feeling buyer’s remorse. They’re frustrated; they’re watching what Trump is doing—building a ballroom while he is cutting off SNAP benefits—and they’re recognizing, This is not what I voted for. But they need to see an alternative. So this is the moment to lean in, to run harder. We got a long way to the midterms, but the energy is there to have a really good cycle.
Bacon: How does it play out in Michigan? Like, you saw in Virginia, for example—the federal workers being laid off is obviously a big thing that happens there. It’s a direct result of his agenda. How does that play out in Michigan, where I assume there are federal workers—not denying the obvious—but are there industries or particular groups of people you talk to who are like, I cannot believe this shit, or that kind of thing?
McMorrow: Yeah, I mean, I can tell you the SNAP cutoff was real. We started getting emails to my office, my senate district. I represent Northwest Detroit through some of the Oakland County suburbs here. And just a few days before, emails of people saying, He’s not really going to cut this off, is he? He’s not really going to spike these ACA subsidies? When people start to feel it, when they get notices saying, Your benefits are going to get cut off. When people started logging in for open enrollment and seeing their premiums were going up not just 10 or 20 percent—which is a lot—but in some cases, people were sending me screenshots of their premiums 10 times what they were previously... People are really feeling it, and that is the impact on the ground. And then when people see... You’re standing in the grocery line, you see somebody trying to swipe their SNAP card. It’s not going through. They have to go put the groceries back on the shelf. People are pissed off, especially knowing the government is supposed to work for us, not cutting off SNAP benefits so you can give another tax break to billionaires.
Bacon: We’re in this context where everyone’s talking about affordability—even Republicans who were not talking about it six or seven months ago. But I wanted to make sure that doesn’t become a buzzword. So in a certain sense, I want to hear: When you are campaigning, you’re talking about affordability. What is your affordability agenda?
McMorrow: Yeah, I think that’s a great point. Because you can’t just be talking in buzzwords. You have to make it real. I was at a UA training facility—union hall training facility—talking to apprentices. This is something that I’ve been doing: going all across the state, not just to meet with union leadership. I’m saying, put me in the room with younger people, people who are just starting out in their careers. And I was talking to this younger guy—early twenties, working hard. He is in the union, he’s doing well, wants to buy a house, and he told me he’d been looking for six months on every house he was trying to buy. He was way too late on putting in an offer. People were coming in with all-cash offers. And he just couldn’t find something. So he told me he was finally excited to buy a house just because a friend of his dad’s happened to have a house and he knew about it before it was going on the market. So affordability is cost. It’s also access.
When we talk about housing, it’s making sure there’s enough housing supply and that you can afford it, and you’re not competing with people who are parachuting in with all-cash offers. When we’re talking about health care, we’re making sure you can go to see your doctor and you’re not being surprised on the back end with a 10x increase of your insurance premiums or a copay that you didn’t expect. We have Mike Rogers, who’s the likely Republican nominee here, who was caught on a hot mic making fun of the price of coffee going up. He said, Oh, the Democrats are saying coffee’s going up. Who cares? Who cares? A lot of people in the United States of America. You’re telling me you can’t have a cup of coffee in the morning? I’m sorry. Go fuck yourself. Like, that is a real thing that people are feeling.
Bacon: One thing I have been thinking about is, like, we’ve had this age divide in the party. I’ll talk about age—and I usually would not discuss people’s age in a public setting—but I think it’s relevant. You’ve talked about a new generation; you’re 39. That’s half the age of many of our leading members of Congress. It’s something you don’t see in most other countries. Elizabeth Warren’s a great member of Congress in my view, who leads and who seems very competent. And there are some younger members who I would say are not great, but age is not everything. Age is a number, but I think it’s more than that. Why is it important, and why do you think it’s important to have younger faces for the Democratic Party?
McMorrow: I think for a couple of reasons. Number one, we need our elected officials to be reflective of the people that they represent. And what’s true is that, by and large, Congress is significantly older than the average American. In another one of these apprenticeship meetings, I had an apprentice just expressing so much frustration, and she said, “Everybody there is 80. When is the last time any of them applied for a job? Like, actually filled out a job application, went through the process?” And she said, “When’s the last time any of them even drove their own car?” So that’s not just age, but that is bringing your own lived experience into the role.
I’m a mom of a 4-year-old. A few weeks ago—my husband and I totally screwed up the last day of summer school and the first day of regular school and completely messed up the weeks. So we’re trying to patch together five different babysitters over five different days so we could maintain two full-time jobs and a statewide campaign. That’s something that I’m living that people can see themselves in. And look, you can do that at any age, so long as you stay in touch with your voters and you’re really plugged in to know what people are going through.
