Folks writing postcards: a common sight at the local Democratic Party county headquarters. When I started this campaign, I knew we had an uphill battle. TX-10 is a sprawling, Republican-leaning district that most political observers had written off before we even started. We haven’t had the big donors, national...

I often get asked whether I’m a progressive or a moderate. I like to joke that I live in the radical middle. And most folks I meet in our district live there too. I don’t say that because I split the difference on every issue, because I don’t. Nor do I say it because I think the right answer is always halfway...

Photo Credit: Navy Petty Officer 1st Class Eric Brann This weekend, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth came to Congressional District 10 for a series of visits. It wasn’t surprising considering our district sits at the intersection of defense innovation and military service. Secretary Hegseth saw the remarkable work...

Lori Grinker / Contact Press Images I was a freshman in high school on September 11, 2001. Like millions of Americans, my family was glued to the television for days. Information came in bits and pieces. We watched the towers fall over and over. We watched firefighters dig through the rubble. We watched walls and...

My kids went back to school this month, and it reminded me how much of our lives - and our communities - we entrust to public schools. For me, back-to-school also brings back memories of growing up in a house with two teachers. My mom taught middle school English for more than 40 years. My dad taught high school art...

I grew up in Northern Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C. My parents were public school teachers, and like a lot of kids in the area, I saw Washington on field trips and visits to museums. With my mom in front of the Capitol circa early 90s (if the outfit didn’t give it away). As a kid, I thought Washington...

I took my husband to the ER earlier this week. He’d been sick for days and just kept getting worse. Thankfully, he’s okay. And thankfully, we have good health insurance through his employer. But as we sat in the ER while his doctor ordered test after test, scans, and labs, I found myself thinking about how different...

Political campaigns are chock full of promises. The federal budget is where promises collide with reality. I’ve spent a lot of my career immersed in budgets. And not because I love spreadsheets - though business school certainly taught me to appreciate a good one - but because budgets force us to ask: What are we...

One of the things I’m proudest of this summer isn’t just how many doors our team is knocking. It’s how we’re knocking them. We’ve trained dozens of students and volunteers in “deep canvassing,” an approach to voter outreach built on the idea that if you want to represent people, you should spend more time...

My husband came to this country as a teenager with no money and no safety net. He was an awkward foreign kid trying to find his place. Over time, he fell in love with America: its opportunities, its freedoms, and the idea that hard work could allow him to build the life he wanted. But he also knows what it feels...

Next month, our family’s beloved preschool will close its doors. Both of our kids started in daycare when they were just 11 weeks old. Like so many working parents, we spent many weeks searching for a place we could trust. At our preschool, we found more than child care. We found a village. For the last seven years,...

This week, Americans will celebrate the 250th anniversary of our nation’s founding, when a group of colonists put forward a revolutionary idea: that government answers to the people, not the other way around. This anniversary has me thinking less about what the Founders gave us and more about what they asked of us -...