How do we make
politics for everyone?

Politics, at the moment, is for people who have time. Time to attend events, time to donate, time to stay informed. A large majority of the country spends that time elsewhere — on the jobs that pay the bills, on the people we love, on the daily work of holding a life together.

The answer to making politics for everyone is not in asking people for more, but in building a politics that fits inside the life a person already has.

Addressing Barriers.

Participating in politics has some obvious barriers: a donation, a weekday meeting, a ballot you need a car to reach. Others are less obvious and include the hours it takes to understand what is happening or the social cost of saying something out loud at work.

Why the usual tools don't hold →
Even a well-run town hall holds a few hundred people. A full turnout at the best-attended event in this district is a rounding error against the number of people who actually live here. If I spent one minute with every resident of the First District, the task would take more than five hundred days — without sleep, without eating, without pausing for anything else. The usual campaign answer is to accept that most people will never be reached, and to focus on the ones who show up and donate.
On the texts, calls, door knocking, yard signs, advertisements →
Success for the modern campaign is defined on how much money it raises. The result is well known to us in Southeastern Wisconsin: fundraising emails, unsolicited texts, dinner-hour phone calls, yard signs on every corner, ads in front of every video. Multiply by every race, and you arrive at an attention economy where the loudest and most expensive message often wins. The standard response is to accept this and try to be louder.

Sustainable
Politics.

Sustainable for me, as the candidate. Sustainable for you, as a voter.
Sustainable for me

Consistency. Accessibility. Accountability.

A modern congressional campaign is built around raising money, and the candidate's calendar gets shaped accordingly. I am not doing that. The hours most campaigns lose to fundraising are the hours I get back, and I would rather spend them on something useful to the district.

My strength is organizing and conveying information. I like to make sense of how decisions in Washington land in the lives of people who live here. That is what the weekly video series is. It is the work I am best positioned to contribute, and it is work that is needed right now.

A Consistent Schedule.

What to expect each week. Tap a card to learn more.

Weekly Video Series Highlighting Washington's Impact on Wealth Inequality
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Each week, I talk about an area of our lives where the wealthy take advantage of the working class. I look at how we got here, where we stand now, and what we can do about it.
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Weekly Intercommunal Actions
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The idea is to have a community of communities performing coordinated tasks around our district. Groups act independently but contribute to a weekly action.
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Social Outreach
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Short recaps of the weekly videos, highlights from past intercommunal events, promotion for upcoming ones, and other posts bringing attention to an alternative political space.
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Time for Opportunities
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Intentional flexibility in the week for interviews, long-form writing, and community invitations that would otherwise get squeezed out of a fundraising calendar.
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An accessible platform for voters.

The standard practice of constituents emailing or calling their representative, only to be processed by a staffer and handed a canned response, should no longer be accepted. We should demand better. ClearCandidate replaces this gatekeeping with predictable accessibility. If you have a question, post it on the platform; when a topic gains enough community support, I provide a direct, public answer. This model prioritizes slower, asynchronous communication to ensure that every response is deliberate, transparent, and sustainable.

Why →
Do we really need our congresspeople to be quick-witted and strong public speakers? Or should we value accessibility and transparency? A cycle that asks a candidate to have a public opinion on everything within the hour is good for content. However, thoughtful thinking takes longer than that. ClearCandidate keeps a public log of how my views change, and why. If an answer is not good enough, the community can keep asking for clarification.

Regular workers deserve regular representation.

I have kept my job and my family life intact, and I intend to keep them that way through the campaign. Our representatives should be able to live lives that keep them connected to the communities that elect them.

Why →
The expectation that a candidate sacrifice everything — work, family, health — selects for a very particular kind of person, oftentimes someone who can afford to. These are not the same type of people who will represent the working class.

Why limit spending?

My major point is that current method of campaigning is built on money in order to access fragments of your attention. I am arguing that our attention is our most valuable resource, and that is why sustainability is so important. A campaign with a cap on its fundraising must have a much better alternative to offer in return.

Sustainable for you

Share what you know
with the people you know.

The standard campaign instinct is to send a message through every available channel and hope enough of it sticks. It is an exhausting process for a swing state, and most of it gets ignored.

There is an alternative. Each of us already has a handful of people in our lives who would hear us out — people we work with, people we socialize with, people we worship with, people who live on the same block. Those relationships are the channels that already work.

The specific ask: Engage nine people in your life.

Nine people. Three groups of three.

3

from where you work or study.

3

from your social or spiritual life.

3

from the street or block you live on.

Why three groups →
The different groups represent unique conversations that reach across aspects of our lives that have become separated. We can discuss wealth inequality across all of these groups in different, but similar ways.
Why small groups →
Counting you, each group is four people. In a group that size, it becomes easier to communicate ideas. You can then serve the role as translator by helping people understand that their day-to-day life is profoundly impacted by political decisions.

A consistent place to share ideas.

ClearCandidate is not just to understand the candidate but to talk about issues that impact our community. You can think of it as a permanent town hall for candidates. Members get one post and one endorsement per week to encourage slow, deliberate communication.

Why slow is the feature →
Most online platforms are built to capture as much of your attention as they can. ClearCandidate was built for the same reason the nine-person ask was chosen: it fits inside an already busy life and helps us talk about the issues we face.

Clear-eyed on the
systemic issues.

A sustainable politics should be a simple politics. Not simple in the sense of dumbed down, but simple in the sense that a person holding down a job and raising a family can understand the day-to-day decisions without an advanced degree. The way we get there is to notice that most of what is called a separate issue is the same issue wearing different clothes: housing, healthcare, education, immigration, corruption, the quiet sale of our land and electricity to companies from somewhere else. It is a question of who owns the thing, and who is making the money.

01

Affordability is wealth inequality.

When rent and groceries and childcare and medicine outpace wages for decades, we are witnessing a transfer of wealth in action. The decision to fund war overnight while millions of Americans are struggling to get by is one only the cruelest among us would make.

02

Universal basic services should not be tied to your job.

As long as our survival and well-being depend on our employers, our leverage is small and our time is borrowed. We have to imagine a world where instead of subsidies for corporations, our tax dollars fund services that benefit us directly for healthcare, housing, education, and childcare. It shouldn't be this hard.

03

The people who do the work should own the work.

A data center comes to Wisconsin because the company that owns it answers to shareholders somewhere else, and our land and our electricity are cheap line items on a balance sheet they will never have to live next to. Immigration stays broken because the low end of our consumer economy depends on labor that can be paid less, and the people who benefit from that arrangement are the same people who pay to keep it in place.

These issues, and issues like them, share the same story. A small number of people own the thing, and the rest of us work inside it, under rules we did not write or support.

Worker-owned companies are one honest answer. When the people doing the work also own the enterprise, the success of the company is the success of the worker. The same logic applies to our utilities, our hospitals, and the land under our feet.

Why.

I don't like what I see when I look in the future, a future that belongs to my daughter and all other children. I want her to inherit a country where her time, her attention, and her future belong to her, and to the people she loves.

We get one life. I want to spend what is left of mine building something better than what we have, especially while the alternatives are sitting there, unused, waiting.

When we feel disconnected from the process, we start to believe our politics is someone else's job. But it is not. It is ours. This country is something we need to make and nurture together everyday.

If it works, we will have built something durable that can set the standard for politics not corrupted by money. If it falls short, hopefully it sparks an alternative outlook for the next person.

Explore ClearCandidate → Watch This Week's Video →