“That ****ing redneck!” A rural progressive’s journey through Virginia politics
I hadn’t intended to write this.
After losing my election in June, I was pretty done with politics for a number of reasons. But after being prodded by a few people, having some statistics being brought to my attention, and after one eye-rolling contact from a Republican operative, I figured, hey- why not?
I had no idea it would end up being what Medium estimates to be a one-hundred and sixty minute read. Dang. My sincere apologies. The crazy thing is that this doesn’t even cover a heck of a lot of the stuff that transpired in the nastiest, most public primary in the entire Commonwealth of Virginia this year.
So, settle in if you want to hear the story about how an ER Nurse and the progressive blogosphere worked together to hit the “sacrifice fly” that helped get Medicaid Expansion passed in Virginia.
Or how a ragtag group of internet sleuths helped uncover a Republican Presidential nominees’ attempt to throw an election, way before anyone took that kind of threat seriously.
How it goes running for office after being diagnosed with malignant cancer when you’re already the primary caregiver for your mom’s terminal cancer.
How a democratic politician proudly took credit for something they’d asked to be ghostwritten for them- and then unknowingly badmouthed the same volunteer who’d authored it.
How an emergency services provider was the subject of an almost half a million-dollar media campaign dedicated to re-traumatizing them for watching patients almost die.
How backstabbing a contemporary can be more important than turning a state blue.
How a sitting Republican Congressman was tricked into pretending to be a Democrat and bad-mouthing Donald Trump.
And how a “****ing redneck” had almost a million dollars spent to keep them out of political office.
Heads up. Things are gonna get wild.
I suppose I should go back allllllll the way to the beginning to truly lay this out.
In 2003, when I was 17 years old, I ran for school board in Manitowoc, Wisconsin. I was too young to vote for myself, but I was on a mission: make sure kids got fed. You see, school lunch wasn’t provided to any students in the school district I lived in.
The city was a deep-blue union town, and when I say union, I mean it. In 1997, a group of workers at the Dayco manufacturing plant asked to have time off to go see a Green Bay Packers game. When management said no, they took off and went anyway. Well, that didn’t sit too well with management, and they tried to fire the workers. The union took it to court, and the judge openly berated the human resources manager, telling the manager he “should have known better” than to pick a fight with the union in “this kind of” town, taking the time to explain the difference between Manitowoc and the “right to work” state the management team had been flown in from after they’d bought the local Imperial Eastman plant out.
In the most authentically Wisconsin thing ever, the judge also castigated the manager for being so ridiculously out of touch as to interfere with people who were going to see a Green Bay Packers game.
Now, even with that kind of an incredible example, it’s important to know that Manitowoc had a very conservative strain of union Democratic politics- albeit one not uncommon at the time. Or maybe it was unique, even then, as it was the kind that would allow school kids to go without school lunch in a union town.
You see, sometime in the mid 1970s, the school board was doing a tour of the high school at lunchtime. Supposedly, as the story goes, they watched as high schooler after high schooler (I’m imagining bell bottom jeans, long hair, tie dye, etc) commit the unforgivable sin of throwing some of their food away instead of eating it.
This was apparently such an outrageous sin that the school board decided that no kids in the entire district would have access to school lunch. Not the high schoolers, not the kindergartners- nobody. They were so terrified of “wasting money” they closed every school kitchen in the entire district. If you were truly too poor to have your parents pack your lunch, you could go to the office at lunchtime to be issued a sad looking brown-paper bag containing a stale PBJ and a cardboard box of milk.
But you can probably see the problem: at our high school, the social stigma behind parading through the hallway and cafeteria with “the poor kids’ lunch” was so great that kids would go hungry rather than dare to subject themselves to it. This is what eventually caught my attention: a friend of mine who showed up to lunch period a few days in a row empty-handed.
I’m embarrassed and devastated to say it took me several days to notice anything was amiss. Finally, the gears in my head turned enough to catch that something wasn’t right. I asked her what was wrong, why she didn’t have lunch- and she shrugged. Nothing. I just want to get some homework done, or I’m not hungry, or I’m not feeling the greatest.
Our group of friends began to sense something sensitive was wrong, and one day, surprised her by packing enough extra lunch in aggregate to bring an entire lunch to school just for her. When she showed up to lunch, she stopped cold- and then broke down in tears.
It turned out her mom had just been forced to go onto disability because of an injury she’d suffered at work, and they could barely afford rent. In fact, the only reason they even had heat was because the gas company legally couldn’t turn it off in the wintertime.
Packed lunch was a luxury they simply didn’t have the money for.
I was ashamed how long it had taken me to realize that- and the next day, I skipped school to drive to the city office building and file to run for school board.
Which is how I ended up spending a snowy Wisconsin January and February knocking doors and telling people about my single-plank campaign: kids deserved food. The high schoolers, I said, could at least fend for themselves a little, but the grade and middle schoolers had no chance. We had an obligation to make sure they got fed.
And completely unbeknownst to me at the time, I had become a progressive. Even though I came in dead last in an election where I couldn’t even vote for myself, the candidates that won followed through with the promise I’d intended to deliver and made lunch available to all students the following school year.
If you would have asked me at the time, though, I would have vehemently denied being a progressive. My dad was Republican, and I had joined him in being involved in local Republican politics. But as I began to get older and more mature, I quickly began to become disillusioned with conservatism and the Republican party. Several friends of mine had deployed to Iraq. I was “officially censured” and lambasted by the local Young Republicans for daring to question whether the war was a good idea. John Kerry became the second person I ever voted for (by virtue that I filled in the bubble for Russ Feingold first and without question).
Watching George Bush win re-election was a tough pill to swallow. I looked for places where I could wallow in mutual distress at the result of that election and discovered a link to a story posted on the liberal blog DailyKos. It dismissed the conspiracy theories being bandied about that Bush had somehow stolen Ohio, and instead focused on a very poignant and uncompromising look on how Bush had won, where the Democrats had failed, and what needed to be done to move forward.
The comments section of that article became a sort-of group grieving session for people that understood all too well what was going to come in the next four years.
DailyKos is where I made my first foray into writing about progressive politics, as a part of that group. It became somewhere I’d visit at least a few times a week, and played a crucial role in forging my ability to translate progressive policy into conservative language so well; sort-of a “deprogramming” from the conservative landscape I’d grown up in.
It was where I celebrated the 2006 wave election in Congress. It was where I reached out for advice when I got accepted into the University of Virginia and had to move to Charlottesville. All of the best counterarguments I developed arguing with my much more conservative family members got their start on DailyKos. I almost never commented, simply content to lurk. I’d read the I Got The News Today posts that were so depressingly frequent at those times, about the young Americans- many my age- who were dying in Iraq and Afghanistan for no reason whatsoever.
But other than lurking and occasionally commenting, I didn’t participate much in the nascent progressive blogosphere (or politics in general) until a young Senator from Illinois won the Iowa caucuses in early 2008. I’d had my eye on him, but that win was what opened my eyes that I could (and should!) do more than just lurk. And when things began to heat up between Clinton and Obama supporters began in earnest- a veritable online civil war in the left-wing blogosphere- I threw myself headfirst into trying to heal and navigate that rift.
I also began to write about my conservative upbringing and sharing stories on how to navigate discussing progressive politics with your family. I understood what conservatives said to each other, understood why they said what they did and how it was specifically engineered to manipulate people- and I was ready and willing to teach others how to do the same thing back to them.
My efforts caught the attention of a group of folks working with Obama Rapid Response. The digital crowdsourcing efforts the Obama folks did were so cutting edge for the time. I quickly showed I had a knack for rhetorical flourish and debate. The Obama folks, to their infinite credit, understood the utility of having these kinds of people around, who were not associated officially with the campaign, to “boost” or “influence” voters online.
The working group I was part of came up with talking points on the Jeremiah Wright “controversy”; there are no words for how surreal it is to seeing stuff you workshopped actually come out of the mouth of someone on MSNBC mere hours later. And while we did a lot more stuff like that- mostly ignored, some used, some forwarded on- the crowning effort of that year was exposing that some of the folks trying their best to sow division (folks who went so far as to try and form a pro-Hillary putsch of delegates at the Denver Democratic convention) were paid McCain staffers.
It was an effort I took incredible pride in being even a bit player in, because 2008 was a tough year for me. I’d moved with my then-infant kiddo from southwest Virginia to Charlottesville to attend the University of Virginia, leaving behind all of my family, my friends, and any semblance of a support structure. I’d had it hammered into me repeatedly as a millennial that I had to go to college, and that if I worked hard enough, everything would just work out. I knew that the opportunity I’d been given was a once in a lifetime affair- one of eighty-five students selected out of almost a thousand applicants- but I also understood how close to the edge we’d be running to make things work, and that my kiddo would be the one to ultimately pay the biggest price if things went bad.
My work that year in support of President Obama was something bigger I could lend my support to, somewhere I felt like I was really making a difference, when so much else in my life was up in the air. As the air turned cooler and summer turned into fall, I knocked doors with the Albemarle County Democrats, my kiddo strapped into a carrier on my back. I worked with the University Dems to get Michelle Obama to visit the University of Virginia that fall, which earned me a picture of my kiddo and I standing by the UVA library with the soon-to-be First Lady.
It was a heady time, and it whet my appetite for behind the scenes, knuckle-cracking work. And that’s mostly what I did for the next couple years. Going toe to toe with Republican operatives at this time was actually a challenge; and hell, sure, it was fun. I knew where to pay attention. I knew where to listen. I found the redlines that’d get you banned on places like RedState, the Drudge Report, and LittleGreenFootballs before the latter moved toward sanity. My original and most prolific Reddit account is from this era, as well.
There is a quote from an episode of the show Futurama, where one of the characters says “You are technically correct- the best kind of correct.” The rhetorical tete-a-tetes we’d get into, both straddling those lines… it was an intellectual dance, and it was a lot of fun. I spent the next few years doing exactly that.
But eventually that changed. When Congressman Tom Perriello (D-VA) narrowly lost in 2010, after voting for the Affordable Care Act- famously, a reporter told him that vote would cost him his job, and he replied “If people get healthcare and I have to go home, it’s worth it”- I became more disaffected with organized politics. It didn’t help that a lot of my advice had been being ignored on the various campaigns and efforts I’d been working with. One politician I had helped told me that- and I quote- “The Republicans are on their way to becoming a rump party that won’t be able to hold office outside of the deep South.”
I don’t suppose that kind of delusion or hubris is surprising to anyone reading this. But after Obama won re-election, I decided I was retiring from politics. I had to constantly butt heads with a family that was almost entirely conservative on a regular basis, I wasn’t being listened to, and I had a young family and career as a brand-new ER Nurse to nurture. Politics was for other people. I wasn’t interested. And for awhile, things were looking up! I went year after blissful year ignoring politics entirely.
Then Donald Trump happened.
I didn’t take Donald Trump seriously at first- too many of us didn’t. I still remember the feeling the first time it hit me exactly how dangerous he was. I saw some of the dark corners of the internet we always used to keep our eyes on light up; watching in horror as the very worst people became engaged by his rhetoric, a vise grip squeezing my heart.
So, I cracked my knuckles and got back to work.
I lurked in Discord forums; on Reddit. I made some sockpuppet accounts on a very prominent social media site- I’ll skip the name here so as not to get banned post facto for taking advantage of their notoriously lax enforcement of their own rules- and joined a dozen MAGA and Conservative groups’ pages, lurking on the conversations taking place and organizing being done there, surviving several rounds of culling as some groups became paranoid people like me were doing, well… exactly what I was doing. I’d chortle every time the circular firing squads they formed to ferret out “liberal plants” seized instead on fellow MAGAites.
Eventually, I tried to bring this to Clinton folks, a few of whom I knew from working with previous on various campaigns in the past. That they demurred wasn’t a surprise to me; I hadn’t expected them to give me a job, or anyone in the loose conglomeration of folks doing the same kind of work I did. All I was looking for guidance on targeting- where they needed resources put in, so we didn’t duplicate efforts.
And let’s be totally clear here: I was absolutely a bit player. Sure, I felt like I’d done good work, but I had no delusions of grandeur; there were better people out there who were more talented, had been connected more recently, and could work above board, rather than behind the scenes. So when they said “no, thank you”, I wasn’t surprised.
No, it was why they demurred that stunned me. “Nah, don’t worry. We got this easy.”
The Clinton folks were so assured of an easy win, and that no efforts like mine would be necessary, they dismissed any need for them offhand. This made me dumbfounded. The concerns I pointed out repeatedly fell on deaf ears, and I wasn’t the only one. Colleagues of mine were getting the same response and were just as blown away as I was.
Shell shocked, I decided I couldn’t sit back and do nothing. Which led me to do something I hadn’t done since 2010: open volunteering with a campaign. I signed up to volunteer with a Clinton campaign phonebank, and discovered the nearest one to me was being held in just a few days in neighboring Greene County, Virginia. If I couldn’t use my rhetorical skills behind the scenes, maybe I could use them outwardly somewhere that might matter.
As we went through the onboarding for the phone calling event, I discovered we would be calling into Omaha. This puzzled me greatly, as I wasn’t familiar with Omaha, Virginia; was this some hamlet in the mountains? A NOVA suburb I’d never heard of?
No, it was Omaha. Omaha, Nebraska. We were phonebanking into Omaha, Nebraska from Stanardsville, Virginia.
When I tried to point out that we could probably do better calling folks in communities nearby, in a state we lived in, I was frowned at, and told- very matter of factly- that Virginia was now irredeemably a blue state, and that there was no point in trying to phonebank here.
I snapped internally. Of course, I immediately recognized there was no point in hashing it out with the hapless campaign staffer who was doing their best with minimal support. I simply decided that that was it for me. I got up, walked out, and immediately set off to do something, anything else to help out- with or without official help.
And that’s what I spent 2016 doing. It ended up being just fine that the Clinton folks didn’t want our help; it left us free to do things we wouldn’t have been able to do quite so openly otherwise. We pitched Gary Johnson relentlessly, and then, once he entered the race, we helped organize the effort to get Evan McMullin on the ballot here in Virginia. We knew there were people who weren’t going to vote for Hillary Clinton, but we didn’t want to give them an excuse to vote for Donald Trump. I still remember one of the local Republican county party leaders, literally screaming in spittle-flecked apoplexy as he accused us (and me, in particular) of actually being liberals. I couldn’t hide my grin at that; I’m not immune to schadenfreude, after all.
In partial recompense, every time we did something like that, I donated a nominal sum to Hillary Clinton, only stopping when I was exactly one dollar short of the FEC reporting limit. I’d made enough noise and pissed off enough Republicans that they’d found my donations to Barack Obama and Tom Perriello, found my efforts in volunteering for Creigh Deeds for Virginia Governor in 2009; I didn’t want to give them any more ammunition than I had to. After the election, I discovered some of the Clinton folks found out what we were up to and got a kick out of it.
As election day rolled around, I had a literal ton of weight roll off my chest. Clinton was going to win; I just knew it. I went for a jog that day before night shift and almost floated the whole way. All the work we did was worth it. We’d all escaped disaster. We’d saved the future of our country. And, just as importantly, I could go back to being a nobody again.
November 2016 is a blur to me. I remember seeing the results coming out of Wisconsin on election night, and being familiar enough with those communities to understand exactly what was coming. I remember the absolute shock. I remember not being able to sleep, even after a long nightshift in the ER.
I don’t remember exactly when I decided to run for office. Running for office isn’t something I’d ever seriously considered doing before that. Partially because I had no real interest in it, and partially because I had a digital history going all the way back to USENET which consisted of me being an opinionated loudmouth on the Internet. I’d been an open Bernie Sanders supporter until I saw he had no path to win the primary, and then went unapologetically into helping Hillary Clinton. I’d been active all over the progressive blogosphere, and even wading into conservative forums on places like Reddit, with gems like these:
“Seriously, you ****suckers, either FUND ADOPTION, FAMILY PLANNING, AND CONTRACEPTION initiatives at 300%, or SHUT THE **** UP.”
“Medicare for All is the only serious way to pursue healthcare reform. It’s either that, or being a ****ing insurance shill.”
“(****ing Republicans). They hate abortion, but refuse to do anything else that might accomplish that goal. And furthermore, once the kid is born, they (take a) “**** you!” attitude and stop caring.”
“(Republicans) don’t care about anything but ‘stigginit to the libs’. Truly. They’d vote for someone to the left of Bernie Sanders tomorrow if they thought that would really just stick it to the libs.”
“(Republicans) I’ve met love to flip off comments proving they’re only selectively against abortion. Their abortions are fine; everyone else’s should be illegal. And they’re not for expanding birth control, or properly funding adoption/foster care programs. As long as they’re born, apparently that’s all Jesus/St. Reagan cares about.”
And these are some of the less bombastic and vulgar comments I made. To make things worse, I got into fights with Clinton supporters in both 2008 and 2016 for different reasons, and then in 2016 got into it with Bernie supporters who wanted to follow Susan Sarandon’s example. In fact, this is what ended up getting my original DailyKos account permanently banned.
I’ve always found that while people put a theoretical high price on changing people’s minds, they never seem to value that anyone’s mind got changed. IE, many Clinton folks thought supporting Bernie at any time was irredeemable, regardless of how much leg work you subsequently put in on their candidates’ behalf, and I certainly never had any of my entrenched pro-Bernie friends pat me on the back for choosing to fight for Clinton. These are a minority of both folks’ supporters, to be sure, but a vocal one.
But my state rep was the epitome of an “entrenched politician”. The first establishment Republican in Virginia to enthusiastically support Donald Trump’s campaign, he had run unopposed for almost a decade, and was the Virginia GOP’s money man; raising hundreds of thousands of dollars while running on a solo ballot and tossing his money far and wide. And I felt helpless, well aware of exactly the danger Trump posed… and not being able to do anything about it.
I didn’t hesitate; I went to work. First, knowing I couldn’t scrub my internet posting history, I set about installing “mines” everywhere I could- traps for the Republicans to run into. For instance, to this day there is still an ostensibly anti-Clinton missive written by me… with a vulgar message to Republicans spelled out in selective capitalization hidden within it.
I did a number of similar things, with the rationale that if one of them was found by the Republicans, I could point out they’d been trolled and mock them mercilessly. That way, if they found any of the things I mentioned above that I couldn’t scrub, there would already be a high bar for it to make it above the background noise of politics. All the kinds of things that the Republicans tried to do to us, I wanted to do right back to them.
Of course, I also had to start moving into the unfamiliar territory of the actual mechanics of running for office. So, one of the first things I did during this time period was contact the Democratic Party of Virginia’s folks who were in charge of recruiting and supporting candidates to run for office. This conversation didn’t go well for a number of reasons, which I’ve alluded to in the past, but never fully articulated in the spirit of “playing nice”. So now that I’m well and truly past the need to “play nice”, let me elaborate on things a bit.
As I’ve written in the past, the first question I was asked when I called the Democratic Party to ask about running for office- literally interrupted mid-conversation to be asked- was if I could write myself a $200,000 check. Stunned, I said no… of course not. Well, then: did I have a rolodex that had a bunch of rich people in it? When I responded similarly in the negative, the dripping condescension that came in reply was so thick as to be almost comical.
I was lectured that the Republican I wanted to run against was well liked in my community- as if I wasn’t aware of what was going on in my community- and that if I (or anyone) ran against him, it would probably only make him do better. If I actually wanted to help, the implication went, the savvier move was not to run anyone against him, so as to not “mobilize Republican voters”.
I was speechless.
Sadly, this was actually the conventional wisdom at the time for many districts like mine. I suspect this partially an attempt to give cover to the state party to avoid having to build up infrastructure in districts other than the ones they wanted to, but it was clear this was a strategy that they actually believed in. And not just in Virginia, but across the country.
Mentioning, too, that I was accepted into the nurse practitioner program at James Madison University wasn’t an asset; it was just proof to voters that I wasn’t really committed to running or winning. If I did that, clearly the Virginia GOP would know I didn’t want to win and wouldn’t tie up any resources in our race. Again, I was speechless- I’d worked so incredibly hard to get into NP school, after having to juggle working full time and raising an infant during my undergraduate education. But I accepted that rationale and ended up rescinding my offer of admission for the sake of the campaign.
Things didn’t go any better when I was asked about my history of being involved in campaign politics. I was pretty forthright about my past; I may have, uhm, glossed over the more vulgar parts of it, but what I admitted to was enough for them to only reiterate that it was just liable to make the Republicans here do better if I ran against them, because I’d surely be pigeonholed as a radical liberal.
Finally, in exasperation, I laid out what I thought were my selling points. I was great at public speaking. I could make progressive arguments in conservative language, to be able to run as a Democrat in an R+30 district, and had been doing so for years. I could truthfully make the case I had once been a conservative and was disaffected by Trump to try and pull over moderates, even if I had to gloss over the timeline that shift in politics had actually occurred on, since I’d effectively been a progressive for my entire adult life. I was a gun owner that could unapologetically make sensible gun reform arguments. And as an emergency department nurse, I actually provided abortion care to patients.
What followed that last admission was sheer and almost unmitigated panic. Rapid fire concerns came up, one after another. I was told, point blank, that when it comes to abortion, “voters are stupid”. I was told that nobody- not even Republicans!- were against the kind of abortion care we provided in the ER.
And did I forget the part where voters were too dumb to handle nuance about abortion? Moreover, if that information became public knowledge, my and my family’s life would potentially be in jeopardy. And there was a heavy implication that I might single handedly cause Lieutenant Governor Ralph Northam- then the only candidate for Governor- to lose, because that admission might cause a landslide turnout for Republicans; not just in my District, but across Virginia, as Republicans capitalized on my candidacy.
Now, the second point I knew very well was complete bullshit even then. Plenty of Republicans are against emergent abortion care. As I am preparing to post this article, the Attorney General of Texas is taking a woman that has a potentially life-threatening, non-viable fetal abnormality to the Texas Supreme Court and threatening to prosecute any clinician that treats her. It’s not like they started believing those things magically the instant Roe versus Wade was repealed, they’ve always been that way.
I know the GOP doesn’t really do “party platforms” anymore, but if they did, that kind of opposition to even lifesaving abortion care would for sure be in there. But at that time, the official view from the Democratic Party was apparently that while they might be the wrong beliefs, Republicans actually had sincere principles or beliefs on abortion. Surely they weren’t interested in situational ethics and moral relativism in the pursuit of winning at all costs; they were just different! They didn’t want to actually repeal Roe versus Wade, they just wanted to pretend to, so they could manipulate voters and donors.
