Local candidates can transform the lives of thousands of people – for better or worse. Three stories take us through the journey of what it takes to win elections and serve in these positions. From discovering a problem and choosing to step up, to getting out the vote, to navigating precarious party margins and fighting for progress– community support is everything. And the same issues we see dominating the national conversation can often hinge on just a handful of votes. In this episode, we're talking about building change in local and state office.
Local candidates can transform the lives of thousands of people – for better or worse. Three stories take us through the journey of what it takes to win elections and serve in these positions. From discovering a problem and choosing to step up, to getting out the vote, to navigating precarious party margins and fighting for progress– community support is everything. And the same issues we see dominating the national conversation can often hinge on just a handful of votes.
In this episode, we're talking about building change in local and state office.
Learn more about how you can build change at actblue.com/buildthechange or follow us on Instagram and TikTok.
ALOK
Regina Wallace-Jones was driving her kids to elementary school on a balmy day in East Palo Alto. Traffic was at a crawl, as always.
Regina
There we were, school started at, um, something like eight 30, and there we were in the car at 7:30 in the morning in service to moving them exactly four miles from point A to point B.
ALOK
This is what their drive always looked like. At least an hour to travel just four miles – and Regina knew why. Just about everyone travels through East Palo Alto. It’s the same distance from Facebook, Google, and Stanford.
Regina:
The byproduct of that, for those of us who are residents in the city, is that we felt like we were trapped in our homes, that we could not make a casual run to a neighbor's house depending on what time of day it was that we had to leave very, very early to get our children to school if we were taking them out of the city…
ALOK
And this didn’t just randomly happen.
Since the 50’s, East Palo Alto has been an oasis for Black families that were shut out of white-only neighborhoods by red-lining. Today, the tech boom and gentrification have contributed to a stark wealth disparity in the city. The top five percent of households make more than 2000 times the average income of the lowest 20% of households.
Rather than supporting the local school system, which serves the majority Black and POC East Palo Alto, policymakers decided to bus students out to the neighboring, affluent Palo Alto.
Regina
And so I just remember reflecting on the contrast between, as I was sitting in this hour long drive with my little elementary school children, uh, the contrast between the way that they were experiencing school and the way that I experienced school at their age, and feeling like they were spending so much time on the road to travel such a small distance that they were missing out on the chance to rest, on the chance to study, on the chance to sit down and eat, eat a great meal, um, in the mornings.
I wanted, uh, us to be seen as a place that was widely inclusive and richly diverse, and one that was, uh, willing to embrace, um, many new perspectives. We did not have that narrative at the time. I also really remember feeling particularly, uh, unhappy with the way that we were approaching housing and housing expansion, um, in my city.
ALOK
And so, sitting there in the car, in the East Palo Alto sun and standstill morning traffic, Regina decided she had to do something about it.
Regina:
The point of view that I was swimming against was one that had been established over a really long arc of time. But I felt at that time that it was important for me to step onto the public scene and to try to move the conversation in a different direction.
ALOK
She decided… to run for city council.
But this conviction was very new for Regina. For most of her life, she was really more of a behind-the-scenes player.
Regina:
I had a, a 10th grade English teacher. She would say, you've got great ideas. Why is it that you are organizing everyone else's campaign? Why don't you be the candidate?
ALOK
Regina went on to work as a regional field organizer for Barack Obama. She fundraised for Kamala Harris. She volunteered for Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
But there, in the car, something clicked.
Regina:
There are very few people by my estimation that are born to run for public office. When, um, when, when, when you sit down with anyone who has, uh, decided to run, I believe the vast majority of people would say, I ran because something made me mad, right?
ALOK
Regina ran for city council in 2018 – and won. Then, in 2020, she was elected mayor of East Palo Alto. She had ambitions to fix traffic and housing issues – the same issues that fired her up in the first place. But not long into her term, Regina’s big plans got interrupted.
[Music]
ALOK
In partnership with ActBlue, this is Build the Change, a show about the people at the center of progress.
I’m your host, Alok Vaid-Menon. I’m an author, poet, actor, activist… And your companion for this trip around the country. We’re in search of the most compelling causes, and stories from the candidates, activists, and everyday people driving them forward.
But it doesn’t take a lot of money or influence to make a difference. Every day, people all over the country are coming together to build something bigger than ourselves. That is the core of ActBlue's mission: building a platform to ensure candidates, organizations, and grassroots supporters can all participate in democracy, build people-powered movements and raise the money they need to create lasting change.
