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Democrat Will Lawrence faces a familiar challenge in Michigan.
Like other progressives this cycle, including Darializa Avila Chevalier and Graham Platner, Lawrence has deleted controversial social media posts that have since been resurfaced. Now, he’s trying to put distance between himself and the musings as he tries to defeat other Democrats in the primary for Michigan’s 7th Congressional District.
In the interview with Semafor earlier this week, Lawrence rejected past comments he made supporting the “defund the police” movement before his congressional campaign.
In one since-deleted tweet in 2020 as protests inspired by the murder of George Floyd unfolded around the country, Lawrence — then posting as @wlawren90 — backed calls to “defund the police.” A year later, he reiterated his position in a post about rising crime: “seems like cops are bad at stopping crime, hey i’ve got an idea, let’s get rid of them and try something else.”
“The protests in 2020 raised important criticisms of our criminal justice system, and like millions of other Americans, I was horrified by the killing of George Floyd and inspired by the multiracial and multigenerational protest movement that followed from that,” he told Semafor. “Those posts are out of step with what I believe now.”
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Those were among hundreds of posts that Lawrence deleted before running for Congress because, he explained, they could have been “misinterpreted.” He also axed a post from August 2021 when he asked followers to “envision a world of free and open migration,” without borders. At the time, he was an activist (Lawrence cofounded the Sunrise Movement).
If opponents try to focus on the posts, and not his positions in 2026, he told Semafor, he is confident that people would see through their “stupid political games” and vote accordingly.
“Anybody who gets to know me finds out that I’m somebody who loves Michigan,” Lawrence said. “I hate injustice, and I spent my life working to understand the causes of injustice and how to build power together to have an affordable and dignified life. That’s what I’m focused on, and it’s all a process. I’m sure I’m saying things in the course of this campaign that I’ll disagree with in five years.”
David’s view
Progressive Democrats, after a fitful start, have grabbed momentum in congressional primaries.
Michigan’s 7th district, which narrowly backed Donald Trump in 2024 while also electing a Republican, is one of the tougher targets for a Bernie Sanders-endorsed challenger. The Vermont senator’s chosen candidates are mostly running in deep blue seats, like New York’s 13th district, where no Democrat thinks that Avila Chevalier’s old posts about Marxism can help Republicans win in November.
In our conversation, Lawrence said what a lot of Democrats have since 2020: That was another time, exploding with ideas, and he doesn’t now believe every single thing that he posted at the time.
Plenty of candidates change their views when they exit activism and enter politics. One way to understand what’s happening on the left now — where the Sanders and Zohran Mamdani project of backing like-minded candidates is a major cause — is that it has left behind some of the radicalism of Trump’s first term and rediscovered what made Sanders popular as a national figure. When young leftists and more moderate Democratic candidates were embracing intersectionality and ideas like prison abolition, Sanders wasn’t: He saw economic populism getting lost in a fog of social justice ideas.
The popular revision of this history, for much of the left, is that “woke” ideas came from outside their movement. It often came from liberals who did not want to challenge neoliberal economics and were more comfortable talking about race and gender. That’s a little simplistic — look at San Francisco’s Scott Wiener being chased from a trans rights event by hecklers accusing him of being pro-genocide. No liberals there!
But step one, for Lawrence and many progressives, is moving on from some of the far-left ideas they debated in public, and endorsed, when the anti-Trump wave was cresting six years ago. Step two is convincing the electorate that it’s not 2024 anymore, they’re not Kamala Harris, and voters will focus on more current topics than bad tweets from the Floyd era.
Notable
- Lawrence talked to WIRED about his call for a data center moratorium, an issue that was off the map when he started running. “People feel like they’re being utterly disrespected by the companies and the local officials who are welcoming them into town.”
- I previously covered what’s happening in the 7th district for a story about Democrats abandoning Biden-era foreign policy ideas.