Michigan Democrat running to replace Sen. Gary Peters calls war in Gaza genocide

GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — Mallory McMorrow, the Michigan Democrat running in a three-way primary to replace retiring Sen. Gary Peters, has shifted her stance on the war in Gaza and now believes it is a genocide.

Her latest evolution came during a chat with voters at a brewery in the West Michigan town of Allegan Sunday, just days ahead of the anniversary of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack that led to the conflict. McMorrow’s team provided video of the exchange to POLITICO.

During the back-and-forth, an attendee asked McMorrow whether she would accept support from AIPAC — the politically influential pro-Israel lobby that’s backing rival Democratic candidate Haley Stevens, a member of congress.

“I’m not accepting AIPAC support,” McMorrow told the questioner. “I’m not seeking their endorsement. I’ve never accepted their support. And what we are seeing in the Middle East is a moral abomination.”

She went on to say she would’ve supported Sen. Bernie Sanders’ resolution to block offensive arm sales to Israel and called for a two-state solution.

“My view on this is we have completely lost the humanity of this issue,” McMorrow continued. “It is talked about as like a third rail litmus test without acknowledging these are human beings. They’re people. And our position should be that there is no individual life that is worth more than another individual life.”

A different voter interrupted her to asked whether the conflict was a genocide. McMorrow paused for several seconds, exhaled, and responded, “based on the definition, yes.”

“I don’t care what you call it,” she added, saying for some Jews the term “means something very different to them: that if you lost family members in the Holocaust it means the specific medical testing, gas chambers, being put on a train — I don’t want us to get lost in, ‘do you agree with this definition or not.’ I want to get to the solution.”

The issue is personal for McMorrow, whose husband is Jewish: She received a death threat on her daughter’s life after Oct. 7.

Her remarks demonstrate the fast-moving politics of the issue in a battleground state ahead of next year’s midterms. And they come as the Michigan Democratic candidates are looking for ways to contrast ahead of the election.

They also isolate Stevens as the only remaining Democratic candidate not to call the conflict a genocide. Stevens recently declined two interviews with POLITICO on the matter. Abdul El-Sayed, a former Michigan health official, has long said the war meets that criteria.

Asked 13 days ago by POLITICO about whether the conflict in Gaza is a genocide, McMorrow said “dehumanizing Palestinians, declaring collective guilt, blocking food and medicine and bombing Gaza to the point of uninhabitability is a moral catastrophe.” She declined to use the word “genocide.”

A spokesperson for McMorrow said she based her new stance on a United Nations Commission of Inquiry report from Sept.16 declaring that a genocide took place, as well as conversations with community leaders.

Asked for comment on McMorrow’s position change and its involvement in the race, an AIPAC spokesperson said in a statement: “Israel is fighting a just and moral war and is demonstrating a clear willingness to end the conflict. Rather than making false and malicious allegations against the Jewish state, the pressure should be applied on Hamas to release the hostages and give up power.”

On Saturday, the day before McMorrow called it a genocide, she told POLITICO she faces questions about the issue at nearly every event. She acknowledged it was “a probably small percentage of voters that are voting based on the issue, but it’s a lingering concern people have.”

El-Sayed, who is endorsed by Sanders, has warned that AIPAC backing Stevens and spending a lot of money in the race could help Republicans win the seat. He’s noted the state’s “uncommitted movement,” the national pro-Palestinian group, could fray the party’s coalition. Like McMorrow, he said he faces questions about the issue at every campaign stop.

“When I talk about the fact that our tax dollars are being misappropriated to weaponize food against children and to subsidize a genocide, rather than to invest in real people in their communities and their kids and their schools and their health care, it is the single biggest applause line in every speech,” El-Sayed told POLITICO in an interview before a party confab here. “People understand that this is not about what’s happening over there. This is about what’s happening with our tax dollars over here.”

Later in the evening Saturday, McMorrow, el-Sayed and Stevens gathered inside a room for Best of the West, a traditional Michigan Democratic fundraiser at a hotel in downtown Grand Rapids. There, they heard Lt. Gov. Garlin Gilchrist, who is running for governor, also say that the war in Gaza is a genocide.

McMorrow’s comments came on a weekend in which candidates running in the contentious and longhaul primary—it’s not scheduled to take place until August, though state lawmakers have discussed moving it up—sharpened their knives against one another.

McMorrow and El-Sayed have also contrasted with Stevens over her receiving the tacit backing of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, whose leadership has become a flashpoint among a new generation of Democratic candidates.

Not long after El-Sayed recorded himself trying to eat a heaping, 12-stack cheeseburger to talk about rising costs and billionaires, POLITICO reported that Stevens was set to take a luxury California fundraising trip in Napa Valley this weekend amid the shutdown with members of the DSCC.

“The DSCC believes that Haley has the best chance to win in the general,” reads an email obtained by POLITICO from Stevens’ fundraising firm. “With a proven record of winning in tough elections, she starts this race with a clear lead. The Republicans are uniting in opposition to Haley Stevens in the primary, viewing her defeat as clearing a path to capturing a Michigan U.S. Senate seat for the first time in three decades.”

The email promotes a weekend fundraising swing though Los Angeles in addition to her Napa stop. “If the government hasn’t reopened, she won’t attend the events,” a spokesperson for Stevens said.

Still, in such a competitive race even the trip itself was fodder.

“I’ve never been to a wine cave,” El-Sayed told POLITICO in an interview. “I don’t really know what happens there, but I’ll tell you this, I’ve been all over my state, and I’ve never found one — and Michigan has pretty good wine. It’s right here.”