As she runs for a U.S. Senate seat in Michigan, Democratic state Sen. Mallory McMorrow is buzzing around a state known for making cars with a unique pitch: keep bees instead.
The rise of artificial intelligence poses an existential threat to a manufacturing-based economy, she often warns on podcasts and at public events. McMorrow also boasts about the work she and others have done to promote apprenticeship programs and encourage less obvious career paths.
She rhapsodizes about winemaking and beer brewing. And she’s particularly enthusiastic about beekeeping.
“You can go into a certified apprenticeship, and maybe you find out you’ve always wanted to be a beekeeper and you didn’t know it, and now you have a great career,” McMorrow said last month in a video chat with The Common Good, a nonpartisan advocacy group.
It’s an approach that McMorrow describes as hopeful and forward-looking — and an alternative to what she sees as a dangerously singular focus on the auto industry, the longtime lifeblood of Michigan’s economy.
“When the auto industry does well, we do well. When it goes down, we go down,” McMorrow, 39, said in an interview with NBC News. “That has been an Achilles’ heel for us. Between that and the fact that, for millennials and Gen Z, we’re not going to have the career security that our parents did, it’s very likely that you’re going to have to change your career multiple times throughout your working life.”
McMorrow’s message also presents a substantial tension point in next year’s Democratic Senate primary. Rep. Haley Stevens, one of her rivals for the nomination, has made Michigan’s rich manufacturing history — and her work in the Obama administration on the Great Recession-era rescue plan for Detroit’s Big Three automakers — central to her campaign.
Their race is already a study in the traditional versus the nontraditional, as one of a handful of 2026 primaries that will clarify the direction of a Democratic Party struggling to find its bearings. Stevens, a sitting member of Congress, has establishment support in her state and in Washington. McMorrow and a third candidate, physician Abdul El-Sayed, are running as outsiders. McMorrow’s focus on alternative, artisanal career paths contrasts with the sensibilities of Stevens, who launched her campaign reminiscing about her first car, a used Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme — “a piece of Michigan … the Michigan that helped build this country.”
Asked about McMorrow’s focus on nontraditional apprenticeships, including beekeeping, Stevens countered that now is the time to “double down” on manufacturing.
“There have always been people, pundits and speculators who have doubted Michigan manufacturing, and that is not me, and that is not the people of Michigan,” Stevens, 42, said. “I’ll just say that we are in a really trying time right now with the current administration and the tariffs that they’re putting in place, and our manufacturing sector deserves an advocate.”
McMorrow rejected the idea that she is disparaging manufacturing. She said she favors an “all-of-the-above solution” and that she is optimistic about the auto industry’s future. Responding to Stevens’ comments, she added: “I think that either/or approach has hurt us.”
Nevertheless, McMorrow’s emphasis on beekeeping and other niche apprenticeships stands out as a staple of her speeches and a subject she raises unprompted in interviews. She even acknowledges that her evangelism has echoes of “learn to code” — the mantra from the 2010s that was meant to promote a shift to high-tech jobs but mutated into a condescending clapback.
“At one point it was ‘learn to code,’ or it was ‘pivot to video’ — it’s the one weird trick that’s gonna fix it,” McMorrow said. “And what I’m trying to say in the room is there is no one weird trick, that we don’t know how technology is going to change our economy and change our workforce. … So, yes, there is a little bit of a callback to ‘learn to code,’ but what I’m saying is learn to find what’s next for you.”
Michigan’s count of active registered apprentices jumped 12% last year, according to a state report. But nearly 60% of those apprenticeships were concentrated across five job categories: electricians, construction laborers, carpenters, millwrights and plumbers, pipe fitters and steamfitters. While there has been an uptick in nontraditional apprenticeships, it has largely been in fields like health care and public administration.
The report included no mentions of winemaking, beer brewing or beekeeping.
El-Sayed, 40, agrees that such “craft” apprenticeships offer career paths that are valuable to Michigan’s economy, singling out cheesemaking, leather-making and knitting. He believes more should be done to ensure those jobs have higher pay, better benefits and stability.
“It’s one thing to talk about apprenticeships,” said El-Sayed, who lost a primary for governor in 2018. “But it’s another to talk about the structures that enable a sustainable economy in those spaces, and I think that comes with empowering small businesses and empowering unions, and that’s why I’m so focused on those two parts.”