Regina Wallace-Jones, whose story you just heard, is now ActBlue’s President and CEO. But as mayor of East Palo Alto, it became especially clear to her exactly how much hinges on local government.
That’s what we’ll be hearing more about today. We’ll come back to Regina’s term as mayor at the end of the episode – but first, we’re taking you on a journey to and through local and state-level office. From the decision to run, to the flurry of getting out the vote, to the intricacies of the voting floor and beyond. States often become the battleground for progressive causes that change thousands of lives. We’re about to hear two stories from states with razor-thin margins, where every person and every vote makes a difference.
State and local politics are the frontier for the issues that impact our daily lives – and it’s real people, not just career politicians, filling those roles and making that impact.
So, we start… with the campaign.
[MUSIC - staccato piano]
[Rain fades in]
Lala:
We were out there till the very last minute on election day. I remember it was pouring rain. And we were there with one of our candidates. Uh, he was outside at a polling place and we were with him, um, you know, greeting voters, thanking them with our umbrellas in the rain. Although the weather was terrible… there was this real sense of excitement and electricity in the air that I've really, it, it doesn't, it doesn't come around very often.
[Music picks up]
ALOK
This is Lala Wu. It was 2017, and she was in Virginia with other Democratic volunteers for the state election cycle.
[Audio of 2017 Sister District victory live stream fades in]
Lala:
We were in a car together heading to a watch party at some restaurant, you know, downtown. And we had to stop in the parking lot. We were all hotspotting from our phones and drafting the emails that we were sending out to our volunteers because we realized we needed to tell them that we'd won already, all of these races, that the results were coming in much faster than we thought. That it was a massive blue wave that we didn't know when it was gonna crest, but we knew it was coming and we were really honestly taken a bit surprise, but in a really, really good way.
ALOK
Lala is the co-founder and executive director of Sister District. She organized a group of volunteers to support Virginia’s progressive state-level candidates in a pivotal election season. That year, 12 out of 13 of the candidates those volunteers supported, won.
Sister District was founded in the aftermath of the 2016 election.
Lala and her co-founders, Gaby Goldstein and Lyzz Schwegler, were shaken by the unexpected, painful results.
So, they were inspired to affect political change. They realized something – Because they lived in the Bay Area, they had resources that other states did not: lots of passionate volunteers and financial support to devote to progressive candidates.
So, they hatched a plan.
LALA:
We realized very quickly early on that where our resources could be most helpful was in state legislatures. So some could say that we have been obsessed with state legislatures since we were founded in the wake of the 2016 election. And everything that we do is to build power in state legislatures because they are such an overlooked venue for making positive change in this country.
ALOK
They have a couple of different ways they build that progressive power for state-level candidates.
Lala:
The first is we help to win urgent elections each cycle. And the second is we build democratic infrastructure for the long term. We focus our energies on helping to build power in state legislatures in key battleground states. And every year we look to build a portfolio of states where we can flip a chamber, hold a chamber, or make inroads into badly gerrymandered states.
Lala:
It comes down to early support plus grassroots field support, voter contact, grassroots fundraising, plus being on speed dial with these campaigns, making sure that they have every bit of support that they need, that we can help with them, fill in any gaps on their campaign.
Grassroots donors and volunteers are essential to winning any state-level campaign – and it’s Sister District’s strategizing that helps this support reach the places that stand to affect the most change. Legislatures on the precipice of flipping, states on the verge of passing groundbreaking laws – or states who might pass harmful laws.
Virginia is one key battleground state. For more than 20 years, the state House and Senate have hovered at a pretty even split. When the margins are so thin, getting just a few progressive candidates elected can make an enormous difference. And often, it takes just a few votes to do that.
When Sister District returned to Virginia in 2019, they helped gain even more ground for progressive candidates – they flipped the State House and State Senate. Along with a democratic governor, they created a political trifecta.
Lala:
We were able to do so much with this trifecta. Democrats in the state were ready. They had been preparing for this moment, for years and decades. And so with the support of folks on the ground ushered in two years of historic legislation, including ratifying the Equal Rights Amendment, banning the death penalty, legalizing recreational marijuana passing, gun safety reforms, protecting abortion, setting, ambitious climate goals. The list goes on and on and on.
But 2021 demonstrated how tenuous these victories can be.
That year, Republicans took the governorship, and regained control of the House.
Lala:
Things did not go the way we wanted them to go in 2021.
Lala:
The moment I realized we were going to lose the house in 2021, I of course felt devastated that it felt like some of our work that we'd done before was coming undone. But I also immediately felt a sense of resolve and a determination that we had to keep doing this work and we had to keep moving forward. And just a reminder that this work doesn't end. There is no terminal point for this kind of work.