Any attempt I made to push back on that, however, was waylaid by the other monumental concerns thrown at me. I’d only seen politics from behind the scenes, so I had no experience on this side of it, the running for office side. Hearing this kind of admonition was terrifying. The open warning that I might cost the election of an entire state was bad enough, although I was still skeptical of that… but that last point was the worst one.
“You’re on your own.”
I took another week or two of deep thought and consideration after this. Eventually, I decided to plow ahead. I decided someone had to do something. I’d watched politicians do stupid things my whole life, after all. Maybe it was time to show people how to forge a new path. And if I was on my own, it would be up to me to figure out how to navigate being a progressive running in the most gerrymandered district in Virginia.
“You’re on your own” is one of the defining features of politics. It means the “cost” to get involved in politics is dramatically higher, literally and figuratively, which severely limits the kinds of people who can get involved in politics to begin with. Many will argue that’s a feature, not a bug, and I have a hard time disagreeing with them.
Initially, I didn’t think that would be quite as high of a bar to clear. With the background work I’d done in politics, my ability to communicate issues to people in a way that resonated with them, and the way Donald Trump had upended everything, I figured I could set a new mold for how to attack conservatives as a progressive in deep-red America. Yep; it’s me, hi! I was the one who’d finally chart a new direction. A white progressive dude who had all the answers- have you ever heard of such a thing before?
I was rapidly disabused of this notion. Sure, I might have some unique ideas, but there was a reason a lot of things were done the way they were- and had been since time immemorial. I began to understand exactly how frequently knowledge is guarded as a job security measure in politics. Even something as simple as asking for advice is disdainfully ignored, or even openly sneered at.
This struck home with me in particular after I chatted with my uncle, who I’ve only interacted with maybe ten times in my life. He was an executive vice president for a number of years at what was then the largest bank in the United States. My mother’s siblings were never particularly close, but his role on its own precluded a lot of contact, particularly as he ended up spending a lot of time laying the groundwork for this bank’s investment into China. Afterwards, he became a lobbyist with a group that, if I named them here, would be instantly known to the majority of folks who are politically involved.
I called him not long after I was asked if I could write myself a $200,000 check, as I was certain he knew the kinds of folks who could do just that, hoping to pique his interest now that I was running for office- even if it was as a Democrat. The twenty-minute conversation we had was probably the longest continuous conversation I’d had with him in my life. He shut me down immediately on any thought of helping me raise campaign funds, though, telling me he didn’t “do money and politics”… but told me that he would happily give me advice.
He launched into a TED Talk of who he considered exemplary politicians, extolling the virtues of John McCain and Dianne Feinstein. I didn’t actually understand who he meant at first, because he kept repeatedly referring to them just by their first names. I finally asked him to clarify exactly who he was talking about after he began describing a recent call he had “with Dianne.” He did so, and without breaking stride launched back into his talk while I attempted to process that. “John”, similarly, turned out to be John McCain.
All the advice he gave me was excellent for perspective, even if I demurred at why he considered those two to be his examples of stellar politicians. I began to feel like Homer Simpson in the Den of Antiquities.
“Dianne always stood up for what she believed in, and never let pressure sway her,” my uncle said.
Oooh, that’s good, I thought to myself.
“Like how she always stood up to the teachers unions,” he continued.
Oooh, that’s bad.
His final bit of advice to me ended up being the most relevant. “Reach out to people who you sincerely think can give you good advice, advice that you actually need,” he said. “It has to be sincere; people are generally pretty good at knowing who is bullshitting them. Ask them for twenty minutes of their time.” Twenty minutes, he said, was the sweet spot; short enough to fit into pretty much anyone’s schedule, long enough to get good input if you knew what to ask, and a “short circuit” around folks who were guarding knowledge for “job security”. Besides, he told me, “if they can’t give you twenty minutes of their time, odds are their advice wasn’t worth anything to begin with, and you’re better off without it.”
I took his advice almost immediately. For example, near the beginning of my 2017 run, I was told by someone in Democratic leadership that one of the legislators that had experience with (and apparently loathed) my Republican opponent was Senator Barbara Favola. She was a longtime lawmaker occupying a seat in deep blue Northern Virginia, and I was eager to pick her brain- not just about my opponent, but about the vagaries of running for office from someone who’d been there and done that. So I sent a request for a meeting or phone call with her to her staff- who I was, what I was running for, and why I wanted to talk. After three weeks with no response, I reached back out, rationalizing she and her staff were likely busy doing the real work of legislating.
When one of her staffers finally got a hold of me, she opened our conversation with outright hostility… at a level that made me literally reel. “Senator Favola isn’t interested in funding your campaign,” she sneered, “so there’s no need for you to keep asking.”
What followed was a bewildering five-minute conversation. Mortified that I’d apparently unintentionally offended a Senator, I stammered that I’d never asked for, nor intended to ask for, money because I found it unlikely I (or anyone) could outraise my opponent. What I could do is what any grassroots, “guerilla” campaign does: make him react to us, get him off balance, etc. And that I’d reached out because I’d been told that Senator Favola would be an excellent resource for that.
The tenor of the conversation from the staffer made it clear she was skeptical at best; nobody, she seemed to imply, calls just asking for advice. It had to be for money. And if I indeed was only calling for advice, the impression I got was that she thought that only made me something between stupid and inept. She ended our call with a half-hearted assertion she’d pass my sentiments onto the Senator- but, of course, I never heard from her again.
This was the predominant kind of response I got to these sorts of inquiries- but to be clear, I also got a lot of gracious advice during the same time period. State Senator Creigh Deeds seemed to be initially skeptical, but after an earnest conversation gave me great advice on multiple occasions. This might’ve also been because he remembered I volunteered for him in 2009, but if so, he never gave any indication of it. The Virginia House Minority leader sat down eagerly with me to discuss our race and give his advice. The Chief of Staff for a federal lawmaker happily sat down with me on more than one occasion to this end. Several Delegates from across the Commonwealth were similarly inclined, and I cannot laud the support these folks gave me enough; it meant an incredible amount to me.
But they were certainly the exception, rather than the rule. There was a clear and open incredulity that any candidate would be calling for a reason other than a fiscal one- and sincere disdain when they realized I was seriously asking for advice. This hadn’t been all bad; a local donor was so taken aback I’d called for any reason other than to beg for money that they laughed uproariously and immediately wrote me a check. When the House Minority leader sat down with me and told me not to bother asking this donor for money because “there’s no way you’ll get any”, I had to explain that I’d already gotten a sizeable donation from them. That elicited a laugh… until he realized I was absolutely serious.
But those are all things I had to do on my own; all things I had to find out on my own. There was never a suggestion of, for example, when I broke the news that I did what any ER nurse or provider does- provide abortion care- that maybe I should sync with Planned Parenthood, with Repro Rising (then NARAL), with any number of other pro-choice organizations who’d been doing the work in that space for eons.
Just before they endorsed me in 2017, the folks at Planned Parenthood admonished me for exactly that. “We’ve done this sort of thing once or twice,” one of their leaders told me. All I could do was shrug helplessly, because she was right. I should have. But at that time, I didn’t even know what I didn’t know.
In general, though, nobody supports rural candidates or districts- financially or otherwise. The state party surely doesn’t; if anything, they drive money and support away from rural candidates. These candidates- usually regular human beings with normal jobs- are left to do their own fundraising and campaigning, while the state party warns donors that these rural districts are a “waste” of time and money to support. When these candidates lose, the party folks in the urban parts of the state go “Well, what did you expect from Those People in Those Districts; this just proves my point that we shouldn’t waste time trying to compete there.” And the districts get redder and redder.
To put it a different way, for those of you with green thumbs reading this, or folks with a farming background: crappy, awful seeds will still grow in fertile soil. You can have a candidate who sees nothing wrong with saying aloud that going to meetings for Terry McAuliffe makes them “deserve” a political seat over an emergency services provider- and if they’re running in a D+21 district, that could very well still fly.
But even the very best seed on the planet can’t grow in awful soil. And nobody should be surprised about that.
I think a good case in point of all of this is a discussion I had with a prominent Virginia politico in late 2022. This text chain began after a staffer from a Virginia Democratic congressional campaign went onto Twitter to vent publicly about the deficiencies she saw in how the party ran and supported races in rural Virginia. In particular, she called out the absence of systemic help in Virginia’s 5th Congressional District, home of the odious insurrectionist Bob Good.
“Yep,” this politico said disapprovingly, including a link to the tweetstorm, “the media loves it when Dems pull this shit publicly.”
“Just ignore it,” I advised them- but, clearly, they couldn’t just drop it. Below is a transcript of our conversation, edited for brevity and clarity:
It’s still f-ing stupid. Obnoxious. Also just wrong on the merits. Fact is, the DPVA should NOT have put resources there. If they had, that would have been political malpractice, and anyone who doesn’t understand that shouldn’t be in politics, really. Parties have to focus, have to put resources where they make sense for WINNING.
“I mean, when I asked about running in ’16, they asked if I could write myself a $250k check, and when I said no, they said maybe I oughtn’t run.”
Yeah. That was the right response. The incumbent Republican was unbeatable, in a bright-red district. So sure, if you want to run, that’s up to you. But no reason for the party to put resources there. ‘It’s not personal, it’s business.’ People need to not take this stuff personally.
“I was asking them for advice, not money. They told me running against that incumbent would probably make him do better because Republicans might not show up if he was running unopposed.”
Yeah, that’s an argument that’s been going on forever- whether it makes sense to run Dems in deep-red areas. I’d argue yes, as long as those Dems don’t expect money from the party.
“Well, we made him blow almost a half a million dollars fighting us off; he spent $125k on TV the last week of the race.”
Yes, which is good. So that has mostly convinced me it’s best for Dems to run everywhere. Not because we’re going to win, but because it’s important for Dems to get the message out, pin them down in their districts, force them to spend money, etc.
“It is, indeed. Now, where does the DPVA fit into all of that? Shouldn’t it be like we are with Ukraine right now? Resources and money, even if a fraction we’d spend on ‘our’ things, to pin down and destroy an enemy of our country.”
Yeah, I wouldn’t compare deep-red rural districts to Ukraine at all. Deep-red rural districts can NOT be won. Ukraine COULD be won, but it seemed like a long shot at the beginning.
“Losing by 35 instead of 40 gives us Governor McAuliffe.”
Yeah, but that’s not going to happen.
“It’ll never happen if we don’t try.”
The way McAuliffe would have become Governor was to increase our turnout in deep-blue districts. That’s where we lost it. If we had cranked it up in Hampton Roads, we’d have kept the House of Delegates, and McAuliffe, Herring, and Ayala all would have won. That’s where the votes are, in the ‘crescent’.
“Yeah, but in the absence of that, if we took the (Congresswoman Abigail) Spanberger approach, it would have gotten us over the edge. I don’t think we have to choose. I think we can have it both ways.”
The thing is, resources aren’t infinite, so it’s always going to be a tradeoff. You’ve got to go where you get the biggest bang for your buck.
“Yes, that’s why I favor reverse coattails. Put some infrastructure funding- and see, the people in (the Rest of Virginia) would do wonders with what you could spend in one day on a House of Delegates campaign in Tidewater- and then it lets you say you’re investing in the entire Commonwealth.”
Has that been tried? Like, anywhere? If so, how’d it go? I honestly don’t know the answer to that.
“The infrastructure stays there. We win seats. We train new politicians. Etc. Or Caroline (County), Greene (County), etc. We can do both. Booker got 2% better than McGrath spending $6 million compared to $94 million? The party surely controlled a lot of McGrath’s fundraising because they wanted it to be spent on them.”
Interesting discussion, but pointless in the end, because it’s not going to change anything. The DPVA doesn’t listen to me at all; they get angry if you even make constructive suggestions privately. So, fuck it. I’m not wasting my time/energy.
So, simultaneously:
- It doesn’t make sense to run Democrats in deep red districts
- There is only enough money to be spent in districts that matter right now, and investing in potential future wins is not just folly, but dangerous
- If Democrats do run in deep red districts, that might be good, but they should understand they need to do it with no help whatsoever even if it’s just asking for advice, which is important to know isn’t personal
- It’s incredibly important for Democrats to get a progressive message out everywhere, as well as pinning down Republican candidates and forcing them to play defense
- There’s no point in discussing or fighting for change because the DPVA has decided how things are going to be, and they’re not going to change for anything or anyone.
This is a very experienced politico, a great person who has done a lot for Democratic politics in Virginia. I appreciated their feedback and input a lot, even though we would often butt heads. Heck, those conversations were some of the most fun! For instance, I was cajoled for getting involved in boosting Gary Johnson and Evan McMullin during the 2016 election in the same ultra-red districts they’d insisted were unwinnable by Democrats. “Campaigning for Gary F’ing Johnson? Ergo, helping Trump?”
I apparently needed to remind them that I had tried volunteering to help in deep-red Virginia and was told to make calls to Omaha, Nebraska instead. I reiterated their own argument that putting Democratic efforts into these deep-red counties was “political malpractice."
“How many votes am I going to flip to Hillary Clinton versus a third-party candidate in Rockingham county?” I asked, alluding to the fact Secretary Clinton barely broken single-digit percentages there in 2016. The meek reply to that was, “Well, there are dems there… not the majority of course, a small minority…” and the subject was quickly changed, which I think was as much an admission as I was ever going to get that I wasn’t wrong.
But the response there didn’t surprise me; it was pretty common. That kind of “asymmetric warfare” is anathema to someone from the midnight-blue urban crescent of Virginia. There is always this weird expectation from those circles that, as progressives, our political brand is We Have To Play Fair™. If we just play fair, one of these first days- any day now!- surely it’ll force the Republicans to play fair, too. And those of us who want to fight back, using some of the Republicans’ own methods and tactics against them, are often looked down on or treated more poorly than Republicans themselves.
The clear expectation, then, was that if you lived in rural Virginia, what you should do is one of two things:
- Self-fund buying a giant “Hillary Clinton/Joe Biden/etc for President” sign and stand on the side of the road in McGaheysville, Virginia (twenty points if you can pronounce that correctly) all day, being thankful all the while that you’re supporting a Democrat
- Move/drive/commute your butt far away from your community and neighbors; don’t bother to try and change the mind of those backwards, snaggle-toothed, inbred cretins. Instead, send your money and time and efforts to deep-blue urban Virginia.
Obviously, that wasn’t going to fly with me.
So, in order to run as a progressive in the most gerrymandered district in Virginia, I eventually settled on a strategy of going directly for the jugular on a number of hot button issues- guns, abortion, you name it- in order to make my Republican opponent be on the defensive from the get-go. I would give credence to how many people in my district fell on the political spectrum, not belittle their notional conservative views, but use the Republican rhetorical and cultural war BS right back against the GOP to pull these voters towards progressives. And if I kept them off balance with these punches, I figured there was less of a chance they’d be able to pay attention to my history of aggressively online progressivism.
I also wanted to rhetorically poke my opponent directly in the eye. For instance, he’d recently made some eye-rolling, predictable statements on voter ID. Unfortunately, voter ID was something that polling we had of our district said was favored by most voters- so I wrote up a platform plank that literally said:
“Voter ID? I have no problem with that- as long as you’re going to have the state pay for it. States like Texas and Wisconsin have used ‘voter ID’ initiatives as a backdoor way to disenfranchise voters, and voting is the cornerstone right of our Republic; we need to make sure as many people can vote as possible!”
Of course, Republicans don’t really care about voter ID. It was one of the dog whistles they used to engage both their base and moderate voters. “What’s wrong with voter ID?” a moderate voter might ask, completely unaware of the way Republicans crafted voter ID laws specifically in order to disenfranchise Democratic voters. Instead of a long explanation about how Wisconsin and Texas had just been sued and had their voter ID laws struck down in Federal court because of how they disenfranchised voters (the reason I specifically mentioned those states), I wanted to shift the argument to “Sure, as long as the state and taxpayers pick up the cost; even if the state has to pay to drive an ID to each and everyone’s house, so working class folks have a chance to get it. That’s reasonable, don’t you think?”
Because the true Republican response- we just don’t want people to vote- isn’t something they could say aloud. Well, I should say, it’s not something they could say aloud then, because subsequently, they’ve gone so far as to attempt to stage an insurrection to prove how they actually feel. So getting them to openly argue only some people should be allowed to vote was as close as I figured I could come.
With guns, I took much the same tack. I was a gun owner, and one that could probably outshoot the majority of the Republican legislators in Virginia- and, yet, I had no problems enacting common sense gun safety legislation. This was a dichotomy I knew that would hit hard; a Republican not holding their own against a Democrat on guns was a fate worse than death. One of the best moments of my 2017 campaign was at a debate in Fluvanna county, when my opponent admitted he had no idea what a “bump stock” was, and I got to “mansplain” it to him.
We did a social media hit where I talked about how there was no reason responsible gun owners couldn’t support gun control legislation, while I loaded and fired my bolt-action Mosin Nagant rifle. This got us a lot of attention, including from the Minority Leader of the House of Delegates, who was so tickled he clapped his hands and grinned at how “emasculated” that framing would make the Republicans seem. “Perfect!” he announced at a fundraiser we held in fall 2017.
And, last but certainly not least, abortion.
I wrote an argument for my policy page that if you truly didn’t like abortion, if you wanted to get rid of abortion, you would go out of your way not to make it illegal. I had statistics collated and ready to go for the inevitable pushback from Republicans from states like Colorado, that expanded access to healthcare for women- birth control, maternal care, checkups, etc- and saw their abortion rates plummet. I knew that Republican women favored abortion access privately by large margins... for themselves and their daughters. The abortions they were against were theoretical ones, from scenarios that mostly didn’t exist- the ones created out of whole cloth by Republican strategists to keep their base riled up.
“If you want to get rid of abortion,” I said, aiming at these women in particular, then you couldn’t make it illegal. It was an explicit attempt to use my position as someone who actually provided abortion care to insinuate that is exactly what my opponent wanted to take away from them. That the “wink, nudge” from Republican politicians that Republican women would continue to have access to abortion care was a complete farce; if given the chance, those Republicans would immediately go after their ability, their daughter’s ability, to access abortion.
Basically, I wanted to take the alt-right’s playbook, and use it right back against them, with the obvious caveat that the concerns I was bringing up were grounded in reality, whereas the alt-right's were created from whole cloth.
My thought on this- particularly when it came to abortion- was that when, inevitably, my Republican opponent tried to point out that I actually provided abortion care, I could launch into a “there’s nothing pro-life about the Republicans!” argument and humiliate him and/or anyone else who was going after me- and prove that the Republicans wanted to take away access to even the emergent abortions we did in the ER.
That was what I figured the biggest problem I’d have would be. I knew the rhetoric I chose to use was bombastic, but I figured I had things going for me that would let me get away with it. The biggest of which being that progressives were big on nuance. They’d understand that clearly, as an ER Nurse, I provided emergent abortion care- who wouldn’t know that?!- and that I was running in a district where Democrats simply couldn’t win.
Did I want to win? Absolutely. And I was going to put in the work to try and make that happen. But I’d been in politics more than long enough to understand my actual chances of winning in a district where Hillary Clinton barely broke 10% in one of the four counties that comprised it. I was running to be a resource sink, pure and simple. To give folks a Democrat to actually vote for for the first time in a decade. If I ran with the kind of language I quoted above from my past, then my candidacy would truly be pointless; the Virginia GOP wouldn’t take me seriously, and my opponent would continue sending checks to battleground districts. Obviously, everyone would get the wink/nudge.
To be sure, I’d been warned about the tack I’d chosen. The local party chairs at the time, activists and volunteers we were working with, and a half a dozen people who are now local politicians and elected officials, told me they understood what I was driving at, but warned me it’d be likely to backfire. I assured them that nobody would care about a redneck ER Nurse from Barboursville, Virginia, and moreover that folks on our side would clearly be in on the joke.
To say they were openly skeptical is an understatement, but I was convinced I had the right idea. After all, I had to (on my own!) navigate being someone who provided abortion care while running in the most gerrymandered Republican district in Virginia. The unmitigated terror the DPVA folks had exuded when I brought up the fact I provided abortion care still sat in my head.
Even though I knew some of the things they thought were bullshit, I figured there was a real reason they were terrified. After all, just a few months prior, the local MAGA Congressional candidate had his supporters picket the Democratic field office toting loaded AR-15s. And with Trump having just been elected, his supporters felt emboldened to do whatever they wanted.
But more than anything else, the reason I forged ahead on that was because I wanted to make the Republicans pay. I’d seen the damage their rhetoric caused. It had infected family members, who had become radicalized by Fox News. I’d already seen patients die or be maimed by it, including in regards to abortion. I had watched with blind rage as people bragged about voting for Donald Trump because he was “clearly the pro-life candidate!” I wanted to take their weaponized buzz words and use them straight back against them, to give them a taste of their own medicine.
Be that as it may, the most poignant warning I got when I was formulating these plans was also the one I took the least seriously at the time. My mentor, the person who’d last run for this seat before me, told me point blank: “I understand what you’re doing. (The local political folks) understand what you’re doing. But if you’re ever in a primary, anyone who runs against you isn’t going to care what your intentions were. They’re only going to care about using your words to take you down.”
This I almost laughed openly at. Our area had been gerrymandered into oblivion with the willing help of the Democratic party, sacrificing the voices of local progressives in order to bolster seats in the “urban crescent” of Northern Virginia, Richmond, and the Tidewater. What primary would ever occur here I’d even have an opportunity to participate in? Ridiculous.
But the continuing sway of people telling me that I just might not be as smart or clever as I thought I was continued to pile up. The most devastating feedback I got on this- from someone who is now a much more talented state legislator than I would ever have been- was when they told me that even if I did think I was going to lose, I had a responsibility to not act like a “toddler with a shotgun” in using my rhetoric in such a bombastic way. “I know you don’t think the things you say matter, but they do. They do from anyone who runs for office. And if you actually care, what you say needs to reflect that.”
Everyone once and awhile, someone goes full “Cobra Kai” and sweeps your legs out from under you. It’s humbling and necessary for true growth. And so I was- humbled and embarrassed. Which is why I readily capitulated on this point before I officially launched my campaign and set my website to be viewed by the general public, amending my issues pages to be in line with the advice I’d received. But I’ve always been someone who’d rather admit they made a mistake and be better, than double down and refuse.
