By Matthew Hutchison / news@whmi.com

State Sen. Mallory McMorrow, making an explicit pitch to Livingston County's independent voters in a U.S. Senate race that could determine control of the chamber, said she believes her background makes her the best candidate to tackle high-profile issues such as healthcare, housing, data centers and AI.

Speaking on WHMI’s “Meet the People” podcast, McMorrow also reacted to breaking news about surging gas prices and said Michigan residents are paying an economic and human price for a war with Iran, which she said the United States had no reason to enter.

“People can’t afford to make ends meet. It’s killing us,” McMorrow said in the nearly 45-minute conversation. “And this wasn’t inevitable. It was a choice. We had, you know, the reporting that shows Benjamin Netanyahu convinced President Trump to go into war with Iran. Now, let's be clear, the Ayatollah and the Iranian regime were no friend to the United States, but there also wasn’t an imminent threat to the United States that would justify us going to war.”

She continued: “We’ve lost service members, and the President seems to write them off as expendable. And people are paying for it back home, whether it’s gas prices or in health care costs or in fertilizer. You know that's crushing our agricultural industry. We are paying the price for a war we had no reason to be dragged into.”

McMorrow is one of three Democrats vying for the U.S. Senate seat left open by retiring Sen. Gary Peters. The Aug. 4 primary winner will face Republican Mike Rogers in November.

With Gallup now finding that a record 45 percent of Americans identify as independents, McMorrow said she is the candidate best positioned to win that constituency, citing her private-sector background as an industrial designer and auto journalist and her accomplishments in the state Senate.

“My proudest moment as a legislator is when I get to introduce things that are not my ideas, that come directly from people, so that is my case to all voters, especially independent voters,” she said. “If you have a great idea, bring it to me. I want to champion it. I want to test it. Because the way we get out of this mess is not by relitigating the same stale ideas over and over and over again. It’s doing something totally new.”

McMorrow pointed to her work with Republican state Sen. John Demoose of Northern Michigan as evidence of her ability to work across party lines.

“I’ve heard him give interviews where he says there are events in Mallory’s life that led her to become a Democrat, and there are events in my life that led me to become a Republican, and there are issues where we are never going to agree, and we debate them we do, but on the things we agree on, let’s focus there,” she said. “That’s why he and I have introduced legislation together, and we’ve shown up on panels together because we recognize we don’t have to agree with each other on everything, but we want our kids to stay in Michigan and have job opportunities and see themselves in the future here. And that's pretty powerful.”

On housing, she called the national shortage an emergency and said the federal government should do more to clear red tape to expedite building. She cited the rapid reconstruction of a collapsed Pennsylvania highway under Gov. Josh Shapiro as a model. “All of a sudden they were able to build in days, not years,” she said. “It is a crisis. It is an emergency. Let’s treat it like that.”

On healthcare, she said a federal public option would drive down costs even for those who keep their private coverage. “In the states that have implemented a public option, they have not only seen the uninsured rate collapse to almost zero, they’ve seen the cost of private health insurance come down as well, because you’re creating a competitive marketplace.”

On AI, McMorrow – who has co-sponsored legislation targeting social media addiction, data privacy and potentially harmful AI chatbot interactions – warned against repeating the mistakes made with social media.

“We are not the product,” she said. “We made that mistake with social media. Your time, your eyeballs, to sell ads to you 24 hours, your profile data about you, where you go, what you buy, what you talk about, is all monetized against you. And with AI now touching healthcare, employment, education, national security, we need to make sure that people control it and we don’t let it go rogue.”

She also flagged the national security implications of the Administration’s decision to allow Nvidia to sell some chips to China. “That’s a national security threat. It is an American company producing a product that is more advanced than any of the other companies in the world to date. And what we’ve seen China do historically is not only use our products, but they will reverse engineer them, and they will come back and build something better very quickly. They’ve done this in the auto industry.”

In a separate WHMI story published yesterday, McMorrow disclosed that a man shouted an antisemitic slur at her Jewish husband in front of their 5-year-old daughter at the recent Michigan Democratic Party convention in Detroit.

Despite the divisions inside the party and the turbulence of the campaign, McMorrow said she believes most voters share more in common than the current political environment suggests.

“Everybody wants a safe community, good schools for their kids, clean water and clean air,” she said. “More than anything else, what I hear from people is they just want it to be boring again.”

The full interview is available on WHMI's podcast page linked below.