On Choice

I’d like to start off this piece by asking for your forgiveness. It’s been a while since I’ve written, not from a lack of desire or topics to write about—but a lack of time. Not a worthy excuse, but an accurate one. My apologies!

The year 2022 was a challenging one for me. I turned 50, I broke a bone for the first time in my life, and I joined the Forward Party. Well, “joined” is a bit strong. “Was forced into” is closer to the mark. I didn’t really have a choice. I was part of the comms team at the Renew America Movement (RAM), and in July of that year, RAM and the Serve America Movement (also known as the SAM Party) merged into Forward. The party had been founded the year before by former presidential and mayoral candidate Andrew Yang.

The merger followed a few months of discussions and two in-person gatherings, one in New York City and the other in Washington, D.C. I attended the latter, which incidentally took place during the same historic week that the Supreme Court handed down the Dobbs decision. Yang was there. So were David Jolly from the SAM Party; Miles Taylor, my boss at RAM; and an interesting mix of political folks you’d know—and many you wouldn’t—from across the political spectrum.

Theoretically, I should have been thrilled. The idea of forming a legitimate new third party was intriguing to me from the day Donald Trump became the Republican nominee in 2016. To this day, I still believe Americans deserve more choices at the ballot box. And the idea of being involved in the creation of one from the ground floor should have been exciting.

But the truth is, I was disappointed. I liked RAM. I liked my role there. I liked my coworkers (well, all but one—but that’s a story for another time). Most of all, I liked our mission, which was to support common-sense, consensus-building candidates who were firmly pro-democracy and anti-extremism—and who were challenging MAGA candidates head-on.

Beyond the personal, the Forward Party just didn’t make much ideological sense to me. What did a bunch of moderate ex-Republicans have in common with a guy who ran a presidential campaign based almost entirely around universal basic income? Plus, the original Forward Party website, prior to the merger, said Forward would be the “crypto party.” I wanted no parts of that.

And my biggest concern of all? The upcoming 2022 and 2024 elections. RAM would have been fully focused on fighting MAGA, not muddying the waters with a third party that could conceivably split the pro-democracy vote at a desperate moment. In my view, the timing was dreadful.

So just quit, right? Well, it wasn’t quite that easy…

Broken and Bewildered

I had a long-standing vacation on the calendar that happened to coincide with the planned public announcement of the merger. I got lucky in that I missed not only an organizational launch my heart most certainly was not in, but also all the craziness surrounding it. I felt kind of bad about it, but mostly I was relieved. Plus, it was the first week-long family vacation we’d taken in about five years, due to conflicting schedules, various family obligations, and of course, Covid. So I was really looking forward to it (no pun intended).

My good fortune didn’t last long. At the very end of that otherwise lovely vacation, I broke my ankle. I wish I could say I did it while surfing or hiking or doing something athletically demanding. But no. At 10 pm on the night before we left, I attempted to step off a curb into my husband’s truck while holding two cups of rapidly melting ice cream—one in each hand. I don’t know why I thought I could do it, but I couldn’t. When I stepped back again for leverage, my foot landed on a crack in the concrete and went sideways. For a brief moment, I thought I could right the ship, but then, down I went, ice cream and all, straight down in a heap on my turned ankle. It was pretty ugly. Both “knobs” of my left ankle were broken—the side against the curb was in pieces—and I needed plate-and-screw surgery to repair it six days later. Ugh.

Long story short, I had no choice. I couldn’t leave my job because I needed the health insurance to pay for my ongoing treatment and physical therapy. So for the time being, I was stuck. Over the next few months, as my bones slowly healed (much too slowly, from my vantage point), I tried to figure out my new role. Forward kindly sent me flowers after my surgery, and everyone there was super nice. But work-wise, I felt kind of invisible.

If you’ve never been involved in a merger, it can feel a bit like Lord of the Flies at times, especially when there’s no clear organizational plan. We were all thrown onto this island without much direction. Suddenly I had to prove myself among all these young and talented people when I felt the least capable of doing it. I was old and irrelevant.

Frustration and Friendship

Not surprisingly, I found myself becoming resentful about the whole situation. Forward was getting hammered in the press—and with good reason, in my humble opinion. We never should have launched 100 days before a critical midterm election. That was plain as day to me from the jump. We had some brilliant political minds on our advisory board. How could they not see something so obvious, I wondered.

From my perspective, the better choice would have been to let the midterms play out first. The post-election media cycle would roll into the holidays, and then a January launch, with messaging built around whatever the election results might be, would be ideal. It also would give our organization more time to prep, and allow our staff to gel into a cohesive unit, with well-defined responsibilities we were 100% ready to execute on. Alas, the powers that be chose a different route.

