We Didn't Run Because We Always Wanted To. We Ran Because We Had To.

I’ve always admired Senator Warren.

When I first ran for State Senate in 2018, I was a nobody in politics. My degree was in industrial design. My background was in media, industrial design, and consumer products. But I was so horrified after 2016 — how it tore our communities and our country apart — that I Googled “How to run for office.”

I joined Emerge, an organization that trains Democratic women to run. What struck me about the women in my cohort wasn’t ambition. Not one of us said, “I was born to be in politics.” We were there because we reluctantly saw running as the only solution to problems that, infuriatingly, nobody else was fixing.

That was Senator Warren’s story, too.

She wasn’t born into politics. She lived a pretty typical American life, with all the wrinkles and rough edges that come with it. She studied why families go broke. She fought to create the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau to protect people from being defrauded by banks. And then she ran for Senate because she, like every woman in my Emerge cohort, saw running as the only solution to problems nobody else seemed willing to fix.

That’s the thread that connects us.

A few days after I won my first race — 500 volunteers, 18 months of campaigning, a 20-point swing to defeat a Republican incumbent in a stunning upset — my phone rang. Unknown number.

It was Senator Warren.

She’d read about our race and wanted to talk. About Michigan. About our district. About what people actually cared about. She didn’t ask for anything. It wasn’t transactional. It was genuine.

A year later, she called again — to ask me to introduce her at her presidential campaign rally in Lansing. I hadn’t even endorsed her yet. She didn’t bring that up. She saw me as a leader in my own state and offered to share the stage. It was a partnership, not a transaction.

That stuck with me.

And it made the decision to endorse her then that much easier. Teamwork first, the rest falls into place.

We’ve stayed close ever since — sharing a stage in Lansing, catching up at a rally in Detroit, sitting together with community leaders to talk about education, gun violence, and childcare during the Biden-Harris campaign. We’re both the kind of people who want to actually fix things, not just talk about fixing them.

So when she called last week about this Senate race, she got right to the point:

“Mallory, it's time. We can do so much good together with you in the Senate.”

That’s Elizabeth Warren.

She’s endorsing this campaign because of what you’ve built with us — a grassroots movement that doesn’t need corporate PAC money and keeps growing anyway. She taught me something I haven’t forgotten: you don’t win alone. You build something bigger than yourself. You run to rebuild something, not just to win something.

Neither of us ran because we always wanted to be senators. We ran because we looked around, saw what needed fixing, and realized nobody else was going to do it.

Years ago, I endorsed her because I believed in her vision. Now she’s endorsing me because she knows we will win — and together, we’ll fight to fulfill that vision.

Let’s go.

– Mallory

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