Democratic anger at their own party fuels 2026 primaries

When Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow decided in February that she wanted to run for an open U.S.

When Michigan state Sen. Mallory McMorrow decided in February that she wanted to run for an open U.S. Senate seat, she conveyed her intentions to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. But the committee asked her to hold off, according to three sources familiar with the conversations.

In that call and subsequent ones, some of which took place at the staff level, DSCC officials didn’t explicitly ask her not to run, but “they were slow-walking,” said one source who discussed the private conversations on condition of anonymity. “It was, ‘Can you wait a little longer, can you wait?’”

In early April, McMorrow defied their wishes and launched her campaign, inveighing against “the same old crap in Washington” and highlighting polls that showed the Democratic Party’s approval rating at an all-time low.

“We need new leaders,” she said in her launch video. “Because the same people in D.C. who got us into this mess are not going to be the ones to get us out of it.”

Whether she intended it or not, the 39-year-old McMorrow started a trend of Democratic outsiders end-running party leaders to launch their campaigns, sometimes in explicit opposition to them. The movement is fueled by a crisis of confidence among Democratic voters in their own party, which is giving encouragement to the types of nontraditional candidates who have been walloped by leadership-aligned rivals in the past.