Ann Arbor Observer - Power Couple

On October 7, 2023, as Jon Mallek married first-term state representative Jason Morgan in matching navy suits with teal bowties under a trellis draped with eucalyptus leaves, the thought of running for office himself was the furthest thing from his mind.

More than a few of the 350 guests, however, wondered. The wedding on the Washtenaw Community College campus of the two photogenic thirty something men was one of the biggest political and social events of the year. Governor Gretchen Whitmer officiated and a fleet of elected officials—members of Congress, the state legislature, city council, and the county commission—attended.

One of them was councilmember Linh Song, who was on the verge of announcing that she would not seek re-election in Ward 2. She recalls Mallek talking about how both of his parents had long served in elected offices in his Wisconsin hometown. “He shared this really sweet story about how he helped his parents campaign and how deeply he cared about the community that he grew up in,” Song says. “Then he spoke about Ann Arbor and how thankful he was to be able to come here and work with the love of his life.

“I teased him at the wedding. I was like, ‘Maybe you should run for office,’” she says. “A bunch of councilmembers were there, and our ears perked up like, ‘Oh my gosh, Jon’s fantastic.’”

Mallek’s new husband was less gung-ho. “I’ll be honest with you, I didn’t know that I would wish elected office on anyone at that moment in time, especially not my husband that I love very much,” Morgan says as the couple sip coffee at their kitchen table a few days after New Year’s.

“More and more people just kept asking, and I think that Jon’s first three answers were no. Then, as more people kept asking and encouraging him to run, that’s ultimately what made him decide, ‘Yeah, okay, I think I’d be the best candidate to run for this.’”

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They met at a 2017 Christmas party in Washington, D.C. cohosted by Morgan’s then-boyfriend. “We were not big fans of each other initially,” Morgan says. “There is nothing in a million years that would have ever made either of us think that we would one day be married.”

Morgan, then a county commissioner and instructor at WCC, says he screwed up by making a wisecrack that Mallek understandably took as an insult. (This reporter has heard the wisecrack and, while it’s not lewd, it’s too convoluted to explain—and mystifying as a comment made to a stranger at a party.)

They didn’t interact the rest of that night, but Morgan felt badly about the moment for more than a year. He followed Mallek’s social media posts, and “became a big fan of his cat, Doug.” To put the awkward moment to rest, he invited Mallek, then an agriculture policy specialist for the office of the U.S. Trade Representative, for a coffee when he was back in Washington in early 2019 for a conference of county commissioners.

By then, Morgan’s prior, long-distance relationship had ended—and the two hit it off. “It was a late-afternoon coffee that ended up turning into dinner, and we ended up spending four or five hours, basically just talking,” Mallek says.

They had strikingly similar backgrounds. Morgan grew up with one brother in Pinconning, a tiny, conservative town near Saginaw Bay. He came out to his family and his school around age sixteen, and was the first person to ever bring a same-sex date to the homecoming dance. “My dad was, surprisingly, immediately very supportive, and my mom was supportive of who I was, but really, really worried for me,” he recalls. “She was very worried about my safety and my ability to have a job and a career and a safe and happy life being gay.”

Morgan didn’t retreat: In college at Northern Michigan University, he became the school’s first out LGBTQ student president.

Mallek grew up on a dairy farm in central Wisconsin, the youngest of five with four older sisters. His family, too, was supportive and concerned when he came out during his freshman year at St. Norbert College. “They were just like, ‘Well, it’s fine that you’re gay, just maybe be judicious about how you tell people or who you tell,’” he recalls.

Morgan’s faster timeline reflects something else about him: he’s been a young man in a hurry since age thirteen, when he was diagnosed with Becker’s muscular dystrophy. He faced the grim prognosis that he could lose the ability to walk by his twenties and die by his early forties.

Morgan went public with his diagnosis in 2017 when, as a newly elected county commissioner, he told his story during MD Awareness Month. By then, he was twenty-eight and had defied the most dire predictions, largely by taking up running.

