In 2026, voters in Michigan will cast ballots for races involving the office of Governor, Attorney General, and Secretary of State. Gary Peters (D-MI) is opting to retire, so there’s an open U.S. Senate seat.
Democrats have three strong candidates: Mallory McMorrow, Haley Stevens, and Abdul El-Sayed. All three have raised millions of dollars for their campaigns ahead of the August primary.
Over the next few months, Detroit Public Radio will be checking in with the candidates so our listeners can make an informed decision. The focus of this first round of interviews is to set a baseline for the candidates views on policy and what separates them from their competitors.
The series begins with Michigan State Senator Mallory McMorrow.
She talked with All Things Considered Detroit Host Russ McNamara on Jan. 8, 2026.
The following interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Healthcare access
Russ McNamara, WDET: What’s your plan to fix healthcare?
State Senator Mallory McMorrow: So I come at this from somebody who was an industrial designer, who’s solutions oriented, and our solution needs to be three fold. It needs to be universal. Everybody needs to have health care, no exceptions. It needs to be affordable. You should not be able have to break the bank or go bankrupt for a hospital visit.
So for me, that starts with a real public option, something that will force the private health insurers to compete. And I’m somebody who as a millennial, we’re around the same age, we don’t have the same job security that our parents did.
So having a real public option, there are a few states now who have implemented public options Colorado, Nevada and one other and they are starting to see real cost savings. They are starting to ensure that everybody has coverage. Vermont, on the other hand, as an example, they tried a single payer system and abandoned it 15 years ago after not being able to figure out the payment or the implementation.
RM: Just to kind of clarify on that you’re not in favor of something like Medicare for all. Vermont’s a very small sample size.
MM: I think it’s too big of a challenge. Admittedly, we are a country of more than 360 million people. When I talk to people all across the state, they don’t say that they they want one single system. They say, I want the insurance that works for me. I want to be able to see my doctor. I want to be able to go to my pediatrician, and I want it to be affordable. That, to me, requires more options, not fewer.
Abortion rights and the Supreme Court
RM: If elected as a U.S. senator, what would you do to reinstall abortion rights that were shifted back to the States by the U.S. Supreme Court?
MM: We need to codify abortion access as a fundamental right, the right that was taken away from women after 50 years of precedent with Roe [v. Wade].
I had legislation here in the state of Michigan to ensure that Medicaid covered reproductive rights abortion procedures. That was one of the things that unfortunately didn’t make it through the final version of the Reproductive Health Act. But your income should not determine whether or not you have access to the care that you need if something with your pregnancy goes wrong, and that is something that we need to fix on the federal level, and that I will fight for.
RM: Does that level of fight include eliminating the filibuster for abortion rights?
MM: Yes.
RM: Does that include packing the Court and increasing the number of justices?
MM: We have to fix the Supreme Court. I am open to any conversation on how we do that. The Supreme Court was supposed to be an independent arbiter of the Constitution. Very clearly they are not. They are now bending at the whims of this President, handing this president effectively immunity to do whatever the hell he wants. So I am talking to some constitutional experts right now, some judicial experts on whether that means term limits, whether that means oversight, whether it means reforms, or whether it means more justices. I am open to anything to ensure the Supreme Court does its job.
Affordability and wealth inequality
RM: The top one percent in this country control a third of the wealth in this country. That’s doubled since 1990. What is your plan to address the wealth gap?
MM: The average home buyer now is in their 40s. We have our population aging and declining in the state of Michigan, I talked to a lot of people who say they want to start a family. They cannot fathom how they would be able to afford to do that. So the biggest thing that we have to do is address income inequality, and one of the provisions that I just put into a piece of legislation in Lansing would prohibit companies from pursuing stock buybacks if they were to receive a state incentive. This was on the transformational brownfield legislation. We have companies continuing to pad their shareholders bottom lines instead of paying their employees. We need to raise wages. We need to create incentives so that companies are not paying their CEOs 100 times, 200 times, 300 times the average wage of their worker, and instead encourage companies to be better corporate citizens.
RM: Quick yes or no: Should billionaires exist?
MM: Yes, I think they can and should exist. And I look at somebody like Mark Cuban as an example. You can be a billionaire without being a jerk. This is somebody who goes out and says very publicly that this country, the infrastructure of this country, the educational system of this country, gave him the platform he needed to be successful. And he’s out there trying to bring medication costs down. Cost Plus drugs, I think is something that we should be taking a real hard look at it.
But you don’t need to be an Elon Musk to do it. I mean, you listen to this man who wants to become a trillionaire, trillionaire with a T, and his vision of the future is so dark and dystopian that he wants to abandon the earth and go to Mars. You should be successful in this country if you work hard, you play by the rules, but you should also be able and be forced to give back so that the next person has the same chance you did.
AI in Michigan
RM: Utilities and tech companies are pushing AI. Americans are a bit more skeptical. How do you reconcile resources required for data centers with the need to address climate change?
MM: Michigan has an opportunity to be the first state to do this right. There are some states and some companies that are getting this very wrong. And for data centers and for utility companies who are jacking up residence rates for these things to come online, they have every right to be angry.
You know, I just mentioned Elon Musk. You look at Colossus down in Memphis, that is an example of a company and a man doing everything wrong where rates are growing going up. The air quality in the surrounding neighborhood has become almost unlivable. People have asthma and they feel like they did not have a choice for what this company decided to do.