So I came out of 2021 feeling, feeling some, uh, maybe a little light desire for revenge.
In June 2022, the supreme court overturned Roe V. Wade. Protests broke out.
[Protest audio]
Abortion bans started to sweep the country - particularly in the South.
[Short news waterfall of abortion bans in different states]
States became the new front for issues of bodily autonomy. Almost every southern state passed some form of abortion restriction – and Virginia was poised to join them.
[Music kicks up]
Lala:
So here's the situation. We go into 2023 and we've got a Republican governor with Governor Youngkin, and we have a Republican House of Delegates, and we have a Democratic state senate where we can only afford to lose a single seat. That single seat majority is the only thing that stands in the way of Governor Youngkin passing an abortion ban. And he, coming into 2023, had been really pushing people on this idea of a 15 week abortion ban. He said, this is gonna be the Republican panacea, this is how we respond to all of the Democratic wins that have been happening since Dobbs.
[News clip:
Youngkin: “I think we can come together around a 15-week bill. And that’s what I have been very clear about, I think we should continue to work on that…”]
Lala:
Virginia was the last state in the South without a post roe abortion ban.
Lala:
And it really hit home so deeply and, uh, so powerfully for so many of us at Sister District as volunteers, as staff, as everyone, it felt really, really personal.
Knowing what’s at stake, Lala and the Sister District team got on a Zoom call to strategize. This year, they’d have to push harder. That meant more volunteers, more phone bankers, more resources. They identified ten candidates to support, and got to work talking to voters.
Lala:
We had a volunteer named Barbara, whose call motivated a woman to go vote immediately while she was still on the phone. This woman was like, I'm gonna put on my shoes. You're right, I gotta go right now. And this other volunteer named Rebecca, she really encouraged and talked to a voter about the issues and turned this voter from being a bit hesitant to being eager and then even to wanting to volunteer, which is absolutely amazing. I mean that a local volunteer is worth their weight in gold.
Volunteers across the country poured their effort into Virginia, and all the while, Lala and her colleagues watched the numbers roll in.
[Local news reports: “We’ve already had a few races called in our region…” “...Several voters told us they believe this election has high stakes, especially when it comes to party control in Richmond…” “...Fewer than 400 votes here, so this is a very tight race…”]
On election night 10 Sister District staff members were volunteering until the end once again, with one eye on the news.
Lala:
And that means a lot of emails, a lot of coordination, a lot of data, a lot of keeping volunteers updated. And so we got together, we found, um, this amazing space in a hotel. We were going to be in this big room together. And then that afternoon we found out it was double booked . And we thought to ourselves, oh my gosh, what are we gonna do?
Lala:
And then incredibly our amazing head of operations, she worked her magic and she managed to get us this sprawling huge space. And this, uh, basically the kind of like unused restaurant bar of this hotel. And it was, you know, dark wood paneled, great ambiance, lots of space to spread out, super fun. So we ordered a bunch of food, we set up our laptops, and then we sat nervously and we, and we sat and we hit refresh, and we hit refresh, and we hit refresh. And we hit refresh and we watched the numbers come in, and as they came in, we could tell this was gonna be a good night.
Lala:
And in the end, eight of our 10 candidates won their races, which was absolutely amazing. Um, several of those candidates were tipping point candidates, meaning that they were the closest races in those chambers that were, we were able to hold the state senate and flip the state house. And we, we loved it. We, we took group pictures, we hugged each other, we clapped, we celebrated, we talked to our volunteers on Zoom, shared their energy with them, gave them insights of kind of what we were hearing, what was happening.
Um, and then I would love to tell you that we stayed out all night and had a great party. But really as soon as all of those wins happened, we got out the emails we needed to get out. We did all the things that you need to do as an organization. We all went to bed 'cause we were absolutely exhausted, but we went to bed very, very happy.
So, holding the Senate and flipping the House meant Youngkin couldn't pass his proposed ban. Sister District was a huge part of that success, raising more than $550,000 for the candidates, and making 43% of all the calls on their behalf.
But if 2021 demonstrated anything, it's that these wins have to be defended. Lala remembers her daughter’s first protest – she was about eight months old, right after the Dobbs Supreme Court decision leaked.
Lala:
I had her strapped to my chest. It was gorgeous. We were walking alongside Sister District volunteers and, you know, I felt really proud to be there with her, but also just so mad that I had to be there at all. And then I saw this sign that said, I marched with my mother.
