Michigan Magic with Mallory McMorrow

Hello, and welcome to the Bullwort podcast. I’m Tim Miller in for Charlie Sykes. It is his birthday very special thirty ninth birthday for Charlie today. You can all wish him well on Twitter. So I’ve been brought up from the basement, and I’m taking over for the day.

I have a super exciting guest. But before we get to her, there’ve been a bunch of stuff that has happened since I last talked to y’all. We have had a wonderful damn mid term, which we’re gonna be talking about today, and the Twitter apocalypse. And so if if you don’t wanna give your little eight dollars to to Elon Musk, I just wanna let you know where you can find our bulwark stuff that’s not on Twitter. We have an awesome Reddit community, Reddit slash the bulwark.

You should go hang out there. Some of the lid bulwark fans are there. I do have to say, you know, and I get I get nagged over there from time to time, but I I go and check-in anyway. Over on Instagram at the bulk work on Instagram, I’m at Tim ODC pics. I’ve been posting more work and less videos of my child.

To my mother, Shagren. So, you know, make that worthwhile. And most importantly, we have a new deal, the Twitter apocalypse deal, eight dollars a month for Bulwark Plus. You can come over to our board plus page on sub stack. You can comment on the articles.

You can boom. You can cheer. We can have a thoughtful exchange of ideas. Whatever whatever you guys are into, whatever the mood strikes that day. It’s been very cool, very vibrant, come hang out with other bulwark people over on sub stack.

One more thing before I get to the guest. I’ve been traveling this week for the circus on Showtime. You can see me on Sunday. Our guest is gonna be on two. And I just wanna share an observation from where I’m taping from now here in Arizona.

For all the good stuff that that happened on Tuesday, we are still in the midst of a pretty volatile situation here in Arizona. And I flew from a bunch of Carrie Lake and, like, master’s events here in the state across the country to Virginia where I saw Abigail’s hamburger, which is wonderful and then up to Philly where I saw doctor Oz. And I have to say that contrast between the odds events, which were directionally, couldn’t have been that much different from that were on the event. And what is happening here in Arizona? You know, couldn’t be more stark.

The Kerry Lake Lake Masters Mark Venture events are like one part church revival, one part oath keepers meeting, you know, one part WWE rally. It is. The energy is intense, dangerous, maybe overstatement, but slightly menacing. And there’s also a lot of excitement and enthusiasm. And so we have here is a protracted count.

I was at the Maricopa County facility yesterday. Talking to the county recorder. And, you know, they’re only gonna count about sixty thousand, seventy thousand votes a day, which means we’re not gonna know the results of Lake and Hobbs into the middle of next week. So for all the good stuff, for all the wins for democracy the last week, you know, one of the biggest races is still gonna be in flux, and we might be heading to a very narrow recount situation here, at least in the governor’s race. Over on the senate race and the secretary of state’s race, We are looking at a Blake Masters loss and a Mark Finjan loss.

So wins for Democrats in both of those, but Lake, and then in the Attorney General’s race, Abe holiday, you’d probably rather be them than the Democratic opponents today, but they’re both very, very close and we’re really not gonna know until the results come in. So That’s my update. That’s what you’ve been missing from me. I wanna get to our exciting guests next. She’s amazing and we’ll focus on her So with a brief interlude from my friends at Goose.

Next, senator Mallory McMorrow. I couldn’t find a Michigan magic song for you malory, but we had some Michigan magic this week. What? Tell us about

it? What’s happening there? I’m really first of all said that you didn’t hold the Yes Michigan nineteen eighties tourism promo videos.

That’s absolutely

amazing. Excellent. Got it YouTube. I you can find it on my Twitter account many, many, many times. I always take an opportunity to post it.

But Michigan, Oh my goodness. Governor Whitmer got reelected by almost ten points. AG data and Nestle got reelected, secretary of state, Jocelyn, Benson got reelected. And we flipped the Michigan senate blue for the first time in nearly forty years and flipped the house. So Michigan is a democratic trifecta.

Unbelievable. I wanna go really deep on that for folks that don’t know Mallory. She’s a state senator up in Michigan. She represents a to the northern suburb of Detroit, no panic in Detroit this week. And you you might have seen her when one of her Republican colleagues called her a groomer.

The fund raising email groomer, and she spoke on the Michigan senate floor and just gave an amazing viral speech or even get to in a second. I wrote this week for the bulwark about one of the for me, the main takeaways from the election was that the Republicans were punished for their crazy. There’s a lot of frustration around these parts that, like, doesn’t feel like the Republicans are getting punished enough for crazy on the election denial stuff, on the, you know, gender and sex stuff, on, you know, abortion. And and seems like Michigan was kind of ground zero for the fact that this wasn’t true. People did have legitimate concerns about the about, you know, economy and democratic governance, but but that was over shadowed by the fact that they didn’t wanna give the keys to these freaks.

What do you think about that? That’s exactly

right. It feels like we finally reached the limit on crazy. And that’s a good thing. You know, Michigan, it it was a perfect storm of of things that happened in twenty eighteen, voters, created an independent citizens redistricting commission. So this was the first election that we ran with new lines that actually matches the partisan makeup of the state?