Unfortunately, this change didn’t sit well with everyone. Even amongst progressives, change and admitting you were wrong is often seen as a sign of weakness; something to be treated with suspicion. And one of the people I’d reached out to asking for advice- an activist from another state, who was running a candidate assistance organization using his father’s name- was convinced that my asking for his advice, and ultimately amending the issues I’d asked for advice about, was proof positive I was a clearly a Republican “double agent”. They made sure to keep screenshots of the beta, private version of my website, which I’d reached out to them to ask for advice about. When they saw I’d changed it after soliciting feedback from a number of other people, this person, and some of the progressives he worked with, began to attack me publicly.
Now, as far as I can tell, these folks never really explained what my ostensible plan was, or how it squared with my progressive activism and an internet history that dated back to dial-up. To them, the Star Wars fan fiction I wrote in 1999 featuring a romance scene between Jacen Solo and Tenel Ka at the New Jedi Academy Temple on Yavin 4 wasn’t the nausea-inducing, cringeworthy efforts of a teenager. Instead, it was insidious evidence of a long con. The fact I was willing to openly admit I wasn’t as smart as I thought I was about framing progressive issues to a largely conservative audience wasn’t humility; it was guilt.
Honestly, I think that the sight of a politician saying “alright, I screwed up, my bad entirely” was so anathema to some people’s experiences that it made them more skeptical. Any self-respecting politician avoided talking about these hot button topics unless they absolutely had to, in which case they said the bare minimum before fleeing in absolute terror.
But I don’t want to give undue credit here, so let’s be clear: some people just didn’t like me. Which is actually just fine! This is a perfectly cromulent reason to not support someone running for office. But as progressives, we always feel like we need a reason beyond emotion to vote for a candidate. “I don’t like them” is something the Republicans say. They vote on emotion, we’ll sneer, while insisting our votes are based on logic and reason and the candidate’s fifty-page policy paper about taxes on properties in abutment to single-family zoned residential plots.
Thus, it’s a lot easier to work against someone when you create a nefarious reason you oppose them; it avoids the kind of blowback you get for opposing a progressive candidate running against the author of Virginia’s infamous transvaginal ultrasound bill because “we just don’t like him!”
I quickly found out these folks’ concerns were not genuine, but that was something I didn’t know initially. I presumed they had (understandable) actual concerns about where I actually stood on the issues. And trying to dance around the issue while attempting to admit my boisterous progressive past didn’t work for them; it wasn’t seen as trying to avoid giving ammunition to the Virginia GOP, who were paying strict attention to everything going on, but was instead seen as intransigence on my part.
Finally, I made the big decision to go so far as to open up my own self-opposition file to some of them. It was truly a desperation move, because even though I knew it would exonerate me completely, if some of my more pointed history of aggressive progressive activism got out… oof. It would almost certainly destroy all the work we’d been putting in to shape our campaign into one the MAGA folks would take as a serious threat.
This gamble paid off, and every single person- every one!- who cared enough to hear the whole story stood with us. Many had understood what I was going for the whole time, even if they raised an eyebrow at it, and the evidence I provided only cemented that. Sure, I got awful advice from people I figured knew way more than I did- but they never forced me to take that advice. I was the one who made that decision. The open apology and admission I’d made without equivocation or blame shifting earned me a lot of respect.
But to a very vocal minority, this only served to make things worse. The person they thought was a “johnny come lately” writing viral posts in the progressive blogosphere turned out to be a veteran progressive poster who’d been around longer than they had. Rather than admit they’d misjudged, or even to double down and blame me for their actions, vis-a-vis “look what you made me do!”, they decided to go all-in on trying to kneecap my campaign.
Interestingly, this group spent more of their time working against me than the Virginia Republican Party. Candidates across Virginia got unsolicited calls specifically about me, warning them about “who Kellen really is”, but it was morphed into such open hostility that it only served to discredit those efforts. Of course, it wasn’t just me, either; it’s why so many experienced Virginia politicians and activists simply block all incoming California numbers now.
Paradoxically, it was the open animosity of this vocal minority of progressive activists that actually made everything we did in 2017 possible. And when I say “open animosity”, I mean it. After I wrote about the events of the Unite the Right attack in Charlottesville in 2017 and the tragedy that had befallen the victims and our community, one of these activists went so far as to openly lament about me:
“Oh, for fuck’s sake! This is just all too much, I can’t take anymore”.
Not because of what had happened to our community; not because of the deaths, injuries, or trauma sustained that day. No, their biggest heartache about the Unite the Right attack on our community was me, and their concern that they wouldn’t be able to attack me any longer.
Of course, memories in politics are notoriously short, so that didn’t actually stop them from continuing to attack me; some went so far as to try and work on behalf of my Republican opponent in 2017 (the author of Virginia’s transvaginal ultrasound bill) to undermine me.
The Virginia GOP was well aware of all of this and watched everything that transpired with open delight. They read the comments in our forums, the same as we do theirs. I know for a fact they did everything they could to help and sow discontent. I’ll expand on this later, but during this time, a MAGA Congressman- apparently bored with being in Congress- seemingly created a few hilariously bad sockpuppet accounts on Facebook, Twitter, and other places, and trolled me via the anonymous account the local Indivisible folks and I had identified.
(Pro-tip, readers: if you’re going to make sockpuppet accounts, you cannot forget to logout of your fake account and into a real one, and absolutely don’t do it from a US House of Representatives IP address. That’s what VPNs are for!)
I couldn’t really be mad at the Republicans for doing this, since I’d been doing it to them for years. Hell, even the Virginia Republican Majority Leader got in on it, taunting me openly and personally on Twitter for it. But for a group of fellow progressives to openly join their efforts… oof.
There was a reason that, during the entire time I did behind the scenes work, I never did this to fellow Democrats or progressives. Sure, I got involved in many a primary, but my red-line was always staying positive. I once “fired” a candidate after their husband openly insulted one of the other candidates in their race, and threatened to call them out openly if there wasn’t an immediate apology. I didn’t make any friends with the candidate doing that, but I never regretted it.
Because candidates are human beings; they are sacrificing time with their families, they are working hundreds of unpaid hours, they are subjects of attack themselves from Republicans with absolutely no morals or values beyond power for power’s sake. It’s a lot to go through. Why would you make an ideological ally, especially with the current stakes- our entire democracy on the line- go through that again?
Unfortunately, this group of progressives was more in tune with the MAGA folks thought process, rather than those sorts of concerns. And since evidence of who I actually was- which I found out later they knew was genuine even before I’d shared it with them- didn’t change their minds, I would have to resign myself to working upstream against both the MAGA folks and a group of progressives who decided fighting me was more important than helping Virginia Democrats take back the House of Delegates.
I knew I had two choices. I could throw my hands up and give up- or I could keep fighting.
I chose the latter.
We’d hypothesized from the very beginning that our best bet was if we stayed under the radar until the early fall, and then make the Republicans panic as the election neared. We knew we could never outraise our opponent; we couldn’t fight him toe-to-toe. We had to be different; we had to outwork him. We had to be nimble. And we had to toy with them until it was too late for their massive war chest to be used in earnest.
And this is exactly, precisely, what happened. To this day, I’m amazed it worked as well as it did. Writing off my candidacy because of the furor I’d created and the animosity I’d fostered from bad-faith progressives meant my MAGA opponent and the Virginia GOP ignored me, chortling to themselves- all while I worked with the folks at DailyKos and Blue Virginia, with the activists both in our district and across Virginia, to engineer a grassroots funded effort to out-organize anyone who’d ever run in central Virginia before.
The hard work paid off. My opponent barged into our first debate arrogantly, with a ringer for a moderator, and still got thoroughly dismantled, so much so he refused to hold more debates. We had volunteers come from all over the Commonwealth to help us knock doors, which sent the local Republicans into a straight-up tizzy. Incredibly, they eventually decided that the entire controversy had been something we’d engineered from the start.
I’d absolutely love to be able to claim that was my idea the whole time, as if the infamous quote from Will Rogers wasn’t just as true today as it was when it was uttered. It was just a lot of luck combined with a lot of hard work from an incredible group of volunteers and staffers.
One of the hardest things I had to do that fall was to tell Hillary Clinton I was honored that she wanted to endorse me- but that my Republican opponent was looking for any excuse he could make to “nationalize” my campaign, to paint me as “just another liberal”- and that it was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done to decline that. Jon Podesta, of all people, thanked me for all my hard work.
And along the way, as I mentioned earlier, I got an endorsement from Planned Parenthood. They grilled me for almost an hour and a half while I sweated, knowing I’d had to open my self-oppo file to and they could’ve read all the way back to the comp.sys.ibm.pc.games.flight-sim fan fiction I wrote about Jane’s F-15 taking place in a world where Barney the purple Dinosaur was secretly a Thanos-like agent of evil attempting to enslave humanity (yes, you did just read all of those words). But I knew the consequences for lying to them or hiding anything would be severe- so I just didn’t. At the end, they pointed out I could have just asked them for advice, but they understood my explanation of “not knowing what I didn’t know”, and my sheepish admission of having thought I was the smartest person in the room. They stood behind us unequivocally.
We lost- but we cost the Republicans a half a million dollars they would have sent to races across Virginia. Former Congressman Tom Perriello called it the “sacrifice fly” of Virginia in 2017. Local activists, voters, and all of our supporters both here in Virginia and across the country made the Virginia GOP pay and helped us deliver for the voters of the Commonwealth of Virginia. Medicaid Expansion passed by a single vote a few months after the 2017 election, and as an ER nurse, I was privileged enough to be able to see the difference that made firsthand.
Our effort was only a small part of what happened in 2017 here in Virginia, but it took all of us, in every corner of the Commonwealth, and in the progressive blogosphere, to make it happen.
And on a personal note, I’ve always taken to heart how many of the people I worked with went on to bigger and better things. A half a dozen are current elected officials. Others have been field and campaign managers for local, state, and federal campaigns across the country. One came within 500 votes of winning an election against a nationally known politician.
Whatever part I played in the current success of these folks is minor, to be sure, but I’m proud of being even a small part of that story nonetheless.
The irony that none of it would’ve been possible without the sincere and open acrimony we’d received from a handful of fellow progressives has never been lost on me.
I guess every once and awhile, open and unadulterated hate can end up doing a little good.
That was the end of my story of running for office. I knew I would never have the money to be able to donate large sums to candidates, but I could put in the behind-the-scenes legwork that makes every campaign function.
There is an old saying, which I think is particularly pertinent here: if you like sausage or laws, you should never watch how either is made. While my experience with the political system is that it’s less “House of Cards” than an unholy cross between “Benny Hill” and “The Office”, it’s an unseemly and really, truly just… stupid process.
Of the things that will be detailed in this piece, this is the kind of thing that’ll give me the most grief, I guarantee it. More than some of the voice recordings I have, more than some of the evidence of politicians openly and unapologetically lying, it’s going to be what I’m about to write that will cause the most uproar. Because while everyone involved understands these things are true, nobody is supposed to talk about it. I’m absolutely convinced there are elected officials in the Commonwealth who only run for office because the behind-the-scenes drama is more like high school than high school ever was, and if they don’t get that fix, they’ll evaporate into nothingness. Even the stuff I write here only hints at the magnitude of it all.
My rhetorical skills and behind the scenes introspective were in high demand. Solely because of my undeniable talent, right? Heh, I’d love to think so, but it has more to do with the fact that I never charged a single dime for anything I did to help a Democratic candidate, staffer, or activist- and never had a problem with taking zero credit for what I did. I felt like that if I was asked for help, I needed to do it if at all possible.
I ghostwrote pieces for candidates from federal office to school board, and in every corner of the Commonwealth. I recorded dozens of radio and Spotify commercials, in English and in Spanish. I wrote fundraising pieces on left-leaning Democratic blogs, including Blue Virginia and DailyKos, and gave others advice on how to use those sites to engage in grassroots fundraising.
I even ended up working alongside the very progressives who tried to kneecap me in 2017. After the same person who made the “Unite the Right” comments attempted to publicly kneecap any candidate she saw me openly assisting, I sent them this message, which seemed to work. I know for a fact we subsequently worked together to help candidates across Virginia; but they did their thing, and I did mine, and I figured that would be the end of that.
I filled out questionnaires for candidates from unions, pro-choice organizations, and healthcare organizations. I did strategy and messaging work. I conducted opposition research on MAGA folks for progressive candidates. I worked with the DPVA and DNC on COVID messaging during 2020.
This would all occasionally backfire in hilarious and depressing ways. I once got a series of Donald Trump-esque emails from a nationally profiled candidate insulting a piece I wrote that their campaign manager had asked for and enthusiastically approved the draft of. I openly told their manager that I wasn’t pretending to be an impartial journalist, and I would, ahem, “take under advisement” any editorial changes they wanted to make. They understood the wink nudge and gave me their edits, only to find out, post publication, their candidate had been repeatedly emailing me during the middle of a busy ER shift, screaming I’d never work in politics ever again.
Very similarly, after my House of Delegates race this year made the national news, I had to field multiple calls asking if I would please, pretty please, not mention to the press that I had done work for their bosses in doing this or that.
I think we all understand the reality that things “authored” by candidates are frequently not even glanced at by the candidate before being published. Even so, I cannot tell you how surreal it is having a staffer plead with me, panic evident in their voice, not to go public with the fact that their boss- who’d been quoted in the Washington Post- had happily “authored” something I wrote, despite my supposed incompetence.
I was also pretty good at connecting people to other people, and leaking information strategically. When I found out the things I wrote could be a lightning rod, I decided to use it to my advantage. On more than one occasion, I’d write a draft of something- a dissertation, a rant, you name it- and I’d make several versions of it, wherein I would change language that was specifically inserted to be a lightning rod. I’d then send those versions in different directions, and wait to hear what came back around, and from who.
Some folks I was sure would be iron-lipped were the first to blab to everyone they could think of. I got screenshots of a candidate on the I-95 corridor- someone who I had tremendous respect for and liked personally- trashing and mocking me when one of these pieces was forwarded it to them, which was beyond disappointing. Other folks who I was sure would spread things far and wide never uttered a word. But mapping the leak networks and knowing who talked to who was an asset in and of itself. Some of these people, I’m sure, are still chortling to themselves about how naive I was to trust I could share stuff with them privately.
Every year, Virginia Democrats hold a function called the “Blue Commonwealth Gala”. It’s a glitzy affair where you get to see how much you can pay the DPVA to watch politicians gets outrageously drunk and pat themselves on the back for what a good job they did. If you wanted an example of why I was a bad politician, this was it: I absolutely loathed those kinds of settings. Hobnobbing with donors whose monthly income often approached my yearly? Smiling at politicians from urban Virginia who I often knew for a fact had been badmouthing me as a country yokel who could barely count past twenty-one, even with all his clothes off? Oofta.
On the other hand, it gave me perfect cover. Every time I went, I made it a habit to bring a flask of real moonshine (good old fashioned all-organic corn squeezins from Franklin County, Virginia). As I would strike up conversations with people, I would conspiratorially offer them some, with the (very genuine) admonition that they probably wouldn’t be able to handle it.
Hooooo, buddy. The combination of a dumb redneck challenging you, and being able to brag you had real moonshine? I maybe had one or two people refuse in all the years I went there. While it was strong, I have it on good authority none of the shine I ever had access to went over 100 proof- so nothing you couldn’t easily buy from a store in the same strength. The vast majority who tried it walked away preening, and I know for a fact a few bragged about it afterwards, with the notation that “Kellen is walking around drinking moonshine” adding to my bumpkin persona.
But they were mistaken about that: I never had a single sip of the moonshine during the Gala. In fact, I never had ANY alcohol at these events. I was always 100% sober. To run more cover, I utilized a pretty clever trick I’d learned from a Virginia legislator who’d been in politics a lot longer than I had: offer to return someone’s empty beer can to the recycling bin near the start of the Gala, and then walk around all night with the can in hand.
I cannot tell you how huge an asset it is to be the person in command of your faculties when so many others aren’t… especially in a setting like that.
And this doesn’t even tap into the work we did infiltrating MAGA groups in central Virginia and feeding that information out, particularly in 2017 and 2018. I’ve only ever hinted at the work we did to undermine the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017 beforehand, but because we had some of these groups infiltrated, we were able to kill some of their plans. For instance, we leaked screenshots outlining that a “wedding reception” booked at a public venue in a majority African-American part of a neighboring county was intended to be another “Tiki Torch rally”. This enabled us to get their permit canceled- though my stomach turned when I watched this group rage and swear revenge on whomever had snitched them out.
But the vast majority of what I did to help was mundane and normal, and even a lot of fun. A Virginia-based blogger and I helped throw an entire Republican convention; it was fun, but it was also pathetically easy. I wrote a piece lamenting how dangerous it would be for Democrats electorally if a fringe candidate won their nominating convention, which emboldened this candidate so much they bragged about it on a prominent Virginia right-wing talk show the next day. “(Democrats) are terrified of my candidacy!”
I watched as this candidate begin to strut and preen like they were the greatest gift to Virginia politics of all time… and then came in dead last in the first round of voting in their nomination process. I’m told they ran out of their convention in tears- but, more importantly, they didn’t stay to help organize against the candidate who finally won. It wasn’t my intent to wreak quite that much havoc, but it was hilarious to see it happen.
The Republicans certainly knew I was doing some of this. A MAGA candidate who ran for office, lost, and then moved to run in a neighboring district reached out to me to try and convince me the favored candidate in their primary was a “swamp” candidate, an “establishment” candidate, and while we might disagree on politics, surely I wanted to help “shake things up” in Washington? I advised them they could “get seriously ****ed”- those were my actual words, in fact.
I was also one of the only people openly and vociferously defending Governor Northam when he was attacked by President Trump on the completely fake “full term abortion” nonsense. I think there’s been a lot of forgetfulness on this front, because this was immediately followed by the yearbook scandal that almost cost him his job, but Governor Northam was largely left to fend for himself in the wake of describing something I’ve seen personally: the absolute tragedy that occurs with non-viable birth defects, and what families have to go through in the toughest times you can ask any parents to endure. I was disgusted, but not surprised, to see Democrats across the Commonwealth flee and shrink from the onslaught he faced, but I absolutely refused to back down.
I served as a confidential source to both state and national newspapers on country-wide news on more than one occasion. I did both radio and TV commercials for the Democratic party and candidates from the federal to the local level. I even ended up on every single piece of literature Senator Tim Kaine handed out across Virginia in 2018. Sure made a great conversation piece when I was knocking doors for him that year.
And you would not believe how many people, from journalists to activists to elected officials, ask for medical advice. Being your friendly neighborhood ER Nurse means giving advice on anything: hemorrhoids, cardiac surgery, mental health, pediatric emergencies, and that’s not even mentioning COVID. I once had a Delegate describe, in vivid detail, their bowel movement to me. Obviously, being an ER Nurse, none of that bothered me, but it was certainly a surreal kind-of moment when you’re doing behind the scenes triage work for a sick Congressional candidate to get them well enough to stay on the campaign trail.
The only time I broke from doing more than “behind the scenes” work was to undertake a brief run for Lieutenant Governor. The candidate I preferred- a far better choice than I was- indicated to me, at that time, that he wasn’t then interested in running. Rationalizing my area would be gerrymandered for forever in the state Senate and House and seeing that every single candidate lining up to run was from urban Virginia- with not a single candidate from “ROVA”, the Rest of Virginia- I decided to step up. I warned loudly and openly that Virginia was not a blue state, and that if we didn’t take that truism seriously, we’d end up with a Republican win in 2021.
Sigh.
But then real life took over. One of my kids had a mental health crisis. The candidate I actually wanted to run for LG I announced he was going to. The COVID pandemic hit. And I figured my time in Virginia politics had come to an end.
Or maybe not.
In December 2021, an ostensibly non-partisan commission, bolstered by the conservative Virginia Supreme Court, somehow got new maps drawn that- for the first time in a generation or more!- weren’t just blatant attempts to protect incumbent politicians.
I didn’t pay much attention to this at the time. This happened during the very short window between the end of the COVID Delta surge, and the beginning of the Omicron surge. I was too burned out to consider politics. And right in that window, I also experienced perhaps the toughest memories I have of the entire time I spent in the ER during the COVID pandemic.
I think part of the reason I remember that tough COVID case so vividly is how it blended with politics. It happened the same day I had to make do with a very brief post-night shift nap, so I could journey to the office of my state Senator. Redistricting was being discussed at that time, but all of the draft lower legislature maps for the area still had our community ruthlessly gerrymandered; a deep-blue island centered on Charlottesville City, surrounded by now more “purple” (but still unwinnable) districts encompassing the rural communities around the city.
By the same token, this meant any fairly drawn Senate district for our area would be relentlessly blue- and would almost certainly “draw out” the current incumbent, State Senator Creigh Deeds, who lived in rural Bath County near the West Virginia border. I had mused idly about running for that seat but knew a number of other people would be looking at doing so, too. This included my eventual primary opponent, who had recently used her new position at the chair of the county Democrats to say explicitly she was only going to be chair until she figured out what office would come open to run for.
But my first question was: would Senator Deeds move, or retire? I knew two people- my future opponent and another local legislator- had mulled openly about primarying him. But I didn’t feel like I had anything to offer as a legislator that would enable me to justify to a voter why they ought to vote for me instead of him. And when he told me he was going to run again, I told him exactly that- then thanked him sincerely for his time and walked out of his office grinning, with a literal weight off my chest.
The obligation I felt to do something systemic about the patient I’d seen, and all the other ones like him, evaporated. Oh, I knew that things weren’t any better. The pandemic. Climate change. The looming decision from the Supreme Court on Roe versus Wade. I was acutely aware that it would be my colleagues and I in emergency services who would be asked to hold the line for people who had no intention or desire to do anything to brunt the magnitude of what was coming. I saw how decimated we were and knew that we’d do everything we could to hold things together- and when we inevitably failed, that we wouldn’t put that failure on politicians who took us for granted… but on ourselves.
But at least I was released of my sense of duty. I’d done the “run in an impossibly red district” thing once already. I’d done it while ostensible progressives fought to undermine me just because they didn’t like me. Much like I felt on election night in 2016, I was giddy. It was over.
Then the final maps were released… and lo and behold, the new district I’d been drawn into by a mere and literal ninety feet, was not only the same one I worked and lived in, but it was a strenuously blue one. Not even a swing district, or in the top ten most competitive in Virginia. Here was a chance to actually win and be a voice for everything I’d seen the past few years, to warn of what was coming. To swing for the fences on progressive policy. To give our area a voice on par with the folks in Northern Virginia, in Richmond, in Tidewater.
Just when I thought I was out… they pull me back in.
