Just before Christmas, I had my worst phone call of this campaign.
That’s saying a lot. As a candidate, you make thousands of calls, mostly cold calls to potential donors. Aside from the strangeness of calling people I don’t know for money, I’ve had my share of hang-ups and cursing and rants, typically directed at me as representative of a Democratic Party that is either too far to the left or too far to the right, and in either case needs to stop calling ten times a day for money.
On this particular cold call, I reached a strong supporter of one of my opponents, who said she’s been closely involved in local politics for decades. I thanked her for her time and was going to move on when she asked why I was running. I started to answer, but it was quickly obvious that it was a rhetorical question. She asked how much money I’d raised, and I told her, and she said I had 0% chance of winning and could only take votes away from a real candidate. I agreed that, as a first-time candidate, my path to winning was narrow—but she insisted that there was no path and that it was disappointing that I would even be in the race. This went on for a while. She wasn’t merely baffled that I would run given long odds, but offended that a newcomer would presume to do so.
This wasn’t a personal attack—she didn’t know me, what I’ve done, what I stand for, or what I’m trying to accomplish, and she didn’t want to know. All she knew was that I wasn’t a familiar face in local politics and hadn’t raised millions of dollars, and so I shouldn’t be running. I wish it had been a personal attack, related to something deficient in my career or my character or my platform, because those would be real, substantive disputes. I wish she’d said that I didn’t have the right experience, or that she hated something I’d said, or that I was dead wrong on some policy, because I could have respected that and learned from it. But all that mattered was that I wasn’t in the club.
When I got into this race, it wasn’t specifically because I wanted the office. I ran to advocate for a vision within the Democratic Party, one that seemed so obvious to me that I couldn’t understand why established politicians hadn’t already embraced something like it. The last six months as a candidate have made it clear what we’re really up against. It’s not merely a matter of winning support for a new idea or platform. Democratic politics is set up to guard the clubhouse doors, against new people and, inevitably, new ideas. In a normal time, that’s stultifying. When we’re in a fight for the future of our country, when we’ve been losing for a decade and desperately need an infusion of the new, it’s madness. That call was draining because it crystallized the dysfunction that Democrats suffer, the parochial concern for who wins a seat and not who wins the country.
Still, she had a point. I want to get this platform and candidacy in front of people and I can’t do it without attention, and that most often means money. Other candidates in this race have raised millions. I haven’t. I’ve tried a lot of things over the last six months. A few have worked a bit. Most haven’t, and the path continues to narrow. We’re getting to the stage in the race now where local papers start covering only the frontrunners, where candidate forums start inviting only a few candidates, where local political groups start making their endorsements. Already, candidates are dropping out and planning to endorse others, and I’ve been asked if I would too.
It’s undeniably tempting to take that route. Running from behind is not an experience I’d recommend. The ego hit aside, it’s tough to take something you care about and subject it to the indifference of others. Why not bow out, endorse the next best option, and move on? Why not save some dignity for the next time around?
But I believe in the importance of this platform and the urgency of this moment, and I believe that the voters in my district—of whom I’m one—are not excited by the frontrunners. As long as there’s a path, I’ll be on it.
We’ve got two and a half months left, and I’m not going to waste it. I’ll be out in the community, on the phones, and making as much content as I can every day to get the message out, here in the district and anywhere people will listen.
I’ll be focused on three messages:
1. The New American Century
This vision is why I chose to run and why I keep running. America faces a generational choice: will we build shared prosperity for our country and the world, or will we manage a decline into inequality and unfreedom? We have the pieces in place—for now—to realize a dream of growth, progress, opportunity, and care for all, but we are not on track to do it. The Trump presidency is not the disease; it is a symptom of broader national stagnation.
So far, I haven’t done a good enough job of articulating what I’m talking about. On the campaign trail, in 30-second interactions, all of that gets boiled down to “innovation.” On the website, I’ve tried to decompose this into a set of issues, because that’s how people absorb campaign platforms, but that doesn’t really capture it. In the Substack, I’ve mostly written about it in reaction to current events. This is the time to make clear what we should be aiming for, and I’m going to do it in every channel I can.
2. Dysfunction in the Democratic Party
I’m a Democrat, and I have been since before I could vote. When I was getting involved in politics, Democrats were the party of civil and human rights, of science, of economic justice. I’ll stay a Democrat until another party is better, and today that’s impossible to imagine.
But the party today is historically weak and derelict in its duty to the country. The nation and the world need us to win. Individuals, universities, companies, even allied nations: all are being intimidated by the administration, and none of them is set up to withstand a long-term fight. The one institution in the world specifically tasked with beating MAGA and ending this era is the Democratic Party, and instead we vacillate between capitulation and hollow, performative rage. We lose because, in a moment of enormous change, we’ve become a closed system that rewards familiarity over vision. We won’t successfully beat MAGA until we beat our own inertia.
3. The special importance of Illinois’s Ninth District
The Ninth District of Illinois is special. It’s diverse in so many respects: from urban Chicago neighborhoods to farmland, across faiths and races, and from working class to wealthy. Its communities are extraordinary in their civic engagement, and it’s a progressive district in the American heartland. We should be leading the national conversation, not following it. Our representative should be setting the agenda for what Democrats can be, not just reliably voting the party line. I’m going to ask the voters of this district not to settle for the default option, but to take a bet on something better.
In middle school, I was on the chess team. After every tournament match, our coach (i.e., the school librarian) would go over our games with us. I remember once that he saw in my notation that I’d resigned, and he asked why. I told him that I was obviously going to lose, and I didn’t want to drag it out. His new rule for me and for the rest of the team: never resign. You don’t know where the game will go; you could see an opportunity you’d missed, your opponent could make an error, you could have a flash of inspiration and turn it all around. Stay in until the end. I don’t know how many games I won after that because of that rule.
Watch this space.