There is no political bench in Tennessee because nobody built one.

The honest situation

The bench is empty on purpose.

The Tennessee Democratic Party doesn’t have a deep bench because nobody has invested in one. Talented people who could run for state House, city council, county commission, school board look at the landscape - the funding, the press hostility, the time commitment, the political class’s indifference to outsiders - and decide it’s not worth it. Nobody runs against the incumbent Republican. The state stays the way it is. The next cycle, the same calculation produces the same result.

This is the structural problem nobody else is fixing, and it is the one that quietly determines every other fight. The voting rights bills, the redistricting reform, the rural healthcare push - all of them depend on a state legislature different from the one Tennessee has now, and that state legislature depends on people choosing to run who currently don’t.

If this campaign gets one thing right beyond the seat itself, it has to be this: leave Tennessee with more people running for office than when I started, at every level. That outcome doesn’t depend on Congress acting. It depends on doing the work.

My pledge

The seat doesn’t belong to me. It belongs to the work.

This is one of six planks in the pledge. Every federal candidate in the country gets asked, on the record, whether they’ll sign the full document.

What I’ll do federally

Use the seat as a teaching platform.

This plank is mostly state and local work, because the bench has to be built locally. But the federal seat is a megaphone, and how it gets used matters.

• Constituent services treated as one of the office’s central jobs. Casework on VA, Social Security, Medicare, immigration, IRS. Too many constituents experience federal casework as slow, confusing, and opaque. A well-run office is transformative on its own and demonstrates that government can actually help.
• Publish how the job works. The office hours, the curriculum, and the transparency reports are also documentation - this is what a House office can do, here’s how it works, here’s how someone else could run a better one.
• Earmarks and federal advocacy used as a teaching tool. The Community Project Funding process, the agency advocacy, the federal letters of support - all of it gets documented publicly so the next Tennessee candidate doesn’t have to learn it from scratch.
• Cosponsor and vote for the broader democracy-reform package. The Freedom to Vote Act, redistricting reform, campaign finance reform. The bench gets bigger faster when the structural conditions are less hostile to running.

What I’ll do at the state and local level

The fix is people. The work is finding them and helping them.

This is where most of the actual bench-building has to happen. None of it requires Congress to act. All of it requires consistent effort across cycles.

• Direct mentorship of candidates running for state House and local office in TN-5. The federal seat doesn’t matter if there’s no bench underneath it. State legislative races, county commission, school board, city council. Real time from the campaign and the office - not a one-time press appearance, but ongoing support.
• Slate-building for uncontested races. Too many races in TN-5 go uncontested every cycle, and the exact count should be published, seat by seat. That changes. Identify the seats, recruit candidates, help with filing paperwork, and put the slate on this site.
• The DIY politics curriculum, in public. Tennessee-specific. Free. Updated as election law and party rules change. Available to anyone who wants to run for anything in this district, regardless of whether they’ve ever been part of a Democratic Party organization before.
• Local candidate office hours. Separate from the constituent office hours. A time and place where someone thinking about running can show up and ask basic questions without committing to anything.

What I’ll push at the party level

The party has to invest in the bench it claims it doesn’t have.

The Tennessee Democratic Party currently has limited capacity to recruit and support candidates in many parts of the state. Some of that is funding. Some of it is choice. The party could commit to fielding a candidate in every state legislative race and every federal race in Tennessee, even where the odds are bad, on the theory that contesting the seat is itself the work. A party that doesn’t contest a race doesn’t get to claim its bench is empty by accident.

The party could also adopt training and mentorship as a standing program, not a one-off cycle initiative. Other state parties have. Tennessee’s could too.

The pushback I’m ready for

“Recruiting candidates isn’t a member of Congress’s job. Pass bills.”

This is the conventional version of the job description, and it is part of why the Tennessee Democratic bench is in the shape it’s in. The version of the job that treats passing bills as the entire mandate produces members of Congress who are excellent at one institution and indifferent to the political ecosystem outside it. Tennessee has been served by that version for a long time. The bench shows the result.

The whole argument of this campaign is that the system gets fixed when regular people work it from every angle, not when one savior in Washington passes a magic bill. Building the bench is the proof of that argument. If a member of Congress can’t spend any time on it because of how the job is conventionally defined, the conventional definition is wrong. The job is whatever the person doing it makes it. I am proposing to make this part of it on purpose.

And nothing about office hours, a published curriculum, or mentoring local candidates conflicts with the legislative work. They’re additive. The members of Congress who cite a lack of time are usually citing a lack of will.