WASHINGTON—Politics—a panel of three Michigan Democrats running for a key open U.S. Senate seat—and a closing speech by Sen. Bernie Sanders, Ind-Vt., highlighted the final day of the Auto Workers’ Legislative-Political Conference in D.C. on February 11.
The three Democratic candidates, Rep. Haley Stevens, State Senate Majority Leader Mallory McMorrow, and physician Abdul El-Sayed, under instruction from moderator Art Reyes III, the union’s political director, focused their remarks on the issues rather than taking potshots at one another.
Stevens aimed her fire at the absent Republican, former Rep. Mike Rogers, represented on stage by an empty chair. He’s an easy vote for right-wing anti-worker GOP President Donald Trump.
Rogers also received an invitation to the discussion, but did not bother to reply, said Reyes. “That should tell you something” about the overall Republican attitude towards workers in general and the UAW and organized labor in particular, he noted.
Republicans hold 53 of the U.S. Senate’s 100 seats, to 45 Democrats—including retiring pro-worker Sen. Gary Peters—and two independents, including Sanders, who’s endorsed El-Sayed.
The party needs a net gain of four seats to take Senate control, and retaining Peters’s seat is vital. The November race is considered a toss-up in “purple state” Michigan. The primary is on August 4.
“We need our politicians to fight hard for us,” said UAW Region 1 chief LaShawn English of Detroit. “The outcome of this year’s election and of 2028 will go a long way towards determining the future of the working class.”
The UAW has such political sway in Michigan that union leaders staged the Senate hopefuls’ session in D.C. before 3,000 delegates from around the U.S., plus viewers on the UAW’s livestream.
All three Democrats have good name recognition: El-Sayed from a prior statewide run, Stevens for her willingness to take on Trump, and Rogers. McMorrow first came to prominence when a right-wing GOP senator accused her of not being Christian, an outright lie. Her blistering response garnered headlines and internet views nationwide.
The three differed little on the issues in the rapid-fire Q-and-A. The closest anyone came was when McMorrow noted “one other” of them ducked a question about refusing to take corporate campaign contributions. Stevens proudly says she refuses them. The non-answer was from El-Sayed.
All three endorsed passing the Protect The Right To Organize Act, labor’s #1 legislative priority. It was stopped by a GOP filibuster threat engineered by that party’s corporate campaign contributors.
The money spent on corporate “stock buybacks alone,” which enrich the 1%, “could fund paid family leave, child care, a secure retirement, and living wages,” added McMorrow.
And El-Sayed, a physician and public health specialist, touted his strong support for Medicare For All, a prime cause of the Auto Workers and other unions, led by National Nurses United.
Veteran Michigan Democratic Rep. Debbie Dingell had spent her entire speech to the delegates two days before touting the government-run single-payer health care plan and its advantages for workers, their wages, and the competitive health of the firms they toil for.
“I sat on” Democratic President “Joe Biden’s advisory committee” on health care issues, El-Sayed added. That commission wrote Biden’s plan, now law, letting Medicare use its financial clout to bargain down the prices of 10 prescription drugs. “Why not all of them?” El-Sayed asked.
McMorrow was the most outspoken in arguing for raising the federal minimum wage. It’s $7.25 an hour and hasn’t risen since 2009. “An appropriate minimum wage is a living wage,” she said. “In Michigan, we passed a $15 minimum wage and then indexed it to inflation. We need to do that at the federal level.”
And when Democrats took complete control of the Michigan legislature after the 2022 election, they boosted workers’ incomes another way, she reminded the crowd. “We were the first state ever to repeal right to work,” the state-by-state laws that let non-union members in union-represented shops use union services and protections without paying one red cent for them.
Sanders’ closing speech came after union President Shawn Fain introduced him to a standing ovation and repeated “Bernie! Bernie!” chants. Sanders repeated many of his frequent themes. They included the widening income and wealth chasm between the ultrarich and the rest of us, Medicare for All, and free education from kindergarten through college degrees.
He reserved particular fire for Trump and his multibillionaire partner in destroying parts of the federal government, Elon Musk. Musk, he said, has more wealth than the entire bottom 50% of the U.S.
Sanders labelled Trump “that crazy man in the White House,” and called him an economic and political threat to workers. “Our political system is corrupt, and billionaires can defeat candidates of the working class. Musk spent $290 million to elect Donald Trump,” last year, the senator noted.
“We have a president who does not believe in the Constitution, and he’s taking five-year-old kids to detention camps,” referring to an infamous kidnapping by Trump’s ICE agents in Minnesota.
ICE men used the five-year-old as “bait” to lure his parents out of their home. ICE flew the boy and his father, who has an asylum claim pending, to a detention camp in deep-red Texas and held them for two weeks. Sanders denounced ICE as “a domestic army shooting down citizens” in Minneapolis.
“Trump didn’t invent this playbook,” the senator said. “It’s the playbook of demagogues who fault Jews and Blacks and gays and Latinos” for the economic disasters workers face.
“The economy is not working for working people,” the senator said, a constant refrain from him. “The only way” to reverse that is by “working people standing together in a mass movement” for causes such as Medicare For All and rewriting labor laws “so that anyone who wants to can join a union.”
“We have to stand up and say” to Trump, Musk, and the 1%, “you don’t have the divine right to rule.”
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