Because the reality is it’s just different for Millennials and Gen Z than it was for our parents’ generation. My dad stayed with his first company for 30 years. The average Millennial and Gen Z is going to have to get a new job every couple of years. We don’t have the same job security. It costs significantly more. The average new home price adjusted for inflation for my parents’ generation was $200,000. Now it’s $450,000. The idea that the average new homebuyer is now over 40 years old is just a very different reality, and voters want to know that you understand that, and that when you go to Washington, you’re going to be bringing their challenges with you to actually make life better for them.
Bacon: So it’s not necessarily that 70-year-olds are not internet-friendly—though that’s sometimes true, as I experience when I do this Substack Live stuff. But your point is not that it’s not merely a technology issue. It’s maybe more of a lived experience: How much financial security do you have? They’re out of touch—that’s the key here. And any age relates to that, as we’re getting at in some ways.
McMorrow: I think so. There is a digital piece to it, and there’s a communication piece. As I’m getting all across the state, what is true is that more and more people are getting their news from social media. We’re having this conversation right now on Substack, and you can’t put your head in the sand and pretend that these outlets don’t exist. I was talking to a sitting senator last week, and she mentioned, Look, you can be on a YouTube show that has a million viewers versus maybe your MSNBC hit. Maybe there’s a hundred thousand people. And that’s not to say that that’s not valuable, but it’s a different audience. And you also need to know how to use these tools, how to reach people.
So there’s the communication aspect, the digital aspect, and also the lived experience aspect. And again, it’s just making sure that when you look at our federal officials, on the whole, you have an equal representation of all of the people who are represented so that we can all lean on our lived experience. I can bring my own lived experience as a Millennial and a mom, and learn from the older members and what they’re going through and how we can collectively push forward policy that helps everybody.
Bacon: We just had this health care crisis, and during this health care crisis, do you think the solution is more Obamacare—improved Obamacare—plus some kind of public option or Medicare-for-all? Do you have a distinction between those three things? Which one is preferable to you? Which one is more achievable?
McMorrow: Yeah. Look, I’ve been now in office for going on eight years, and what I know is that policy work is never done. So I think when we hear Medicare for All, sometimes it comes across as this purity test slogan—as if we wave a magic wand and that it’s all fixed. I was talking with one of the policy advisors who worked with Senator Kennedy on the Affordable Care Act over the last week, and he told me—he’s like, Look, if Senator Kennedy were still with us today, he would’ve said the next day: “We keep working on it. It’s not done.” You’re not done. When the bill is signed. We now have three states—Colorado, Nevada, and Washington—who have implemented public options, and they have seen cost savings. It is starting to work in those states. You look at a state like Vermont that tried to just shift to a single-payer system in one fell swoop, and 15 years ago, they abandoned it because they just couldn’t make the math and implementation work.
So I’m somebody that supports a public option. Especially as a Millennial, thinking that your health care is going to be tied to your job, I just think, is an outdated notion, especially for people who don’t have the same job security that we used to have. But I also want us to refocus the argument. We talk so much about insurance—How are you going to pay for it?—and we’re missing the fact that all of these arguments are still about: How do you pay for a fundamentally broken system? People don’t have time to build a relationship with your doctor. People don’t trust medical experts anymore because if it takes you six months to get an appointment and then you’re in and out, you don’t have time to ask questions.
There’s a program here in Michigan that I’m really, really proud of. It’s called Rx Kids. It was started by Dr. Mona Hanna-Attisha. She was the whistleblower of the Flint water crisis, and she’s a pediatrician. She saw the impact of horrible, indefensible government decisions on kids that’s going to impact them for a lifetime. But she started to think of how can we improve outcomes for kids? And she created this program called Rx Kids that was piloted in Flint; that’s a cash grant program for new moms. She calls it a cash prescription: $500 upfront, and then a couple hundred bucks every month for, I think, the first two years of a kid’s life. And what she has seen is the outcomes are tremendous. The babies are born at healthier weights. Their brains develop in healthier outcomes. The moms are making it to their doctor’s appointments. They have research now that shows that when you give moms cash, they’re spending it on their babies. They’re buying food, formula, diapers. They’re not missing doctor’s appointments, and they’ve actually seen the birth rate in Flint increase because it turns out when it’s easier to get pregnant, give birth, and have healthier outcomes in the first three years of a baby’s life—when most of the development happens—more people do it and they do it in a healthy way.
So we just passed funding here in our last state budget where we are expanding this program statewide, which is something that I would love to take with me to the federal level. Let’s talk about outcomes. This is a program that—the return on investment—saves the state so much money over the remedial care that would be required over the lifetime of a child when you can address it upfront. That’s the type of thinking I want to get to. Let’s stop splitting hairs over how we pay for it. Yes, we need to fix our insurance system. We need to make it more affordable for people, but let’s fix the underlying system and focus on outcomes.
Bacon: So this is a campaign I’m curious about. Clearly, in the general election, Michigan is a very competitive state—Michigan is a state that the Democrats lost in 2024 and in 2016 as well, and that was a big reason why they lost the election overall.