But I knew that would likely involve a primary. As soon as the maps dropped, I knew of a half a dozen other people who were considering running, and I reached out to any of them I thought could do a better job than I could- a candidate of color who is now the Chair of the Albemarle County School Board; my friend who’d run for Board of Supervisors in 2019; and the amazing candidate who’d run for Congress in my district in 2020. When they all declined to run, I filed as soon as I could, and began to put in the hard work of building another grassroots campaign in a state with no campaign finance laws to speak of.
There was really only one other serious candidate who I knew would be running: the person I mentioned earlier, who’d taken a position as the chair of the local county party that January. As I mentioned earlier, her first email from that position said outright that she was becoming the chair in order to look and see what political seats would open up and what she could run for, so her intentions were never in doubt.
I knew her fairly well; I’d voted for her in 2011, during her first run for office, and when I volunteered with the Charlottesville Democrats that year, I’d helped her then, too. She’d put her name on as a co-host for a fundraiser for my House of Delegates campaign in 2017 on The Lawn at the University of Virginia when she decided to run for Charlottesville City Council. She and I had talked about organizing in rural Virginia in 2018, and about going to various local county political meetings together to accomplish that goal.
And she and I stood in a cold parking lot in Louisa, Virginia, in 2019 talking about running in rural Virginia. Among other things, I told her in detail about my 2017 mistakes about framing abortion, and she told me she was moving specifically to run for the State Senate in the 50/50 battleground district we were currently standing in. This she told me with some hesitation, as she knew people had been trying to recruit me to do the same thing.
But I assured her I wasn’t interested and said more power to her if she could move to run, because someone needed to. Four years prior, there had almost been no candidate for that seat, and only a last-minute “Hail Mary” had prevented that. This lack of organization meant that Democrats got blown out in a district we’d previously only lost by 200 votes. We couldn’t afford to repeat that mistake this time.
To that end, I promised I’d spend the rest of the year chipping in where I could to help her campaign. I still have an email from her campaign manager from that year telling me how much her candidate had loved the radio commercials I’d done for them, for instance, and had knocked doors, spoke at events, and written and ghostwritten letters to the editor on her behalf. Hell, I even argued via proxy with the then-Senate Minority Leader at a large Democratic function when he wanted to know why anyone would volunteer for her race, calling it “unwinnable” for “that candidate.”
But understand these are the hollow and polite goings-on that are part-in-parcel of the political process. The fundraiser that was “co-hosted” in 2017, I knew very well at the time, was simply a way to get her name out there- the email I got apologizing for a totally unexpected inability to actually show up for it wasn’t surprising in the least. When she avoided mentioning abortion in her campaign platform in 2019 at all, I doubt that was from any advice I’d given her; she had national pro-choice organizations that I’m sure told her the same thing.
The polite message from her 2019 campaign manager was merely a nicety, the kind of thing your “assistant” sends on your behalf when you have no clue (or even care) about what’s been done for you. Heck, in 2022, she even went so far as to call me a “hero” for my time in the ER during COVID, though it’s quite clear she never actually believed any such thing. Very few people actually care about the hard work put in on their behalf, particularly in those kinds of races. They just expect it’s owed to them.
But that was fine with me. I never did things to help other candidates for the “attaboys”; I did them because I wanted to be a sincere help anywhere I could. Case in point: a candidate I helped recruit and bundle a five-digit total donation for in 2019 was one of the most outspoken opponents of me this past cycle, going so far as to patrol Charlottesville’s downtown mall in May 2022 telling people in the crowd how horrible I was.
I won’t lie: knowing the effort I’d put in for them meant absolutely nothing to them sucked. But in 2019, I was in it to help the best candidate available that year for a critical seat… and so I did. That she turned out to be wholly unworthy of that help after the fact is disappointing, but, alas. I similarly helped my newfound opponent unapologetically during her past runs, and voted for her, because it was the right thing to do at the time.
I sat down with my campaign team early on and made it clear that we were going to run a clean, honest, and positive campaign- but that I also wasn’t stupid, and that if we were going to have a primary, it was only fair to utilize my behind-the-scenes skills to their fullest extent. I was excited to finally engage in the sort-of tete-e-tete I’d been forged in, with rhetorical dancing and constant vigilance to keep your plans secret, your opponent off-balance, and to win an election as the biggest underdog in the Commonwealth.
I told them I’d told our opponent in 2019 that her strategic purchase of a new house to run for State Senate was something I’d applauded openly, so it’d be pretty hypocritical and unethical for me to hit her for it now. Similarly with the fact she’d done everything she could to avoid the word “abortion” in 2019, even though the Democratic Senator who’d previously represented that same district lost by only 200 votes in a Republican wave year (one reason that President Obama decided to eschew endorsing her race in 2019). But it was a strategic decision, and I wasn’t going to hit her for it.
We noticed that she’d been trading houses back and forth as her address on campaign finance paperwork as late as the end of 2022- a house which wasn’t in our district- but I told our team that none of our voters would actually care about that. In 2017, after she lost her race for city council, she posted a long missive on Facebook which seemed to decry how it had been the Charlottesville Democrats and the August 12th “Unite the Right” attack that had put her in last place; it was certainly nothing she did. Again, I pointed out none of our voters would actually care about that.
We were the underdog. Any “whining” we did would only cement that, but not in a good way. If you’re winning, you don’t whine and you don’t complain. You just do the work. And that’s where I came down with my team on the kind of race we’d run.
And when I say underdog, I mean it. Our race had the biggest disparity in household net worth of any race in the entire Commonwealth. We won’t know for sure until financial records are released this coming year, but our estimation based on publicly available information was that my opponent’s net worth was potentially over an order of magnitude more than mine. She’d almost donated what we bought our entire house for to her last political campaign. Once, when she wanted to practice a political speech, she rented out the entire space the speech was going to take place at for two entire days beforehand. And she’d been running for office for almost fifteen years at this point. Thus, I figured things couldn’t get too stupid… right?
But things took a stupid turn from the very beginning. In fact, “stupid” is probably the predominant adjective to describe our entire race. Every time I hear people accuse any political party of semi-competent scheming, I can’t help but guffaw loudly. As I said earlier, it’s never, ever, ever “House of Cards”. No, it’s just “Benny Hill” music 24/7.
I’d love to say it was all the behind-the-scenes tradecraft experience I had that enabled us to keep tabs on what my opponent was doing, but the hard truth is that their campaign leaked information, and had information leaked about them, like a sieve. It wasn’t quite at Trumpian levels of porousness, but… man. I assume, since their general demeanor was one of that they were the only ones who “deserved” that seat and that clearly everyone else agreed, that there was no need to take any precautions. Thus, the concept of “operational security” just never occurred to them.
We knew what neighborhoods they were knocking doors in, and when, very early on. I still wonder if they ever noticed our canvassers, as early as February, were in the same neighborhoods as theirs on the same day and wondered if that was just a big coincidence.
She’d call someone- including elected officials- and as soon as she hung up the phone, I’d get a call or text in return: “You’ll never guess who just called me.” I got the feeling very early on she just assumed everyone was a confidant for her, and obviously on her side, as the thought anyone would let me know about it seemed to be something she considered simply preposterous.
And it wasn’t just them. Their mail firm bragged to multiple people about the campaign mail buy my opponent had opted for- how many pieces, what kinds they were, when they were going out- which the leaks from her own campaign confirmed. We knew when their first negative piece of mail was going to hit so accurately, we were able to specifically time a positive piece of ours to hit the very same day, in order to contrast each of us.
But we also used active campaign tradecraft, too. We sent multiple trackers to my opponent’s launch event, making sure to chat her up surreptitiously and take a video of her speech. While refusing to name me directly at her launch shindig, she instead implied that a Bernie Sanders type of candidate couldn’t win our district- which was eye-rolling. I didn’t have any problem with being compared to Senator Sanders (far from it!), but we were running in a D+20 district that the third most senior Republican in Virginia- a guy with an unlimited campaign war chest- thought he couldn’t win. But if she wanted to position herself as the more conservative candidate, I was content to let her do so.
Of course, we weren’t going to let her go without her being asked directly about me. And when she was asked directly in the milieu following her launch speech, she told multiple people she was actually the only person running. Not the only “serious candidate” or some other mealy-mouthed thing, but the only one.
One stupid turn begets another. Though she ostensibly stepped down as the chair of the local Democratic party, my opponent openly admitted that she kept access to all of the information the local party had accumulated over the years in voter outreach and engagement. This was to be expected and was a pretty common move in establishment circles- it was likely a big reason why she’d become chair of the party in the first place (other than to eventually put that factoid on a political mailer), and I knew there was no point in “working the refs” on it, because whatever refs might exist would certainly not care she’d done that.
Amazingly, that’s not the stupidest part. The stupidest part was that she “accidentally” left the phone number on the county party website as her own, so anyone calling to “get engaged with local Democrats” was forwarded directly to her. This is how we discovered if someone called to “get involved with local Democrats”, they were instead told about her campaign… and wouldn’t you know it? Once again, she was the only one running for our district! This was even more interesting because technically, at that time, there were three of us running.
I initially thought the person who we’d had make that call was joking or exaggerating at first; why lie about something so hilariously easy to double check? And then I heard it with my own ears. Alas.
In fact, this happened more than once- we kept tabs on the phone number, but otherwise said nothing until after it was changed some weeks later. I’ve got zero idea if they finally caught on or not as to the sudden increase of call volume with these kinds of inquiries. No offense, but I can’t imagine that many people call the Albemarle County Democrats on the phone with a burning interest on how they can get involved in local politics. I know that having a bunch of Gen Zers suddenly call and ask about that would make me wonder. It was a reaffirmation to me of that old ditty: “Never say anything you don’t want to show up on the front page of the Washington Post.”
There’s a lot more here, but if I listed everything that happened in this vein, we’d be here for hours. Suffice it to say that in the initial part of our campaign in 2022, I continued to be rarely referred to, and certainly wasn’t taken seriously. When I was mentioned, I’m told it was apparently not politely, as the title of this piece might indicate. But I was quite content with not being paid attention to.
She would also occasionally tell people during this time that I was actually a secret Republican that wanted to make abortion illegal, but mostly she ignored me, acting as if I wasn’t even running. Instead, it was “Bernie Sanders types” and that she alone had the fundraising ability to beat the incumbent Republican. None of this surprised me in the slightest. We tried to goad her into saying some of the more incendiary things she’d been saying privately aloud where we could record it, sadly to no avail- so give her credit for that, at least.
But this was a miniscule part of our effort in 2022, because 2022 was a busy time. I wrote a viral story about a now-US Senator and got a thank you directly from their spouse for speaking out on their behalf. We effectively stopped campaigning for ourselves and went full bore into campaigning for Josh Throneburg for Congress, who was running against Representative Bob Good.
Bob Good is legitimately one of the worst folks in Congress- and knowing the kind of people we currently have in Washington, that’s saying something. It’s why we knocked hundreds of doors, we wrote postcards, we organized fundraisers that totaled almost ten thousand dollars in aggregate contributions to his campaign- we knew the odds were against him, but we weren’t willing to give up on Josh.
It was a sincere point of pride for me, as it contrasted with folks who said it was pointless to support Josh Throneburg. Knowing a working class “****ing redneck” had contributed twenty times as much to his campaign as someone who could’ve paid off my mortgage without even breaking a sweat was something I was proud of.
To be fair, I was the only one who actually saw a value in trying to help him win. It wasn’t about me, after all, it was about the people of VA-05. Had that calculus changed, then I might’ve gotten beat in the amount of support provided. Actions speak louder than anything, I suppose.
Then the calendar turned to 2023… and things changed significantly.
After six months of being a nobody that had already lost, the news broke that we’d outraised our opponent in the last half of 2022- and on an enormous amount more individual donations. It wasn’t even close.
This seems to have embarrassed her. Understandably so; I know that if I’d told everyone my value as a candidate was being able to raise more money than anyone else, I would’ve been embarrassed, too. I got a chuckle as journalist after journalist told me about the repeated messages they’d gotten trying to shape the coverage on this back in her direction- did you know, for instance, that my campaign manager’s time and expertise wasn’t worth that much!? And that she had more cash on hand?! Apparently, true fundraising benchmarks should account for how little you respect the other candidates’ staff.
For better or worse, though, we were being noticed now. Nothing to be done for it but wait.
Boy! We didn’t have to wait long.
We quickly became aware my opponent had begun calling all of my donors and supporters. Literally, it seemed as if she was going straight down a phone list of my donors in order and, as she saw fitting, badgered them, cajoled them, threatened them, told them they were supporting a Republican, told them I wanted to make abortion illegal, told them there would be unspecified consequences if they supported me.
The reason I know what she said to these folks was because she called my donors and supporters so proliferatively that we were able to get the word out to them very early on… and one managed to get a full recording of the conversation that transpired, as when her number showed up on their phone, they knew exactly why she was calling.
Now, this sort-of calling is a tacky thing to do in any circumstance, but if you’re going to do it in a one-party consent state, you have to think there might be consequences.
We got readouts from multiple other calls too. A legislator gunning for leadership supposedly said I was the “most dangerous candidate” running in Virginia, if my opponent was to be believed. The leader of a national pro-choice organization let us know similar things were going on.
I chuckled ruefully at it all and rolled my eyes at some of the proclamations. But my humorous mood evaporated after we heard from a teenage intern who was shaken because an interview with my opponent’s campaign had quickly turned into an extended session on how I was so evil, this intern would be a veritable hero for helping to take me down.
At almost the exact same time, I got a message from a completely unexpected source: someone who worked at Emily’s List, the large national PAC dedicated to helping female candidates win elections.
Now, that Emily’s List would weigh in for my opponent was exactly zero surprise to me- although, funny enough, I’d actually been vetted by Emily’s List for support in 2017. As the first cohort running in the wake of the Trump presidency, I thought maybe they were expanding their horizons, as they commended me for how I’d messaged around hot button topics in such a red district. I got through three or four rounds of emails with them when a lightbulb suddenly went off.
“I appreciate your consideration sincerely,” I wrote to them, “but I just want to make it clear that, yes, I am a nurse, but I am also a male candidate.”
I never heard back.
Imagine how taken aback I was when someone from Emily’s List reached out to us proactively with a warning of what was going on. I am going to be circumspect here on exactly what was shared with us- I don’t want this person to lose their job on my account, particularly now. But this person was so disgusted they reached out to us surreptitiously to give us a heads up on what was going on.
What was shared with us, the internal deliberations and communications we’d been made aware of, was so alarming that I approved a big risk in potentially burning this source: I had my campaign manager reach out to Emily’s List directly. We decided to avoid mentioning that we knew what they were doing behind the scenes, but we hinted at exactly what we’d been told in what we offered to discuss with them.
Their response was short and to the point: a single sentence, saying they had no desire to talk to us.
Now, this pretty much assured me that the information we’d gotten was correct, because I knew why they didn’t want that information. Because if you don’t know for a fact that something is a lie, you can technically say you aren’t lying. If they heard me out, then they’d lose the moral fig leaf they wanted to use to assuage their consciences. I can’t even count how many times I’ve used that particular strategy on Republicans in the past, and the irony certainly wasn’t lost on me.
I considered strongly throwing the gauntlet down at that point but was repeatedly and strongly advised not to. “You cannot get into a war with Emily’s List,” I was told. This, of course, was excellent advice- advice I can’t fault even now, as hard as that is to admit. They had the resources to crush me dozens of times over, and clearly weren’t going to avoid weighing in hard for a female candidate with a robust net worth. That’s not even counting the potential optics of a white redneck dude leveling what would have, at that time, been a preposterous accusation. “Emily’s List is planning to do what!? Pfft. Get real.”
More happened in this vein; again, it would be hard to recount it all here. Eventually, it led me to send out this email to a couple of party folks, ensuring it would get leaked in the direction I wanted it to. Moreover, I explicitly called the caucus election liaison at the DPVA and the local county party chair (the one handpicked to replace my opponent) and gave them both a readout on the call that had been recorded. I told them I understood there were no referees in this match, but I wanted to give them advance notice in case I needed to go public with any of that information.
Their response was pretty much what I expected: complete unsurprise. In fact, nobody I ever spoke to- not even once- suggested I might be mistaken, or protested my opponent would surely never do such a thing!
Of course, this made me intrigued to see what would happen when we started to get asked about each other on the record. We were both Democrats running in a primary that would decide the winner of the general election. We were absolutely going to get asked about our differences. What would she say when asked that question directly?
To this end, I baited her repeatedly, to get her to equivocate on this; to give an inkling that she thought I was anything less than assiduously pro-choice. I even wrote an article on DailyKos on February 20th of this year about something we’d been explicitly leaked that she had said. In the article, I didn’t mention who the source was- the commentariat, of course, assumed it was a Republican. To be fair, we had gotten pushback from the MAGA folks, who had tried to get me fired for publishing articles on DailyKos; that’s just not what that was referring to.
I suppose I can admit I was moderately surprised she repeatedly said, on the record, in forums and news interviews, that we were the exact same politically when it came to abortion and choice. Though we didn’t know it at the time, she even said this after filming a negative commercial where she attacked me for my supposed inability to be trusted on the subject of choice. Over and over again, the difference between us was merely “experience”, and nothing more. I kept waiting for her to start caging, or being equivocal, in order to build the space necessary to have a sudden “epiphany” on the differences between us on abortion.
Why would she openly say, without even a hint of caginess or political mealymouthed-speak, that we were the same on abortion when she was spending most of her time behind the scenes saying the exact opposite?
There was a pretty simple answer to that question: she figured if she waited until it was too late, she could lie openly without any consequence.
And, as it turns out? She was right.
May 2023 was one of the most… interesting months of my life.
Early in the year, we found out my mother had incurable leukemia. Increasing fatigue, a wound that took forever to heal, and failing the pre-screening for a blood donation in the months beforehand suddenly made horrifying sense. I found out by getting a phone call from my mom after what I’d been told was a standard doctor’s appointment, where she broke the news by opening the call with “Now I don’t want you to worry, but they won’t let me leave until I get chemotherapy.”
This, as you can probably imagine, shook me pretty hard. My mom had never been truly sick in her life; she was the first child in her family born in the United States, with a lineage consisting of Ukrainian/Belorussian women who all lived to see the century mark. Watching her get worse and worse after having been in the ER as long as I had taken a toll on me. I’d seen plenty of people die of her flavor of leukemia and knew (in excruciating detail) what the downward trend for those patients was like. “I just have to live long enough to see you win (your election), that’s the most important thing for me right now,” she told me.
My mom was well meaning, and I love her dearly, but I simply cannot describe here what hearing that did- because she was utterly serious. This was about the same time as the stupid things described previously kicked off. I avoided mentioning any of that to my mom; she had previously said of my opponent, “Well, I’m glad you have a great candidate to run against!”, and I didn’t want to increase her stress level by letting her know what had been going on.
Unfortunately, I didn’t have to let her know, since she found out on her own a short while later. Unbeknownst to my opponent, one of the people my she called to badmouth me and insist I was a “secret Republican” to was one of my mom’s best friends.
That tearful call was a fun one to take.
Then in April, I had a yearly checkup with my dermatologist. As a white guy with Slavic genetics and a ton of freckles, I’d been keeping yearly checkups with my dermatologist since I turned 30. To date, they’d all been routine; I had a couple of moles sent off, but they’d always returned from pathology as benign. The day of my appointment was the day that fundraising numbers were reported publicly, and we’d had a record number of individual donations. I expected we’d be outraised in raw cash numbers, as our win in the fundraising battle the last quarter had deeply embarrassed my opponent. I knew she wouldn’t let that happen again.
Anticipating needing to navigate comms that day, I almost canceled my checkup, rescheduling it at some indeterminate time in the future. Just how close I came to doing just that is something I’m uncomfortable remembering.
As he finished checking me over, the dermatologist said, “You’ve got a mole on your back. I think it’s probably fine, but are you okay if we send it off? I think it should live in a jar.” I nodded, and sixty seconds later said mole was in a jar, headed to pathology. I didn’t give it a second thought until a few days later. In a fugue after a long day of campaign work, I sat on my couch browsing emails and looking over paperwork.
And then, my phone rang. Glancing at the caller ID, I saw it was my dermatologist.
I don’t know if you’ve ever experienced the phenomenon of “time slowing down”. During high stress or adrenaline inducing events, time seems to literally almost crawl to a stop. It’s often something you seem dramatized on TV or in movies and seems completely exaggerated until you experience it yourself. I let the phone ring once more before I answered it, but in that space of time, my internal monologue had time to go, “Huh, the dermatologist is calling me at 8pm. The only reason a dermatologist would call me personally well after business hours is… oh.
“Oh, no.”
The whole conversation happened in a haze. The words “malignant melanoma” featured prominently. Something about needing surgical removal of a good chunk of my back. Something about pathology, about lymph nodes. Congratulations for being so lucky as to have caught this now. While this happened, all of the patients I’ve ever seen in the ER with melanoma flashed through my head. One of the worst five-year survival rates, I seemed to recall.
“Do you have any questions?” he asked me, finally.
“No,” I said, lying. Or, I suppose more accurately, I didn’t have any questions he could answer.
At the same time, we had a final chat with my mom’s oncologist about her options for her leukemia. The chemotherapy she was getting was working, but it would eventually and inevitably fail. When was anyone’s guess; it was just as likely to be in five weeks as five years. It would keep her healthy and at her pre-cancer baseline until then, after which things would go downhill, rapidly.
The alternative, and only hope for survival, was for mom to get a stem cell transplant. Had she been only a couple years older, she would have been ineligible for such a procedure because it is such an incredible hell to endure. A month in the hospital, and six months to a year in recovery, where her immune system would be so bare that even a common cold might kill her. She would need a full-time caregiver for at least half of that time, and the success rate for patients her age was only 40%. There was a very real possibility that she could survive the stem cell transplant, only to die anyway.
So I made a very hard decision: I was more likely than not going to have to drop out of my primary race. I couldn’t campaign as the “sick candidate”- and besides which, politics didn’t mean enough to me to sacrifice time with my family if the melanoma staging was worse than we had hoped for. I wasn’t in it for ego or because I thought it was something I was owed; my wife and kids meant more than any election ever would.
I called the local party chair and the Democratic House Caucus candidate liaison and told them the news. I had initially demurred at this, because we had affirmative evidence that information was getting back to my opponent. But ultimately, I decided they needed to know, and I’d just have to accept leaks were going to happen. I called both and told them, in no uncertain terms, that even though I knew exactly what my primary opponent was doing- badmouthing and lying about me in private, while lauding and celebrating me in public when we were at joint events- I wasn’t depraved enough to value politics over spending every single moment I could with my family.
