Julie Oliver Is Running to Flip the Jalapeño Heart of Texas Blue
Julie Oliver Is Running to Flip the Jalapeño Heart of Texas Blue
She's going bold.
Welcome to a special Tuesday evening edition of Progressives Everywhere!
There is now less than one week until Election Day and over 69 million Americans have already cast their votes. We’re in full-on GOTV mode, but there’s one person you still need to meet, a candidate running a winnable campaign that progressives should absolutely support…
NBC News officially moved Texas to “toss-up” status today, indicating that Joe Biden has something close to a 50/50 chance of winning a state that used to be a Republican anchor. And if he does, a lot of the credit will go to remarkable candidates like Julie Oliver, who is running herself to flip the state’s 25th Congressional district.
The district is a product of egregious gerrymandering, so much so that despite all the focus on Texas, no one paid all that much attention when Oliver first ran in 2018. We covered the race here at Progressives Everywhere anyway — she was just too inspiring and impressive a candidate to ignore. And Oliver way exceeded expectations, eventually losing by less than 9 points, the first time a Democrat had come within single digits in the district since it was reshaped by Gov. Rick Perry (some years, there wasn’t even a Democrat on the ballot).
Now, Oliver has a legit chance to finish the job and flip the district blue. To be transparent, I’d be rooting for her no matter what, given her party affiliation and the fact that she’s in Texas. But Oliver is also running a full-on progressive campaign — she’s proudly in favor of Medicare for All and the Green New Deal, for example — and is devoting more of her life to the cause not because she ever wanted to be a politician, but because she feels the moral calling to help in such dire times.
“I'll be honest with you, after the 2018 election, I felt like, Oh my gosh, I didn't do everything I could I have done and I let people down,” she told me earlier this week. “I just felt this tremendous weight on my shoulders. I looked at my husband in March [2019] and was like, ‘Honey, I have a terrible idea. I think I'm gonna run for Congress again.’ And he was very apprehensive because it's a huge family commitment.”
First, it’s absurd to think she let anyone down, but Julie Oliver is pretty used to defying the odds — she’s done it all throughout her life. You can read her story here, but here are the basics: Oliver grew up poor, dropped out of high school and ran away from home, then got pregnant at 17 years old. She moved back home on the condition that she continue her education, which she did all the way through law school.
Now she’s a mother of four, a successful executive, and a candidate running a smart, data-driven campaign for Congress. And a campaign with really good ads:
The first thing that Oliver did after the conversation about running again was research whether there was a viable path to victory. She met with a friend and together they analyzed the 2018 election results, combing through the data to see where they might be able to turn out or swing more votes in 2020.
Oliver’s goal is to turn out more voters in suburban Travis County and Hays County while cutting into Williams’ margins in the much more red Johnson County. She’s even running to get the veteran-heavy Bell County to get out and vote, calling it the campaign’s “secret weapon.”
(The fact that she’s running against Roger Williams, a slick Trumpian millionaire Republican who took millions in PPP money for his car dealership while the rest of the district missed out on stimulus money, makes it a little bit easier, too.)
It’s unconscionable that there are so many (13!) large counties in the district, but that’s the power of gerrymandering. The 25th district stretches from Fort Worth down to Austin, covering nearly 2500 square miles. The shape of the district is preposterous — as Oliver puts it, “it looks like somebody took a jalapeño and smashed it on top of the middle of Texas and then pixelated the edges.”
Given the fact that the district was engineered to be a GOP stronghold, you’d expect Oliver to play it cautious with her policy prescriptions, as many Democrats in the state have done. But she sees it the other way around — Texas has long been turning purple, demographics are working in Democrats’ favor, and people are looking for major change.
Before COVID hit, Texas already had the most uninsured people of any state, and that number has spiked during the pandemic — at this point, just about 30% of all Texans under the age of 65 don’t have health insurance. As a former healthcare executive, Oliver says she “knows how to explain Medicare for All” in a way that makes the problems with the convoluted and indubitably stupid way medical coverage is financed easy to understand.
And let’s be real, no matter their political convictions, people aren’t clamoring to deal with Aetna or Blue Cross Blue Shield.
“People want health care coverage, they don't want a health insurance company,” Oliver says. “In fact, I have yet to meet the person who actually likes to be on the phone with their insurance company. If they loved their insurance company that much, then you would find somebody who likes to talk to the insurance company. And so far, I haven't found that person.”
Instead, she hears story after story from people who are drowning in medical debt, desperate just to even consolidate the bills they get from various providers, let alone not have to go into financial ruin to deal with an emergency. One family told her on the campaign trail that they lost their employer-based insurance due to the pandemic, which has put them on the hook for the tens of thousands of dollars being billed for their young child’s cancer treatments.
