Running for office radicalized me. Not because my ideology flipped, but because the experience dragged abstractions into daylight and told me to either build something that works for people or stop pretending I’m doing politics.

I’ve worked in the language of power. Obama administration. Clinton world. Pete’s delegate operation. A law firm representing cities trying to bring federal money home. I know the rooms, the rhythms, the incentives. I also know I never fully belonged in them. I’m the kid born in San Antonio to young parents, who spent time on WIC, who moved from a border town to a place where someone thought a joke about my father being the gardener would land. That moment stayed with me not because it was true, but because it revealed how easily people confuse class and worth.

That fluency—being able to move between worlds—helps. It also hides rot. Because power can convince you that strategy is the work. Running cured me of that.

I entered this race expecting to raise, bank, and broadcast. That’s the modern playbook: stack cash, sit on it, then spend it all at the end on paid media and consultants. It’s politics as hoarding, not circulation. I could have followed it. But I didn’t want to build a war chest. I wanted to build capacity.

People are disillusioned, including donors. National networks are triaging. Indiana isn’t wired like a coastal ATM. I could fight that reality or treat it as the test it is.

So we pivoted: people first, not playbook first. And once we did, I understood how far the party has drifted from the people it claims to serve. I can’t count the times someone has told me I’m the first person ever to knock on their door. That’s an indictment, not a brag.

Then came the shutdown. SNAP payments froze. Food stamps lapsed. Six hundred thousand Hoosiers—nearly nine percent of the state—suddenly cut off. That was the spark for Organizing Against Hunger. We didn’t create a new nonprofit or issue press releases. We did the only thing we know how to do: organize.

I researched food pantries, community fridges, churches, and mutual aid groups, built a spreadsheet of resources across the state, and opened it up for crowdsourcing. Our volunteers added what they knew. Others corrected, expanded, translated. It became a living map of help. Then we started carrying it with us to the doors so that every conversation wasn’t just about voting, but survival.

That’s field too. That’s politics.

We’ve built an operation that runs on doors, phones, and house parties; a campaign that became the primary grassroots vehicle in Indiana mounting real voter-contact pressure during a mid-cycle redistricting threat; a team that decided to spend scarce dollars on organizers instead of consultants and TV ads. It’s exhausting, it’s joyful, and it feels like purpose.

The experience also forced me to admit that our usual ideological maps are useless. Progressive versus moderate. Left versus center. Fighters versus folders. These labels describe the online wars of highly engaged people inside a shrinking cathedral of attention. At the doors, the split I see is simpler: more and more people are disillusioned; fewer and fewer feel included. When people feel seen, they participate. When they don’t, they disappear.

We’ve turned “meet people where they are” into a performance. The phrase was polished into slogans and stapled to press kits. But “meeting” implies descending from a perch. The truth is simpler and harder: you should already be there. If you walk a block and learn more than you knew from your inbox, that’s the proof you weren’t in community to begin with.

The day that radicalized me had nothing to do with a headline. It was a woman fighting to get Medicaid. She’d moved back from Pennsylvania, had coverage there, and here she was: twelve interviews in, denied; diabetic; neuropathy; DVT in both legs; unable to sleep in a bed or trim her own toenails because of pain. I don’t care which bureaucratic box failed. I care that government is supposed to help, and she’s fallen through the cracks. When you hold that reality in your hand, Twitter feels like a hobby.

That’s the conversion running forced on me: away from ideology as identity and toward radical proportionality—solutions that match the size of the problem. We say “housing” and pass a tax credit. Then we wonder why tent counts rise. What if we treat housing as infrastructure: planned, financed, and built with the same seriousness we bring to roads? Not because it polls well, but because it works.

The second conversion is directional: ascent over alignment. I don’t care if movement upward comes from left, center, or some new vocabulary. I care that we can show a neighbor their life moved up because we did the work. Up is the only direction that matters. Keep your factional purity. Give me a plan that scales.

We call it The Climb. It’s how we operate. The acronym came from our volunteers: Courage, Leadership, Integrity, Movement, and Belief. It wasn’t handed down from me; it was built upward from the people doing the work. That’s how movements should grow. Bottom-up, not top-down.

