Time to start breaking things

A simple solution for bringing Democrats out of the wilderness

Last week I wrote about what an assassin reveals about our politics, and how the response to his act — both by public officials and everyday people — gives us an opportunity to look at one thing Democrats can start doing to flip the narrative: stop talking like company men and start talking about tearing down broken systems.

We had a lot of great engagement and comments and I just want to say that it’s incredible to see so many people getting involved and working toward solving this!

That discussion focused on our healthcare system, something many Americans view as a corrupt scheme built to extract wealth from suffering people and transfer it to the shareholder class.

On that front, the solution for Democrats is to stop believing healthcare-industry funded polls that try to tell us Americans love their health insurance (that’s like believing soda company-funded studies that tell us soda isn’t bad for us) and start trusting our gut and our lived experiences.

There is a vast amount of dormant political fuel right now in people who want to take down broken systems. And, as I outlined in "Why do people keep voting against their own self-interest?", the only place they feel that they have to turn is Donald Trump.

In that post I promised to start proposing more paths for Democrats to change that dynamic, find their way out of the wilderness, and start delivering for everyday people again. So let’s build off of what we learned about the discontent people have with our healthcare system and expand that lesson to what we can do in other areas. Because the solution to winning again isn’t that complicated:

Start breaking things that Republicans can never touch.

In 2021, as congressional insider trading was running rampant, I was absolutely blasted by Democrats for proposing a complete ban on members of Congress owning individual stocks, even in blind trusts, and saying that they should be jailed for insider trading “just like you, me, or Martha Stewart” would be.

When Nancy Pelosi brushed off the congressional insider trader problem by calling it part of the “free market,” I went on MSNBC and said that that sounded an awful lot like “let them eat cake” to me.

I was surprised at where Democratic elected officials were on this issue, since I had always considered the party to be anti-corruption, pro-worker, and at least not as pro-Wall Street as the other party.

Around that same time a friend of mine, MiAngel, called me up to tell me that something was going on in her hometown of Hayti Heights in southeast Missouri’s “bootheel” region. Her cousin, Catrina, was the new mayor of the town so she gave me her phone number.

The bootheel is a cotton growing former slaveholding turned sharecropping area with a heavy rural black population. Hayti Heights is a relic of segregation in that area. For a long time it was the “wrong side of the tracks” neighborhood of Hayti, Missouri. In 1972 the Heights split off from Hayti and was an all black town up through the 2010s. Now it is about 90% black.

For a long time it was held together by the charisma of its renowned first mayor, David Humes, who centered the town in state and national discussions on race and rural poverty, and even garnered a shout-out in a speech by President Jimmy Carter in 1979.

After his death, however, the town spiraled into corruption and decay until Mayor Catrina’s election in 2019. I called Catrina up and she said that they were having an event in a couple of weeks and invited me to come down, so I agreed.

What I saw was the saddest sight I saw on the campaign trail.

The people of Hayti Heights had set up on the side of a rural Missouri highway to sell hot dogs and potato chips to try to raise enough money to repair their broken water system. They had been buying water from the neighboring town of Hayti for a couple of years, but Hayti had said they couldn’t continue to support both towns with their infrastructure.

To make matters worse, when I was taking the first bite of like my sixth polish sausage (trying to do what I could), the Mayor asked me to come with her to take care of something. So we got in her car and drove about a block to a small fenced in area. I was confused (and maybe a little judgmental) about why we had gotten in the car to drive a couple hundred feet, when she popped the trunk and pulled out a couple of gas cans.

She explained to me that their subterranean sewage pumps had worn out and that they didn’t have enough money to fix them. So she had taken irrigation ditch pumps and rigged hoses to them on either side of the subterranean pumps to keep the sewage flowing. It looked like the type of setups I saw driving through Iraq when I was running missions there.

Gas powered pumps I took a picture of along the Euphrates River in Iraq.

Every four hours, day and night, she had to drive to these pumps to fill them with gas and hand crank them on or they would overflow and sewage would rise up and fill the town. There were several burned out carcasses of pumps along the side that had broken because they weren’t made for this type of work.

