Running blue in a red state: Why it’s important

Consider the story of the person who runs toward a car crash or into a burning building. Tripp Narup would never equate what he is doing with an act of heroism, but I’m happy to do so. The impulse is pretty much the same.

He’s not trying to save an individual’s life but the life of the Democratic Party in his part of Iowa.

Full disclosure: I know Tripp Narup well. He’s a friend, a fellow poet and a former colleague in medical publishing. At work, he was a knowledgeable and kind manager, who championed making our content more accessible for consumers, especially students. (His desire to help others and level the educational playing field might make him seem “woke” to some on the right.)

Narup ran for the state Senate seat in Iowa’s 9th district last year because when he had voted previously, there was no one for him to vote for. No Democrat had even bothered to run. (According to Narup, only 17% of voters in his district are registered Democrats.) He was “soundly defeated,” but now has bigger plans to help Democrats get their message out to southwest Iowa voters. Here’s what he told me in an email exchange:

After losing spectacularly for the Senate, I have now started a PAC to raise money to support (as yet undetermined) candidates to run for four [state] House seats and one open Senate seat. The plan is to raise $2,000 per candidate as an enticement to get someone to step up and run. Any additional money will be used to run ads pointing out the many sins of our current state senators representatives. Now this may strike you as small potatoes (these are farming districts, after all), but my whole campaign cost less than $6,000 and I paid for a third of it. “Big campaign money” around here is $10,000 or so. (In farm terms, that’s about 7 cows.) Compared to big-city politics, this is quaint and kind of endearing.

It’s axiomatic that you cannot win if you do not play the game. Republicans have very successfully over the past few decades encouraged candidates to run at every level, from Congress down to local school boards. Democrats need to start doing the same everywhere, and Narup is doing what he can in his area of Iowa.

That’s basically what filmmaker and activist Michael Moore has been advocating for some time. Moore notes that when he first moved to his area of Michigan, it was almost entirely Republican. There were few registered Democrats. People of different political views didn’t realize they had a community, until they started to reach out to each other and organize. From Moore’s Rumble podcast:

One of the lessons I learned over the years is that there are always more of us than you realize. A lot of people just give up or they go into hiding or they say “I don’t care about politics” or “I just live in a Republican area and there’s nothing I can do.” So, I know you’re thinking, “Oh, Mike, Mike, you don’t understand, I live here. I’m in Oklahoma, I’m in Arkansas.” Yeah, OK. Well, you know, it’s not exactly how we think this is in this country, because we are the majority. The majority of Americans agree with us on the issues, from the climate catastrophe to minimum wage to paid leave to health care. Go down the whole damned list. The majority of Americans are with us.

As Walt Whitman wrote in “Leaves of Grass,” (the 1855 first version is the best), our uniquely expansive democratic republic depended on our friendliness with each other. We could argue and squabble and disagree, but we were never supposed to hate one another. We needed to see God not as a punishing patriarchal figure as a glorious presence in everything and to do our utmost to follow the main message of Jesus, which is without question a collectivist one: That which you do to the least of mine, you do also to me.

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As if to exemplify this message, the man Tripp Narup ran against for that state Senate seat belongs to the same Presbyterian church as Narup. They literally both sang in the choir. No rancor, no ill will. Just American politics as it was for many decades, and perhaps could be again. 

Reasonable people who believe in the basic tenets of democracy and who, as Michael Moore observes, share the opinions of a large majority of their fellow Americans, should step up and run for office. Even in the most hopeless circumstances, even in places where Democrats won’t win this election or the next one or the one after that. No more ceding ground and conceding defeat in advance. It’s time to win back, little by little, the places that have been lost.

Tripp Narup’s defeat was one very small but genuinely inspiring battle in that much longer struggle. Now he’s starting his PAC aimed at funding many more Democratic candidates like him in deep-red corners of Iowa. Most of them will lose. But sooner or later, one of them will win.