In January 2008, I was a first-year law student who was supposed to be studying for final exams. Instead, a group of us hit the road to New Hampshire to campaign for a candidate for president that we believed in: Barack Obama. We trudged door-to-door through snow-caked sidewalks or stood on street corners, holding our signs against the wind. At most houses, I might get a few seconds of polite conversation through a screen door, if anyone came to the door at all. At one house, though, the door swung open wide and the middle-aged dad standing there shouted “Obama!” when he saw my sign. He brought his wife and kids to the door, told us they were excited and already on board, and chatted for a few minutes about the campaign before wishing me luck. There were more addresses on my clipboard, but I was happy to stay and feel the warmth radiating from the house. That moment sustained me through the rest of the doors I had to hit, and to this day finding that family is my most vivid memory of the hope I felt in that campaign.
I thought about that moment this week. Most candidates for Congress don’t spend their days giving speeches or shaking hands, but instead spend hours each day calling people for money—“call time.” Some of the people you reach are friendly, some are curt, and a lot just hang up. A few actually contribute. For me, it’s grueling—not the rejection, which you get used to fast, but the feeling of intrusion. Someone’s at work, or doing errands, or eating dinner, or picking their kids up at school, or maybe taking one free moment for themselves from all the rest of that. They decide, for reasons I still don’t understand, to pick up a call from a stranger, and there I am talking politics and asking for money.
And then, this week, it happened again. A dad answered the phone, was excited to hear from a candidate and asked his kids to say hello on speaker phone. He couldn’t contribute, but what I had to say made sense to him. He wanted to learn more about volunteering, and thought he might bring the kids along to get some civic experience. It felt like being on that doorstep again.
Today marks exactly three months until the primary. Mine is plainly an outsider campaign, starting without any public profile, without a rolodex of wealthy donors, without a network of endorsements. The path has never been easy, and a long list of things have to go right for us to break through and get the message across. There’s still enough time left, but less of it each day. With ninety days left, I’ve been thinking about why I chose to do this, and why I choose to keep doing this.
In short, I am searching.
When Democrats lost the White House again last year, I had a crisis of faith. I am deeply, viscerally patriotic, and I can’t put what’s happening in our politics to the side and go about the rest of my day. I need to find resolution. I could rationalize Trump’s first win as a fluke, the product of a specific moment, and so I could see his first term as something we had to endure to get back to normal. Joe Biden’s 2020 win seemed to confirm that comforting thought, but Trump’s second victory obliterated it. If we were willing to choose him again given all we knew and all he’d done, then his appeal was deeper and more authentic than I had understood. For the first few months of this year, I struggled with what Trump’s second win meant, at one point believing that it meant “The End of America” – not the end of the nation, but of the idea that sets it apart.
Through that struggle, I tried harder to understand why millions of Americans chose the President, and I was surprised to find that something resonated. When Donald Trump said that America was in decline, that it had stagnated, that it was no longer great, I agreed—not with his diagnosis, and certainly not with his prescription, but with the feeling. The country that I grew up in was always striving, always trying to be better, always ready to lead. The country I’ve lived in for the last few decades is stuck, dysfunctional, incapable of taking care of its people or advancing the human condition around the world. I understood how millions of Americans could feel that way, and why they would choose a candidate who spoke to that feeling over a party that didn’t even acknowledge it.
I started to believe that Democrats couldn’t win until we learned to speak to that feeling too. The ideas leading Democrats put on the table were disappointingly shallow: pretending to be Republicans by selling out on civil rights, or retreating into the issues where we’re most comfortable. They didn’t seem to pick up what the country had just told us, again: Americans want dramatic change and national renewal. We would have to meet that demand with vision.
So I started searching. I looked for Democratic leaders and candidates who were offering an expansive vision for American greatness. I came up blank. I tried to publish around this idea, and got no traction. I used whatever connections I had to pitch ideas to the Democratic establishment, and got nowhere.
Eventually, I realized I’d been searching for years. When I was knocking doors for Obama, American decline was already evident. We had lied our way into a disastrous war, our government was proudly pro-torture, our economy was coming apart at the seams, we’d been unprepared for a hurricane that devastated a major city, we were considering amending the constitution to limit civil rights—the list goes on. Then, as now, we said “this is not who we are,” but feared that it was. That was the moment that led so many of us to sign up for Hope and Change, and I’m glad I did. But the Obama presidency did not approach its transformational promise, and the gap between what was demanded and what was delivered is still with us. Some of Obama’s voters turned to Trump as the next chance at Hope and Change. I can’t imagine making that choice, but it took Trump’s reelection for me to see how little inspiration my own party has to offer.
Over the course of those frustrating months, the search became a decision. As you get more and more engaged, the line separating citizen and representative blurs. Artists talk about creating the work they wanted to experience and couldn’t find. As a citizen, if you don’t see the candidate you want, you have to be the candidate you want. So I started to consider running. I asked a friend who’d run for office about his experience. He put me in touch with his old campaign manager and we talked a bit, and that led to more conversations, and then more after that. I took a step, and then another, and then another.
To join a crowded field as an outsider candidate takes some amount of self-delusion; friends and family say I’m “brave” for making this choice, which is a kinder synonym. I imagine it’s what every aspiring actor or entrepreneur feels: you have to believe it’s possible, despite the odds and the evidence before your eyes. The job I left was a rare gift: it paid the bills, provided benefits, gave me time for my family, and on top of all that was interesting. Every morning, my first thought is whether it was absurd to give that up to take this risk. Maybe it was, but I’d rather have the uncertainty of the campaign than the certainty that I’d failed to act on my beliefs. I might run out of time or money, but not conviction.
The campaign is not an end to the search. It’s an inversion of it. Six months ago, I was a voter looking for a candidate I could support, and today I’m a candidate looking for voters like me. Every answer at a forum, every phone call, every bit of content is a searchlight, looking for those people, people who want a country that’s ambitious and energetic, that grows and takes care of people and fights for freedom. I’ve found some of them, but I know there are many, many more. I’m going to keep searching until I find them.