Democrats counting on a blue wave to capture a pivotal Michigan House seat this November are discovering that their biggest liability may be the man at the top of their own ticket.
According to RedState, Democrat nominee William Lawrence, who is challenging Republican Rep. Tom Barrett in Michigans 7th Congressional District, spent years building an extensive online record of hard-left activism before attempting to scrub hundreds of posts ahead of his campaign launch. CNNs KFile dug up the deleted material, and what they found underscores just how far outside the mainstream the 36-year-old candidate has been willing to go in public, even by the standards of todays increasingly progressive Democratic Party.
Lawrence is not some casual liberal but a longtime activist and co-founder of the radical climate group Sunrise Movement, one of the far-left outfits that helped bankroll anti-ICE protests in Minneapolis earlier this year. He also maintained membership in the Democratic Socialists of America until July, only recently cutting formal ties as he seeks to present himself as a more conventional Democrat to general-election voters.
The resurfaced posts paint a picture of a candidate whose ideological commitments go well beyond standard progressive rhetoric and into outright revolutionary territory. CNN reported that Lawrence once imagined a world without police and prisons, pushed for free and open migration, demanded nationalization of fossil-fuel companies, urged abolishing the U.S. Senate, and called for a fundamental overhaul of the Constitution.
His disdain is not limited to American institutions; it extends to the basic building block of society, the family. In one since-deleted post, Lawrence derided the nuclear family as an isolating, individualistic, violent way of organizing society, language that aligns more with fringe academic theory than with the values of most Michigan households.
Lawrences rhetoric has also veered into outright hostility toward fellow Democrats who were not sufficiently radical for his tastes. During the 2021 intraparty fight over the lefts climate agenda, he posted song lyrics including the line, Hurry up and die so that we can get started, a remark widely understood as a crude shot at then-Sen. Joe Manchin for slowing down the progressive climate push.
CNNs write-up captured the tone of his online persona in stark terms. Fuck you..hurry up and die," one highlighted post read, as the network noted that Lawrence, a Democrat running in one of swing seat that could decide control of Congress, deleted hundreds of old posts before launching his campaign that showed him backing a world without police and prisons, forced nationalization to end fossil fuels, abolishing the Senate, open borders, and attacking nuclear-family homes.
The controversy around Lawrence is unfolding alongside another headache for Michigan Democrats: their growing entanglement with the activist lefts most toxic personalities. Abdul El-Sayed, the Democrat Senate nominee facing Republican Mike Rogers, campaigned during the primary with leftist streamer Hasan Pikerinfamous for his The U.S. Deserved 9/11 remarkand later declined to fully renounce him, raising questions about where the partys moral red lines actually lie.
That context makes Lawrences broadsides against the family unit even more politically explosive. In one resurfaced clip, the Democrat declared, F**k isolation and the nuclear family domicile, and again described the nuclear-family home as an isolating, individualistic, violent way of organizing society, adding bluntly, I don't want to be part of that, a sentiment that will sit uneasily with voters who still see marriage, faith, and family as central to American life.
For Republicans, the pattern is becoming clear: the stench of Hasan Piker, as one critic put it, is clinging to Democrats up and down the ballot as they court online radicals and socialist influencers. That association may play well on college campuses and left-wing podcasts, but it is far less likely to resonate in a swing district where parents worry more about crime, inflation, and cultural stability than about dismantling the police or abolishing the Senate.
Confronted with the resurfaced posts, Lawrence now insists he has evolved. Like many millennials, I have done a lot of thinking out loud on the internet, he said, adding, I have clearly said that I no longer agree with some of the things I wrote in the past. I do not support defunding the police or open borders.
Skeptics, however, are unlikely to accept this late-stage moderation at face value, especially given the breadth of his deleted content and his years of organizing on the far-left flank of the party. Lawrence can claim he has changed and try to erase his digital footprint, but he cannot wish away a long record of radical activism that now offers Michigan voters a stark contrast between a conservative Republican incumbent and a Democrat who once dreamed of dismantling the very institutions and values many in the district still hold dear.
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