As Democrats brace for a bruising primary in Michigan’s US Senate race, Mallory McMorrow, one of the party’s top contenders, has quietly deleted thousands of old tweets — including posts in which she took jabs at the rural Midwest, lamented ever leaving California, and said she continued to vote there after she said she’d moved permanently to Michigan.
McMorrow, a Michigan state lawmaker and rising star in the Democratic Party, wrote in her 2025 autobiography that she “relocated permanently” to Michigan in 2014.
Yet a CNN KFile review of the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine reveals a series of now-deleted social media posts of McMorrow describing herself as a California resident as late as July 2016.
McMorrow repeatedly referenced voting in California’s June 2016 Democratic primary and urged voters to register for it. In other now-deleted posts, McMorrow also described herself in July 2016 as a constituent of California Democratic Rep. Ted Lieu and referenced voting in person in November 2014 in the Los Angeles area, where she was a resident at the time.
Public records show she registered to vote in Michigan in August 2016.
On top of questions about McMorrow’s voting record, the deleted tweets offer a window into her political evolution. Among the roughly 6,000 deleted posts are those that reflect a range of progressive views, from contemplating a future without cars, to supporting the Black Lives Matter movement, to comparing President Donald Trump and his supporters to Nazis.
McMorrow also deleted comments about the US coasts breaking off from Middle America following the 2016 election of Trump.
“I had a dream that the U.S. amicably broke off into The Ring (coasts + Can + Mex + parts Mich/Tex) and Middle America,” she wrote in December 2016. “Oh and The Ring nominated Obama as Prime Minister and everyone was given $1,000 and six months to pick a side.”
Her campaign declined to clarify whether the post referred to a literal dream or a hypothetical situation she hoped for.
In recent years, McMorrow has espoused more moderate views and has branded herself as the pragmatist in a crowded Democratic Senate primary that is shaping up to be among the more competitive races this year. McMorrow is locked in a dead heat against US Rep. Haley Stevens and Abdul El-Sayed, a former Detroit public health official.
A spokesperson for McMorrow, Hannah Lindow, said the campaign deleted all her tweets prior to 2020, describing it as “pretty standard for candidates.” She said that McMorrow’s move from California to Michigan “was a process” that was not complete until mid-2016, that she remained registered to vote in California during that time, and that she voted absentee in June 2016.
Lindow said McMorrow considers 2014 the start of that move.
“These are normal tweets by a normal person,” said Lindow, McMorrow’s communications director. “As Michigan’s Senate majority whip, Mallory has spent the past eight years fighting and delivering to make people’s lives better: higher wages, universal pre-K, no kid going hungry in schools, comprehensive gun violence prevention laws, and more. And she’s tweeted about that too.”
McMorrow’s campaign declined to say which positions she did and did not stand by, other than to say she stood by a comment lamenting the Michigan weather.
Michigan’s Senate race is one of the most important in the country in determining control of the chamber. It is one of only two seats in 2026 held by Democrats in states Trump won in 2024, the other being Georgia.
With Democrats becoming more bullish about their chances to retake the Senate in this year’s midterms, the Michigan primary, scheduled for August, is shaping up to be a critical race.
McMorrow is not the only Democrat in the race who has deleted social media posts. Last year, CNN reported that El-Sayed quietly erased thousands of old social media posts — including a dozen tweets that championed the “defund the police” movement, described police as “standing armies,” and urged cities to divert money from law enforcement to social services.
Archived snapshots preserved by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine show that in 2022, McMorrow’s X account contained more than 20,000 tweets. Now, the account shows just 13,900 tweets.
Her deleted posts appear to have been removed after a 2025 New York Post story first highlighted McMorrow’s disparaging remarks about Michigan and “Middle America” after Trump’s election in 2016, with several of the posts cited in that report no longer accessible online, including one praising a thread arguing that rural Americans — not coastal elites — needed to better understand the rest of the country.
In one tweet in January 2017, when a user wrote, “California should have its own diplomats” to “make sure we don’t get nuked because of morons from the other side of the country,” Morrow responded, “There are days like these that make me miss California even more.”
In announcing her state Senate campaign in 2017, McMorrow struck a very different tone.
“Choosing to put roots down right here in Michigan is the best decision I’ve ever made,” she wrote on her campaign website at the time.
Her deleted posts span a wide range of topics.
Some show McMorrow expressing light-hearted support for a future without cars; highlighting a “white privilege” seminar at her alma mater, University of Notre Dame; and saying a southern border wall would limit the flow of avocados into the United States.
“Pushing for [a] future where we don’t own cars… Cars are dead,” she joked in one thread. “What about all the avocados from Mexico? If that wall gets built, bye avocados,” she said in another. “I’m particularly proud of my alma mater #NotreDame for offering a White Privilege seminar,” reads a since-purged 2014 post.
“Mallory started her career as a car designer and doesn’t want to ban cars. She’s been repeatedly endorsed by auto unions,” a spokesperson told CNN.
Some of the deleted posts could prove politically sensitive in a state that Trump has carried twice, and where auto manufacturing and rural communities are central to the political landscape.
Multiple deleted posts from McMorrow also had comparisons between the United States under Trump and Nazi Germany.
Just over a week into Trump’s first term in January 2017, McMorrow wrote, “Dr. Seuss, 1941. We’ve been here before, America. #AmericaFirst #NoMuslimBan,” linking to a Dr. Seuss cartoon about Nazi Germany. When another user wrote in July 2017 that they had “zero faith” they could change the minds of Trump supporters, McMorrow responded, “Agreed. But how do we fight back? Hitler had supporters. Stalin had supporters. Putin has supporters. No one will change their minds.”
In another post in October 2020, McMorrow shared a video featuring a Holocaust survivor warning about parallels between Nazi Germany and “Trump and his authoritarian aspirations.” McMorrow added, “Please watch the full 4-minute mini doc that a dear friend created with Walter, a 91-year-old Holocaust survivor, warning about the parallels he sees between the rise of Nazi Germany and America today.”
Another tweet from February 2016, shortly after the death of Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, said, “Thoughts after Scalia, on life: Never be the type of person that makes people cheer when you’re dead.”
Other posts were more ambivalent about Michigan.
In a deleted tweet from November 2016, responding to another user’s comment about diversity in a Detroit diner, McMorrow wrote that one of her “first reactions” after Trump’s election victory was, “I wish I never left California,” before adding that after a week in Detroit she wanted to buy a home there.
In another post from March 2016 shortly after she moved to the state, McMorrow complained about the weather, writing, “Yesterday it was nearly 50 and now the sky is just shitting ice on everything. I don’t like you, Michigan.”
McMorrow’s campaign stood by her comments telling CNN, “The Michigan sky does in fact sometimes shit ice. She stands by that.”
Though McMorrow’s book tags her move happening in 2014, in a 2015 interview McMorrow said she moved in 2015. Instagram posts on her-personal-turned-campaign-Instagram show she listed her Los Angeles-area apartment being vacated in March 2016.
It’s unclear why she could continue to vote in California, after establishing residency in Michigan, but McMorrow shared a New York Magazine story that April about the state’s Democratic primary being important for the first time in decades. She later shared a crying image of the late actor James Van Der Beek of “Dawson’s Creek” fame lamenting the Democratic primary being settled before California voted.
Under California law, only state residents are eligible to vote in California elections, with residency defined as a voter’s established domicile and intent to remain.
In 2024, McMorrow chastised a Twitter user who said they voted in a state they no longer lived in when in a spat with a voter who moved to California but still voted in Michigan writing, “So you moved for work and live in California but are registered somewhere you no longer live?…that’s illegal.”