Why I’m Running

I graduated from high school in the 1990s, at a time when the American Dream still felt real. The economy was booming, democracy was ascendant, and for young people like me, the path to a good life was clear: work hard, get an education, buy a home, and start a family.

My own family lived that story. My mom left a dairy farm in Ohio to become a teacher. My dad worked summers at Bethlehem Steel to pay for college and later became a pastor. They taught my brother and me that if we worked hard enough, anything was possible.

As our oldest daughter approaches her own high school graduation, that promise feels increasingly out of reach for far too many families. We have built an economy where the wealthy do well while working people fall further behind. Those outcomes come from decades of policy decisions that had their successes but whose failures are now impossible to ignore.

You see signs of that struggle everywhere, especially in our schools, where kids show up hungry and working parents make so little that nearly 40 percent of SNAP recipients are in families with jobs. Economic precarity is fueling the division and resentment that are tearing our country apart. When people believe the game is rigged, they can be turned on one another, instead of against the systems that are failing them.

Every generation inherits the responsibility to protect and renew the American Dream, to establish justice, to promote the general welfare, and to secure a better future for those who come after. Right now, we are not meeting that responsibility, and that is why I am running.