Michigan Democrats are hoping to flip a critical congressional seat this November. Instead, they may have nominated a candidate whose own digital history is becoming the biggest obstacle standing between him and the voters.
William Lawrence, the 36-year-old Democrat challenging Republican Rep. Tom Barrett in Michigan’s 7th Congressional District, spent years building an extensive record of radical left-wing activism online.
Now, hundreds of those posts have reportedly disappeared.
That might be an effective strategy for someone hoping to erase the past. It is considerably less effective when journalists have already preserved it.
CNN’s KFile unearthed Lawrence’s old social media posts, revealing a political worldview considerably further to the left than the polished campaign version voters may see today.
Lawrence is not simply a conventional Democrat who wandered into a primary.
He is a longtime progressive activist and co-founder of the Sunrise Movement, a climate organization firmly rooted on the activist left. The group has also been connected to efforts surrounding anti-ICE protests in Minneapolis.
Until July, Lawrence was also a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.
And his old posts provide plenty of evidence explaining why.
According to CNN’s review, Lawrence once imagined a “world without police and prisons,” advocated “free and open migration,” called for nationalizing fossil-fuel companies, proposed abolishing the U.S. Senate and demanded a “fundamental overhaul” of the Constitution.
Those aren't minor policy differences.
They represent a fundamentally different vision of what the American political system should look like.
Then there was Lawrence’s view of the traditional family.
In one since-deleted post, he described the nuclear family as an “isolating, individualistic, violent way of organizing society.”
Apparently, even the family needed a progressive redesign.
But perhaps the most startling example involved then-Sen. Joe Manchin and the Democrats’ climate agenda in 2021.
Lawrence posted lyrics containing the line:
“Hurry up and die so that we can get started.”
Whatever Lawrence may say about his politics today, deleting the evidence does not change the record of what he previously wrote or the movements he chose to support.
And that is the problem Democrats now face in Michigan’s 7th District.
Candidates are entitled to change their minds. They are entitled to moderate their positions. They are even entitled to regret things they said years ago.
What voters are not required to do is pretend those positions never existed.
Michigan’s 7th is exactly the kind of district where political history matters. Republicans are defending the seat, Democrats want to take it, and voters will ultimately decide whether Lawrence’s transformation is genuine—or whether the campaign simply discovered that his old worldview doesn't sell particularly well outside the activist left.
The internet has a nasty habit of remembering what politicians would prefer voters to forget.
For Lawrence, the deleted posts may have been removed from his accounts. But they haven't disappeared from the political record.
And now Michigan voters have a chance to decide for themselves what those years of radical activism say about the man Democrats want to send to Congress.
