As Michigan’s Senate primary draws closer, Mallory McMorrow is facing new scrutiny over old social media posts that criticized Middle America and expressed nostalgia for California. The deleted tweets raise fresh questions about her past remarks, her voting history, and the evolution of a candidate now presenting herself as a pragmatic Democrat.
A CNN KFile review of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine found that McMorrow’s X account once held more than 20,000 tweets, but now shows 13,900. The removed posts include comments about rural America, Trump voters, California politics, and Michigan itself.
Deleted posts and the California question
McMorrow, a Michigan state lawmaker and one of the party’s best-known Senate hopefuls, wrote in her 2025 autobiography that she “relocated permanently” to Michigan in 2014. But archived posts show her describing herself as a California resident as late as July 2016.
Those posts also show McMorrow referring to voting in California’s June 2016 Democratic primary and urging others to register for it. In other deleted messages, she described herself as a constituent of California Democratic Rep. Ted Lieu and referenced voting in the Los Angeles area in November 2014, when she lived there.
Public records show she registered to vote in Michigan in August 2016. Her campaign said the move from California to Michigan “was a process” that was not complete until mid-2016, and that she remained registered in California during that period while voting absentee in June 2016.
Tweets that took aim at Middle America
Some of the most politically sensitive posts were written after Donald Trump’s 2016 election victory. One deleted tweet said, “There are days like these that make me miss California even more,” after another user joked that California should have its own diplomats to protect the state from “morons from the other side of the country.”
McMorrow also posted about the country splitting into “The Ring” of coasts, Canada, Mexico, and parts of Michigan and Texas, separated from “Middle America.” In that December 2016 post, she imagined Obama as prime minister of the coastal bloc and wrote that everyone would get $1,000 and six months to choose sides.
Her campaign later said the post described an actual dream, not a policy wish. The campaign also declined to say which deleted tweets McMorrow still stands by, aside from a remark about Michigan weather.
A broader trail of now-deleted posts
The deleted material goes beyond immigration, geography, and state politics. Some posts praised a future without cars, highlighted a “white privilege” seminar at her alma mater, the University of Notre Dame, and joked that a southern border wall would stop avocados from coming into the United States.
Other tweets showed her strongly opposed to Trump and his supporters. Some compared Trump and his backers to Nazis, while others linked Trump-era politics to Nazi Germany and referenced Holocaust survivor warnings about authoritarianism.
A spokesperson said McMorrow’s posts reflected a broader political journey and insisted the deletions were routine. “These are normal tweets by a normal person,” communications director Hannah Lindow said, adding that McMorrow has spent years working on higher wages, universal pre-K, hunger in schools, and gun violence prevention laws.
Why the deleted tweets matter now
McMorrow has recently tried to present herself as a moderate and a pragmatist in a crowded Democratic primary. That race is already tight, with McMorrow in a dead heat against US Rep. Haley Stevens and Abdul El-Sayed, a former Detroit public health official.
The contest carries national weight because Michigan is one of only two Senate seats Democrats hold in states Trump won in 2024, alongside Georgia. With Democrats increasingly confident about their chances to win back the Senate, the August primary is becoming one of the cycle’s defining intraparty fights.
The Michigan race is also unfolding in a state where auto manufacturing and rural communities shape the political landscape. That makes McMorrow’s deleted remarks about California and Middle America especially relevant, even as her campaign argues that the posts were ordinary and that her record in office is what should define her now.
Her campaign has said she stands by a complaint about Michigan weather, including the blunt line that “the Michigan sky does in fact sometimes shit ice.” That kind of direct language, along with the deleted tweets, shows how McMorrow’s online past could continue to shadow her as she seeks to win one of the most consequential primaries in the country.
