Mallory McMorrow, the Michigan state senator running for the U.S. Senate, deleted roughly 6,000 posts from her X account, including every tweet she posted before 2020, after news outlets began reporting on her social media history, CNN's Andrew Kaczynski reported Wednesday.
The mass purge came after the New York Post published an April 2025 report detailing years of McMorrow's tweets, posts that painted a picture at odds with the populist, Michigan-first image the 39-year-old Democrat has tried to project as she campaigns to replace retiring Sen. Gary Peters.
Among the deleted posts: tweets disparaging Michigan's weather, pining for California, fantasizing about splitting the country in two, comparing Trump-era America to Nazi Germany, and amplifying a viral thread lecturing rural Americans about their supposed isolation. For a candidate who complained just last year that Democrats give off "elitist" and "academic" vibes, the old tweets tell a different story.
The deleted posts span years and cover a range of topics, but a pattern runs through them: contempt for the state and voters McMorrow now wants to represent.
In April 2014, McMorrow posted: "Aaaand it's snowing. Screw you, Michigan. #NYCtoLA." On January 5, 2017, she wrote: "There are days like these that make me miss California even more." Her 2025 autobiography states she "relocated permanently" to Michigan in 2014, but CNN found tweets in which she described herself as a California resident and voter as late as July 2016. Her campaign acknowledged the move "was a process" and was not complete until mid-2016.
That timeline matters. McMorrow has built her political brand around being a Michigander who understands the state's working families. If she was still calling herself a California voter two years after she claims to have moved, voters deserve to know.
Weeks before Donald Trump's swearing-in as the 45th president, McMorrow posted a tweet imagining the country splitting apart: "I had a dream that the US amicably broke off into The Ring (coasts+Can+Mex+parts Mich/Tex) and Middle America." The geography of her fantasy is telling, Michigan was sorted into the coastal club, not "Middle America." The implication was clear enough that she felt the need to delete it.
In November 2016, McMorrow elevated a post by then-journalist Patrick Thornton that lectured working-class Americans about their worldview. Thornton wrote: "All of this talk about coastal elites needing to understand more of America has it backwards. It is much of white working class America that needs to reach outside its comfort zone and meet people not like them." He added: "Many rural Americans have isolated themselves from the rest of the country. They live in very unrepresentative areas."
McMorrow endorsed the message, adding her own comment: "I'm from rural New Jersey, this rings 100%. Empathy should go both ways, but Trump's base fears what they've never seen."
That is a remarkable posture for someone now asking rural and exurban Michigan voters to send her to Washington. The condescension is not subtle. It is not a misquote. It is her own amplified post, in her own words. And she deleted it.
On Election Day 2016, McMorrow posted: "We've downplayed the importance of quality education for all, replaced it with fear and blaming and anger, and here we are." In January 2017, she invoked a Dr. Seuss cartoon from 1941, writing: "Dr. Seuss, 1941. We've been here before, America. #AmericaFirst #NoMuslimBan." By October 2020, she was sharing a mini-documentary about a Holocaust survivor, writing: "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."
Comparing your political opponents to Nazis is a specific rhetorical choice. It is also the kind of choice that becomes inconvenient when you need those opponents' neighbors to vote for you. The pattern among Senate Democrats who say one thing and do another is familiar by now.
One deleted post stands out for its sheer political recklessness in a state built on the auto industry. McMorrow once wrote that she was "pushing for [a] future where we don't own cars" and declared "cars are dead."
Her campaign tried to wave this away. A spokesperson told the Post that McMorrow "started her career as a car designer and doesn't want to ban cars. She's been repeatedly endorsed by auto unions." That is a non-denial dressed up as a rebuttal. Nobody accused her of wanting to "ban" cars. She said cars are dead. In Michigan. Where the car industry employs hundreds of thousands of people.
The broader context of the Democratic Senate primary makes the deletion spree all the more revealing. McMorrow is not the only Michigan Democrat scrubbing old posts. Fox News reported that rival candidate Abdul El-Sayed quietly removed roughly a dozen past social media posts from 2020 and 2021 that supported the "defund the police" movement. In one deleted post, El-Sayed wrote that major U.S. cities spend "WAY TOO MUCH" on police departments and said "Fixing that is what the #Defund movement is about."
El-Sayed's deletions went further. The Washington Free Beacon reported that he also scrubbed a September 2021 post calling Border Patrol agents "white supremacists" and blaming U.S. policy for illegal immigration. That post reacted to a claim about mounted Border Patrol agents that was later debunked, with investigations clearing the officers of wrongdoing.
The Michigan Senate race is shaping up as a contest in which multiple Democratic primary candidates are racing to hide their own records from voters. That is not a confidence-inspiring start for a party that claims to value transparency.
McMorrow's team offered two lines of defense. First, a campaign spokesperson called the social media cleanse "pretty standard for candidates." Second, her communications director, Hannah Lindow, dismissed the deleted posts entirely.
Lindow told the Post:
"These are normal tweets by a normal person. 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."
If the tweets were so normal, why delete 6,000 of them? The "pretty standard for candidates" defense is an admission that the posts were politically damaging, not that they were unremarkable. You do not scrub your entire pre-2020 social media archive because the posts were boring.
The campaign also pointed to a recent McMorrow post touting legislation imposing restrictions on social media accounts for minors, and another in which she joked about Michigan's gray weather. The message was clear: see, she still tweets about Michigan. But nobody questioned whether McMorrow uses social media. The question is why she hid years of posts that revealed how she actually felt about the state and its people before she needed their votes.
As Newsmax noted, CNN identified additional deleted posts from El-Sayed expressing anti-police views, adding to the broader picture of Michigan Democrats quietly rewriting their digital records during the Senate primary. The deletions across multiple campaigns suggest a coordinated awareness that the progressive positions these candidates once championed are now liabilities with general-election voters.
McMorrow's purge fits a wider problem inside the Democratic Party. Candidates run hard to the left to win primaries, post accordingly, then scramble to erase the evidence before a general election. The internet, however, has a long memory. Archived versions of deleted posts survive. Reporters dig them up. And voters notice.
The Michigan Senate seat is one of the most closely watched races in the country. Peters' retirement opened a rare opportunity for Republicans, and Democrats know they cannot afford to lose it. That pressure is exactly why McMorrow's social media history matters. If she wins the primary, every deleted tweet becomes opposition research in a general election.
The internal tensions roiling Senate Democrats extend well beyond Michigan. Democratic Senate candidates have been distancing themselves from Chuck Schumer as frustration mounts over the party's direction and messaging. McMorrow's tweet-scrubbing is a symptom of the same disease: a party whose candidates know their own stated beliefs are unpopular with the voters they need.
Meanwhile, Senate Democrats have been quietly weighing changes at the top as internal divisions deepen over strategy and spending. The party's 2026 recruits face a fundamental credibility gap, and deleting old tweets does nothing to close it.
McMorrow wants Michigan voters to believe she is one of them. But the record she tried to erase tells a different story: a candidate who pined for California, mocked Michigan's weather, imagined carving Middle America away from the coasts, lectured rural voters about their ignorance, compared her political opponents to Nazis, and declared that cars, Michigan's economic lifeblood, are dead.
Deleting 6,000 posts does not change what she wrote. It just confirms she knows how damaging those words are.
Voters can forgive a lot. What they tend not to forgive is being played for fools.