I asked her if she had talked to any other elected officials or people who could help her. She said no one cared. In fact, the last person she talked to had wanted to fine them for creating an environmental problem when the sewage overflowed.

Coincidentally, a few days later I told this story at an event in Springfield, Missouri, and a woman in the crowd knew of a water advocacy organization in Oklahoma who could help them get a grant. I connected the mayor with the organization, they worked on a grant, and were awarded a couple million dollars in ARPA funding. Hayti, the neighboring town, got several million for its water system, too.

The lesson here could be that Democrats can help build and lift people up. But guess what. Pemiscot County, where Hayti Heights is, is one of the few places where I didn’t significantly outperform Kamala Harris. I only did half a point better than her despite the fact that I was in Pemiscot County over and over again and tangibly helped people there.

And it’s not like Kamala Harris and I were close because she got a boost from being part of the Biden team that passed ARPA and people were giving her credit.

No, she lost Pemiscot County by 49% and I lost it by 48.5%. My opponent never went there during the campaign, has probably never been there, and certainly couldn’t find it on a map. Yet I was annihilated there. A big part of that was that we didn’t have enough money to run ads or send mail in the bootheel. But another part is that people as a whole, and even the media, don’t care that much about building right now, so they don’t talk about it.

A reporter accompanied me on one of those trips back to Pemiscot County during the campaign. In a lull in the conversation the reporter asked Mayor Catrina what she liked the most about me and my campaign.

Catrina didn’t hesitate.

She said “I like that he wants to ban politicians from owning stocks and throw them in jail if they break the law. I’m tired of them making decisions for themselves rather than for us.”

Politically, it doesn’t matter how much money in the IRA or ARPA went to working people. It doesn’t matter how many union workers the infrastructure bill is going to put to work. The system is corrupt and if Democrats want to be trusted again, they are going to have to start breaking things.

Political corruption is the perfect place to start. Here are some things that Republicans will never do:

1. Ban all members of Congress and their families from owning stock and have criminal penalties for breaking the law. My experience on the campaign trail would lead me to believe that many of you would think that’s unfair. No, it’s perfectly fair. Members of Congress make a lot of money. If you want to make money in the stock market, don’t be a member of Congress. No one is making you. When I was at the Pentagon I worked at a procurement unit where military service members, who were ordered there, with no choice, were forced to sell stocks in order to meet ethics obligations and avoid conflicts of interest. I think we can at least ask our members of congress to do the same.

2. Ban all outside income including the book deal loophole and others. People hate politicians going to Washington and getting rich.

3. Reject political donations from all corporate PACs, federal lobbyists, and big healthcare and pharma CEOs. I would make this the top plank of the Democratic Party. This is the single strongest thing the party could do to show it cares about everyday people and that it will actually start doing what it says it will do. And, perhaps, it would let some of these politicians actually do something about our broken healthcare system.

I mentioned this in past posts, but I need to mention it again because it is the reason that the Sherrod Browns and John Testers of the world are going extinct and aren’t being replaced in other “red” states.

Between our campaign’s voter contact and research, we consistently saw my message and background could gain us big ground, especially when paired with strong accountability for my opponent’s failure to deliver for our state. But beyond needing the resources to communicate that message to more voters, the biggest hurdle our message faced wasn’t about me or my message — the research consistently showed it was as simple as the party I belonged to, intensified by sharing a presidential ballot with Trump.

My team and I are working on a series of posts to go over some of the related data on those topics with you and I’m really looking forward to sharing it and going deeper into solutions that we saw could reach people.

But it can’t just be solutions by individuals. It won’t work as long as the party doesn’t do the work to deserve credibility with everyday people. And that work needs to be real, it needs to feel like an actual sacrifice or change, for people to believe it. The three things I outlined above would do that.

As a final note, I want to thank Judy K. for being our first paid supporter on Substack! We quietly introduced it as an option between our last post and this one for anyone who has the means to help us keep doing this work and making it public.

Please keep all the great comments and questions coming, they help guide our work!

In the next week we will start diving into the numbers, and I’ll share an inspirational email we got that is a great reminder of how important this work is for all of us, particularly the younger generations.

Until then.

— Lucas