Believe it or not. Crazy concept. Crazy concept. But beyond that, yeah, Michigan you know, the fact that people around the country know me now from the fact that I was called a groomer and a pet of child by a sitting colleague who was not my opponent, by the way, just a sitting colleague trying to fund raise for herself, really set the tone. This was the route that the entire Michigan GOP followed from Tudor Dixon who made her campaign all about, quote unquote, parental rights and claiming to protect girls’ sports.

She kept having these press conferences. She held one actually on the same day that we passed the state budget. So I was taking a break from session. I walk out and there was a press conference going on where Tudor Dixon announced that she would allow parents to sue their school district. If their school district held a drag queen story time, And when she was pressed by a reporter, she couldn’t provide a single example of that ever happening in the state of Michigan.

And she kept doing this in the last few days, she invited out a swimmer from Kentucky as her kind of main speaker, and this was a a woman swimmer who tied for fifth with Leah Thomas. So, you know, I looked at that and I made a snappy comment on Twitter that was, you know, in the final days Republicans are presenting their plans to fight inflation. Yeah. And and that felt real. And and we saw this all the way down ballot in the States.

Central

issue to voters actually.

Central issue to voters

twice in in women’s women competitions, you know. I I like that they care about women’s sports now. A sudden All

of the sudden, you know, shocker. They they didn’t seem to care about it until this year, weirdly. But, yeah, it it really just felt like voters are a lot smarter than the current Michigan GOP gave them credit for. And you can see right through all the bullshit. And and I think that it was that combination of redistricting.

We got out early with our candidates in the legislature. We finally had financial resources to go first. And define our candidates in really positive ways to voters, which was just such a great counter to all of the ugliness coming out of the GOP. And I just saw a report a few minutes ago actually that of the moms for liberty, parents rights, school board candidates around the state, seventy six percent of them lost. So we’re doing good.

We’re we’re saying no more crazy police. Well, at

least twenty five percent of them are still out there monitoring for the litter boxes. Did you have you found any litter boxes and any Michigan clusters? I did a big investigation on this. From the

You know, Colorado

that we’re pushing the litter box thing. And I we I couldn’t find we couldn’t find any, but any sign of

them? No litter boxes. Just

just a quick background of people don’t know what we’re talking about. These moms groups went after COVID needed to find something else to complain about and went through CRT and all this other stuff. But one of the key points that this urban legend went around that kids were identifying as cats and dogs, and the schools. This was a rampant problem. And that as a result, some of the school districts, some of these world liberal school districts were putting litter boxes in the classrooms so they could relieve themselves rather than using the stall.

But we we we haven’t found any of them. What about midnight? They

they don’t exist. I haven’t found any. There are none in my district, but it’s And did you put any

resources from the state senate into looking into it though? Like, how thorough is the state’s I say just

to remind all of my constituents for purposes of fiscal responsibility. No. I did not expand any tax dollars looking for litter boxes in schools. Howard Bauers, I wanna get to

this speech, and I think it’ll be a lead into talking about democratic messaging and what’s working, what’s that? What’s maybe could be improved and that so just give people the background. What what did you do to earn the title of groomer? You know, what happened in the in the lead up to the speech to kind of you know, thrust you into the national eye. So

Michigan, we’ve got Republicans in the legislature who really wanna be in Florida, which is shocking to me. You know, I think again going back to Tudor, Dixon, I think she said in one of her early rallies. How about we? Florida or Michigan? And think so many people were like, no.

Thank you. I wanna

get back to that. Yeah. I wanna

get back to that. But it we’ve started to see this uptick in our legislature of bills to ban trans kids playing sports that don’t say gay, bill. So it started with a Republican colleague of mine using the invitation, which is supposed to be, you know, a a non offensive intention setting moment of of prayer. And she used it as a really thinly veiled moment to talk about, don’t say gay. Under the guise of a prayer, she said something like there are dark forces that seek to have our kids here and know and see things against their parents will.

And any of us on the floor who know this colleague know exactly what she was doing. This is the woman who chairs the education committee, who continues to introduce bills and hold hearings, trying to ban the sixteen nineteen project and talk about CRT, and it’s whatever Christopher Ruffo is doing is what she’s doing in our committee. And we walked out, three of us, Democratic side walked out. I then took to Twitter and just said, you know, I’m not gonna repeat the words that were said under the guise of a prayer today, but I wanna reiterate to every kid in the state of Michigan that you were seen and heard and welcome for whoever you are. And this colleague took offense to that.

And she the next day sent out a fundraising email.

So you’re brimming them into a life of self confidence and they’re brimming

them into caring about themselves. I don’t know. So she sent out a fundraising email for herself. And she said, Mallory McMorrow, d Snowflake, is angry that she can’t groom or support pedophilia and wants eight year olds to believe they were responsible for slavery. So that was that

was a fun Monday morning. Well, let’s hear we’re not gonna do the whole epic five minutes. If you never did listen to it, you go to on YouTube about I I wanna play one clip in particular and talk to you about.

I am a straight white Christian married suburban mom. I want my daughter to know that she has loved supported and seen for whoever she becomes. I want her to be curious, empathetic, and kind. People who are different are not the reason that our roads are in bad shape after decades of disinvestment or that health care costs are too high or that teachers are leaving the profession. I want every child in the state to feel seen, heard, and supported, not marginalized, and targeted, because they are not straight, white, and Christian.

