Like drinking from a firehose

The past year has been busier than I ever imagined. Running for Senate feels a little like drinking from a firehose. But I had a moment of free time today, and I wanted to reach out to tell you more about my decision to run for Senate.

Before I was a politician, I was a language arts teacher at a Title 1 middle school on the westside of San Antonio. Every day, my students struggled heroically to overcome poverty and systems designed to hold them back.

Growing up, I saw that same fight in my mother — a preacher’s daughter from Laredo who left home at 19. She moved up to Austin and met my birth father, whose drinking problem sometimes led to violence.

One night, he became abusive again, but that night, my mother’s love rose to meet it. She packed all our stuff into her little Ford Escort and took me to the hotel where she worked. The manager let us stay in one of the rooms until we found a small apartment of our own in East Austin.

Like my students, my mom was a fighter. And she passed that fighting spirit along to me.

I first ran for the Texas House in 2018 to fight for working people like my mom and my students. It was a race no one thought we could win, but together we flipped a district Donald Trump had won just two years earlier.

As a state legislator, I’ve led the fight against the billionaire mega-donors that have rigged the system against working Texans. And I’m the only member of the Texas Legislature who has never taken a dime of corporate PAC money.

Now, as those same billionaires and corporate mega-donors take over the federal government, we need more fighters in Washington who will take power back for working people.

So I stepped up to run — to challenge those at the top who pit neighbor against neighbor. They spend billions of dollars to rig the system against us and buy politicians who do their bidding. They’re attempting to do it again right now in Texas — to the tune of $170 million in outside spending against our movement.

It’s a staggering amount of money. We are spending money nearly as fast as we can raise it because I refuse to let them buy this seat.

That’s why Wednesday’s official FEC deadline is our most important one yet. It’s the first one since Republican super PACs started spending, and it’s our chance to prove that we will not let their plan succeed.

If you care about taking back Texas and putting an end to billionaires buying elections, I’m asking you to chip in any amount you can to power this campaign. We’re at risk of getting drowned out, so every dollar makes a difference.

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Those at the top are afraid of our people-powered movement. They know we can win. They know our collective power is an existential threat to the broken status quo they profit from.

We have five weeks to finish what we started. Let’s leave it all on the field.

James

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