I told them when my surgery was scheduled for and let them know recovery would effectively take me off the campaign trail. I said we would have to wait for the results to know for sure, but I wanted to get the ball rolling right now in case things took a turn for the worse. They both told me they understood, apologized for what my opponent was doing and what I was going through. They told me to keep them in the loop, and they’d help me do whatever needed to be done.
It was during all of this that local newspaper called me- and things went completely off the rails.
For some time, we’d been warned by a handful of journalists at different outlets that Emily’s List was trying to shop a “hit piece” on me at my opponent’s request. None had wanted to bite on it; the story fell apart when looked into, and Emily’s List wanted to provide their information strictly off the record, refusing to be publicly associated with it. I’m told this was partially because they’d affirmed I was accurately portraying my experiences in the ER providing abortion care and didn’t want to openly attack a provider in the post-Roe environment. As such, no outlet was willing to run an article being clearly shopped around with an “anonymous” attribution.
On a Monday morning in early May, a few days after I’d made the severity of my cancer diagnosis known to a few select individuals, my phone rang. I was in the middle of a meeting with our staff and advisors on exactly that- what might happen, what we needed to do, etc- when my phone chimed that I’d received an email. I glanced down, to discover a reporter at the local newspaper had emailed me, asking me if I might have any comment on a claim made by Emily’s List that in 2017 that I’d supposedly been “anti-abortion”… preferably before 5pm that day, when an article about it would go to press.
I laughed out loud at the absurdity of it all.
I called the reporter back almost immediately and spent the next two hours on the phone with her going over… well, the majority of everything I’ve written here so far. This is a big no-no in political circles; reporters take a “money quote”, regardless of how long you talk, because they’re on a deadline and have a limited amount of space to write about. The more you talk about, the more they can pick and choose from. But I figured, why not?
The reporter thanked me for being so open and honest. She confirmed to me that Emily’s List, much as the other outlets they’d approached, had desperately tried to remain anonymous and unsourced, and only finally agreed to be listed on the record when the reporter indicated she wouldn’t run an article with anonymous attribution. She and I traded a few emails back and forth, where she shared some of what Emily’s List had said.
Incredibly, the source that Emily’s List had cited for the information being used against me was the very person that, in 2017, had said the worst thing about the Unite the Right attack in Charlottesville was that I couldn’t be attacked any longer, because I’d been treating the victims of it. Given that, it made perfect sense that Emily’s List had been trying to disassociate themselves from being connected to it.
Given that, I told the reporter outright that she was being used to launder attacks that were clearly not in good faith. She seemed to openly recognize that and assured me that it had been clear to her what I was trying to accomplish in 2017, using Republican rhetoric to push directly back against them. When she asked Emily’s List this point blank, she said they’d seemingly hemmed and hawed until eventually replying “Well, people should know he said that in 2017”.
I understood perfectly why Emily’s List was doing that, without needing any insider confirmation on it: they wanted to run cover for my opponent, so she could appear to be above the fray. Since my opponent had run for Charlottesville City Council the year the Unite the Right attack occurred, if she was openly associated with someone whose hatred of me had so divorced them from reality that they “couldn’t handle” I’d been on duty in the ER that day… well. It was a bad look, to say the least.
I also told the reporter that I’d had a conversation about my health status and possibly needing to drop from the race with party folks. Beyond that, I gave her the names and contact information of Democratic party officials from 2017, who’d affirm what I’d said and done and why; a former President of a national pro-choice organization; a local abortion provider; one of the people who’d received a threatening and abusive phone call from my opponent for committing the sin of supporting me; two elected officials who’d worked on my campaign in 2017 before then pursuing elected office; and the candidate who’d run for that district last before I had in 2017.
I also made some inquiries into if my opponent had been asked about all of this, and found out that her campaign had offered an official “no comment”. I told the reporter that if she talked to her editor, and got them to delay publication on the article, the very next day there was an in-person debate, where abortion would certainly come up as a topic and be pitched to both candidates to discuss how we differed on the subject.
The reporter was appropriately and professionally tight lipped, not hinting in the slightest that she’d been given any different answer than “no comment” off the record from my opponent, but I suspected that was probably the case. Given my opponent likely had the expectation the article would hit before our debate, I got the sense the reporter was intrigued to see how things would proceed. We thanked each other and hung up. Not long after, she sent me a message indicating her editor had agreed to delay the article in order to pursue the sources and leads I’d brought up more fully.
The next day, I drove down to the Rockfish Valley Community Center in Nelson County, Virginia, arriving an hour and a half early to the debate. I always tried to show up early to events like that, so I could talk to voters while helping the local Democratic Party folks to help set up the event. But I had a hunch I wanted to play, and I needed to make absolutely sure I was the first person to show up in order for it to pay off.
And it did. The local county Democratic party officials showed up shortly thereafter. I offered to help set out tables and chairs and get things organized for the event, which they happily accepted. As we got out tables and chairs and began to set up microphones, one of the moderators left her copy of the list of questions we were going to be asked unattended. When everyone else was otherwise distracted, I snapped a few pictures of it.
Bingo. Sure enough, the very second question asked both candidates, point blank: “You are both clearly progressive candidates. Where are you different?”
Now, that this question was asked wasn’t surprising. Just a few weeks prior, the Senate race in our area had hosted a similar debate, and they’d asked almost the exact same question to those candidates. I had sent one of our staffers to record the Senate debate for that very reason, the responses to which we’d gone over in our own debate prep. But it was good to see our hunch was confirmed- and even better to see my opponent was going to get an unequivocal, point-blank question.
When my opponent arrived, she and I shared a smile for entirely different reasons. Again, as we later discovered, my opponent had fully committed to the lie that I was somehow anti-choice, having at that point already filmed a horribly negative TV commercial stipulating that in graphic and uncompromising detail. “No comment”, indeed. But as soon as our debate started, and we were both asked that burning question- where are you different from your opponent- she stated unhesitatingly, one last time, that the only difference between the two of us was on experience.
Unfortunately, the only witnesses to that were the good people of Nelson County who’d come to our debate. The only reporter present was one from the Lynchburg newspaper; there was nary a representative from the local newspaper that I’d just spent hours corresponding with the day prior. Not only that, but they never followed up with any of the people I’d given them contact information for.
I had a sinking feeling about whatever article was going to come out. People look to journalists to give them an idea of what to think about an issue, which is why the increasing tendency (particularly during the Trump years) of journalists to equivocate is so dangerous and infuriating. Someone saying the earth is flat, and another person saying the earth is round, gets reported simply as “Candidates have differing opinions on issues!” The truth? Well, that simply isn’t for journalists to determine.
And, of course, there’s the clicks. Susanna Gibson, a fellow nurse who ran for office in Henrico and Goochland this year, had revenge porn illegally leaked publicly during her campaign. After a retinue of other journalists refused to run it, ostensibly by citing that releasing that video would be, you know… illegal revenge porn… the Washington Post seem to have felt that the campaign season wasn’t interesting enough in Virginia for their tastes and ran it unquestioningly. When your editors want there to be news, not much you can do to stop them.
And, it seemed, so it was here. While the reporter I spoke to had been unerringly polite and professional, I got the sense- particularly talking to other journalists who’d once been employed by the same newspaper- that there was some editorial strife taking place between what the journalists they employed wanted to write and report, and what ended up being printed.
When the article eventually came out over the weekend, I wasn’t surprised to see there was no mention of the reporter’s open recognition that I had been trying to use conservative rhetoric to make a progressive argument. No mention that Emily’s List didn’t want to be associated with this information and had ostensibly admitted that they’d known I was now, and had always, been fully pro-choice. No mention that Planned Parenthood had enthusiastically endorsed us in 2017. Obviously, no mention of any of the people who’d graciously offered to be interviewed on my behalf. And a bizarre reference to “Democratic counter-ops”, conflating the explanation of the work I did in 2016 with running for office in 2017.
It was pretty clear the information I’d provided had been mashed together after the fact, hacked and pasted together in the edit, to try and cram everything I’ve written here into a one-page article that would “get clicks” and make a modicum of sense. All the same, it obviously lacked the teeth my opponent had been hoping for.
It was clear she wanted an article headline she could put on a mailer, if nothing else. The article text could describe me saving puppies and orphans and being endorsed by Joe Biden, as long as the headline was something incendiary. Not only that, but the story pretty much went over like a big, wet fart. We had maybe six voters mention the article at any point in the next week, be it on doors, or by contacting us directly.
My opponent was clearly livid, as she began to call legislators in Richmond, trying to use the article to hit me over the head with. I got hit with another round of phone calls and texts- “Guess who just called me”- and we watched as my opponent’s husband hit “like” and “unlike” on the article’s Twitter post over and over again in a desperate attempt to make it “trend”, without being officially associated with their campaign. Imagine the poor social media intern at the newspaper who was mystified at being bombarded with notifications, as we ended up losing count of how many times that Tweet was liked and unliked.
I can’t deny some amusement at the fact someone with a net worth over an order of magnitude more than mine sat and clicked a mouse for an unknown number of hours in order to get a story to trend about me.
While this was all going on, I was still fairly certain I’d have to end my campaign. I put on a brave face about the melanoma diagnosis I’d gotten, in an attempt to not be “the sick candidate”, but the amount they were saying they’d have to excise was significant- about 10% of the surface area of my entire back- and I’d been given a no-holds barred discussion about how aggressive the particular type of cancer I had was. “Six weeks later, and you could have been a dead man,” my dermatologist said. It would be weeks until I would be completely off of restrictions from the surgery, which was a problem, given it was just over a month until the election.
Thankfully, the surgery went well; unbeknownst to me at the time, I would have to return some weeks later to have more of my back excised emergently. But for the moment, I was able to breathe a sigh of relief.
The first day I was allowed back on the campaign trail was a Saturday at the end of May. I decided to go knock doors in rural Louisa County; we had a dozen volunteers knocking in more critical turf. I was supposed to technically refrain from knocking doors just yet, but I made an executive decision that I knew better than the incredibly experienced dermatologist who had saved my life. Or, more honestly, I had so many people standing behind me that I felt like I had an obligation to get my butt up and get back out there.
And it’s just as well I did. It wasn’t long into the morning, just a few houses in, as I met a voter who was walking down their driveway toward their mailbox. I knew we’d scheduled an upbeat and positive piece to hit that day, as we’d had a warning that our opponent had scheduled a “contrast piece” for that day.
I hadn’t given it much thought. If anything, I figured it’d be pretty milquetoast. The last we’d heard from our sources at Emily’s List, they had told us EL wasn’t going to step in with mail or attack pieces on their own, and the polling we had access to said we were about twelve points down. There were definitely plenty of undecided voters, but the results from the Senate race on the same ballot explicitly told us that voters were giving a huge premium to female candidates, with the biggest voting bloc shaping up to be women who came to age in the wake of the initial Roe decision- something I’d heard from other candidates was a Commonwealth-wide trend.
The voter and I had a nice chat, but as she went to get her mail, we simultaneously noticed there was a large mailer with my picture on it- photoshopped, Republican style- explicitly calling me dangerous, and a liar. With a large “paid for” disclaimer with my opponent’s campaign on it.
I was open-mouthed with shock. As I apologized to the voter I’d been talking to and tried to stammer my way out of an exit, my phone began going absolutely nuts.
Out of a morning of things blowing up incredibly, the worst call I got, though, was from my wife. She’d been bringing our kids home from baseball that morning, and my oldest son had gotten out of the car to get the mail. We hadn’t gotten any mailers from my opponent prior to that; when we made our mailing list, we’d taken her off our list, too, as well as anyone we knew was associated with or supporting her. Why waste money sending them mail or giving them an easy way to see our messaging? When I hadn’t started getting her mailers either, I figured they’d wisely made the same decision.
But we got this one. And all the ones that followed. Someone made sure of that. She ended up sending out more mailers with my picture on them than I did.
“Mom,” my son asked my wife, “why did (she) make dad look like he’s a bad guy?”
For weeks, we’d asked ourselves openly in campaign meetings, “What will our opponent do if she feels truly desperate? How will we know she is terrified of losing?” We understood, from conversations she’d had with other candidates and politicians, that winning this election was the only thing she cared about- and she was willing to throw whatever money it took to get it done.
This wasn’t unique in any way; that kind of cravenness is pretty common in politics. In fact, here, it was an almost refreshingly naive brand! Since we’d been gerrymandered into deep-red oblivion for so long, comparing the political machinations of our newly blue community to those in Northern Virginia, Richmond, or Tidewater is like comparing a Peewee football squad to an NFL team. At the very least, folks from those areas understand you have to at least try and pretend you’re not that craven. But after Emily’s List had balked at going as hard as she wanted to openly, she apparently decided it had to be her.
While my opponent’s campaign had always been particularly porous, I began to understand how the cavalcade of leaks came every time Donald Trump did something particularly egregious, because they now came hard. The most pertinent were from a group of people involved with filming a negative commercial for my opponent, giving us a rundown on exactly how awful things might get- and an exact timeline for how insidious and planned out that was.
Filmed the same day as the “positive” commercial spot my opponent had been running, with information on thought processes and, most importantly, was prior several more example of when my opponent said publicly, and on the record, that the only difference between she and I was on experience.
We got details of their strategizing around my mother and I having cancer. At some point, I’ll discuss their thought process when they found out my cancer was worse than I thought, and I might have to drop out of the race. But that’s a story for another day.
Everything that happened, though, was at my opponent’s personal behest.
I endured the most vicious attacks of any Democrat in Virginia in the 2023 primary season- but in order to talk about that, I think I should talk about what I didn’t get attacked on: providing abortion care.
You see, my opponent, the organizations that supported her, and all of her allies knew I’d accurately portrayed my work in the ER; what I’ve done and what I’ve seen, and that I was the only person in the entire Commonwealth running who’d actually provided abortion care. If it wasn’t true, that would’ve been a slam dunk attack. I would’ve not only had to drop out of the race entirely, but they would also have rhetorically nuked me into oblivion. To think that she, Emily’s List, and the list of establishment politicians who sided with her didn’t do their due diligence on that would be beyond weaponized incompetence.
After all, we’d gone over that information ourselves for months before even considering releasing it. I knew I performed abortion care, obviously, but never considered I might be the only politician in Virginia with those credentials until I was approached by a journalist at a large regional paper in the wake of the repeal of Roe versus Wade. We then spent the next six months vetting that information extensively. This included an entire safety review of what the implications of releasing that information might mean, conducted with the assistance of a Virginia federal lawmaker and a national reproductive rights organization.
I remember going over some of the particulars of that with my wife, who was completely blown away. “Why would anyone care what you do in the ER,” she asked incredulously after I went over the death threats and police protection Delegate Kathy Tran had to endure just a few years prior. She had been very uncomfortable after our kids had become the subject of a Richmond Times Dispatch article after one of Governor Youngkin’s appointees posted pictures of our family online and encouraged his followers to weigh in on their physical appearance.
We decided to make the information release on that as low-key as possible. I eschewed taking the national newspaper up on doing an article on that, and instead opting to release that information personally. Moreover, I decided to purposefully release it on the day that Donald Trump was hypothesized to be (first) indicted, so as to make sure it got further buried.
That suited me fine. I didn’t do anything different than any ER Nurse might at any ER in the country. Well, what any ER nurse might have done at any ER in the country prior to the Dobbs decision, anyway. I never considered what I did to be special. It was just me doing my job. An illegitimately constituted Supreme Court and a 50-year effort to repeal Roe versus Wade made it a big deal.
And besides just being common sense, I know for a fact that my opponent vetted me on that and stewed on it. I had a call in the spring from an elected official who told me there’d been an effort to actually try and defend incumbent Republican State Senator Sibbohan Dunnavant, an OB-GYN from the Henrico area, against me. “See?!” the argument reportedly went, lauding Senator Dunnavant’s work as being more “real” than mine, “(Kellen) can’t be the only one!”
Of course, we knew this about Senator Dunnavant. Supposedly, Senator Dunnavant has told people that she “doesn’t do” abortions, although I was quite frank with every reporter that asked me about that. I did then, and still do now, have an awfully hard time believing she’d turf all of her rich white lady patients to the ER. Or maybe since one of her nurses would’ve been the one doing the same thing we do in the ER, she was technically correct she didn’t “do abortions”.
I said openly I couldn’t know for sure, but we had obviously planned for if Senator Dunnavant wanted to clarify any of that. If she said she did, in fact, provide abortion care, we would simply pivot our message to saying I was the only Democrat in Virginia who had that experience. So, although I was amused that any Democrat would attempt to go to bat for one of the most at-risk Republicans in Virginia, but would also attempt to maneuver straight into the trap I’d set, we were ready regardless of what happened.
We also discovered that after extensively researching exactly what ER Nurses do in regard to providing abortion care, there was supposedly a half-hearted attempt to pursue a “well, that’s not real abortion care, what happens in ERs doesn’t count!” If so, my assumption is that this strategy was abandoned because, you know, Republicans are also going after exactly that kind of abortion care.
But it’s clear that they were still furious that I was a clinician who provided abortion care, and never wanted to let that go. They knew it was true, and seemed to stew on it every day, up, until the very end of the campaign. On election day, as I did a swing of the district to stand and greet voters at polls, I got a call from a volunteer who’d been accosted by one of my opponent’s family members. This family member had angrily stomped over to my high-school aged volunteer and demanded to know: “Do ER Nurses even actually provide abortion care?!”
“Yes,” my volunteer said, “obviously they do.”
“Well, that’s interesting, because I’ve seen what he’s written on abortion,” they retorted, having clearly never read anything I’ve written on abortion.
My volunteer nodded politely at them and went back to greeting voters. It was just a window into the rage they had of having to run against someone with practical experience and concerns on the consequences the attacks on abortion rights are having.
To make this even more clear, one of my opponents’ prominent public supporters- a lawyer and elected official- quickly and openly announced to all of their followers on Facebook, once things went nuclear, that they needed to make sure they effectively lauded me for all of the emergent abortion care I provided in the ER. I suppose they suddenly felt like they needed to be very careful not to imply I wasn’t providing appropriate care to my patients, as that would potentially jeopardize my career as a nurse. Though I suspect my career or reputation rated about as high on a list of concerns as the truth did; it was probably more the potential legal liability for suggesting such a thing.
So the official line became that although I was an exemplary clinician and provided exceptional emergent abortion care without hesitation to each and every patient who needed it… somehow, I also couldn’t be trusted to protect abortion rights. That any attempt to do so would dramatically increase the rate of emergent abortions (the very thing they were lauding me for taking care of) was simply hand waved away, lest they be seen as suggesting I wanted to create more emergent abortions.
They also purposefully ignored that I’d made it clear repeatedly, since 2017, that I had borne personal witness to the axiom “making abortion illegal only makes safe abortion illegal”. In fact, I’d said from the very beginning that I’d personally seen things that gave me nightmares about that.
But that’s as specific as I could be. I have to be meticulously circumspect about what I share in regard to the things I’ve seen during my career as a healthcare provider. Even though I was careful to stay well within the bounds of HIPAA, I always knew that someone might see or hear a story I tell, and wonder if it was them I was talking about. And people don’t come to the ER to be part of a story, even anonymously.
So, I could only hint at what my experience with this issue has been. The patient who’d barely survived a botched home abortion. The woman who lost her ability to have children because of the misinformation a local crisis pregnancy center was allowed to spew. The TRAP laws that almost killed a minor. All stories I’ve alluded to since 2017 but weren’t able to talk any more about without breaking the law.
And that’s exactly what I got attacked on. What the brunt of a half a million-dollar political campaign, a half a dozen mailers, and a week of a full saturation TV commercial was focused on:
“Nightmares.”
I suppose, since I’m no longer running for public office, I can be a little more open about the story the “nightmares” reference comes from.
It’s a story I told, time and time again, on the campaign trail, in order to illustrate the difference between my opponent and me. That while I believed she and I both would vote the same way to uphold abortion rights in Virginia- but that it wasn’t a hypothetical concern for me, because I’d already borne personal witness to the consequences of someone not being able to access abortion care in a timely manner.
It was early in the afternoon, and I was the triage nurse in our ER. The triage nurse arguably has the most important job in the entire department, as patient flow is largely at their judgment. You have to be able to discern what’s wrong with a patient in a perfunctory assessment that you might have mere minutes to complete, at most. Nurses in our department weren’t even allowed to train to be a triage nurse until they had several years of experience under their belts.
And I can tell you from experience that a lot of that training is intuitive. You see enough patients, and you can discern- sometimes from a single glance- who is about to die, and who can afford to wait a few minutes to see the doctor.
That’s one of the things I remember about this patient. She came through the front doors, sat herself down in a wheelchair… and from a single glance, I knew she was in dire straits. I got her vital signs, and immediately noticed her blood pressure was low, and her heart rate was high; not dangerously so, but enough I would have taken concerned note of it, all other things being equal. What really set me off was the way she was moving and writhing in pain. It was one of those times where the hair on the back of your neck goes up, and you have the intuitive sense that something is very, very wrong.
We were very busy that day; at that very moment, in fact, we didn’t have any open beds. I told the technician working with me in triage to put the biggest IV in the patient they could get (“Gimmie a 16 or 18 if you can, but I’d rather have something fast than nothing”), while I positively jogged back to the charge nurse and interrupted her conversation with one of our EMTs.
“I need a bed now,” I told her. “I have a patient that I think is about to die.”
Those of you who’ve ever worked in emergency services will understand the magnitude those words carry behind them. We don’t make those kinds of proclamations ever, and when we do, it’s as serious as it gets.
To my charge nurse’s eternal credit, she didn’t hesitate even for a moment; something that would have been within her rights to do so. She had a full department of sick patients to manage, and I was demanding we not only yank one of those patients out of their room and deposit them unceremoniously in the hallway, but bypass people who’d been waiting for hours to be brought back from the waiting room.
She quickly designated a room with a patient who could be wheeled into a hallway bed, and while two of our EMTs cleared the room, I rapidly brought the patient back. The physician met us almost immediately at the bedside. This was a young patient; someone who was already a mother. She had abdominal and pelvic pain that was so acute, she could hardly speak, unable to get a full sentence out without crying out in pain.
We quickly surmised, as she began to bleed to death, that she had a burst ectopic pregnancy.
When someone isn’t feeling well, they’ll sometimes be pale. I’m sure you’ve seen it before. “Hey, you look a little white. A little green around the gills. Are you feeling okay?” I bet you can imagine that right now, visualize it in your head.