We

cannot let hateful people tell you otherwise to scapegoat and deflect from the fact that they are not doing anything to fix the real issues that impact people’s lives. And I know that hate will only win if people like me stand by and let it happen.

So

I want to be very clear right now. Call me whatever you want. I hope you brought in a few dollars. I hope it made you sleep good last night. I know who I am, I know what faith and service means, and what it calls for in this moment.

We

will not let

hate, win. Pretty

good, Mallory. Before that, you had you had talked to kind of about your growing up and your background and humanizing yourself and not, you know, going to the soup kitchen with your mother. But the the thing that I liked about this, the thing I think that the democrats have at times struggled with and and did well this cycle was to kind of recapture this, you know, these terms that that the Republicans like to use, you know, in Virginia, they have to admit in twenty twenty one, they had success about we’re the party of parents rights, you know, we are the party that cares about suburban parents and and, you know, wants their kids to succeed and Christian values and blah blah blah. And then and your pushback was was to kind of recapture those those kind of, you know, identities. And those brands and say no, I’m a white Christian mom.

And being a white Christian mom does not mean that I want kids that are struggling to deal with their sexuality or their gender identity to hate themselves means I want a foster environment where they can feel loved. Right? And by flipping the script on them, again, kind of felt like the Democrats were able to sort of retake this broad middle the types of people that that just want, you know, what’s best for their families and don’t want to care about the culture war bullshit. Is that kinda how you saw how you were framing with what you wanted to talk

about? Yeah. It it is. And to give it a little bit of context, so I flipped a Republican district when I ran for the first time in twenty eighteen. So I, for the past four years, have represented a nearly fifty fifty split Republican and Democratic district.

I had had a long conversation with a mom from one of the more Republican parts of my district. Well before the speech happened, where she had told me that she had been frustrated with her school district. She had been frustrated with school closures and learning loss. And she had joined this parents group. And initially, they had wanted better communication with the administration.

But she reached out to me and she said, you know, she’s noticing that this group that she’s joined is starting to go after the LGBTQ community or starting to talk about CRT. And one of the things she said to me was, I’m not that person, but I don’t feel like I have anywhere to go. And that really stuck with me because I think about what happened in Virginia all the time where part of his timing, you know, Glenn Young in one election on the heels of school closures and the COVID-nineteen pandemic and just kind of coming out with them. It’s very different in Michigan where schools haven’t been closed for a long time. We haven’t had any COVID shutdown protocols for well over a year, probably two years now.

So the timing was different, but also thinking about the idea that people like Lonatyce, the woman who called me a groomer, and this iteration of moms for Liberty in the GOP, somehow claim that they speak in a unified voice for Christians for white suburban moms, and then they use that supposed moral authority to target gay kids is just disgusting. I mean, you can’t claim to stand up for protecting kids in parental rights. If all you’re doing is targeting kids who are not exactly like your kid. So a lot of what I thought they’re doing was in my speech, I didn’t say Democrats or Republicans once. I wrote a lot of things down.

Initially, I had talked about the apocalypse see on the Republican side of the aisle, there is somebody here called Lee Chatfield who was the the ex speaker of the house who is currently under investigation for grooming and raping sister in law starting when she was fifteen. So I had I had some of that in there, but I took all of that out because I recognized that if I started down that route, that nobody would listen to it. It would just be Democrats are yelling at Republicans and Republicans are yelling at Democrats. So I really I flipped the script and I talked about myself in my own identity and wanted people like this mom who reached out

to me to see a different way forward. Yeah. And I think that that is so important. And when I was talking to Abigail’s hamburger about this just this week. Right?

And her her message out of Virginia twenty twenty one was, you know, you do have to listen to people and what they care about. Right? I mean, like, there I think that there was a little bit of a dismissiveness sometimes on the left about the complaints from parents. Some of them were were quite legitimate, frankly, about the school closures, you know, and some of them were illegitimate. But there are reasonable reasons why people were upset about that.

Right? And so rather than just kind of dismissing and mocking those people, right, to listen to them and and kind of capture the mantle of their concern and say, no, I’m I’m a mom too. Right? I’m a dad. I’m trying to address these concerns.

But but we’re not gonna do it, like, on the backs, of families that are different than, you know, the standard white straight Christian families. Like, that’s not what people want. And I and I think that that reframes things and really kind of takes back this big center. Right? Because that’s what most parents think.

Right? Yeah, I

think especially for moms and a working mom who went through COVID-nineteen, it was brutal. It was absolutely brutal. We don’t have a system that supports working moms to begin with, but then when your schools are shut down, or they’re kind of waffling back and forth between being open and closed and you’re suddenly trying to manage work and school and your kid’s education and sometimes being a teacher and sometimes being a parent. I I think we just all had to acknowledge. We all went through hell for two years.

And how, you know, I think reframing that message to say, we all have to move forward. There’s a lot of loss that we have to gain back. It was really hard for kids, especially if you’ve got a kid with special needs who didn’t do well with virtual learning. Every kid has gone through something traumatic right now and so with their parents. So to be able to say, we hear you.

You have every right to be frustrated. I’m frustrated too. And and that’s something that I talk about is I had a baby during COVID nineteen. So, you know, trying to find childcare in the middle of a pandemic was a a nightmare. But blaming one or two trans kids in the state of Michigan who wanna play on a sports team every year because that’s the numbers.

