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Draft Nebraska Politics

Angie Philips is Running for Senate!

Where is Ben Sasse these days? Who knows?! The senator has been a no-show for Nebraskans in recent years, and one of his constituents has finally had enough of this disappearing act. Angie Philips has decided to take on Ben Sasse in the upcoming Senate race in order to give Nebraskans a senator who is rooted in our community and shows up for Nebraskans when they need her. Seeing Red caught up with Angie to find out more about her and her campaign.

“I’m going to run against him”

Angie’s decision to run against Sasse came from precisely one of those moments when the junior Senator from Nebraska couldn’t be bothered to show up for his constituents. In 2018, Angie traveled to Washington along with two dozen sexual assault survivors of various political and sex/gender orientations.  They made the trip across the country to speak with Senators Sasse and Fisher before Kavanagh hearings, to ask them to listen to their experiences and “really think about the message that we were sending to women and sexual assault survivors and really society as a whole, about listening to and believing women,” Angie said.  But when they got there, neither Fisher nor Sasse could be bothered to meet with them.  “We totally got blown off. They had us speak with their staff, they wouldn’t meet with us.  It was just really depressing.” 

After the hearings, both Nebraska senators voted quickly to move the nomination ahead, Angie felt “betrayed”.  “I couldn’t even stay in DC at that point . . . We had all gone up there and we had all this motivation to make change and couldn’t even get heard. . . The whole way home I just kept thinking out how our representatives are supposed to be our voice in DC.  Whether they agree with us or don’t agree with us they’re supposed to listen to us.  And when they hold that type of authority, that type of power, they’re in that position, and then they won’t listen to us, they won’t even step into our communities, there’s no way they can advocate for us in DC.  They’re silencing our voice and they’re preventing us from the right to participate freely in our democracy.”  And so Angie made a decision, “I’m going to make him listen to us, I’m going to run against him if that’s what it takes.” 

People are more important than money

One of the reasons politicians don’t show up for their constituents is because they’re too busy catering to the needs of the wealthy donors and corporations that fund their campaigns.  The need for enormous amounts of money to run for office in America is part of the corruption which is rotting American democracy from the inside out.  We asked Angie how she was going to avoid being beholden to the powerful and monied interests that our current senators are clearly captured by. 

Angie explained that when she first started talking to people about running, “there was a lot of ‘you need to spend 8 hours a day calling people asking for money!’.”  But getting into a fundraising arms race with Sasse seemed pointless.  “I just kept thinking, you know, first of all, Senator Sasse had three million dollars to start this before he even announced.  And he’s expected to raise up to eight million dollars.  Most of that money doesn’t even come from Nebraska.”  Indeed, between 2013 and 2019, nearly two million of Sasse’s donations came from urban centers like Washington, DC, New York City, Chicago, and Houston. In the face of this, Angie latched onto the critical point: “it’s not a dollar amount I need, it’s a vote . . . And whether someone gives me $5000 or $0, they still have that one vote.  So I’m running a campaign that’s very people focused.”  And she’s got a plan to win. 

Angie summed up her campaign strategy by announcing that “I’m going to do what women and working class people do all the time.  We’re going to out budget him and out work him.” 

“I’m going to do what women and working class people do all the time. We’re going to out budget him and out work him.”

Angie believes we need to rethink the battle in front of us.  “This Democrat versus Republican narrative is very dangerous.  I really think it’s more the people versus the plutocracy.”  And she’s not buying the recycled redbaiting being deployed by Sasse and other Republicans right now.  “I think a lot of the attempts to scare us about socialism and things like that” are premised on our fear of losing our democracy, “when in all actuality our democracy is already at threat, it’s already at risk . . . they can make us focus on socialism while blaming this group or that group and that group” and in the meantime, “they can just reign in all their riches and money and power. So I think we need to fight that.”

Talking to Everyone, From West to East

“If we want to see a win in 2020, we have to be the most inclusive, diverse, and unified that we have ever been,” Angie pronounced.  There are lots of disenfranchised and disengaged communities all across Nebraska, and her campaign will be targeted on bringing those people into the election. 

“As I help[ed] with campaigns, and stuff like that, one of the things that I frequently hear, and this has been from both sides, the Democrats and the Republicans, is don’t worry about west of North Platte.  And that upsets me, because my home, my family is west of North Platte. . .  I understand that we may not always agree on everything but they have legitimate concerns out there that deserve to be heard.”

Those communities out west are also far more diverse, religiously, racially, and in terms of sexual orientation, than people think, Angie said.  To those of us who might be inclined to write off everyone west of North Platte as racist bigots, Angie reminds us that “while you see racism and sexism in rural communities, we also have that in urban areas. . .We have to be supportive of all democrats, all people from Nebraska.”  This stance isn’t taken lightly.  Angie grew up in the small town of Grant, Nebraska, near Ogallala, and while she was living there her brother came out as gay.  She still remembers challenges he faced, and “to be honest, [the] harassment and bullying.  I remember the feeling of loneliness out there.”  Despite these memories, or perhaps because of them, Angie insists that we can all find common ground.  And “even if I disagree agree with you, I can still care about you as a human.” 

Because in the end, we’re all in this state together. “Because rural areas tend to be more red and urban areas tend to be more blue . . . we have a tendency to kind of battle against each other, and I think that we need to recognize that we are connected and that we run together. . . We are reliant on each other.”

“I definitely think it’s a mistake to act as though everybody out there is a bunch of racist sexist bigots and ignore them or not pay attention,” Angie insisted.  “I think the Democrats feel like there’s not enough support out there to make it worth the time and energy and I think that the Republicans take their vote for granted.  And so nobody’s out there, nobody’s talking to them.  Really if I’m in North Omaha, I hear, ‘we don’t have a senator, he doesn’t step foot here’, and if I’m in Grant I hear, ‘we don’t have a senator, he doesn’t step foot here’.”

