In It to Win It: Mike Siegel Announces for TX-10 in 2020
On Sunday, a crowd showed up for Mike Siegel’s eagerly anticipated announcement and Day of Appreciation and Action. Supporters filled the rented seats and the extra chairs that were dragged in, stood in the back of the room and the lobby, and spread out in the building’s parking lot. Everyone — Mike Siegel, Campaign Manager Briana Burns, and the members of the crowd — seemed a little gobsmacked by the size and enthusiasm of the event.
It’s not every candidate that can bring out a crowd like that at this point in the election cycle — a good 22 months before Election Day.
Underscoring the campaign’s commitment to cultivating grassroots support and building coalitions, Briana Burns led the Appreciation part of the event by recognizing twenty-five organizations that helped power the campaign, including local Democratic groups, labor organizations, Indivisible groups, and more. (Full list at end of article.)
Mike then recounted some of the 2018 campaign’s successes:
· How — in a grotesquely gerrymandered district and facing one of the wealthiest members of Congress (a seven-time incumbent who in 2016 won re-election by 19 points) — he received 47% of the vote and held McCaul to 51%
· How the campaign beat all of its target “win numbers” — for instance, reaping a whopping 80,000 votes in Travis County, well above the targeted 65,000 votes and an eye-popping 50,000 more than McCaul received
· How the campaign brought national attention to voter suppression, specifically in Prairie View, Texas, and succeeded in removing obstacles to voting
· How — most importantly for the future — the campaign built the infrastructure necessary to win in 2020: a campaign of the people, with over a thousand volunteers, as well as events and staff in each of our gerrymandered district’s 9 (!) counties
Mike then reminded the crowd that political change takes time: “We were never going to flip this seat in one election cycle.” He praised Beto O’Rourke’s efforts to visit people in all 254 Texas counties and to mobilize citizens across the state, acknowledging that overturning decades of Republican control isn’t a one-shot process.
Guest speaker Jim Hightower told the crowd that he also lost his first election by a narrow percentage but went on to win his second campaign:
“I thank Mike Siegel for doing what he did — and being willing to do it again, which is how you achieve success in Texas politics. I lost my first statewide race at about the same percentage Mike did, 3 points, came right back, and won after that. Willie Nelson once told me that the early bird gets the worm, but it’s the second mouse that gets the cheese.”
Campaign staffer Jacob Aronowitz segued to the Action part of the event, encouraging the audience to sign up to help register and engage voters or to support legislative efforts to improve voting rights (e.g., Celia Israel’s HR1), healthcare (upcoming legislation to be filed by Gina Hinojosa), education, and infrastructure, especially in response to recent disasters affecting Texas.
Mike explained: The idea is showing up not just for elections but “showing up ALL the time” and helping TX-10 become dedicated to the Democratic process — and not only in an election year.
So . . . backing up: Who is Mike Siegel?
At an interview earlier in the week, over breakfast tacos at Cheko’s, Mike told me that he grew up in a working-class area and in a household where civic engagement was the norm. At 19, he took a year off of college to manage his father’s successful school board campaign, and he went on to work on several other campaigns, including a successful mayoral campaign in Oakland, California. Married and with two young children, he has worked as a teacher, an activist, and a civil rights lawyer. Here in Austin, he has worked for the City, in which capacity he sued Governor Abbott and the State of Texas over SB4, the anti-immigrant law passed by the Texas legislature in 2017.
This video shows highlights of his 2018 campaign.
Why run in Texas-10?
I asked him how he decided to run in the 2018 election. After all, winning in TX-10 would be a Herculean — many would say Quixotic — effort. Was this a pearl of a decision, slowly built up over time, or an epiphany? He replied,
The wake-up call came when we had this solid national health-care law, the Affordable Care Act, and folks like McCaul were fighting to repeal it without having anything to replace it. That just seemed to me beyond the ordinary selfish politics of conservatism (like ‘We’re only going to take care of ourselves’); this was more like ‘We’re going to actively take things away from people and shorten their lives, lead to the death of them and their family members . . . increasing mortality rates for no other reason than that they didn’t like [President Obama].’
Mike also told the crowd on Sunday about his to decision to run. He described what “real representation” should look like: “A representative should be available, should be accessible. A representative should listen to the people. A representative should fight for the needs of the people.” As many in the audience knew, Representative McCaul does not hold public town-hall meetings (Indivisible hosted one for “No-Town-Hall McCaul” last year, where he was represented by a cardboard cut-out) and is largely unavailable to his constituents. TX-10 Indivisible and the Rosedale Huddle have sent a respectful delegation to his office with questions for McCaul on a weekly basis for more than a year and have yet to meet with McCaul himself.
What does Mike Siegel stand for?
He almost lights up at this line of questioning, and in response quotes Gandhi’s “Be the change you want to see.” He cites these changes as his current priorities:
· Creating an equitable healthcare system via a program such as Medicare for all
· Ending the war on drugs, which he describes as a racially discriminatory system that dehumanizes our citizenry and wastes taxpayer money
· Protecting voting rights, especially in rural, black, and Hispanic communities, some of which had no early voting days in the 2018 election
· Enacting the Green New Deal, which he feels could simultaneously address climate change and bring high-quality jobs in new renewable technologies, especially in places like Harris County
As long as we’re talking, what about the shutdown?
“People are going to lose jobs, their families are going to be shattered, . . . and the shutdown will decrease confidence in our public institutions.” Mike went on with frank dismay, speaking of Trump’s efforts to “delegitimize the FBI, Congress, and the media, and to decrease public confidence in all of these institutions. . . . We need to strengthen them, not tear them down. . . . I feel like McConnell and Trump are tearing down our country to build the wall.”
Can he win in 2020?
We’ll find out. It’s going to take donors and volunteers willing to commit early in the game, with the stamina to stay engaged for almost two more years. In the meantime, Mike is assembling an impressive team of capable, earnest, and passionate staff and supporters. Briana quotes Hamilton: “This is not a moment; this is the movement.” At our interview, she described to me how after Trump was elected, we were all reminded of “everything we had taken for granted”: our democratic principles, the loyalty of our leaders to something other than personal aggrandizement and wealth, the very functioning of government. She and I agreed: Mike Siegel is not alone in wanting to restore common decency to our government.
Watch video of the Day of Appreciation and Action event.
List of organizations recognized by the campaign:
Travis County Democratic Party