Out of a state of ten million people, there are two trans kids who go through the process to play on the sports team to match their gender identity. That’s not gonna fix any of your problems. It’s just scapegoating and it’s just to get you angry so that you don’t notice that the Republicans don’t have any plans to help either. And this is something I think governor Whitmer has done a really, really good job of is acknowledging the issues. She talks about record investment in education, record investment in expanding child care, and she also talks about COVID-nineteen and we have a lot of work to do and do we want to keep moving forward or do we want to vote for people who have no plans at all except to gut public education and to blame somebody else.

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into the widener and the sandals of it all in a second, but just on the substance of this, the the one frustrating thing for me, during the whole don’t say gay, situation. Is DeSantis really kind of somehow managed to claim the mantle of the big metal on this? Right? And and sort of position this very hateful insane bill that frankly, you know, was was written so vague that that my kid, you know, who is doing a homework assignment, writing letter two dads, like, that might have violated the bill, depending on how what you, you know, what you determine as is instruction. Right?

And so this was a totally unnecessary, totally over the top purposefully incendiary in hateful bill and yet didn’t suffer any political consequences versus obviously, severe political consequences in Michigan. So maybe that’s just the floor demand of it all, and there’s nothing that can be done about floor demand. But I don’t I don’t know what you guys kind of had to respond to that similar type of legislation. Is there anything that can be learned on the substance of it that you think helped push back Again, look,

I think part of it is is Florida is Florida. But beyond that so one of the things that I think about all the time is is how do we make the connection for everybody. Because part of the reason why don’t say gay was successful and DeSantis was successful is, you know, the percentage of kids who are gay or have gay parents or trans or whatever it is, is a small percentage. It’s a minority group. It’s really easy to kind of target a minority of the population.

So if you are, let’s say, the eighty, ninety percent of people who are not directly impacted by it, you’re like, well, this isn’t about me. I’m still okay. I like my tax cuts or whatever it is, and you’re gonna step back. Something that was really important to me was really making that direct connection. And there’s a reason that in in the speech that I gave back in April, I said, you know, people who are different around not the reason why health care costs are too high or why the roads are in bad shape because we get regular calls to my office.

There’s a woman who we lovingly referred to as a frequent flyer. Who calls every few weeks? She leaves messages. She’s older. She lives alone.

But you can tell that she’s watching Fox News all day long. And whatever the talking point is that week is is kind of her complaint to our office. And I recognized that for this woman who is a constituent of mine, if you legitimately believe that the twenty twenty election was stolen, you legitimately believe that somehow every single teacher out there is trying to change kids’ gender identity or or whatever it is. It’s a horrifying reality. So one of the things that is really horrifying for me about this whole moment is the GOP is taking advantage of women like her too because they don’t care that she’s vulnerable, she lives alone, they are lying to her and creating a horrifying reality for her too.

So I wanted to make that direct connection and say, you know, things like don’t say gay, do nothing to make your life any better. It’s just gonna devastate the lives of these kids and these families for what? To channel their grievance, to make them feel better. Right? Like, that’s it.

Right? To make that

allow that Yeah.

It’s just to redirect your energy and and and anger towards somebody else, which doesn’t solve the problem.

Right. You know, so my nailing on this. And I think that’s a frustrating part, and I’m happy that you’re saying that. And so it doesn’t get sad enough. Is it, like, literally the people this forgotten man, forgotten woman that that are showing up to these Carrie Lake groundlies I’ve been going to, they don’t care about them either.

Right? Like, they they don’t they’re they’re not doing anything. I’d be I just think about how the people whose lives have been ruined by election conspiracy in fact seen conspiracy. You know, forget not there’s the, you know,

there’s the

not actually caring in the way to do anything which you’re talking about, but then there’s the active harm. Right? Like people whose lives have been ruined because they, you know, went to the capital, you know, if they believe their, you know, their president, or decided not to get a jam, you know, because they believed that whatever, Bill Gates wanted to put microchips in their body. You know, the whole thing is actively harming the people that they actually care about. Oh oh, just on the Florida thing, I wanna get to abortion and and and a couple other things too.

But you know, a lot of buzz I think part of it is just the nature of of just media. And in fact, we all have, like, two second attention spans and, like, Florida vote comes in first and fast. Right? There’s this big victory. And so there’s this kind of buzz around this big night that Ron DeSantis has.

And, you know, as now, the numbers have said, always don’t know what’s happening here in Arizona and California, a couple other places. But, you know, Gretchen Whitmer has as big if not bigger of a night than DeSantis, a total sweep there. You know, talk about that kind of contrast what you think it was that made her successful, you know, in the face of really tough opposition in addition to obviously the kidnapping threats, etcetera. But but you know, a lot of money and effort put in to try to tear her down as a rising star. And and, you know, she comes out looking very strong as a national Democratic figure.

So you’re seeing her much more up close than than me and us. So what’s what’s you’re gonna take on that in the contrast with with the Santa I

think there’s a lot that goes into it. And number one, I don’t think you can possibly discount just how much of a normal person Gretchen Whitmer is. She’s very likable. You know, she she ran on fix the dam roads in twenty eighteen. And I am convinced at because she curses like a sailor if you actually get her, like, talking.