While leadership’s choices sometimes confounded me, I came to love the people I worked with. We were all in the same boat, and instead of turning on one another, we learned to lean on each other and row together. Even though we had some significant policy differences, we respected one another and found room for compromise. And most importantly, we were in it for the right reasons.

Not yet two years removed from the Jan. 6 Capitol attack, we truly believed we could reform the system and prevent the sort of abuses that had led our politics to such a grave state. Over time, I came to understand and appreciate what Forward was trying to do. The goal wasn’t a uniform national platform but access to the ballot and a muscular fundraising apparatus for decent, pro-democracy, independent candidates with a range of political views. In other words, an opportunity to compete in the same league as the two major parties.

So why haven’t we gotten there yet? How did we end up in this nightmare known as America 2025, in which a President who previously tried to overturn an election and incited an insurrection has eliminated large swaths of the federal government; imposed illegal tariffs; launched a crypto scheme to profit off the office; unleashed a masked army of unidentified federal agents and the military on our streets; convinced red states to redistrict mid-decade; commandeered the Department of Justice to go after his political enemies on spurious charges; sued media organizations, defunded universities, and rescinded visas for speech he doesn’t like; ordered late-night comedians to be fired (unsuccessfully so far, thankfully); unilaterally demolished the East Wing of the White House; sought to shield pedophiles—possibly including himself—from justice; and so, so much more?

As we all know much too well, a thorny combination of factors seemed to conspire against American democracy over the past five years that no fledgling new party could possibly fight, even in the best of circumstances. Practically speaking, starting a new party is hard. Because elections are state-run, every state has its own rules, and those rules, to varying degrees, are designed to protect the status quo. And then, of course, there’s money. It always comes down to that, doesn’t it? Our budget was nowhere near where it needed to be in those very early days.

But there’s more. People often say, Why isn’t anyone doing anything? Where are our leaders? And I get it. I always had the quaint idea that folks in power had a lot of wisdom, and the confidence they projected was based on that wisdom. They knew what to do and would do it, and everyone else would follow. But of all the things I’ve learned from working in this field, this is the thing that has surprised me the most: they aren’t who you think they are. They aren’t who you see on TV. They aren’t who you hear on podcasts. They aren’t who speaks at conferences. Not totally anyway.

I’m not suggesting they’re frauds or bad people. Quite the opposite. Most are genuinely trying to do the right thing. Yet, despite all of their ambition, years of experience, and proximity to power, underneath it all, they are just as freaked out and unsure of what to do as the rest of us. In fact, I sometimes think they’re even more disoriented and uncertain than we ordinary folk are, because they actually worked within the system that we all assumed would protect us. They committed their lives to it in ways we did not.

So yes, many good people are trying, but sometimes trying just isn’t enough. That look behind the curtain has been the most eye-opening part for me. No one is going to save us. It’s just us. I guess that’s why my Forward experience was so frustrating. I had to find that out the hard way—and not by choice.

Free and Forging Ahead

Eventually all the challenges of 2022 were resolved. As the calendar changed to 2023, I could finally walk unassisted again. As I turned 51 that winter, I began to see my age as an asset rather than a liability. And as spring became summer, I left the Forward Party. Along with several other members of the crew that was there at the beginning, I was laid off unceremoniously on a Thursday afternoon.

The party just wasn’t pulling in the anticipated funding, and the staff was cut down to the bone. For me, it was a blessing. I was able to use my time and severance to search for something new—something of my own choosing. A dazzling rainbow appeared in the sky shortly after I got the news, seeming to confirm that everything would be okay. Onto the next adventure in my unlikely career in politics.

Though my affiliation with Forward wasn’t by choice, I don’t regret the experience. I met some great people whom I still consider friends. And I learned important lessons about how deliberately difficult it is to build a political party from scratch in this country. The two-party system is a tough nut to crack indeed. Around the time I left, Forward scaled down its big national plans to focus on state and local. It was a smart choice. It enabled them to build from the bottom up, which was the stated plan all along.

As a matter of fact, Forward endorsed a candidate for sheriff in my county in the election earlier this month. Democrat Danny Ceisler was facing down incumbent Fred Harran, a Republican, who had made the dubious choice to work with ICE on federal operations in our communities. That didn’t sit well with a lot of folks, who believe our sheriff should be focused on serving and protecting us, not kowtowing to the Trump White House. I heard Ceisler speak at a No Kings rally. He was very impressive. The Forward Party thought so too and endorsed him. Against some pretty stiff odds, Ceisler won.

Good choice.