But let me tell you: when someone is bleeding to death, when you are literally watching their blood pour- not drip, but stream- onto the floor, “pale” simply isn’t a good enough description of the shade their skin takes.
It is an otherworldly color.
We were infusing uncrossmatched blood as fast as we could, blood from a universal donor the blood bank sprinted to us, because we had no time to wait. By the time we would’ve been able to do a normal donor match to whatever blood type the patient had, they would have been long dead. I will never forget the visceral feeling of making a makeshift pressure bag with my hands, squeezing staring at the O NEGATIVE label on the unit of blood to try and distract myself from watching this patient die in front of me.
We managed to stabilize her enough to get her to surgery, but it was close; the OB surgeon was kind enough to come back to the ER later on to give us an update, as we all were shaken to hear their hunch that had the patient come in a mere five minutes later, she would have been dead; her children orphaned.
This was a very difficult story for me to tell. My campaign staff can tell you how many times I had to practice telling it without actively weeping during it. “You can’t cry when you tell this story,” our comms folks told me, “you just can’t. You’ll be the hysterical candidate. You have to be completely stoic.” I never actually did end up learning to keep from being emotional with this story; I just learned to delay the emotions until later.
Part of what I couldn’t tell about that story on the campaign trail is that I am absolutely convinced that this patient visited a crisis pregnancy center before she came to our ER. Comments that the patient made during triage and before she lost consciousness have convinced me that she went somewhere that told her that her symptoms- her symptoms of needing an abortion or else she would die- were “normal”.
The patient couldn’t articulate anything specific about this. In the few seconds I had to consider it during her triage, I just assumed it was a “doc in the box” urgent care clinic. Those of us in emergency services often grumble at our colleagues in urgent care; the standard joke is that they’ll flip a coin, and either prescribe a z-pack or refer their patient to the ER. But as I was playing the scenario over and over in my head, it was that low threshold for referring patients for higher levels of care that made me stop and realize that it was almost impossible she’d been referring to an urgent care center.
If someone stubs their toe a bit too hard, urgent care centers will send them to the ER. That’s admittedly flippant; honestly, even though it annoys us in the ER occasionally, I’d take 100,000 cases of someone being “annoyingly” referred to the ER rather than miss even a single case of someone not being referred if they needed to be. The fact remains that it is insane to think an urgent care would shrug at someone like this patient is completely beyond the pale. They’d have recognized the problem and immediately called 911 to transport the patient to the ER. And it absolutely couldn’t have been Planned Parenthood or any of the women’s clinics in our area the patient was referring to; they, of anyone, damn well knew better.
Again, while I have limited ability to elaborate openly on this, if it was true that’s who the patient saw before she came to us, she wouldn’t have been the first patient I’d seen who’d had their life jeopardized by a crisis pregnancy center, either. That’s what happens when you allow people without any medical training license to give critical medical advice.
I only told the second part of that story in private, because that’s a very fiery accusation to make for someone who is going to be a public servant. I fully admit I have no proof; certainly, none I can share openly. If true, it would take the patient to pursue any course of action on that, and after barely escaping a critical health situation with your life, it’s a burden that’s understandable you might not want to take on.
Besides that, the right-wing noise machine loves finding even the flimsiest (or non-existent) excuse they can find to jump in to attack, obfuscate, and otherwise wreak havoc. They’d already done so to me, both openly and behind the scenes. One of Governor Glenn Youngkin’s appointees founded and posted pictures of my children online, deriding their physical appearance and encouraging others to do the same. I wasn’t keen to give them more desire to do something similar, which, of course, is the point of that sort of stochastic terrorism.
And I had concrete reasons to be worried beyond that. For example, after I wrote an article that got a lot of attention, I had a slew of pretty egregious patient complaints submitted about the care I provide to patients. Unfortunately for the people who submitted those complaints, there are three emergency departments in the metropolitan area I live in, and they managed to choose one I don’t work at to submit complaints to. It was darkly amusing to get a call from that ER’s manager explaining that they couldn’t really start any formal investigation of me, since, you know, I didn’t actually work for them.
Suffice it to say I wasn’t inclined to give the MAGA folks any more of a reason to attack me than necessary.
It was also a hard story to tell because it is truly one of the most defining of my entire nursing career. Everytime I work, I see the room where this incident took place. I think about it, even if only momentarily, at least once a shift. It’s forever the room where I had to watch a patient almost bleed to death, watching the color drain from their face as their blood poured out onto the floor. I’ve seen plenty of tough things over my career, but this is one of the worst.
The only reason I decided to tell that story at all was because it was a perfect illustration of the human cost of the decisions that people in Richmond and Washington make. The rhetoric politicians spew without a moment’s pause or consideration, because they simply don’t care who will suffer because of it. And this happened before Roe versus Wade was repealed, before Virginia became a refuge for patients from out of state. All of this happened when Virginia was supposedly “safe” for these kinds of patients, and I wanted to show people exactly the kind of danger we were all now in because of an illegitimate Supreme Court, radical Republicans, and the people who coddle them.
The first time I hinted at that story on the campaign trail was at an Albemarle County Democratic Party barbeque in the fall of 2022. It got people’s attention. It certainly got my opponent’s attention; while I didn’t see it personally because I was busy speaking on stage, I was told by multiple people she openly stormed off through the crowd and didn’t return until several speakers after I’d finished. I know how she belittled the story to some of the people she talked to on a regular basis. And I know how furious she was; not at how the laws in Virginia worked. Not that my patient, and many others like them, had gone through what they did. Not that it had clearly traumatized me.
But because I had the audacity to have that experience at all.
She channeled her fury in a very Rovian way; give her credit for that. Hit your opponent where you think they’re the strongest, where they have an obvious edge on you. Swiftboating works for a reason, after all. And if you’re willing to do or say whatever it takes to win, and have an unlimited budget to back it up? Well.
Presumably, this is why Emily’s List did everything they could to attempt to not be associated with it, and why they refused to frame what they ended up putting their names behind as an attack based on “Kellen Squire says abortions ‘give him nightmares’”. And of anything else, it’s the ultimate proof all of this was never about any concern over whether I was “actually pro-choice”.
My opponent’s motives were never in serious doubt, which is something absolutely anyone could have discovered that at any point. All they had to do was ask, openly, what “nightmares” my opponent was referring to.
Now. That all being said… c’mon. Let’s be real here. Look at how much I’ve written so far, to give the proper background on this. My opponent bet nobody would be able to look at things this hard at it before the election, before they could wonder why I had an almost clairvoyant prediction on what would happen with abortion rights in our country. And they had unlimited money to push that lie as loudly as they wanted to, knowing I could do absolutely nothing about it.
They knew I wasn’t willing to fight back in the same way. I’d made it clear to my staff and supporters that I wanted to win, but that there were lines I would never cross to do so. For instance, when we were creating mailers, my team came up with a blurb to put on them to the effect that I was the only candidate in the country running who’d ever provided abortion care. This was technically correct- there are a few other elected officials who had similar clinical experience, but thanks to Virginia’s off-year election cycle, none were currently running.
I refused to approve it, though, because while our mail firm vetted it and agreed it was technically correct, that wasn’t good enough for me. So we changed the blurb to “the only one in Virginia” because it was more than just technically correct.
Still, even knowing that, it was clear they were terrified the gamble they’d made on pushing this lie wasn’t going to work. Suddenly, every possible thing, whether moored in reality or not, was thrown at us. Some of this was probably not directly “thrown” by my opponent, but she’d clearly encouraged an environment where even if these things weren’t openly orchestrated by her, they were certainly winked at.
Her campaign staffers relayed some of these things gleefully to their contemporaries on other local campaigns, apparently certain that everyone would automatically take their side and cheer the swings they were taking at our campaign. I lost count of the number of calls and texts I got from other candidates’ staffers, who sat nodding quietly recounting story after story of the outright cackling that was going on. One eventually leaked internal comms from our opponent’s campaign- from the candidate herself- which mirrored that glee.
The work I did in 2016 to undermine Trump and assist the Clinton campaign behind the scenes- like helping get Evan McMullin on the ballot in Virginia- was thrown to reporter after reporter as evidence that I was actually a super secret Republican this whole time! Unfortunately, in doing so, they managed to accidentally also include one of the pieces I wrote openly on why we did that to undermine the Trump vote in Virginia.
That was dumb, but I get their strategy. They knew the truth, but if you were trying to bluff someone and keep them from doing a modicum of research about what I’d done in 2016, those are the kinds of things you’d pitch- though probably without a years-old explanation of why I’d done. Anything to keep up the noise machine until election day. But at least those had some bearing in reality. A lot of what they pitched had none.
For instance, did you know I had an illegitimate child in Alabama? This was clearly news to me, too. I mean, come on- I know I have a southern accent, but they could have said “southwest Virginia” and made that at least plausible. I guess that also wouldn’t have let them as easily imply the supposed mother I abandoned was black, either.
Did you know I kick my dog? Like, literally- kick my dog. I figured that old trope would’ve been ancient enough to be retired, but apparently not.
Did you know my oldest kiddo’s mother had horrendous postpartum depression, which largely left me to be their primary caretaker when they were a baby, all while I was in nursing school? Presumably this one was shopped around because they thought my wife was my daughter’s mother, instead of her stepmother. So that even though the story wouldn’t make me personally look bad, it would ostensibly air “dirty laundry” about our marriage. There was no thought or consequence as to what this might do to my kiddo’s mother, or to my oldest themselves, who had already been the open target of Republican operatives.
They also got ahold of one of the questionnaires we did; while annoying, I’d actually wanted to post all of our questionnaires publicly during the entire campaign- this one in particular, since I was well aware of what my opponent was doing at that time. I was asked not to by a few organizations who wanted to ensure people could respond to them privately, so I didn’t. Alas.
However, this wasn’t all starkly sinister and tragic; it was occasionally also embarrassingly stupid. If you recall earlier, I mentioned the MAGA congressman our district elected in 2016 was apparently so bored with legislating he seems to have taken to making sockpuppet accounts in order to troll and harass local progressives. Now, doxxing conservative sockpuppet accounts isn’t exactly hard; one of the double-edged swords of echo chambers like Fox News is that it makes conservatives truly believe that progressives act like the stereotypes they push on the air every day. For instance, do you know any progressives who say things like “I am a proud member of the Democrat Party”? I mean, that’s how we all talk, right? Not suspicious at all.
So when someone who talked like that began attacking anyone who spoke ill of our MAGA Congressman with no subtlety whatsoever, it didn’t take a genius to put two and two together. “You don’t think we should even give (Congressman) a chance? He’s such a great guy! Etc.” The effort of this “totally independent”, “Democrat party” voter were well known in activist circles in the 5th Congressional District here in Virginia, where the whole thing quickly became a running joke.
And as I began to run for the House of Delegates in 2017, he began to do this to me. I’m sure you’ll be shocked to discover that the pseudonym this person used didn’t show up in any Virginia voter database, PeopleFinder inquiry, or even a simple Google search from the area he ostensibly lived in. The Facebook profile associated with it had almost no friends, and the ones that it did have were friends of the politician, in the same geographical location as he lived in. However, just to be sure, during one of our conversations I sent him a mined link- one that recorded the IP address of anyone who clicked it before routing to the website indicated.
Again, I don’t recommend elected officials make sockpuppet accounts to troll their own constituents- but if you ARE going to do that, at least try not to do it from a US House of Representatives IP address.
I happily began to join in the effort to tool him along, regaling him with tales of how unsure I was of my commitment in being a Democrat, and then sharing screenshots of our conversation with a dozen fellow Indivisible activists from our local Congressional district. I even got to show some screenshots to author Dahlia Lithwick when she came to Charlottesville to do an event at the Northside library. I got him to speak ill of Trump, of the state Republican leadership, and waited patiently for the day we could expose and embarrass him by showing everyone what he was actually doing during his time in Washington.
I’d say that the experience I had doing these kinds of things over the years helped me to string him along without realizing he’d been caught red-handed, but truly, this was pathetically easy. Stephen Colbert says that- to this day!- he still gets conservatives who wink/nudge at him because they know the persona he created as a faux Fox News-style commentator is “actually true”, and he’s only pretending now. And boy, after that, I understood completely.
Eventually, our Congressman ended up resigning his seat in order to go into treatment for his alcoholism. As an ER Nurse, I see patients suffering from alcoholism each and every day, so it was an easy choice to sadly shake my head and put away the pages of messages I’d accumulated. With no point in exposing either him, or the kind of ever-blameable “overzealous staffer” that magically continues to exist in the political sphere, I put those messages away, thinking they’d never see the light of day.
Lo and behold, six years later, this candidate returned to Virginia politics, running for the House of Delegates in a neighboring district. And when my primary made the national news, it sure looks like someone felt it was time for revenge, as they apparently went directly to my opponent and offered up the conversations we’d had- with the naughty, naughty exhortations made against Donald Trump and the state Republican leadership carefully excised. My opponent, of course, immediately sent them far and wide, to politicians and reporters alike.
I was actually kind-of disappointed the reporters who reached out to me didn’t run the news, or the unedited transcripts I offered in return. This Republican candidate ran unopposed in a relentlessly Republican district, so even if he admitted it openly it was him, there’d be no chance that the news he did this will hurt him, or that he apparently happily aided a Democrat in winning their primary election. But it’s quite apparent that, even all these years later, he never caught on that we had his number the entire time. I mean, geez, I only alluded to it publicly about a dozen times. Heck, a simple VPN would’ve made this all but impossible to confirm. But then again, I guess he does belong to the “write down the felonies you’re committing” party.
There was certainly more here, but I think you get the gist. It’s one of the reasons a leading member of the Democratic Party of Virginia was recorded in the Washington Post as saying the primary race I was in was a, quote, “shitshow”.
I was a little disappointed- not surprised, to be sure, but disappointed- to see a total lack of any mention that the reason the race was a “shitshow” was absolutely not my fault in the slightest. Despite knowing everything that I’ve written here, I stayed completely positive and above board during my entire campaign.
The only time that I deviated from that was after hearing in detail, from a source inside my opponent’s campaign, about the negative commercial they’d filmed about me. They’d told me a number of things, but most pertinently, they told me that the Board of Supervisor member representing the precinct of the county I lived in had gleefully agreed to take part in filming it, citing that I had opposed her in her primary in 2019.
This is true; I endorsed and campaigned for the candidate she ran against in the 2019 primary, partially because he was a candidate of color who had been born and raised in the district, with a postgraduate degree in civic planning from the University of Virginia, and extensive history in being involved in local politics. I’d frowned when she decided to run, as she’d just moved from California, having been an elected official in one of the richest cities in the country. Apparently she was “bored” in sleepy rural Virginia, and so felt the need to run for office again to give herself something to do.
But all that aside, I mostly supported her opponent because he was a personal friend of mine. However, when he lost, I put any and all reservations aside and happily campaigned and knocked doors for the winning candidate. I had no personal animosity towards her, even though it seems that wasn’t true in reverse. So when I found out about the commercial, I immediately called and left her a very heated voicemail message.
Fortunately- or unfortunately, depending how you look at it- she was apparently on a month-long vacation in France, and obviously never responded to me. I guess only she knows the truth behind that.
Aside from that, even knowing this had all been premeditated for months; even knowing that my opponent had openly lied about any number of things, but obviously and most pertinently that she had any concerns about where I stood on the subject of choice; even knowing she was gleefully retraumatizing an emergency services provider (as well as retraumatizing by proxy a patient who almost died); and even knowing this all went on while trying to help my mother manage her incurable cancer diagnosis as I wondered if I was a walking dead man from having malignant melanoma… I stayed positive.
I didn’t engage in any of the kind of behavior my opponent did. Did we get “oppo” information on my opponent? Absolutely. But I didn’t disseminate or lower myself to spread any of it, even unofficially. My threat in the email I sent in January to release all this was completely hollow, as I wasn’t willing to risk even the miniscule chance that I’d help the Republicans in any way- or to cause strife amongst the Democratic activists so necessary to any political campaign… outcomes my opponent clearly had no qualms with.
Now, to be totally fair here, even if I had wanted to go as negative as my opponent did, my ability to do so was severely curtailed. She was independently wealthy; her day job was doing whatever she pleased. In contrast, regardless of what happened on election day, I had to immediately return to my job as an ER Nurse. For reasons I won’t elaborate on just yet, I have no doubt that was well recognized as a part of her strategy. Any attempt on my end to try and emulate her own strategy, and I’d run the risk of alienating myself from the very job that put food on the table and kept the lights on.
As a working-class candidate with a public facing job providing care for people in their most dire times of need, I was never going to have the ability to engage in the kind of behavior she chose to engage in. There were always going to be long-lasting consequences for me that were simply non-existent for her.
I’ve always been wryly amused at the picture painted by the folks who insist that, despite all evidence to the contrary, that I had nefarious intentions, or at the very least that they couldn’t know for sure I didn’t! It imagines me as someone so heinously evil that I’d take a job that required me to provide abortion care as a part of it, years- decades!- before they planned on running for office, as I carefully crafted the visage of being a progressive.
Then when Donald Trump came along, rather than using my rhetorical talent to grift the hell out of MAGA folks who were desperate for validation and were paying literal fortunes to get it, I decided to run for office as a Democrat against the most entrenched Republican in Virginia, in a district he literally drew and gerrymandered for himself.
Yep. I did all that, instead of running as a Republican in an open R+30 seat in the next district over, a district with no incumbent, in the county my entire extended family lives in and is from- and when I say “from”, I mean from, as my wife is a direct descendant of the very first Governor of Virginia and several Governors after them. Even more of her ancestors were in the House of Delegates; one got kicked out of the House for refusing to take a salary (but was immediately voted back in by his constituents). There is a family house with her name on it in Yorktown that is a national historical monument. The chief historian of Colonial Williamsburg has documents from our family dating to the 17th century. Hell, my wife even drew the current logo for that county’s high school athletic teams when she attended it. Each and everyone one of those things are the kind of things that Republican voters go nuts about.
But all that wasn’t good enough for me, I guess. Instead, I gave up my admission to the Nurse Practitioner program at JMU in 2017 (after an elected official told me I “wouldn’t look like I was committed to the race” if I stayed in it). I eschewed a near-automatic win to the Virginia House of Delegates as a Republican. I chose working in a COVID ER rather than grifting millions of dollars from gullible MAGAites. I sacrificed time with my family and friends, all to… to… you see, my evil plan was to…
And that’s why anyone who wanted to know the truth about who I am, and what I stand for, did know. The people who didn’t care, who still don’t care, would’ve been the first ones standing behind people like Tricia Cotham- like an independently wealthy former schoolteacher who moved to run for office- and insisted she was the real deal compared to me, right up to the very moment she voted to take away fundamental rights from her own constituents.
I think there’s a good chance you’ll see some of those people equivocate and explain away the lies and misdeeds I’ve cataloged here, because bad behavior is always okay when it’s your person doing it. A couple conversations we had with voters near the end of our campaign probably exemplifies this pretty well.
My mom- bless her heart- went all in to help us out in the final stretch of the race. Referring to her upcoming stem cell transplant (which would render her cancer fatal if it didn’t work), she insisted on helping us call voters, who almost universally greeted her with enthusiasm. In fact, the only negative call she got was from a voter her age, who began arguing with her about the mailer she’d gotten claiming I was anti-choice.
Mom pressed back gently and with obvious ease, which only made this voter more irritated. They went back and forth a few times, until the voter finally snapped at my mom, “Well, how would you know what he’s really like?”
“I’m his mother,” mom replied without hesitation, “who do you think helped show him what his (Republican) dad wouldn’t?”
The voter promptly hung up on her. I had a similar episode myself. I had begun GOTV texting, meaning I personally sent out several thousand texts. I insisted on doing it myself because I knew I didn’t like getting spam texts, so if I was going to text people, I wanted to be personally responsible as the one who’d get any replies.
One voter responded, asking what civic organizations I’d been involved in. I politely replied with a list of them. The voter texted back, asking what kind of volunteering I’d done; I replied in kind. And thus ensued another half-dozen back and forths with this voter, who I quickly surmised was trying to maneuver me into saying something either she couldn’t agree with, or wasn’t up to her standards, whereupon she could then “apologize” for not being able to support me.
I refused to take the bait, and responded honestly and politely, while the voter became more and more terse. Finally- finally!- she mentioned the controversy about me being supposedly anti-choice, but not until asking me probing questions about abortion I’m guessing she thought I would fail. When I passed them with flying colors by responding forthrightly and sending her links to things I’d written on abortion, she lost her temper.
“I don’t believe you,” she wrote angrily, “I think you’re a wolf in sheep’s clothing!”
I’d actually prepared for exactly this kind of response and had gotten permission from a half a dozen of our supporters (including elected officials) to give their contact information to these kinds of voters, so they could respond personally. When I offered to have one of them vouch for me, the voter declined, saying “I don’t believe this group of true believers you have behind you; it’s all very suspicious.”
At this point I decided, what the hell, and told her outright that my opponent had been lying and had been lauding my “heroism” until it wasn’t strategically useful anymore. I than began linking evidence of the same and offering to send her even more if she wanted to examine it.
It seems she finally believed me… but her response to that end is not what I expected. “Trump lies all the time, and gets away with it!” she said, “I’m not going to be angry when he can get away with it!”
I thanked her for her time and ended our conversation. She was a member of the group that the lies perpetuated against me were truly aimed at: older women, who made up the single biggest voting bloc in ours, and any, Democratic primary. The fights of their adolescence and youth, fights they thought had been won long ago, were storming back… and at least some were ready to believe a lie, as long as it let them feel like they were taking a stand against those fights.
Unintentionally harrowing on her part, as well, she laid out the exact same script you’d see from bringing something up to a MAGA voter. Watch Jordan Klepper of The Daily Show, and you’ll see almost verbatim the script I posted here coming from the mouths of MAGA voters outside Trump rallies. Believing a comfortable lie is a lot easier than believing a messy, complicated, and ego-brusing truth.
Even though voters like her were the single biggest voting bloc in our primary, I’m certain that bloc of voters and rationale didn’t number enough to explain on their own why I lost. The reality is that the climate wasn’t with any white guys this year (the poor, downtrodden, white male; when will they finally get their chance?), and I had a limited budget and barely any ability to push back against this kind of attack, compounded by the fact the media wasn’t willing to do more than memorialize the entire affair as “he said, she said”.
There is still an expectation that there are referees out there who’ll call out lies like the ones flung against me- and when those referees don’t show up to call a foul, the presumption is that there isn’t one. But to deny Democratic voters won’t vote on false premises any less than MAGA voters can is simply delusional.