So I’m convinced her staff gave her, like, one curse word that she could use regularly. And we saw this a few years later when she kinda went viral for a hot mic moment when she said it’s shark week motherfucker. Right? And that got turned into merchandise and candles. People who like Gretchen Whitmer love her.

And what this showed is there are significantly more people who love her than don’t. I mean, on the flip side, the people who don’t like her want to kidnap and kill her. But She is very Michigan. She loves Michigan. She loves football.

She loves tailgates. She loves dive bars. She talks like a normal person. She talks about her family and her daughters. She talked about that during COVID, you know, at the beginning of COVID-nineteen, Michigan got hit hard fast, especially in the Metro Detroit area where it’s almost hard to remember now, but we had body bags piling up in closets, in hospitals, in the Detroit area, you know, I know friends and colleagues of mine who lost dozens of people in their life.

Mhmm. And she took decisive action quickly and saved lives. And there was, you know, within Detroit, the Detroit community presented her with some buffs. They coined her big gretch. And I think that that goes a long way to see somebody who stood up and fought to protect especially people who were hardest hit by a global pandemic, that wasn’t anything small.

And then she came out of it. You know, the fact that she was the focus of an attempt to kidnap and kill her, and and she has gone all over the state over the past few weeks on the campaign. She talks about it very openly and says, you know, people ask why I keep doing this, but it’s because of all of you. And she says, you know, I’m no matter what they throw at me, I’m gonna get up and dust my shoulders off and keep going as long as you have my back. And it’s created this culture where, you know, Donald Trump called her that woman from Michigan in a negative way.

And she took it as a badge of honor and she owned it. And now every woman I talk to feels like that woman from Michigan like it has become a rallying cry for all of us to stand up and say, you don’t mess with those women for Michigan. And it it’s also not a coincidence that we have women in all of our top offices, Governor Secretary of State Attorney General in the state legislature now that are democratic majorities in both house and senate, both Democratic caucuses are majority women. This is a state with some seriously powerful women. And she’s aggressive.

She came out on the issue of abortion before anybody else in governorship positions. She made it a signature issue of her campaign and she did it well before the Dobbs decision. So people saw she’s not waiting for us to lose our rights. She’s fighting for us. And that gave her the freedom and flexibility to talk about education, childcare, the economy, expanding manufacturing wondering battery plants in Michigan in a way that felt very authentic and not just responding to the latest polling data.

I

love that you started there. We got to the policies which are important. But a lot of times the Democrats avoid, you know, the vibe’s element of this, which does matter in politics. Right. Maybe it shouldn’t.

Right? But likability, seeming like you’re a normal person. Like, that matters. Look at the inverse answer. Just It’s just a stark subset right here in Phoenix.

But, you know, Live Carrie Lake may be gonna win while Blake Masters is getting crushed. Arizona. Like, they don’t disagree on anything. Like, all of their issue positions are the same. It’s just that that Carrie, well, I find they’re pretty weird.

Is like a local TV person who seems like an Arizona and Blake, you know, seems like American Psycho. Okay. Coming from California, weird tech guy. I can people just that’s enough for three points. You know, that that this just is.

On the on the margins, it’s the same thing in George. I wrote about this when I went down to Georgia. You know, Warrnock and Abrams. Eight point gap there. Part of that was Churchill Walker, of course, versus Kemp.

Part of that though is that Warrnock specifically branded himself as like a dad, you know, a normal guy, a pastor. Right? And I think that is what worked, you know, it’s a little different than what you were talking about with Whitmer, but this She can go to dive bars. She says motherfucker, you know? She likes football.

Like, to make people think they’re like, okay. I know this person gets me. Right? This isn’t someone in some, like, liberal elite, you know, coastal bubble. Out of

touch. Yeah. It’s this is such a small detail, but to me, it sticks with me all the time. So, you know, one of the most infuriating things is on football rivalries, Michigan Michigan state game every year. Every single politician is asked, who are you rooting for this weekend?

And like ninety percent of politicians say, like, oh, I hope everybody wins and has a great game. Because the dumbest, like, pick a side. Whitmer so the lieutenant governor went to the University of Michigan, Garland Gildarest. Whitmer went to Michigan State. They have a rivalry.

They bet, you know, they bet, like, the opposite person is gonna wear the other team’s colors, and they make it a fun rivalry. And it’s just like so relatable and it’s so infuriating when you see people in political roles refused to pick a side on something so inconsequential. It’s a football game, not just. Just pick one. And

you’re worried you’re gonna lose a couple votes in Ann Arbor. Yeah. You know, because you said you were from Michigan State. Who cares? I’m speaking for which one?

Did you see I wish I had the numbers in front of me. Did you see the University of Michigan vote results, like, from campus? It was it was literally, like, fifty four hundred to ninety four. Gonna try to pull it up really quickly talk. But do you kind of sense that energy coming from younger voters when you were there?

Yeah. I

mean, so Michigan puts it like some more context in this. We legalized same day voter registration back in twenty eighteen along with no reason absentee voting and a few other things. So this was the first midterm where we saw that in effect and the lines at University of Michigan, at Michigan State, the number of pizzas and, you know, pops and things that were sent out to these kids. I think the last kid at UofM voted like two or three in the morning just stayed in line. It was amazing.