So talk to me about when you think of the general election: How will you win? You’re going to campaign, but what are you going to do to bring in people who are new voters, who didn’t vote last time, who maybe voted for Trump last time? How do you see yourself appealing to people in a broad way?
McMorrow: You show up and you listen to people. One of the things that we do on my campaign—you can see it on our website, mcmorrowformichigan.com—we’ve got our agenda, but we also have an open call that if you see something missing... We’ve got my agenda and my track record. But if you see something missing, tell me, because the most important thing that your next senator can do is go in with a sense of curiosity.
I came into this from a career in industrial design; my entire career was about identifying problems, coming up with a thousand different solutions, testing them, focus-grouping them, and working together to come up with the best solution. That’s what I want to do as the next senator, and that just requires getting in rooms with people.
Here’s what I know: In this primary, when we started out, I was the dark horse in this race. I’m a state senator. I’ve never run statewide before, like one of the other candidates, and I’m not currently a sitting federal official, like one of the other candidates. So I knew I had to build up name recognition. I started out in early polling at around 12 percent. I was trailing in third. I am now in a dead heat for the front-runner position, and that’s because we do more than a dozen events every single week. We’re showing up. We’re doing this brewery tour where it’s open to the public. You can ask whatever you want. We have these back-and-forth conversations. The more people get to know me, the more they learn about our track record in the Legislature, where we’ve actually delivered on every single issue that we care about, and they hear about this approach. They like it, they get it, and that’s also a stark contrast to Mike Rogers.
He’s a multimillionaire who moved back to Michigan from Florida last year just to run for Senate. He’s going to come in and be a rubber stamp for Trump, say he knows everything. And I think being a little more humble and saying, You have experiences that I might not know about. Tell me about your life. What’s going on? What problems do you need to solve?—and then I’m going to bring that as my agenda as the next senator from Michigan.
Bacon: Let me follow up with two things. First of all, I like the fact that you didn’t say rural people or Hispanics—you didn’t do that, which I think is good, because I think, not just in terms of race but in general, we tend to categorize people too much. But talk about that a little bit. Your electorate is people who live in Michigan—that’s who you’re trying to reach, of all kinds.
McMorrow: Totally. It’s a state of 10 million people. We’ve got to go talk to everybody, and I think, very candidly to your exact question: The Democrats have micro-targeted ourselves to death. And it felt like over the last few years we’ve sort of tried to stitch together a policy agenda that gives everybody a little something. Like, if you’re a woman, you must care about abortion. If you’re a Latino, you must care about immigration.
People have shared goals and values. People want to buy a house. You want a career that you love that gives you fulfillment, that not only allows you to pay your bills but save up for retirement. You want to go on vacation; you want to start a family. People have hopes and dreams that are the same, whether you’re in Detroit or Grand Rapids or Flint, or the Upper Peninsula, or Macomb County, Hillsdale, wherever you are. The job of the senator is not to try to slice and dice and figure out little bits and pieces for different types of people. But we’re Michiganders. The next senator should represent Michigan.
Bacon: I prepped, but I didn’t recall—I actually didn’t look up—what your profession was. And so when you said industrial designer, I don’t totally know what that means, but I know it’s not lawyer. And so I was excited about—no offense to the attorneys I know, including the one I’m married to—but I was excited about the potential. We probably need a few less lawyers and a few people who’ve done anything else in Congress. But talk about that from your perspective.
McMorrow: Yeah. OK. So, industrial design: Basically every product that you design... interact with is designed by an industrial designer. An industrial designer is sort of that cross between art and engineering. So I went to school for a degree in industrial design. I always wanted to be a car designer. It was my lifelong dream. I actually designed a concept car that we built full-scale at an auto show when I was still in college. I got to give a press conference about it. And in normal times, that would’ve set me up for success. But I graduated in 2008, so I was living in the backseat of my car and couldn’t find a job. But eventually I became a senior designer over global branding and licensing for Hot Wheels at Mattel. There’s a Hot Wheels car that has my name on it, if we can see right at the bottom there. And then I worked in design, media, and advertising, but I think you’re exactly right.
It’s not just diversity in age that we need in our elected officials; it’s also career and background. I’m somebody who, for most of my working life, worked at a company—which is how most people are employed. So I understand what that’s like and can bring that in here. But also my career has always been about storytelling and problem-solving, and that’s very different than, you know, I love lawyers too. Lawyers are great, but lawyers are trained to argue their position. And what if your position is wrong? For design, there’s a willingness to bring everybody together to find the solution—recognizing it might not be yours, it might come from an unexpected place, but that collectively, together, there is a solution out there, and designers are trained to be curious enough to find what that is.
Bacon: Alright, great answer. And Mallory McMorrow, thanks for joining me. This was great. I’ve enjoyed a lot, understood and learned more about industrial engineering—or industrial design. So I’m excited about that. Thanks for joining me. I appreciate it.
McMorrow: Yeah, thanks Perry.