“It’s just so sad that we're in a pandemic, you have a child with cancer, the last thing you should be thinking about is, oh my god, how are we going to pay for this?” she says.
Early voting has already started in Texas, with a record-setting 8 million ballots already filed. Oliver’s campaign is running TV ads and fanning out across the massive district to get out the vote with canvassing, dropping off literature at people’s doors in as many target areas as possible. It’s also working with Sisters United, a data-driven organization in Texas that tries to turn out women who are registered to vote but rarely do so.
And with a week left, she’s not only feeling good about her chances, but also satisfied that she won’t have any regrets this time around.
“I can tell you that two years ago when I ran, the week before the election, I was like, Oh my gosh, I need three more months to campaign,” Oliver says. “I can honestly say that I feel like we have done absolutely everything you could possibly do, especially in a pandemic. It’s just so cool, feeling like, wow, we've really connected with hundreds of thousands of voters. It's amazing.”
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Important News You Need to Know
Supreme Court and voting rights: There has been a flurry of Supreme Court decisions (and a few challenges) over the last 24 hours. Those decisions will have real implications for how people vote and sadly, whether those votes will be counted. Let’s break them down:
The big headline last night came nestled inside the Supreme Court’s decision to reject a request to extend the absentee ballot deadline in Wisconsin past November 3rd. Brett Kavanaugh, showing the same sort of dignity and even-handedness that he displayed during his confirmation hearings, all but signaled that he would be willing to toss out tens of thousands of valid votes if it would help Trump win the election.
Specifically, he made a legally dubious argument that it was in the best interest of states to know the winner of the election on the night of November 3rd. This is the sort of specious logic that a hack TV producer would make, not an actual Supreme Court justice. Then again, we have a hack reality TV star as president, so maybe it’s not too surprising.
This doesn’t just impact Wisconsin — it’s clear now that SCOTUS, especially with Amy Coney Barrett having officially stolen RBG’s seat, could very well cut off all ballots not delivered by Election Day, no matter a state’s standing laws. So now the race is on to get ballots in ASAP — at this point, if you haven’t yet voted, either do it in person or return your mail-in ballot to a drop box or election board office. You can find the information you need to do so right here.
With Barett now on the court, in fact, Pennsylvania Republicans are now pushing SCOTUS to look again at the decision it made just last week, even ignoring the proper legal process to do so.
Last week, Justice Roberts joined the liberal justices to refuse to hear an appeal of a PA State Supreme Court decision that affirmed an extended absentee ballot delivery deadline. SCOTUS tends to not touch State Supreme Court rulings these days, given its majority’s supposed embrace of “federalism,” but four conservative justices had no problem tossing aside that principle when it presented the opportunity to disenfranchise voters. They hate voting!
As a result, despite their newfound willingness to toss federalism aside, these radical right-wing justices would have no interest in overturning this new decision by the Texas Supreme Court, since it disenfranchises lots of people.
Meanwhile, an ambitious Michigan judge just overturned a ban on bringing guns to polling places. Because guns are obviously necessary while waiting to vote. It’s not like it’s infested with radicals who want to kidnap the governor or anything. (Read Gretchen Whitmer on that terrifying event here.)
Here’s some nice news:
I don’t want to read too much into early voting results, but I like these statistics.
Money Bomb From Bloomberg: This would have been more effective a few weeks ago, considering the sheer number of early votes cast, but Michael Bloomberg dropping $15 million more on races in Texas and Ohio certainly isn’t a bad thing.
I mean, beyond the fact that we should have publicly financed campaigns and outside spending should be limited, of course.
New York: If you’ve yet to vote in New York State, remember to vote for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris so on the Working Families Party line. It’s what good progressives do. And New York progressives, in particular, are very charming (and no I’m not just talking about myself):
Not Very Nice: I loved the new Borat movie, but I do wish Sacha Baron Cohen would pay the non-actors more (or at least the good ones). If you’ve seen the movie and loved the social worker who helps out Borat’s daughter, you should think about helping her out a bit — she’s unemployed right now due to COVID.
Fake News: When we’re done with this election, we’re going to have to take a serious look at the death of local journalism in the United States. It’s not just an economic or community issue, but one that is actively reshaping the country’s grip on reality and the integrity of its elections.
Last week, the New York Times published a long investigation into massive mills of right-wing faux-news sites that served to peddle misinformation and inject lies favorable to the GOP into the national discourse. Today, the Texas Observer went deeper into Metric Media, the leading right-wing nonsense company, which has pumped out over 1200 of the quasi-quaint garbage factories, with 56 Republican-leaning fake news websites in Texas alone.
What we really need to be doing is amplifying bold and accountable progressive newsletters…
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