And you talked to a lot of kids, you know, there’s a bunch of people who were interviewing why they were there. And you can’t underestimate people who were there to vote for Whitmer. They were there to vote for prop three, which added constitutional protections for abortion and reproductive rights. And it matters when I started seeing videos early in the day, I was like, oh, this is this is going well for us. Let’s

talk about prop three and okay. What here it is. The kid’s name is at you miss voter. Yes. I don’t know if you thought do you follow at you miss voter?

It’s a great Twitter account. Eighty eight forty two to five seventy three. Yeah. Ninety four percent to six percent. And I think that some of those five seventy three kids are just trolling.

I don’t I don’t know. That’s above phenomenon who’s saying numbers there in in Arbor. Talk about prop three, you know, the the degree to which you think that abortion, you know, played a role here, you know, was that the whole deal, just part of the deal, and, you know, how to kind of strike a ground tier where you’re protecting people’s rights but not, you know, playing into kind of Republican hands. Yeah. And

talk about

how that all works both on the policy and politics. Absolutely.

So prop three, as as I mentioned. So this was a citizen led petition ballot initiative that amended our state constitution to guarantee access to abortion and reproductive rights also included things like maternal healthcare, sterilization, if there are families who choose that, and a number of other things. And it made such a huge impact, not just on election day, but throughout the course of the election. And I’ll

tell

you why. So I remember and and I relate to on the day the Dobbs decision came down, I think it was CNN or somewhere. They interviewed a young woman, a college student. Who was just so furious because she said, you know, we just lost Roe, we lost the right to my own body, and somehow national democrats just texted me and asked for five bucks. And it felt like such a slap in the face.

Meanwhile, in Michigan, the day the Dobbs decision came down, I went to a rally in Detroit. And I was able to tell everybody there that we have been fighting on this issue proactively four years now. In the legislature, my colleagues and I introduced legislation back in twenty nineteen to repeal our nineteen thirty one abortion ban and effectively caught a high row in statute. Governor Whitmer filed a lawsuit months before the DOP’s decision came down that led to abortion still being legal in Michigan because as of one judge basically standing in the way of our ban going into effect after dobs. And Planned Parenthood,

ACLU,

and Michigan Boy which is a coalition of black women, got together and introduced this petition initiative months before the DAF’s decision, you know, back in the spring. And it started circulating and the amount of energy, especially the day the Dobbs came down, that people who came to these rallies, who were angry, who were livid, had something very tangible that they could do. This felt like such a greater impact than national democrats texting you and saying, give me five bucks. We were able to lay out a cohesive plan to say between the governor, the legislators on the ballot, and this petition initiative you can take action and fight back in a meaningful way. We saw tens of thousands of people sign up on the day jobs came down to circulate this petition initiative.

They turned in nearly eight hundred thousand signatures, which is almost double what is required to get on the ballot, and the most signatures for any initiative in state history. And then it it drove people directly to the polls. I mean, this is anecdotal, I talk to a lot of people who I know from my gym or my yoga studio who have never volunteered on a Democratic campaign but came out hard for this. I think because it was so simple, because it was a single issue, and because it was a very meaningful way to fight back. And then that allowed those of us who are on the side of supporting this issue to also lay out you need a legislature who’s gonna support what you just voted for.

On the ballot. So I don’t think you can discount how big a deal it was to have this on the ballot. And as pundits kept saying, oh, abortion’s not the top issue anymore. That’s not what we felt on the ground. You know, I think that that a lot of people, yes, inflation is real.

Gas prices were real, but there was a huge understanding that gas prices go up and down, but losing a fundamental right to decide if and when to get pregnant that you’ve had for fifty years is not just a summer blip of an issue. That’s

right. And I think that the other big kind of pungent question was this democracy part. Right? Like, did how much did that matter? And so I’m interested in your kind of taking It’s not like, oh, it was seventy percent of March, thirty percent of March even.

You know, is this really the two things that kind of explain this? You know, the fact that, you know, the the the dogs overturning, and so you’re looking at the people in Michigan Tudor, Dixon, Caramel, and it’s like, These are these people wanna put in not middle of the road abortion reviews, but extremely restricted restrictive abortion laws. And and they also have basically pledged that they would make Donald Trump an unelected autocrat next time if they had the chance. And and this kind of democracy, Trump, and abortion, you know, ends up kind of outweighing, you know, people’s other concerns. Is that kind of your your feeling of it at the ground?

Or were there other issues? Or, you know, what what was prime out of all that? Yeah.

I do think democracy did play a big role here, but it’s really hard to wrap your mind around democracy as an abstract construct versus really breaking down what it means. So in Michigan, it was the perfect storm. In the wake of the twenty twenty election, many of my Republican legislative counterparts flew to DC met with the Trump administration and were trying to overturn Michigan’s twenty twenty election results. Matt DiPerno, who is the Republican nominee for attorney general, was also working with the Trump administration to try to overturn Michigan’s twenty twenty election results. He became a name based on filing many, many failed lawsuits about the twenty twenty election.