So I suppose we should talk about misinformation. One of the things I wish I could say bothers me most about this whole to-do is the misinformation aspect of it.
Misinformation is supposed to be what’s killing our society and jeopardizing our very democracy. It’s why Hillary Clinton lost in 2016 and has been the rallying cry of progressives the entire Trump administration; I went into my spam email folder (which had a stunning 76,660 emails in it) and searched for the word misinformation and its analogues, and got over a thousand results. Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff, Jennifer Wexton, Elizabeth Guzman, Michelle Maldonado, Tim Kaine, Mark Warner, Sherrod Brown, Gerry Connoly, Michelle Obama via the Obama Foundation, RideShare to Vote- I could go on and on, but I think you get it.
There was also one from Ted Cruz somehow, but fuck Ted Cruz.
In particular, the misinformation strategy used against me was one literally straight out of the alt-right playbook called the “Ship of Theseus”. It’s been discussed openly by alt-right strategist Christopher Rufo (of “groomer” and “critical race theory” infamy) as one of many ways to go after progressives and progressive beliefs. I won’t delve into it in full detail here, as this piece is already long enough. Instead, I’m going to borrow some words from Ian Danskin’s informative video on what it is and how it’s employed.
The rhetorical “Ship of Theseus” strategy is a devilish maneuver because it relies on the kinds of substitutions that are, in a vacuum, defensible. Many of these substitutions might work on their own, but the “Ship of Theseus” is about making an inordinate number of substitutions and then burying the context, hoping nobody will catch on.
This is how “calling trans people by their correct pronouns” eventually gets transmuted into “trans folks are groomers and pedophiles”, how “teaching more about diversity” becomes “critical race theory in kindergarten”, or “the left wants the Israeli government to stop bombing Palestinian civilians” gets shifted to the “the left loves Hamas”.
One can make the (dubious) argument that these substitutions aren’t technically a lie, but at best, it’s meant to form a picture in your mind of something that didn’t happen; that isn’t true. It’s meant to get you mired in the truthfulness of individual claims, debating technicalities of a statement blatantly meant to deceive. You’re not supposed to get a chance to articulate any context or discern the truth until it’s too late, as you try to peel back the layers to expose the truth.
And if there’s anything that spinsters on the right have proven over the years- and I don’t think anyone reading this will disagree- is that there is incredible power behind statements that are short, quippy, and wrong.
Again, as Ian Danskin so aptly notes, there’s nothing so special about progressivism that makes us immune to abusers and opportunists. And, again, there is a surreal expectation that there are “referees” out there that will call a “foul” if it happens, and an equally surreal expectation the media will do all the legwork required to ferret out the truth.
The only real difference in the employment of the rhetorical “Ship of Theseus” attack is that, when the alt-right does this, it does it to progressives. When progressives do it, we do it to each other.
I first saw it back in 2008, when I watched Obama supporters gleefully push the claim that Hillary Clinton was going to send you to jail for not having health insurance. Go to jail for not having health insurance?! That sounds awful. But there was no truth to that whatsoever.
Secretary Clinton’s health insurance reform policy was effectively, well… Obamacare. There were non-criminal penalties for not having health insurance, possibly including a fine- but IF it was enacted as a tax, and IF you couldn’t pay it, well… people that don’t pay their taxes go to jail, right? And so now, ipso facto, Hillary Clinton wants to put people in jail for not having health insurance.
I remember pointing out at the time that that wasn’t true and being brushed aside. Looking back, I wish I’d made more of an attempt to stand up against that, instead of being complicitly silent. We had plenty of good things to talk about in regard to then-Senator Obama. There was zero reason to have to lie about anything. That’s the key with misinformation, and especially with this particular strain of it: when you don’t have anything good, you HAVE to lie, which is why it’s become the Republicans’ entire schtick at this point.
And when you employ this argument, you did it in the same way a domestic abuser would: demeaning them with the aim of cutting them off from their community. In the case of someone who is embraced by the progressive community, you slander them by using something the community cares about. And a lot of progressives are already acclimated to getting burned, to finding out a gay activist harasses his employees, that a race activist exploits the labor of women, that a supposed feminist is actually a TERF who mocks trans folk. This understandably puts a lot of people on edge.
The alt-right is perfectly happy converting an attack or a bad argument into whatever they think progressive language sounds like, and the worst progressives among us are more than happy to adopt their tactics to use against fellow progressives. Somehow, it’s never back against the people who are actually fighting to end our democracy; we don’t ever try to play hardball back against them, we have to “play nice” against them.
To be fair, though, even when we do call someone in the alt-right a racist, homophobe, or anti-Semite, it doesn’t serve the same purpose.
Tell me: when’s the last time a Republican lost an election for being homophobic? For being racist? For orchestrating an insurrection against our democracy? You can bellow that as loud as you’d like, but the MAGA constituency is made up of people who either cannot be convinced that one of their own is a racist, homophobe, or traitor- or they can, but just don’t care (or even prefer it that way).
The MAGA folks give their candidates clearance to employ progressive language and values against us; they cheer it on, and never hold it against them. They’ll happily join in the wink and nod to get their candidates elected. Hell, they have entire think tanks and pay charlatans hundreds of thousands of dollars (if not more!) to enable them to do just that.
There’s no real solution to The Ship of Theseus strategy, other than time and a willingness to suss out the actual truth, and to be able to recognize these sorts of things from the get-go, so that when a TERF says “pedophile”, they mean “trans people are allowed to exist”, etc, etc.
In her 2019 state Senate primary, my opponent was asked how she’d manage the opposition candidate using unfair tactics such as falsehoods on social media, running in a 50/50 district. At the time, she said:
[That’s] very pertinent in this day and age, as we see constant disinformation and downright lies being told all the time… y’know, so how to deal with it? Strength and courage. I have something that I usually wear that says “my faith is bigger than my fear.” And I think you have to come at it that way. I don’t think that us being negative is right. Because the truth is we can win on our ideas.
I had this flagged to run immediately, since we’d listened to both available forums she’d taken part in during her 2019 primary race as preparation for ours, and that quote went out to the media frequently. But as far as I know, our local CBS affiliate was the only one to actually bring this up. When they asked her if she thought it was hypocritical, if it mattered that she clearly lied at some point- whether she lied in 2019 when she said she cared about misinformation, whether she lied in 2023 when she said the only difference between she and I was “experience”, or whether she was lying now on having any concerns about my supposed progressive bona fides.
To my opponent’s credit, she was honest in her answer to them: no. It didn’t matter. I suppose she saw no problem in admitting that aloud, because in the immortal words of Heath Ledger, “it’s all part of the plan”. Politicians lie; that’s just what they do, right? If we want to be really frank, people actually prefer that, because when politicians don’t, when they tell the truth, “everyone loses their minds!”
But I want everyone here to understand this kind of misinformation is more than a rhetorical problem. It’s more than “being mean in a primary”, as a Twitter pundit described it. It’s a real problem. It’s affecting real people. And the difference is particularly meaningful in a purposeful way to me, because I’ve seen firsthand- in excruciating detail- the toll real misinformation has taken on our society.
I’ve seen blood pooling on the floor during an emergency C-section, desperately trying to save someone who didn’t have access to prenatal care.
I’ve sweated while waiting for a pediatric life flight helicopter to land and pick up an unstable pediatric patient that attempted suicide after being bullied for simply wanting to be who they are.
I’ve seen women almost die from ruptured ectopic pregnancies, simply because crisis pregnancy centers are allowed to exist.
I’ve wrestled a backpack away from a middle school student we later found out contained a gun. I’ve treated kids with multiple gunshot wounds, and then had to listen to politicians who tell me what we actually need are more guns to solve that problem.
I’ve had people beg me for the COVID vaccine as they were dying of an entirely preventable disease.
That last one… I’ve seen all those other stories throughout my career as an ER Nurse, but it was COVID that truly shone a light on just how weaponized disinformation has become over the last… four years, wow. Has it really been four years now? Damn.
I don’t know how many people I had to watch die who didn’t have to; I lost count. We never got as bad as places like Southside and the Shenandoah Valley, where morgue trucks parked outside hospitals and cardiac catheterization labs got turned into COVID ICUs. Where ICU capacities peaked at multi-hundred percentages, which is something that shouldn’t be possible or legal, but is what happens when you pretend the healthcare system hasn’t collapsed by paying a brand-new ICU nurse less than six months out of nursing school $125/hour to take care of four ICU patients on ventilators (while the hospital bills them for one-on-one care).
Even so, it was still bad at my hospital and in my community, and I’d have to guess I was part of the care team for maybe a couple dozen people who ended up dying. Too many. Almost all of them unnecessarily, as they were victims of a billion-dollar misinformation campaign waged by the very same people who pushed emergency department nurses out of the way to get vaccinated.
The Delta COVID surge was the worst we saw. This was August to December of 2021, when patient volume and acuity just kept getting worse, and worse, and worse. Every time you thought it couldn’t get any worse, it did. It was surreal. There was a stretch where, for twelve weeks in a row, I worked overtime. And when I say “overtime”, I mean 60–70 hours a week- including a stretch where I worked eleven 7pm-7am shifts consecutively.
Looking back on it now, I have no idea how I survived that. I really don’t. It’s all in a fog in my mind; just numb. Night after night after night of misery. Every crisis we solved just led to another one. I’d leave at 7:30am and come back at 6:30pm to discover some of the same patients were still in the ER, waiting- and more and more were waiting behind them. Trying to work a functional emergency department on a handful of beds because all the other ones had COVID patients holding for an inpatient bed. Doing lab work and chest x-rays in the parking lot. People were counting on us to make it work, to figure it out- because if we didn’t, nobody would.
There was one case I remember in particular. This was in late 2021, after Thanksgiving, when we hit the absolute peak of the Delta surge. Before the omicron strain became the predominant one, COVID had a pretty predictable track, whether it was the original “null” strain, Alpha, Beta, etc, etc. Delta was no different, it was just the deadliest strain by far. It was like clockwork: days 8, 9, and 10 post infection were the “make it or break it” window. Either you made it through that, or you ended up in the ER. And if you ended up in the ER, it was because you were sick.
So, you can imagine what happened when a bunch of unvaccinated folks got together for Thanksgiving. It was like watching a freight train derail, because we knew what was coming… and could do absolutely nothing to stop it.
And that’s when we had the worst day I personally ever saw during that time period, where we had to put multiple people on ventilators- intubate them with breathing tubes- on one shift. By this point of the pandemic, we had become pretty adept at stabilizing people, pulling them back from the edge and getting them well enough to go to the COVID unit. The COVID unit and ICU, in fact, saw more emergent intubations than we did in the ER for quite some time for this very reason.
But not that day.
I was the charge nurse that shift. In theory, the charge nurse in the ER is a sort-of conductor, doing no patient care themselves, and instead orchestrating the ebb and flow of patients and clinicians to ensure everyone gets seen, every problem gets addressed, every crisis gets answered. While there is theoretically a nursing supervisor and other hospital management available, the ER Charge Nurse is who runs the show when things go bad- particularly at night. I’ll again credit the charge nurse we had on duty in the ER during the events of the Unite the Right attack in Charlottesville in 2017 for us being able to handle the influx of patients we saw. Her authority in managing the event was unquestioned up and down the chain of command at our hospital; it was her show to run, and she ran it like a textbook scenario.
But at this point in the pandemic, that textbook had long ago been burned to ash. Critical staffing and patient volume meant that I was on the floor doing patient care every single shift while in full COVID “battle rattle”: respirator with a surgical mask adorned atop of it, a visor with either a hood or a surgical hair net over a scrub cap, a respiratory-resistant full body gown, layered gloves, shoe covers, etc. An impressive bit of regalia, to be sure, though I never complained about wearing it. I remembered when garbage bags were considered appropriate PPE and we had to re-use single use paper masks for weeks at a time.
The unsung heroes on our worst days were our unit secretaries, who were experienced enough to simultaneously help manage patient flow, direct ambulances, answer the phone, arrange for helicopters to fly patients out, and pick up patient call bells. I simply don’t have the words to laud them to the extent they deserve. And this day was no different; it was our unit secretary who let me know about the “squad report” she’d just taken from an ambulance coming from a nearby rural county. A COVID positive patient right in the danger window, who was doing poorly at home, and whom the ambulance crew was trying to keep stable.
I had only had one room open- a room which had been vacated by another COVID patient mere minutes, if not literally seconds, earlier. But the nurse for that particular “zone” of patient rooms was busy with another COVID patient who wasn’t doing well, so I furiously cleaned the newly opened room, and hastily finished it just as the EMS crew rolled the patient through our doors.
I got the report from the medic, but it was already clear the patient was not doing well. He was doing what we call “tripoding”- leaning forward to make a triangle shape with his body and arms, attempting to open his lungs- while breathing maybe up to sixty times a minute, literally gasping for air. Breathing one time a second for more than a very short stretch without passing out is hard to do for perfectly fit and healthy people; try it for yourself and you’ll see what I mean. He had an oxygen non-rebreather mask on, with pure oxygen flowing as fast as the canister would allow it- even though, by looking at the patient, you’d think it wasn’t doing anything at all.
But the thing that struck me the hardest was how young the patient was. Now, in any non-pediatric medical setting, “young” is relative; I can tell you it’s not an uncommon occurrence to see the MEDIAN age in a completely full emergency department to be as high as 84 years old. So, when I say “young”, I mean an age range of “has kids that are probably too old for pre-school and probably too young for college”. I’d seen younger patients than this one super sick with COVID, for sure, but the worst cases were still predominantly people in their mid-60s and older.
As we moved him from the EMS stretcher onto the ER bed, the paramedic gave me a run down on what was going on. The patient was COVID positive, having been diagnosed (as had much of his family) after Thanksgiving. He’d gone to see his primary care physician, who’d apparently refused to write him a prescription for hydroxychloroquine or ivermectin, so the patient had sourced both for himself. Unsurprisingly, they didn’t work to alleviate his symptoms, and the patient became increasingly short of breath.
The solution the patient had was to go to Lowes to buy oxygen. I don’t know if you’ve seen these personal oxygen canisters; they sort-of look like Febreze, except they’re just oxygen. Pull the trigger, and “pffft!” Kind-of like the O’Hare Air from The Lorax. As the medic explained it to me, the patient had gone through so many bottles they were littering the floor of his house like he was on the approach to the summit of Mount Everest; they had to wade through them in order to extricate the patient from his recliner in the living room.
At that point, I pretty much already knew how things were going to go. Had the patient come in even a few hours earlier, we might’ve been able to do more to get him stabilized without having to intubate him. But there was no point in entertaining “shouldda, wouldda, couldda” at that point. My staff and our physicians were busy with similarly ill patients, including another one in similarly dire straits that was being prepared to be intubated themselves, so I began to get everything ready, rushing to get the supplies we’d need to put them on a ventilator.
I’d just finished placing an IV in each of the patient’s arms, and was attempting to swap a functioning end-tidal carbon dioxide monitoring module into the bedside cardiac monitor, when the patient reached out and grabbed my arm. I was single-mindedly intent on the task at hand, and this startled me so abruptly that I almost literally jumped. I turned to see the patient looking me directly in the eyes… and I mean, directly in the eyes. Through my PPE, through my visor. Straight into the depths of my soul.
But all he did was continue to breathe rapidly. I stood there for a moment, eerily confused, and was about to ask him what the deal was.
And then he asked me a question.
One single question.
“Am I going to die?”
When you’re struggling to breathe like he was, getting five words out might take ten or fifteen seconds. Recuperating from the effort required to speak at all can take several times as long. When I tell you it took everything the patient had to ask me that question, understand that I mean it took everything the patient had to utter those seven syllables.
All the while, his eyes never left mine.
Never deviated a millimeter.
Now, after being in both politics and emergency medicine, I’d like to think I’ve developed the ability to keep a poker face and unerringly neutral demeanor that is second to none. Not that it’s easy; far from it. I once had a doting grandfather show me pictures of his brand-new granddaughter, and had to happily make small talk with him as he told me about the trip they had planned to fly out to see her, smiling even though I knew the doctor hadn’t yet been in to tell him what I’d just read the death sentence the radiologist had written about the CT Scan he’d just had: “Pancreatic mass concerning for probable metastasis to multiple sites”.
We once had to tell a mother her fifteen-month-old had a sexually transmitted infection. She was momentarily stunned, and then seemed relieved and somewhat embarrassed, telling us she’d recently had that same infection. You see, her boyfriend had cheated on her. They’d reconciled things, but before she knew she was infected, she’d taken a bath with the baby. So, she explained very earnestly, that had to have been how her daughter got it, too. Then we had to explain that, no, that’s not how her daughter could have gotten infected. That it could only have been through direct sexual contact. And we asked her if her boyfriend had ever been alone with her daughter. Then I had to watch as the realization of what that meant dawned on her… and break her completely, as she began to break down and sob in a way I’d never heard before.
And, of course, I’ve had to take care of honest-to-God, Swastika tattooed Nazis. Who took pride in the fact they, and their buddies, had come to our community to cause trouble; to walk down the sidewalks in predominantly minority neighborhoods and threaten the people who lived there. Who felt empowered enough to hold an entire tiki torch rally, screeching “YOU WILL NOT REPLACE US.” Who attempted to sexually assault two of our nurses, and who told me they hoped I’d have to call the police on them, because it’d let their buddies “kick the shit out of the (racial and antisemitic pejoratives) downtown”.
It’s never easy. Anyone who tells you holding your cool in those sorts of circumstances is lying. But I managed to do it, each and every time.
So I’m not sure why this patient’s question made me flinch. Thinking about it now, I suppose that in all those other examples, I was able to get a “game face” on. I had time to internalize things and cope with them, ever briefly, before I had to do my job. I didn’t have any time here, and even the best and most nimble of folks can be thrown off their game occasionally.
Because I knew what the likely answer to his question was. I knew what we’d been seeing for months with the Delta COVID strain. I knew how many people made it home after getting the point he was at, and being intubated.
I knew.
I did my level best; truly. I promised him we were going to take good care of him. That we were going to do everything we could for him. Everything we could to get him back home to his family. I know for a fact that my voice never broke or faltered from the confident tenor I’ve developed over a decade and a half in healthcare to reassure people who are terrified and want some reassurance that everything is going to be okay.
I stood there with him for a minute, as he recuperated from the exertion it took to ask me that question. A look came over his face. As I sit here, I cannot for the life of me describe it, even though I can see him- clear as day- in my head now. “Resigned” isn’t the right word, nor is “melancholic”. Depressed? Fatalistic? All of the above? It was coupled with him gasping for air, which didn’t help anything.
And as he looked me in the eyes, I saw he knew the real answer to his question.
As a cold slug of despair formed in the pit of my stomach, I patted the patient reassuringly on his shoulder, and got back to work getting things ready. I was so buried in attempting to busy myself with thinking about anything but what had just happened that I almost missed what he wheezed out next; I had to pause and wonder if I’d actually heard what I thought I’d heard.”
“My kids,” he said aloud- to me, to himself, maybe to nobody in particular. I’ll never know for sure. “My wife.”
“Sir. It’s okay. We’re going to get you better and get you back home to them,” I said, desperately praying I wasn’t a liar, “you just work on breathing! That’s your only job right now, okay? All you have to do is breathe. We’ll take care of all the rest.”
He nodded, and after a minute I’d gotten everything as ready as I could until our doctor and respiratory team were done with the other patient they were working with. Before I finished, I went back and again put my hand on the patient’s shoulder as reassuringly as I could. I looked him in the eyes, and told him I would be right back, that the doctor and respiratory team would be in immediately, and reiterated we would take good care of him. And, as I do before I depart from any patients’ room, as I’ve done tens of thousands of times during the course of my career, I asked him “Is there anything else I can get for you?”
And then he said the very last thing he’d ever say. The culmination of a life of decades, of laughing and crying, of pain and joy, anguish and relief, of tugging at his mom’s skirt, of skinned knees on the playground, of goofing around in class, of ice cream on a hot summer day, of taking off and driving on a road trip to nowhere in particular, of falling in love, of a marriage and honeymoon and kids and a house and a dog, of preschool pickups, of parent-teacher conferences, of plans for retirement, of seeing kids grow and laugh and cry and love just the same.
The last thing he ever said was, “I really fucked up, didn’t I?”
When you intubate a patient, when the paralytics and sedative drugs kick in, you can watch as the lights in someone’s eyes get dimmer and dimmer, and then disappear entirely.
And I had to watch as the lights went out in his eyes for the very last time.
He stayed in our ICU for awhile. Every day I worked- every single day- I’d go check on him. I’d come in early. I’d stay late. I’d find an excuse to run down to the ICU. I’d stare through the window of his room, through the door if it happened to be open, and wish. Pray. Hope, beyond all hope, that I would come down one day to find the miraculous had happened. That he’d been off his breathing tube. That his family would all be crowded around him, jubilant. That he’d be discharged and run the gamut of a hallway full of cheering nurses and doctors, cheering and clapping like wild.
But it wasn’t to be.
I struggled with that. A lot. Because all of the people who fed him malicious misinformation weren’t going to be there for this man’s family. Tucker Carlson is never going to show up to high school graduation. Marjorie Taylor Greene isn’t coming to the 4th of July. Ron DeSantis and Donald Trump aren’t going to dote on grandkids on his behalf. None of them care about my patient, or the hundreds of thousands of others that died or were maimed
Because all of those people only care about themselves. They only care about power, about money, about status, and they’ll do or say whatever it takes to achieve and keep that- no matter what.
If there was any single thing that moved me to run for office, that “broke the camel’s back” and got me back in the saddle and go after it, it was that realization.
That’s why I said I wish I could say that what bothers me most about this whole thing is the misinformation aspect of it. But the truth is, even to a large part of our fellow progressives, true misinformation- misinformation meant to deceive for malicious purposes- is something to shrug about. Something that’s unfortunate, but, I mean, what’re ya gonna do about it, amirite? Politics is a tough business, after all.
Officially, according to the CDC, nearly 1.2 million Americans died of COVID. In the same time period, according to the School of Public Health at UPenn, another 1.2 million “excess deaths” occurred in that same time period, along with nearly six million excess hospitalizations. All unfolding with stunning and heart wrenching accuracy to what I predicted.
Nobody cares, though. Not enough to do anything about it. Not enough to keep my colleagues and I from having to go through all of that again. My opponent could call me a “hero” at one turn, and then purposefully re-traumatize me the next. Do you really think she wouldn’t do that to any of my colleagues if she found it politically convenient?