Others, like Stevens, are less enamored with McMorrow’s approach.
Republicans backing former Rep. Mike Rogers for Senate would almost certainly highlight McMorrow’s emphasis on such jobs if she is the Democratic nominee, said Greg Manz, a GOP strategist in Michigan.
“Michigan built the American middle class through manufacturing, and Republican leaders in the Great Lakes State are focused on reviving that strength — not replacing it with boutique hobbies,” Manz said.
McMorrow, Manz added, previewing an attack line, “is throwing in the towel on family-sustaining industrial jobs, while Mike Rogers is fighting to bring them back.”
Adrian Hemond, a Democratic consultant in Michigan who said he is not affiliated with any of the candidates but has spoken favorably of Stevens, also criticized McMorrow’s approach, saying it is geared more to “college-educated white women” than it was to blue-collar workers. He called it an “absolute, atrocious loser” in a general election.
“Talk about beekeeping and winemaking — like, that is pitched pretty clearly at affluent Dem donors, right?” Hemond added. “That has no appeal with the broader electorate, like zero. There are probably a few dozen people in Michigan who think that they might make a career beekeeping or winemaking. This is just la-la land stuff for an important, but relatively small, slice of the electorate.”
Michigan is home to more than 600,000 manufacturing workers, according to a recent state estimate. And a December 2024 report from MichAuto, an industry advocacy group, counted 288,000 jobs directly tied to the auto sector, with more than 1.2 million jobs directly or indirectly tied to the broader mobility industry, which includes automaking.
Quantifying the number of beekeeping jobs is a tougher task. In a 2022 interview with WCMU Public Media, an expert in the field from Michigan State University estimated the number of commercial bee farms in the low hundreds.
Officials with the Michigan Beekeepers Association — a group that has 800 members, most of them hobbyists — said they were delighted to learn of the apprenticeships McMorrow is championing, though they were unaware of them until reached by NBC News.
Candace Casados, the association’s president, said the state had 82,000 honey-producing colonies in 2024 and roughly $15 million of honey production in sales. She believes apprenticeships can help the industry grow.
“Beekeeping is very much an experiential field,” Casados said. “Apprenticeships let mentors pass on their knowledge for things like disease detection, hive management, seasonal cycles and forage planning. There’s so much that needs to be learned as a new beekeeper, and having that hands-on experience and knowledge and guidance under someone is just key.”
As of late September, there were only two registered beekeeping apprentices in Michigan, making an average hourly wage of $15.50, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. The state also reported having two winemaking apprentices, at an average wage of $18.50, and one professional brewer apprentice, at a $17 wage.
“I bring up beekeeping as an example, mostly because it’s unexpected, and it’s surprising to people, and it catches people’s attention,” McMorrow said when asked about its tiny footprint when compared to mightier industries in Michigan.
McMorrow, who has held campaign events at craft breweries across the state, said she has met brewers and others who, worried about the rise of AI and shifting economic tides, left behind jobs in the finance, tech and auto industries. Those conversations, she added, have reinforced her belief that a wider menu of apprenticeships is prudent.
“We don’t know what’s coming yet,” McMorrow said. “We don’t know how this technology is going to change our workforce. And we’re going to be much more nimble and ready as a state. If you are able to pivot and get into another field, [you] may not be so susceptible to changes with AI and know that if you need to change again in another 10 years, you can.”
Stevens, for her part, did not explicitly criticize McMorrow by name but drew unmistakable contrasts, emphasizing her belief in manufacturing as the past, present and future.
“We’re not going to give up on manufacturing,” Stevens said. “And we, of course, need a senator who’s going to want to champion it.”
“It’s our skilled workforce that’s going to move us forward,” Stevens added. “And so when you talk about the new technologies that over the last 50 years have caused people to doubt the prowess of our industrial base and our manufacturing sector, it is going to be our skilled workforce here in Michigan that’s tied to manufacturing that will win the day.”
McMorrow characterized such thinking as shortsighted.
“I think where we have fallen short as a state,” McMorrow said, “is by putting all our eggs in one basket instead of recognizing we can do all of the above.”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