And then, you know, Jocelyn Benson has been a very outspoken defender of democracy Sea and voting rights and election protection, and Christina Karamo, who was the Republican nominee for Secretary of State, two weeks before the election. She filed a lawsuit against the city of Detroit in an attempt to throw out all of Detroit’s absentee ballots. And at that point, tens of thousands of Detroit voters had already sent in their ballots. So, you know, I think you look at the issue but then you also look at the fact that all of the candidates on the Republican side, to your point, were not just moderate on the issue. They were extreme.

They were made it very clear they were gonna turn over election results if they didn’t like them, and they were trying to take people’s votes away. And that is a way that takes the issue of democracy and brings it down to a very granular low level that people on the ground understood. And they understood what’s at risk. You know, Michigan is a place where we will decide the twenty twenty four election. We are a key battleground state and you’ve got to have people in office who are a, gonna let you vote for the next president respect the popular vote instead of just anointing, you know, fake electors that they wanna put in.

Right. And it it matters people really get it here because we’ve seen on the ground really blatant attempts to just strip people’s boats away. So

all the buzz now, you know, it’s a set a lot of sad Republicans out there these days. I have to tell you it’s like, all I can say are long while I talk about is the twenty sixteen election how we used to sit in a room. So SAD, Normandy Republicans. And and, you know, how we dealt with that. And I was in a room with SAD, MAGA, Republic on Tuesday night monitoring the race.

And so there are a lot of sad magger Republicans out there that that are turning their lonely eyes to Ron and his Wellington boots You mentioned earlier that Tudor Dixon said she wanted to Florida, her Michigan. That didn’t turn out that great. What, you know, what your are you concerned about? The prospect of big run sweeping through the Midwest and and bringing Republicans back to glory. What’s your what’s your political assessment

of? Floridaing,

the Upper Midwest. Well, I think Michigan

pretty loudly rejected the idea of Florida. The Midwest. And also, you know, I know that DeSantis one and one handily, but just watching him completely deer and headlights in his debate with Chris when asked if he would even serve a four year term. I mean, this is a guy who’s not prepared for any pushback and just seemed just wholly unprepared at all for that debate, but it didn’t matter in Florida. Well,

Charlie Chris, and my friend Anna Navarro, did a rant on CNN. Charlie Chris is not exactly the strong you know, we’ve we’ve been talking about the strengths of your messaging, and aggression, normal know, Brent is normal. Charlie doesn’t really pass the vibe check. We don’t need to hit somebody while he’s down, but, you know, I think that it’s safe to say maybe not strongest competition. Yeah.

I could see that. But

I think so so Melissa lock in, in her election night speech, where she won, you know, what was the most expensive congressional race I think in the country. She said something that I really loved. She was like, look, I can’t fix the Republican party. Even if I wanted to. But if they’re gonna keep putting up election denying extremists, I’m gonna keep beating them.

And I think that’s exactly right. And that’s a lot of what I’ve been talking about is is even to independent and moderate Republican voters is if we wanna get back to a place where there are two functional parties. Democrats have to keep winning and keep beating these extremists, and the Republican Party will be forced back to a place where they’re not running on lies and conspiracy theories and and insurrectionists. And instead talking about tax policy. I mean, that’s genuinely my hope.

You know, Michigan went a long way towards that effort. We’re already watching Tudor Dixon live tweeting her frustrations with the GOP who put out a report basically throwing Tudor Dixon under the bus for why they lost, so we’re seeing the Trump faction already fighting amongst itself. I’ve heard Matt DiPerno is gonna run for the chair of the Michigan GOP, so I don’t know. I mean, they could double down on crazy. Yeah.

I don’t think that there’s a

lot of you know, old line, John Engler Republicans walking through that door in Michigan. It seems to me like the bench is is is pretty mega. Okay. Well, I do or I’m just gonna end with just a couple or I just wanna maybe? We we we have a lot of agreement, Valerie, you know, a lot of agreement, a lot of celebrations.

So so maybe let’s you know, that you you mentioned that maybe Republicans could get could get back to disagreeing on issues at some some time. And I noticed that the Michigan Trifecta I said the first thing that they were gonna do is repeal the right to work law. I like right to work. I used to be a republican. Okay?

So tell me why I’m wrong.

Why do

we have to get rid of the right

to work a lot? So first of all, the entire caucus did not say that. I could see that a member of the caucus tweeting out. But look, the reality is in Michigan, and and we talked about this as a our incoming caucus for the first time yesterday. This has only happened with the Democratic try factor in Michigan four times in the past hundred years.

There is a lot of pent up interest and energy and a laundry list of things that people want us to do. And we have to be really, really smart and strategic because this is ours to lose. So, you know, I am somebody who Michigan is in Union State. What are your

thing? Well, do you think are the priorities for — I think we

gotta start with a low hang. — right? Like, people voted overwhelmingly on prop three. So I think in the legislature, we have to repeal the nineteen thirty one abortion ban and just get it off the books because that’s how we got into this mess in the first place. I think we have to expand our civil rights act protect the LGBTQ community, shore up voting rights, protect public school funding, because one thing that we can stop now is Betsy DeVos had been running a ballot initiative to create vouchers here in Michigan, which would have stripped a billion dollars from our public school aid fund over the five years that had gone through, we can end that now and make sure that we’re shoring up, you know, our constitutional ban on private funds going to public school or public funds going to private schools.

