Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Mallory McMorrow deleted roughly 6,000 posts from her X account, including every tweet she published before 2020, after the New York Post exposed a trail of social media commentary that clashed sharply with the image she now projects to Michigan voters.
CNN's Andrew Kaczynski reported the mass deletion, noting that the purge followed the Post's April 2025 scoop detailing McMorrow's years of posts mocking Michigan, pining for California, defending "coastal elites," and comparing Trump supporters to Nazis. Her campaign called the cleanup "pretty standard for candidates."
Standard or not, the deleted posts paint a portrait voters deserve to see, one of a transplant from the coasts who spent years on social media belittling the state and the people she now asks to send her to Washington.
McMorrow, 39, is running in the Democratic primary to replace retiring U.S. Sen. Gary Peters. She serves as Michigan's Senate majority whip and wrote in her 2025 autobiography that she "relocated permanently" to Michigan in 2014. But the tweets she scrubbed tell a different story about how she felt once she arrived.
In April 2014, she posted: "Aaaand it's snowing. Screw you, Michigan. #NYCtoLA." On Jan. 5, 2017, the day before Congress certified the presidential election results, she wrote: "There are days like these that make me miss California even more." CNN's review found tweets in which McMorrow described herself as a California resident and voter as late as July 2016, more than two years after she says she moved to Michigan.
The contempt went beyond weather complaints. In the weeks before the presidential inauguration in January 2017, McMorrow posted about a dream "that the US amicably broke off into The Ring (coasts+Can+Mex+parts Mich/Tex) and Middle America." The fantasy of a country splitting along cultural lines is a revealing one for a candidate now campaigning as a champion of the working Midwest.
She also elevated a November 2016 thread by then-journalist Patrick Thornton that lectured Middle America. 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."
McMorrow added her own commentary when she reposted it: "I'm from rural New Jersey, this rings 100%. Empathy should go both ways, but Trump's base fears what they've never seen."
Thornton's thread went further, declaring that "many rural Americans have isolated themselves from the rest of the country" and that "rural and exurban people need to see more of America." McMorrow chose to amplify every word of it.
The deleted archive also included posts that drew explicit parallels between the Trump era and Nazi Germany. Days into the first Trump term, McMorrow posted: "Dr. Seuss, 1941. We've been here before, America. #AmericaFirst #NoMuslimBan." In October 2020, she urged followers to watch a "full 4-minute mini doc" featuring "Walter, a 91-year-old Holocaust survivor, warning about the parallels he sees between the rise of Nazi Germany and America today."
On Election Day 2016, she wrote: "We've downplayed the importance of quality education for all, replaced it with fear and blaming and anger, and here we are." The implication, that voters who chose differently were driven by ignorance and rage, is a familiar refrain from the progressive left, not from a candidate trying to win a general election in a state that swung right.
Then there is the car problem. In a state where the auto industry remains the economic backbone, McMorrow once posted that she was "pushing for [a] future where we don't own cars" and declared "cars are dead." Her campaign now insists she "started her career as a car designer and doesn't want to ban cars" and that she has been "repeatedly endorsed by auto unions." The contradiction between the old tweets and the new talking points is precisely the kind of thing a mass deletion is designed to bury.
Michigan Democrats are facing growing headwinds heading into the 2026 midterms, and a candidate caught scrubbing her own record is unlikely to inspire confidence among swing voters who already distrust the party's messaging.
McMorrow's communications director, Hannah Lindow, told the Post that the deleted posts were nothing to worry about.
"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."
A campaign spokesperson added that the deletion "was a process" and pointed to a recent post in which McMorrow touted legislation imposing restrictions on social media accounts for minors. The campaign framed the purge as routine housekeeping.
If the posts were truly "normal tweets by a normal person," the obvious question is why McMorrow felt the need to delete all 6,000 of them. Normal tweets do not require a mass cleanse a year after a news outlet flags them. The timeline matters: the Post published its scoop in April 2025, and McMorrow wiped the slate sometime before CNN caught it in 2026. That is not spring cleaning. That is damage control.
The irony is thick. McMorrow told Politico last year that she was frustrated Democrats give off "elitist" and "academic" vibes. Her own deleted tweets, sneering at Michigan weather, fantasizing about coastal secession, lecturing rural Americans about their isolation, are a case study in exactly the attitude she claimed to oppose. The repositioning looks less like growth and more like a calculated pattern of Democratic image management that voters have seen before.
McMorrow is not the only Democrat in the Michigan Senate race scrambling to clean up old social media. Abdul El-Sayed, another candidate in the same primary, deleted a September 2021 post in which he called Border Patrol agents "white supremacists" and blamed U.S. policies for illegal immigration. The Washington Free Beacon reported that El-Sayed's deleted post was tied to a disputed image of a Border Patrol agent on horseback, a claim that was later debunked and the agent cleared of wrongdoing.
El-Sayed's scrubbing went further. Fox News reported that he quietly deleted roughly a dozen old posts from 2020 and 2021 expressing support for the "defund the police" movement, including statements that major cities spend "WAY TOO MUCH on police departments" and that police are "standing armies we deploy against our own people." Backed by Rep. Rashida Tlaib and Sen. Bernie Sanders, El-Sayed's campaign now claims he worked alongside law enforcement and raised officers' wages. Newsmax also documented the deletions, noting that scrutiny has intensified as the primary heats up.
Two leading candidates in the same Democratic primary, both caught deleting years of politically toxic posts. The pattern is hard to dismiss as coincidence. It suggests a party that knows its candidates' actual views are liabilities in a general election, and would rather erase the evidence than defend the positions.
Michigan has become a recurring source of accountability questions for Democratic officials, from missing records to evasive answers. McMorrow's mass deletion fits squarely in that tradition.
Social media posts are not private diary entries. They are public statements, made voluntarily, often with political intent. When a candidate publishes thousands of opinions over a decade and then wipes the archive the moment it becomes inconvenient, voters lose the ability to judge whether the person asking for their vote has been honest about who she is.
McMorrow spent years on X telling the world that Michigan's weather was miserable, that cars were dead, that rural Americans were isolated and fearful, and that the country should split in two along cultural lines. She amplified a thread calling on "white working class America" to get out of its comfort zone. She drew parallels between a democratically elected president and the Third Reich.
Now she wants Michigan voters, including the rural, working-class, car-building voters she once mocked, to make her their senator. And she would prefer they never see what she said about them.
The broader Democratic Party is grappling with exactly this kind of credibility gap. Candidates who spent years staking out positions on the progressive fringe now rush to repackage themselves as moderates, hoping the internet forgets. The internal tensions within the party only sharpen the incentive to hide the trail.
McMorrow's campaign says she has delivered results for Michigan families. Maybe so. But a candidate who trusts her own record should not need to delete 6,000 posts to sell it.
Voters can judge a politician by what she says today. They can learn even more from what she tried to make them forget.