Angie’s looking forward to returning to Grant and visiting many other towns across the state, as well as deepening her long-standing connections to her North Omaha neighbors and preparing to advocate for all of us in Washington.

Advocating for Nebraskans

Health and Education

Angie worries sometimes that “we move too far to the middle and lose our progressive folks and maybe fall down on our values a little.”  She plans to uphold those values by advocating for free public higher education and Medicare for All.

She’ll be announcing a more detailed policy position next year after she’s had more time to talk to Nebraskans and study the details involved in such positions.  But she’s committed to increasing Nebraskans access to health care and a college education. 

In terms of healthcare, Angie supports Medicare for All, and is “leaning towards getting rid of private healthcare altogether.”  But she’ll be talking to people around the state about insurance, and what the changes might mean for us in the short and long term.  She emphasizes the need to look at accessibility as well, particularly for rural areas.  “When we talk about getting educators and psychiatrists and medical personnel out to rural Nebraska, we have a tendency to try to incentivize people from the city to go to rural Nebraska and that hasn’t been working because it’s not necessarily a good fit. . . What we should be doing is incentivizing rural children and young adults to get these degrees and get these educations to either take back to their community or find ways that they can stay in their communities as they build and develop.”

Angie condemned the hostility with which our current disaster of a governor has treated the state’s education system, noting how it’s costing the people of Nebraska.  “The Governor has taken so much money from UNL some of their programs have closed down,” she said, shaking her head.  “I have a friend from Western Nebraska, [and] her daughter was planning on going to UNL, and entering a program and then most likely returning home.  But because her program got closed down she’s now [going] out of state. So that’s out of state tuition.  Odds are she goes to college there, makes networking [connections] there . . . who knows if she’ll even come back?”

Climate Change and Environmental Justice

Like any sane and responsible individual, Angie believes we need to be tackling climate change right now.  She highlighted the need to act with an eye firmly fixed on environmental justice.  She tells a story from her own neighborhood in North Omaha, where her neighbors are primarily working class people of color.  “We still have a coal burning plant and it had five towers and they knocked down three of them, and it’s taking them forever to get rid of those last two. Meanwhile in North Omaha our kids are more likely to have asthma, our elderly folks are more likely to struggle with heart disease and respiratory problems.  So yes, we need to address climate change because clearly that’s going to have grave effects, it already is—look at the flooding and weather.  But sometimes we have a tendency to think of it . . . in a longer sense, and I’m like no, this stuff is killing our kids right now.”

“This stuff is killing our kids right now.”

As her work helping to organize the Women’s March in Omaha in 2017 taught her, there are lots of intersections in the different ways people are oppressed by power.  “One of the struggles that Guatemala is having right now, which is where we’re seeing the most migrants come from, is that climate change has changed two degrees, which prevents them from growing coffee.”  Refusing to tackle global warming in the US is ruining people’s livelihoods in other countries, and driving them to leave their homes in an effort to survive. 

Immigration: It’s Personal

As an activist helping migrant families in Nebraska, Angie cares passionately about immigration reform.  She condemned the failure of congress, including Nebraska’s senators, to act on this matter.  “The only reason Trump has even been able to go in and do as much damage to DACA and TPS as he has is because congress has failed for so long to legislate it.  I actually went to Senator Sasse’s office this morning, because I like to call him and ask him what he’s doing about immigration, and it’s nothing.  He has nothing.  His staff say, ‘I’m going to pass along that information’ . . . well I’ve been calling for a year.”  In the meantime, people are suffering, and families are being separated right here in our state.  Angie described how she’d just spoken to a man whose has five children.  He lives in our state with a few of the children and his wife lives in Mexico with his youngest children, whom he hasn’t seen in years.  He faces a choice: reunite the family by returning south, and watch them all starve, or stay in Nebraska to earn enough money to keep them all fed. 

“Family separation is not just happening at our borders.”

“Family separation is not just happening at our borders,” Angie said.  “These are the people that we’re criminalizing, that’s we’re locking up, that we’re banning forever, permanently.  And we’re doing it right now. . . Elections are too late for a lot of these people . . . We have to continue to try to press the senators, the congressmen, for action now.”

And Angie isn’t satisfied with tinkering around the edges.  She calls for the abolishment of ICE, and in fact, the whole Department of Homeland Security, which she describes as “a corrupt corrupt agency.”  “When you hold the attitude that the president holds against people from the southern border, what kinds of employees do you attract?  We get thousands and thousands of complaints of children [subjected to] sexual and physical abuse.” And while Trump’s immigration policies are “obviously inhumane and awful” it isn’t just a Trump issue. “We’re taking about decades and decades and decades of harming families and people just because they’re in search of a better life.”

“I know that these are strong views for even a Democrat, running in Nebraska,” she said, “but I’m happy to put them out there, because I think that it forces other candidates to talk about it.  If I talk about it, everybody I’m running against is going have to talk about it, if everybody I’m running against talks about it, Senator Sasse is going to have to talk about it, or be obviously ignorant of it.  Hopefully we can get some action as we go and not just wait for the elections.”

“When you to try to delete the humanity of someone, that’s personal.”

We pointed out that Angie clearly takes this issue very personally.  “It does feel personal,” she replied.  “It’s no longer just about a group of people that I’m aware exist.  It’s about my friends, my family . . . when you to try to delete the humanity of someone, that’s personal.”

Help Angie Outwork Sasse

People power is needed to help Angie “out budget and outwork” Sasse, and take him down in next year’s elections!  Volunteer for her campaign, and donate what you can.  You can visit her website here.  And you can join her campaign kickoff on October 10th.

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