Nah. And she’s far from unique there.
My colleagues and I are good enough to literally hold the country together, while we desperately clinging on by our fingernails and sacrifice more than anyone is comfortable believing. We’re good enough for platitudes. Good enough for “thoughts and prayers”.
But only as long as it’s convenient.
And that’s it.
I mentioned above that one of the biggest goals of attacking someone in the way I was is to isolate them from their community, from their group of friends. I’m pretty sure my opponent figured that when she started weaponizing her lies to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars, support for me would disappear entirely. Instead, I’d become a pariah, and she’d be lauded as a hero and a genius.
That didn’t happen here. My friends and supporters stepped up in a way I simply don’t have the words to honor appropriately. Almost every “high information” voter jumped in to support us vociferously- and the number of elected officials, activists, and community members who did the same. New York Times reporter Jamelle Bouie was openly astounded by that, saying he’d never seen anything like it before.
Of course, things like this always have their caveats. When the Washington Post wrote an article about our primary, an elected official quoted within savaged me openly while conveniently forgetting to mention that they’d not only loudly defended me in 2017 for being a pro-choice candidate in the most gerrymandered district in Virginia, they’d lauded me just weeks prior to that interview, sending me a text message saying that “I could not agree with your views (on abortion) any more than you do forcefully and clearly stated them.” I’d be very intrigued to know what made them abruptly change their mind, although I have a suspicion I know.
Another person who I had shared the story about our family and postpartum depression was happy to relate that to others, while being well aware I promised my daughter would never know about it. But a call went out to try and find dirt, so as to post facto justify the decision to engage in the kind of a “shitshow” of a strategy employed by my primary opponent in attacking me, and I guess that became fair game, too.
I suppose there is something to be said for people showing their stripes- and that those were the only kind of people my opponent could find to advocate on her behalf.
And the sunk-cost fallacy was as pervasive as it ever has been. A local Democratic precinct captain publicly said she knew my opponent was lying, knew I was unequivocally pro-choice, and lamented the “nastiness” in the strongest possible terms- but was still supporting my opponent “because of her experience”. “This just isn’t the candidate I know,” another said, also referring to my opponent, ignoring that this was exactly the candidate she knew.
But these folks were in the minority- and I was just as happy they showed themselves to be who they really were, rather than who they pretended to be. Not a single person who’d supported us publicly wavered in the slightest, and perhaps a dozen people who’d openly endorsed my opponent got ahold of me, publicly or behind the scenes, weighing in on our side. This primary was truly a lightning rod, as former statewide elected officials, candidates for statewide office, current elected officials and legislators, and even people on the ballot in June as well reached out to tell us how disgusted they were about what was going on.
A former Obama appointee had a very frank conversation with me with his thoughts on the matter; a well-known University of Virginia professor did the same. One currently elected Virginia legislator told me “You put up a hell of a race under illegit conditions”; another bemoaned how “impossible” it would be to work with my opponent, knowing her word couldn’t be trusted. The best comment I got, though, was from a female legislator and elected official in Virginia, whose political ceiling is somewhere in the stratosphere. She told me, quote: “There’s not a man I’d trust more to fight for women than you.”
Finally, it was the people who had everything to lose by standing up for what’s right, the people who could’ve easily kept their mouths shut and ignored the whole thing… I simply don’t have the words for how much their support meant to me. It’s truly a one-of-a-kind experience to see that many people stand behind you when the going gets tough. I could have written this entire article on that alone, and it wouldn’t do justice to how incredible that was, or what it meant to me.
I understood very well, though, the difference between those kinds of people, and “low information” voters that made up the majority of the electorate. “Winning the internet” was great, and in a traditional Democratic primary for a race like mine, with anemic turnout, those kinds of “high information” voters that overwhelmingly weighed in for us would’ve made the difference. But in an incredibly high turnout election like the one we had, driven by the Senate race on the same ballot, that dynamic was completely inverted.
Honestly, I’d rather lose and keep the support of my friends and my community than win and know how many people openly loathe and despise me the instant my back is turned. I got into politics to try and make a difference; politics was a means to that end. If I had been running because I thought I “deserved” the seat, that I’d “been to all the meetings” because I had an Ivy-league education, and because it was the next step on my political checklist, I’d probably be pretty morose right now.
That’s probably the biggest reason I’ve actually been quite sanguine about this whole thing. In fact, the only thing I truly regretted in losing was to be able, in a much bigger way, to help other candidates win. I was open for the entire year that our district was unwinnable by Republicans, and we needed to use the power here to help other districts flip blue.
Specifically, I named Lily Franklin in Blacksburg, Susanna Gibson in Henrico, and Jessica Anderson in Williamsburg as three races we needed to chip in at. It was enough that my primary opponent made noises as if she would do the same thing- one of the mailers she sent out actually bragged she was personally responsible for electing almost every woman in the Virginia legislature.
Alas; once the primary was over, her “experience” in electing other legislators went wholly and completely unused. Lily Franklin lost in a red district in deep southwest Virginia by a mere 141 votes; you’ll be shocked to hear that her opponent is now crowing about the “mandate” he has from the voters in that district to do whatever he wants.
Susanna Gibson had revenge porn dropped against her and weaponized nationally by the Republican party, had people approach her kids on their school playground, was harassed at her own home for weeks, and received death threats, while Democratic politicians insisted she wasn’t the victim in that sordid affair- the party was. But Susanna still fought hard enough to almost win and took it right down to the wire.
Meanwhile, Jessica Anderson broke all sorts of individual donation records and came up just short. All three were abandoned, not just by my former opponent, but the entire Democratic party as a whole. Each judged as being unworthy of support- an affectation of sorrow after they lost, sure, but not even a sincere thought to fix that in the future.
But the real-life experience that candidates offer isn’t something valued in politics, particularly on these kinds of hot button issues. That’s why no effort was put in to work to elect these candidates. That’s why, in the wake of Glenn Youngkin being elected, you saw every establishment politician in the Commonwealth shrug and refuse to call a special session to protect abortion rights. They’d been using abortion as a political football just as much as the Republicans had. Sure, at least they were on the side of protecting those rights- but when push came to shove, they went on vacation, and why they didn’t want someone who was a witness to the consequences of that kind of behavior as a colleague, to remind them of that.
They talk about how important it is to address gun violence. But having someone who fielded a call from a parent who begged me for any information on his son, because his son wasn’t answering his phone, and his son always answered his phone. Begging for information that I already knew… but couldn’t give. Having someone who has borne witness to the gun violence epidemic first hand wasn’t something they wanted in a colleague.
They talk about how critical addressing the black maternal mortality rate is. But having someone who had to usher a father away from an emergency c-section at the bedside for someone too unstable to make it to the operating room, as he watched his wife and child die in front of him from something that would have been wholly preventable with the proper maternal care. Someone who had to promise the father as he broke down and screamed for his wife and child that he wouldn’t be kept away one second longer than necessary… that experience isn’t something that benefits those legislatures in a colleague.
They talk about how important the opioid crisis was- but having someone who knows what it’s like to watch a “bad batch” of drugs hit the local market in real-time, someone who has had to work codes on teenagers who overdosed, doing CPR until ribs crack and pink, frothy foam begins to spew from a blood-flecked mouth behind dead, unmoving eyes, and a mother screaming the unholy sound that only comes from a parent knowing they’ve already seen their baby girl for the very last time to remind them of the weight and consequence of their failures to act wasn’t something they desired.
I could go on and on, but there’s truly no need. I knew all of that from the moment I decided to run for office. Those skills and experiences aren’t considered assets to candidates running for political office; certainly not as a Democrat in Virginia. When you begin to understand that the Democratic Party is primarily a fundraising organization, not an election winning one, this begins to make more sense. The most successful of our candidates succeed in spite of, and not because of, the party apparatus. Cue another round of crocodile tears and gnashing of teeth here, of course, but I don’t think you’ll find anyone willing to truly push back on this- because it’s true.
“WELL, you decided to run for office KNOWING THAT, then,” they’ll say, “so you can’t complain!”
Yeah, and I’ve had to save the lives of COVID patients who refused to get vaccinated, too, while garbage bags and masks reused for weeks were considered appropriate PPE. I “signed up” for that, too. In both instances, I absolutely could’ve quit anytime. I recognize the dichotomy there, and I chose to stay and fight on both tracks because it was the right thing to do. The thing I felt like I had to do.
As I alluded to earlier, admitting that aloud here is what’ll burn my bridges the most thoroughly. There’s plenty of worse behavior that’s taken place in elections in Virginia than what I’ve catalogued here; true, most people are smart enough to not leave this much open evidence about it, but that’s not a disqualifying attribute for folks we involve in politics.
But that works well for me, because my intent, were I to lose my primary, was to run for Congress in 2024 against insurrectionist Bob Good. I was going to take Bob on- or the actual, January 6th-attending insurrectionist who may primary him this year. I had absolutely no delusions of my chances to win in such a gerrymandered district, but it’s possible he may go entirely unchallenged- which is completely unacceptable. We don’t have to (and shouldn’t!) go full Amy McGrath/Sarah Collins and pour nearly ninety million dollars into a black hole, but we need to challenge every single Republican everywhere we can.
I intended to use my bully pulpit and experiences to attack Bob and his fellow insurrectionists and extremists, knowing they would foam at the mouth and elevate those attacks into the national consciousness. It wouldn’t make Bob Good less likely to lose, but it might affect other Republicans in other races across the country who had to grapple with the things he was saying. And if we don’t do everything we can, 2024 may be the last free election our country has- Donald Trump has made that abundantly clear. We are sleepwalking our way into a dictatorship, and the consequences of that will be- as they always are- thrown onto the shoulders of my colleagues and I in emergency services.
I hope I’m wrong. But it won’t be the first time I’ve wished fervently I was wrong. Or the second time. Or third time.
Regardless, it would have been an incredible amount of work and sacrifice, because even knowing I was likely going to lose, I would have done what I did in 2017- worked tirelessly and unapologetically to try and win anyway. I’ve spent enough time away from my family over the last six years. I’ve survived cancer. I’ve lived through an unmitigated pandemic. I’m ready to be done. The trashing my name and experiences were subjected to was an unintentional gift from my opponent; this missive merely “burns” that bridge completely.
As for my former opponent? I’m not worried about someone who is their own worst enemy. As I recall, this primary season only two white males won primaries anywhere in Virginia, and both were experienced and seasoned politicians with giant war chests. Even with that, those candidates only won by the barest of margins. My opponent could’ve continued doing her behind-the-scenes trashing of me while staying overtly positive, and almost certainly would have still won handily.
A Richmond-area elected official who drove to my house multiple times to do debate prep with our team eviscerated me in mock debates, all while staying outwardly completely positive. She had me sweating and stammering, and I understood vividly why the Republicans flailed so openly when running against her- they were terrified of her. With all of my supposed upsides and unique experiences, it made me well aware that I could get my clock cleaned by someone more talented than I was.
Instead of relying on talent, though, a choice was made to run one of the most one-sidedly vicious primary campaigns in Virginia Democratic history, while leaving an incredible amount of hard evidence that the plan from the beginning had been to lie openly. I could never properly memorialize the kind of incompetence required to take an infinite campaign war chest and a political environment that’s never been more friendly to you, and instead openly show everyone in the Commonwealth just who you are.
Despite everything I wrote here, perhaps the worst thing I ever encountered that my opponent had done was when I knocked on a door near the end of my primary campaign and had a chat with a voter who was on the fence. The voter finally, and almost apologetically, told me “I just don’t understand why you decided to file to run for this race with such a formidable candidate already in it.”
I was taken aback. “I don’t know what you mean,” I said, hesitatingly, “I was the first person to file to run in this race, literally months before anyone else.”
I’ll never forget the way this voter’s face scrunched up in confusion. She told me my opponent had knocked on her door just a few days prior and had said point-blank that she was the first person to file to run for this seat- and told the voter she had no idea why I’d chosen to file after she was already running.
The number of people who cast their vote based on the metric of “candidate who filed to run first” is probably something like a tenth of one percent, at best. It’s almost completely meaningless. But lying openly about something so incredibly easy to fact check, lying when the truth would absolutely suit you just fine, isn’t something it sounds like will stop anytime soon.
Sadly, I ultimately left with that voter undecided on who they were going to vote for. She was struggling with the fact that one of us had lied openly and blatantly to her face. I encouraged her to look it up for herself but have no idea if she ever did. Sometimes, people prefer not to know they’re being openly misled.
Winning never meant enough to me to convince me to engage in that kind of behavior. There’s just no benefit. For, what, a state legislature office? Besides, there’s always a cost to that. As the great Taylor Swift says, “Trash takes itself out every single time.”
Most of my former opponent’s soon-to-be colleagues are well aware of what I’ve written here. Now, they can certainly tolerate (or even applaud) the kind of behavior catalogued here when it’s used against someone like me. But the axiom “once a cheater, always a cheater” goes the same in politics as it does relationships- and they’re smart enough to realize that.
Listen. In my time working in the ER, I’ve been a part of more national news stories than I’ve ever been able to admit publicly. I’ve taken care of patients who have been in the national news for weeks, if not months, at a time. I’ve seen titans of industry, former national figures, athletic heroes, national and international names. When you work this close to Washington, DC, in a city with a “public Ivy”, I suppose that’s inevitable.
And I’ve also seen their struggles. I’ve seen them decline. I’ve watched as someone heralded as a gifted orator drooled openly, barely able to string a sentence together. Forgetting who their children were, screaming angrily that they were strangers trying to kill them. I’ve kept the secret of a gay and HIV positive public figure, who confided to me that the release of that information would destroy their persona. I’ve consoled a former Fortune CEO that cried in embarrassment from becoming bedridden and incontinent. I’ve held the hand of someone who made waves in national news and with national acclaim and accolades as they died, alone.
None of us is special. None of us will avoid that fate. Far sooner than most of us want to realize, we will be in their shoes. And then, ultimately? Aside from a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent of us, we’ll be forgotten. Completely and utterly forgotten.
Money and notoriety doesn’t get you far in the final and inevitable arena.
As you can see, I’ve included some hard evidence of the things I talk about along with this article but have purposefully left out a lot of the best- or worst, depending on how you want to look at it- examples of the things I highlighted here, as well as a few things I’ve avoided mentioning so far. Amazingly, even with as much as I’ve written, it doesn’t touch on a fraction of the things that happened in total.
I say this because during the rigmarole of all of this during this spring, someone I had a lot of respect for reached to tell me they assumed I was lying in my explanations- and, paradoxically, assumed my opponent was lying, too. Politicians just lie, right? I asked him why he didn’t just ask me for the receipts, because I had them in incredibly embarrassing detail, and he was stunned. It never occurred to him to, you know… ask for proof. It’s one reason I wrote as much as I did here- almost everything here is independently verifiable for people who don’t want to trust my word and want to check what I’ve said for themselves.
And if any of the people who aren’t mentioned by name, but who will know exactly who they are, want to show their own receipts to correct the record on anything, I’ll happily and publicly include their counterpoints or evidence to the contrary as well.
It was knowing how much I’d have to write here to even hint at all this that kept me from writing this for the longest time. The thing that prompted me to finally sit down and write all of this was being approached by someone unofficially associated with the Republican candidate who filed to run against my primary opponent. They told me that my former opponent was continuing to spend her time badmouthing me at Democratic events locally, as she was apparently asked frequently about our contentious primary.
“She’s telling people that she had serious reservations about your bona fides, and was forced to attack you,” they told me, suggesting I should release some of the “dirt” I had. “Don’t you want to defend your honor?”
I was shocked- shocked!- to hear that was happening. But when you’re in the middle of gossip and intel being traded back and forth, you always take these kinds of things with a grain of salt until you can verify it. Checking with the local party folks I still keep in touch with, I found out, sure enough, that’s exactly what was happening. Which means once again, there were trackers at those events, and nobody had any idea they were there.
Of course, there was no way I was going to help a Republican, ever. So I reminded this operative of their candidate’s actual chances to win, and kindly invited them to take an aerial copulation through a laterally rotating pastry product. This prompted them to call me a “cuck”, which, if you didn’t know, is the height of MAGA discourse.
Prior to that, I was truly done. The “hero” vilification? Meh. I never felt particularly heroic about anything we did during COVID in the ER. Surviving? Sure. Heroism? I don’t think so. Besides, I knew when my former opponent called me a hero she didn’t actually mean it, so when she effectively admitted as much publicly it didn’t bother me. The same for purposefully manipulating the story I shared relating the vicarious trauma I had watching someone nearly die from not being able to access legal abortion care in a timely manner.
And I knew that neither she, nor the party in general, cared about anything I’ve done over the years. That work had no value to them. But I’m not special; they don’t care about anything anyone has done. This, too, is something I’ve known as I’ve watched candidate after candidate and the party as a whole burn through volunteers and activists.
I watched a disabled 70-year-old be castigated by a paid DPVA staffer for not finishing a ninety-door “knocking” turf in the rain, asking her if she really wanted the Republicans to win- as if her “failure” alone was going to make the entire difference. Lip service is paid to the efforts of volunteers, but unless you have a big wallet or are working with rare candidates who give a damn, there’s no value there. But, again, anyone in politics for the attaboys is in the wrong business.
Lastly, though, I thought we all had an understanding: my opponent knew she was lying but was willing to do anything at all in the pursuit of power- a tale as old as time.
Let’s say, hypothetically, I had been made a “generous offer” to not run for office so as to clear the path for another candidate. If, as a stipulation of agreeing to that, I had indicated there would need to be a crooning of my progressive bona fides in order to set me up with a different open race that was coming up, it would’ve been immediately shouted “I thought I was pro-choice, but then I met Kellen Squire! Wow!”
I know that. You know that. We all know that. And we also know that if you get into politics, if you choose integrity over expedience, if you choose to run against someone who’s told people “if I lose this race, it’s all over for me”, against someone who has the money to stack behind that, you’re apt to get the Rove treatment.
And seeing that abortion, or any issue facing Virginia, is only useful insofar as it benefits her? Gasp! In similarly shocking news, water is wet- film at 11. Ho hum, time for us all to move on.
Instead, it looks like she not only felt enough heat to be obligated to try and explain her actions, but she also had to do it while shaking her head and going “Look what he made me do!”
So, I’m sure she won’t mind if I now feel obligated to clear the air a bit. It’s why almost all the things I’ve written here are able to be verified by anyone who wants to do the legwork.
The audio recordings I mentioned above don’t cover my former opponent in any glory whatsoever. And I’ve only hinted at the inside information we got about her campaign from people she considered to be in her “inner circle”, from Emily’s List, from the staff of current legislators, from current elected officials, and from other sources that will remain anonymous for the time being. I don’t want anyone to lose their job on my account, particularly now that it doesn’t matter anymore. Besides, I also don’t have any desire to curtail the ability for people to leak about what goes on in that camp.
However, I think it needs a few more years before I can release some of that information openly. It’ll let people move on with jobs and put some distance in-between leaking this information to us; give people the cover of plausible deniability. I’m not ever going to be relevant in politics again, so I’m not burning their cover on my account. I’m certainly not worth that, and my opponent absolutely isn’t worth it. So, while I’ve provided copies of the above information to a number of people and journalists already, I’ve got that information securely embargoed to ensure the safety of those involved.
Honestly, though, nobody will probably hear about all of those things, because they won’t be of any use if my former opponent’s dream job is being a member of the Virginia House of Delegates. I mean, these things like this would look pretty bad in contrast to, well… pretty much any other Democratic candidate in a primary. But they’re all infinitely better compared to any Republican. It’s why, despite everything else, I promised to vote for my former primary opponent in the November election. There was absolutely no way I was going to vote for a Republican, and our district is too blue to allow a “Tricia Cotham” to exist.
Besides, it’s not like anyone would ever openly tell people being a Delegate is “beneath them” and is only useful as a step on the way to other things. And even if they did, they certainly wouldn’t leave any evidence of that behind.
Right?
Right.
Special thanks to: Cari, Brooklyn, Austin, Mason, Debra, Marland, “Samanta”, Wil, Danny, Cynthia, Linda, Paige, Angela, Josh, Amanda, Kenny, Jim, Janelle, Sally, Ann, Kate, Nancy, Kelsey, Nathan, Rebecca, Brandon, Davis, Kathryn, Natalie, Josh, Jade, Susan, Sara, Jack, Paul, Jason, Abigail, Mike, Brian, Cyndi, Lili, Dolores, Dashad, Jenny, James, LJ, Ellen, Judy, Allison, Jerrod, Laura, Barbara, Sara, Chris, Joshua, Elly, Matt, Shannon, Oliver, Katie, Doug, Chris, Atieno, Dawn, Lindsey, Dell, Holly, Doreen, Heather, Jenna, Dawn, Adele, Zach, Annette, Meghin, Katie, Jennifer, Sarah, Kristen, Stephanie, Amanda, Erin, Adam, Carrie, Melissa, Phil, Aimee, Alex, Parisa, Ben, Pete, Anna, Roger, Cameron, Brandy, Rebecca, Mary, Bekah, Tristan, Donte, Rod, Kelly, Lisa, Carol, Brent, Lynlee, Eleanor, Patrick, Mary, Adele, Andria, Russell, Charlotte, Susan, David, Steve, Mark, Travis, Nicole, Ren, Mel, Andrew, Juanita, Andrea, Victor, Beverly, Matt, Mel, Tarina, Greg, Shelley, Lisa, Kerry, Justin, Chuck, Sean, Chloe, John, Stella, Molly, Brandy, Virginia, Dan, Jessica, Stacey, Cindy, Oliver, Stephen, Henry, Kyle, Giselle, Shelly, Steve, Lakshmi, Celeste, LRS, Virginia, Elly, David, Aimee, Jordan, Lily, Susanna, Peter, Colleen, Lee, Taikein, Luke, Larry, John, Gene, Jim, Jeremy, Amanda, Ebony, Sena, Ann, Dan, Juanita, Shannon, Zyahna, Wes, Ross, Tristan, Aditi, Tim, Seth, David, Lucas, Jordan, Bellamy, Zach, Matt, Shawn, Robert, Don, Tara, Anne, Veena, Rob, Ahna, Benjamin, Joe, Kat, Tracy, Fitz, Chloe, Sam, Candi, Tom, Ryan, Kim, Cyndi, Sydney, Clara, Hadrian, Tannis, Jackson, Juli, Kysen, Denise, Blasky, Brit, Dee, Spiff, and everyone else who thought the truth mattered.