If you’re looking for tidy villains, this isn’t that story. I’m running against an incumbent I like personally and respect. This isn’t about a dramatic vote. It’s about use of office. It’s about The Center for Effective Lawmaking ranking him among the least effective members of Congress across both chambers and both parties. It’s about the fact that Indianapolis is falling behind peer cities in bringing home federal dollars, and I know how to change that because I’ve done it for mayors and cities nationwide. It’s about reimagining this seat as more than a vote in Washington: as a connector that bridges federal, state, and local government; as a party-builder in a state where Democrats used to win because Indianapolis was organized; as a voice that carries when state leaders won’t listen.

That reimagining has a price. Some days it’s $140 at Kilroy’s to say, “you belong.” Some days it’s $40,000 from my retirement because belief without sacrifice is branding. Some days it’s an organizer telling me he’d hold me accountable if I ever forgot the people who built this. And he’s right to. Proximity isn’t loyalty. Loyalty is earned daily with proof.

I’ve been coded as progressive because I’m young, Hispanic, challenging power, and working on issues like civil rights and policing reform. I’ve been coded as establishment because of the schools I attended and the rooms I’ve been in. I’m both and neither. The only test that matters is whether you move lives up and whether you do it at the scale the moment demands.

Running is lonely. Not because fewer people are around me—more are—but because the people who once felt safe keep their distance until the result is written. Some friends I love have gone quiet. Strangers have become family. Some days I want to be fully open with my team. Other days I ration myself because not everyone needs to carry everything. I miss the version of politics where a decent argument could be just that. I also know that version mostly lived in my head.

But there’s a counterweight to that loneliness: a new kind of belonging. People’s Power Hours where neighbors don’t just attend, but they build. House parties where the host is not a donor silo but a node in a network. Volunteers who aren’t perfect on first contact and don’t need to be, because perfection isn’t the bar. Presence is. Organizing Against Hunger taught me that too: the best volunteers aren’t always political, they’re just people who refuse to look away from hunger in their own city. And once you organize around hunger, you can organize around anything.

The awkward kid who keeps showing up is worth ten smooth talkers who never leave the group chat. We’re learning to build a culture that values proof over polish and keeps score in doors and relationships deepened, not dopamine.

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When we entered this race, the threat of redistricting didn't exist. And then suddenly it hung over everything. Maps could change overnight; Indiana’s only safe Democratic seat could be cracked apart. So we aren't treating redistricting as someone else’s fight. We're organizing. We're knocking, calling, texting, and activating people who had never been pulled into this process before.

 

I don't know what will happen with redistricting, but the mission remains the same. This campaign was never just about a map. It’s about rebuilding the ecosystem that makes statewide wins possible. Indianapolis is the engine. If we strengthen the engine, we lift the whole state. So while we protect this seat, we’re also helping statehouse candidates four seats away from breaking the Republican supermajority. That’s the long climb.

Running didn’t make me angrier, though some days I let myself curse the way golden boys get built and kept. Running made me clearer. It taught me that the direction of our politics isn’t left or right. It’s up or down. That moderation without movement is just inertia with a nice haircut. That purity without power is performance art. That the only politics worth doing is the kind you can defend to the woman in the chair who can’t sleep.

 

Redistricting brings clarity. When institutions stall or fold, people step in. And when people show up in numbers—at doors, on calls, in living rooms—even the most powerful actors recalculate. If the map holds, it's not because someone made the right speech. It's because people organized. That’s the lesson I’m carrying into the rest of this race.

We finished that 260-house packet. I don’t know if the young volunteer I texted will reply. But I know tomorrow we’ll pull a new packet. I know there will be more lunches I shouldn’t buy but will. I know there will be more conversations about redistricting. Not as a looming hurricane, but as proof that when people show up early and in force, the storm can pass. And I know that on some doorstep—maybe yours—I’ll knock, and we’ll talk not about factions or clever slogans, but about what it would take, in this place, with these people, to move one life up.

That’s my campaign. That’s my religion. After the knock, build the stairs. And when people are hungry, feed them. Because that’s politics too.

No matter what happens with the congressional map, the work isn’t done.
 

Let’s climb.