His political career began as a freshman at NMU when he contacted Hillary Clinton’s 2008 presidential primary campaign about getting the New York senator to NMU. She wasn’t campaigning in Michigan—the state had lost its delegates by moving the primary date up too early—but his enthusiasm landed him an internship in the national campaign.

When Clinton announced her concession to Barack Obama that summer, Morgan was among the interns crying in the background. “I literally carried boxes out of the national office as we were shutting down that campaign,” he says. But Michigan Democratic congressman Bart Stupak hired him to work on his own 2008 campaign, and in his senior year, he returned to D.C. to work in Stupak’s office.

In 2011, Morgan got another offer—this time from congressman John Dingell to be his field representative in Washtenaw County. “I asked Congressman Stupak what he thought about Congressman Dingell, and he called me immediately and said, ‘If you have a chance to work for John Dingell, there is nothing else in the world you should do. He’s a legend.’ And fortunately, Congressman Dingell took a huge leap in hiring me as somebody who had never lived in Ann Arbor.

“My job was to know everything happening in Washtenaw County, represent him here, and then staff him here and make sure that he was doing everything he could for the community,” Morgan says. “It just kind of felt meant to be for me to move to Ann Arbor, and I fell in love with it.”

By the time he and Mallek had that prolonged first date in 2019, Morgan was a full-fledged Ann Arborite. And Mallek, who’d come to D.C. for an economics degree at American University, was thinking about a move back to the Midwest.

Covid helped make it happen: during the lockdowns, he spent months here with Morgan while working remotely. In August 2022, as the pandemic eased, he landed a job as a policy advisor in the Michigan Department of Agriculture and Rural Development. Mallek is now the policy director.

A month before Mallek took the job, Morgan proposed to him atop a silo on the farm where Mallek was raised.

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Morgan has risen quickly in Democratic politics—he’s the vice chair of the Michigan party—and is increasingly influential in local races. He helped persuade Jennifer Conlin to run for state rep, and Justin Hodge to try again for a county commission seat.

“Jason has always been the kind of person to put himself out there and make himself available to talk and to try to encourage other people that he thinks would be good public servants to want to be involved,” Hodge says. “And it’s not just me who he’s had these conversations with.”

But for his own husband, Morgan was more cautious. “It’s really challenging work, and it’s pretty thankless a lot of times,” he explains. A council run “was not my idea,” he says. “Jon thinks it was, but it was not my idea.”

Mallek laughs and says he “always suspected he would push me to get more involved. … So this wasn’t totally out of the realm of something he might eventually want me to explore.”

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Each has an annual running goal—Morgan’s is 500 miles, Mallek’s is 1,000—an endeavor that’s especially important to Morgan in his ongoing fight against MD. “I don’t run because I want to, I have to run to maintain my mobility because if I don’t, there’s a very good chance that my loss of my ability to walk would be accelerated,” he says.

Morgan and Mallek chuckle at being labeled a “power couple.” Friends tease them about it; one sent a holiday card addressed to “the honorable Jason Morgan and the more honorable Jon Mallek.”

“We’re both just passionate about trying to do good public policy, both very much policy nerds,” Morgan says. “It often doesn’t feel like you’re anything special being in elected office. It just feels like, okay, I serve in this role and it’s something I do to try and make good things happen.”

Mallek is startled by a phone alert reminding him he’s late for a meeting. He jumps up, waking the two cats—Doug has a companion now, too—and apologizes for having to run. After he’s gone, Morgan notes that his husband is, like Morgan himself, getting swallowed up in his new role.

“My worry is that the work that you do in politics is pretty heavy some days and that wears on you,” Morgan confides. “I don’t ever want him to lose who he is, which is possible in politics. I definitely have a lot more gray hair and I have undergone a lot of stress over the last eight years in this work.”

Mallek, he says, is “my foundation—he’s what keeps me happy. So I can’t have him ever lose that, or we’ll both be in the tough times.”

Read the full Ann Arbor Observer Story by Steve Friess here