The Moment I Decided to Run

People sometimes ask me what moment made me decide to run for Congress. 

 

And the truth is...there wasn’t one. It wasn’t lightning. It was erosion.

It was the slow realization, over years, that the systems I’d spent my career trying to strengthen had quietly hollowed out. That the Democratic Party in Indiana, once vibrant and competitive, had become a shell of itself. That no one was coming to fix it.

The thought didn’t start with me wanting to run. It started with me wanting to rebuild.

In the summer of 2024, I launched a small, scrappy political organization called Next Gen Hoosiers. It wasn’t a campaign. I wasn’t a candidate. I wasn’t taking a paycheck. I was doing 20 hours a week of call-time outside of work because I believed in the simple idea that Indiana still deserved to compete.

The plan was straightforward: raise money and attention for down-ballot Democrats—particularly in the State House where we were just four seats short of breaking the Republican supermajority. I thought that if we could focus energy there, maybe we could start to loosen the grip of one-party rule.

We ended up raising real money. Not massive sums, but enough to buy digital ads supporting ten State House candidates. It was tangible progress. And it forced me to zoom out.

Because when you start mapping the math of power in Indiana, you notice something: every path back to statewide viability runs straight through Indianapolis. For decades, Marion County was the engine of turnout and organizing. Every precinct chair and vice-chair seat was filled and active. The county party’s budget was bigger than the state party’s. Democrats won statewide because Indianapolis worked.

But fast-forward twenty years: the engine’s gone cold. The 7th Congressional District—the vast majority of Indianapolis—now has the lowest turnout of any district in the state. More than a third of precinct leader positions are empty. The party infrastructure that once fueled statewide wins is now defunct.

That realization hit hard.

Because I’d spent my career around politics—national races, federal strategy, the so-called big picture. But if the foundation under us was this weak, none of the national plans would ever stick. And when I looked around, it became clear that no one else was rebuilding it.

The state party isn’t strong enough. Our legislative caucuses haven’t grown in years. Our lone swing-district congressman has to focus on survival. And our mayors outside Indianapolis—good people—don’t have the platform or the capital.

That leaves two jobs that could lead the rebuild: the Mayor of Indianapolis and the Member of Congress from Indiana’s 7th District.

Both are safe Democratic seats. Both have megaphones and resources. Both should be anchors for party building, for statewide revival, for showing people what functional leadership looks like.

But that’s not what’s happening.

One uses power only for himself. The other holds power and never uses it at all.

So when I started talking to donors, strategists, and community leaders about Next Gen Hoosiers, I’d lay out this map—this clear structural gap—and they’d all say some version of the same thing:

“You’ve identified something real. But if you see the problem this clearly, why don’t you do it?”

At first I laughed it off. I’d been the staffer, the strategist, the person behind the curtain. Running wasn’t the plan. But after continuing to hear it, I realized I didn’t have a good answer to why not.

That’s when I called Tony Coelho—my mentor, one of the great architects of modern Democratic strategy, and someone whose judgment I trust more than almost anyone’s.

I laid it all out. The numbers, the map, the decay, the opportunity. I told him about the void of leadership, about how no one was using these safe seats to rebuild the state party, about how the people here deserved more.

He paused and said, “Keep going. Explore it.”

And that was the first green light. Not fireworks, not fanfare. Just permission to keep thinking. But it changed everything.

From there, the conversations multiplied. Each time, the same pattern: disbelief at the status quo, and then that quiet question. "Why not you?"

Eventually, it stopped feeling hypothetical.

The truth is I didn’t wake up one morning wanting to be a congressman. I woke up one morning and realized we’d run out of time to wait for someone else.

Because this district should be the beating heart of the Democratic Party in Indiana. And instead, it’s been left to atrophy when it could be the engine of a statewide comeback.

So, no, there wasn’t one single moment. It was a thousand small ones, the sound of a party crumbling in slow motion and the echo of people asking why no one was fixing it.

At some point, the only answer left was: because I can.