And and go from there. So we’re gonna be meeting over the next few weeks as a caucus, figuring out what are all of our priorities from all across the state and really calendaring out, okay, what do we introduce and when so that we you know, this is our challenge. To show people that when democrats are in charge and governing, we keep the state. Moving forward. Yeah.

There’s always this push and pull when you’ve to look in right, which is like we have total control, so we wanna get all these things done. But at the same time, you know, the reason why you have total control really is is well, prop three. And so you’re right to deal with that, but also, you know, because the democrats really retook the big middle. In Michigan. Right?

And and and the Republicans pushed out into the extreme. Right? So you don’t wanna give them an opportunity to kind of claw

some of that back. So that that’s always the challenge. Right? Right. And we see the the Republican, and I love saying this, the Republican minority leaders.

Feels good. Already, you know, they’re posting on Facebook about the laundry list of of things like here are all the extremist democrat things that they’re gonna run right away. So it’s on us to prove them wrong, put them on defense, make them have to take tough votes on things that are overwhelmingly popular with a majority of Michigan. Yes,

dividing them. This was my big problem with the incoming Democratic congress that they finally got their act together in twenty twenty two. In twenty twenty one, they were they were putting up stuff that divided their own? Caucus. Right?

You know, the original BBB, it was all their opponents were against it. It was the democrats who were fight in fighting. It’s like, no. Right. Put up stuff where all the Democrats agree and where you divide the other side.

This is politics one zero one. So Exactly.

That that’s

my little that’s my that’s my that’s my tip for you. I do have to admit on the shot and fright side of things. I did spend a decent portion of yesterday driving around Arizona listening to my favorite Republican podcasts. Just just having a day now. I’m just just hearing about their analysis, you know.

Oh, yeah. Doctor Oz didn’t have it for him. Anyway, okay, my last hard question and then one fun question. What’s your nerve level about Joe Biden twenty twenty four and kind of that whole

debate? I mean, I I think if he runs, that that he runs. And especially if it’s Trump running, that’s the decision that he’s gonna have to make. I am not as worried about that as I think a lot of people are because I’ve been the one out there probably louder than anybody saying, we’re a big ten party. We’ve gotta uplift the rest of the voices.

Not just the person in the White House. So I’m really excited about the team we’ve got in Michigan, and I’m gonna keep pushing for us to be building that bench Alright. And

so yeah. And and this was my last question. So you are kind of part of this bench that have have come out of, you know, rising stars that maybe some people hadn’t heard earlier in the year. Are there other folks, either in Michigan or or nationwide on the Democratic side that that you, you know, think that should be getting more attention. We should be following you like their kind of political instincts.

That’s the first part of the question. And the second fun part of question is, it’s a dunk tank here. So what what Republican besides Tudor, Dixon? Were you most happy to see Go Dallas on

Tuesday? Oh, man. I like the second part of the question. Okay. So you could take them in either order.

Yeah. Okay. Now I’m gonna start with the first

one because otherwise we’ll never get back to it. So, therapy will like me all over the country. You know, your state legislators are never in national news or on TV, but there are great dynamic people, Malcolm Kenyatta in Pennsylvania, Chevron Jones in Florida, poor Florida. He’s fighting a good fight down there. And just so many good people doing so much good work.

And that’s one of the things that I wanna help focus on is I’ve been working with the DLCC basically the legislative version of the d triple c — Yeah. — to highlight and be a spokesperson for state legislators. So going into My next term, you know, one of the things that I wanna focus on too is introducing more people to all of the other amazing legislators we have on the ground. So that we get out of just looking only at the top because, you know, I I look back to Donald Trump saying, I alone can fix this. And Democrats have to get away from thinking that one race somewhere at the top is gonna fix everything because it’s not.

And if I can use this weird moment that I’m in to help uplift to those people and and introduce them to folks, I’m gonna be really excited to do that. Okay. Republicans who are really excited about the Republicans in Michigan. So Mike Shirke are a majority leader who would have been out of office anyway because he’s termed out just horrible. Like, he has said no shortage of misogynistic, horrific things about the governor.

He said he wanted to wrestle her on the front lawn of the capital He couldn’t stop talking about the dress she wore the first time she did, a state of the state of dress, how beautiful she looked the first time she gave COVID briefing and she took a mask off. I mean, just like cringe worthy stuff. And this is somebody who has promised me many times that we would get a hearing on red red flag laws or common sense gun reforms and lied. For four years. He is somebody in the wake of the Oxford High School Shooting Here in Michigan.

The day after the shooting, he was asked if the legislature would do anything to prevent this from happening ever again, and he said no. Because if we did, we would turn into a country we don’t recognize. And then he took a meeting with a young woman who lost her sister in the Oxford High School shooting, told her that he promised her a hearing on red flag laws. And lied to her. So I have no patience for that, and I’m glad he’s out of office and they were in charge now.

Good

sentence. Mallory, thank you so much for staying this time. I wanna just congratulate you on winning, on the state of Michigan, on the Michigan Magic that we saw in the in the midterms, and I wanna thank all of our listeners for joining us today. Charlie will be back in the hot seat on Monday. Thanks to my friends at Goose from musical interlude to Jonathan Mose and Katie Cooper for producing it.

And we’ll be back on Monday and do this all over again. Go democracy, peace out. You’re

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