Now here in Michigan, we started by passing legislation that for a data center company to receive an incentive, they must ensure that rate payers are not subsidizing the cost of that data center. They must use at least 90% renewable energy to power that data center, and they need to be responsible with their water. That is a good start for us. I think any data center should be built with unionized labor. We need to make sure that these are good jobs. We need to make sure that it does not use Michigan’s water, that it has a closed source system that does not drain the Great Lakes or harm our water system, we need to ensure that it is bringing more renewables onto the grid.
If we do this right, we can encourage these companies and these investments to force the grid infrastructure upgrades that we have been so desperately needing for decades now in a way that can actually help create jobs and opportunity.
Finding a cure to fearmongering
RM: For the past few years, Republicans and conservative media have made it a priority to attack trans people, whether it’s trans kids playing sports, serving the military, and making their own health care decisions. What is your plan to support one of the most marginalized and at-risk segments of the population?
MM: Look for people who got to know me, maybe for the first time outside of my district and outside of Michigan, it was for a speech that I gave from the Senate floor in a moment when Republicans in our state were targeting and demonizing kids, and I am never going to run away from that. You know, whether or not a fifth grader wants to play soccer with her friends, doesn’t have any indication as to your future and your ability to start a business or raise a family.
And what the Republicans have done an incredible job of doing is by playing on people’s rightful anger and fear that they are not doing as well as they had hoped or as well as their parents did, and instead of actually solving those problems for people, they’re finding somebody to blame. First it was immigrants, then it was DEI [diversity, equity, inclusion] then it was trans kids. It is a smaller and smaller group of people.
And I fundamentally believe the way forward is that we have to be the party that solves those fundamental problems for people. If we can restore the American Dream and ensure that in Michigan and in the United States, if you work hard, you play by the rules, you can achieve that life that you wanted, then there won’t be this appetite to target and hurt vulnerable kids.
If we can restore the American Dream and ensure that in Michigan and in the United States, if you work hard, you play by the rules, you can achieve that life that you wanted, then there won’t be this appetite to target and hurt vulnerable kids.
I am really proud of the work that I’ve done in the state senate to expand Elliott Larson [Civil Rights Act] to ensure that you cannot be fired, you cannot lose housing because of who you are, how you identify or who you love. But obviously people are under attack right now, and we can’t run away from that, but we have to be very clear in telling Michiganders and Americans that this man and these Republicans don’t care about you either. They’re not doing anything to fix your problems, and you targeting a marginalized community isn’t going to make your life any better.
ICE immigration raids
RM: Immigration and Customs Enforcement has been terrorizing immigrant communities since its inception, all in the name of safety and fighting crime. That has been turned up a considerable amount since President Trump took office last year. This week, an ICE agent shot and killed a woman in Minneapolis. Bluntly, should ICE exist?
MM: Yes, and it needs to be vastly reformed. Michigan is a border state. We need Immigration and Customs Enforcement to do the work of what and who comes across the border. That should be its job. Its job should not be to be unleashed on communities to terrorize people, to go after people whose skin color isn’t exactly right, or who have an accent.
Right now, we have masked vigilantes who are being unleashed across the country, being recruited into these jobs with no experience, who are high on their own power, who are throwing American citizens in vans, deporting them. As we saw, as you mentioned, in Minneapolis this week, an American citizen is dead because she stopped her car. There is no justification for that use of force. And the U.S. Senate needs to do its job of oversight of a full investigation of what happened, not only here, but across the country, and then to reform this agency so it actually does the job of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement and not terrorizing Americans and immigrant communities.
Israel-Palestine conflict
RM: In October, you characterized the deaths of tens of thousands of Palestinians at the hands of Israeli military as genocide. Have you changed that stance at all?
MM: I am somebody who looks at the videos, the photos, the amount of pain that has been caused in the Middle East, and you can’t not be heartbroken. But I also feel like we are getting lost in this conversation, and it feels like a political purity test on a word—a word that, by the way, to people who lost family members in the Holocaust, does mean something very different and very visceral, and we’re losing sight of what I believe is a broadly shared goal among most Michiganders, that this violence needs to stop, that a temporary cease fire needs to become a permanent cease fire, that Palestinians deserve long term peace and security, that Israelis deserve long term peace and security, and that should be the role of the next U.S. senator, particularly in this primary.
We’ve got some candidates who are using this as a political weapon and fundraising off of it, and I think that that is just losing the humanity of what we’re seeing in the Middle East. And we deserve better.
RM: Should the US be giving money, weapons, military aid to Israel if they are indeed running a genocidal regime?
MM: We need to use the leverage that we have. You know, I came out in support of the Sanders resolution that would have blocked offensive weapon sales to Israel, and the more that Netanyahu pushes into Gaza, the worse this gets. And to be very clear, being in support of Israelis is not being in support of Netanyahu, in the same way that being in support of Palestinians is not the same as being in support of Hamas. And centering the humanity of what we see on the ground, and especially being sensitive to how many Michiganders are directly impacted by the impacts of the Middle East, is where we need to be.
So we need to use the leverage that we have as the United States as an ally to ensure that this war ends and that the ceasefire is a permanent ceasefire.
Campaign funding
RM: You’ve said you will not be taking campaign money from AIPAC, the powerful pro-Israel lobby. Where is the money in your campaign coming from?
MM: So far to date, we have outraised every other candidate on both sides of the aisle, and it is with zero corporate PAC dollars, and it is from people. We have raised more than $3.9 million for more than 60,000 individual donors. More than half of our donations are from people donating $200 or less. That is significantly more than any of the other candidates. In fact, I’ve got more grassroots support than my two Democratic opponents combined.
So it is by people, people who are donating $5 and $10 people who are donating what they can all across the country, and I am incredibly proud of that.
RM: So you’re turning away corporate money?
MM: Yes, no corporate PAC dollars at all.
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