Lala:
I never imagined I'd have to march with my daughter. And it just stopped me in my tracks. And I was like, what crazy insane world are we living in that this is still the fight that we're fighting? But then I thought to myself, okay, it wasn't, you know, a waste what they were doing before. It was just that we have to keep going and that we're going to have losses, we're going to have setbacks, but we're also going to have incredible wins and we need to embrace and celebrate those wins and really think about how incredible it is that we are able to stand on the shoulders of giants and continue this legacy of fighting for what we believe in, for fighting for a country that we know can reach its potential.
Lala:
I've learned that progress is not linear. That sometimes you win and sometimes you lose, but you have to keep going.
Our next story exemplifies what defending progress looks like, in the midst of fierce opposition against bodily autonomy. Democrats’ work in divided states can often look more complicated than the triumphant wins in Virginia.
Paige:
It's damage control, right? It's like harm reduction in, in the political sense, right? It's like you're just doing what you can, where, where the firewall firewall, we say, you know, we are just the firewall. We're just trying to stop the worst spills from getting by in any way that we can
We’re headed north to the land of “live free or die.” Few places are as politically unique as New Hampshire.
Paige:
My name is Paige Beauchemin, RN. My pronouns are she, her. I am a nurse and I am the newest member of the New Hampshire House of Representatives.
Paige is navigating a fiercely divided House, filled with very different ideas about how to run a state. And in her first few weeks as a state representative, she faced a culture war up for the vote, which garnered national attention.
Paige is a reproductive health nurse. In her day job, she has the opportunity to have a positive influence on the issues she cares about. But a chance meeting made her consider getting into politics.
Paige:
Then I found a new friend, and her name is Crystal, and I found out Crystal is a legislator, and my jaw dropped because I didn't know that legislators are just people walking around, you know, I, I didn't know it was just normal people that can be legislators.
A special election seat opened up in Paige’s Ward, the urban, southern city of Nashua, New Hampshire. Paige knew she couldn't say no.
She sat down with her husband and three young children to talk it out. Politics was a time commitment. Her kids might have to wear nice, button-up shirts now and then.
Still, they all agreed she should do it.
When Paige got elected, she found herself up against some politically extreme colleagues.
The New Hampshire house of representatives alone is the third largest legislature in the world. Not “state” legislature. Legislature. It trails only behind the British Parliament and the United States House of Representatives. As of this recording, there are 201 republicans and 193 democrats. And the margin between the parties is consistently that thin. Though republicans hold House control the majority of the time, democrats are rarely far behind.
Paige:
We are generally considered a purple state. And, and of course that's oftentimes geographically dictated as it is nationally, right? We have more Democrats in the urban areas. Nashua is is one of the most urban cities, and all 27 of our representatives are Democrats. Whereas in the northern part of the state, we have a lot more Republicans, and that's, that's a more rural area.
Representatives are volunteers, paid only $100 per year and a few perks – a free EZ-pass, mileage reimbursement, and a special license plate. But they must come to sessions in person, during the day. So younger folks with a typical nine to five are vastly underrepresented.
Any of those representatives – or any New Hampshire citizen, for that matter – can propose a bill to hit the House floor for debate, as long as that bill is sponsored.
With such a big House, you can find a contingent backing any number of outrageous political extremes – from requiring teachers to out LGBTQ students, to seceding from the union. And, as Paige was on the precipice of being elected, House Republicans proposed a 15-day abortion ban.
As a nurse, she understood the reality of a bill like this: Most don’t know they’re pregnant at 15 days, even if they are.
At the same time, New Hampshire Democrats proposed codifying abortion rights into New Hampshire law.
Both proposals were voted down, but these headbutting political extremes define the climate in the state.
Current law in New Hampshire bans abortion after 24 weeks, unless the mother’s health is in jeopardy. But an extreme bill like the 15-day ban could serve to push the needle in a more conservative direction, kindling a conversation about more “moderate” bans. It’s no secret: Republicans weaponize potentially divisive issues like abortion to fire up their base. Any culture war issue can get this treatment.
Last year, a New Hampshire House Republican proposed a bill that banned all gender affirming care for minors. The bill proposed other harmful changes as well: : It removed a teacher’s ability to use a student’s preferred name or pronouns. And, it changed the definition of conversion therapy to potentially legalize conversion therapy for trans kids.
It was Paige’s first week voting in the House after she’d been sworn in. And already, she was facing down talking points from the national culture war.
Paige:
I think now the social issues have been weaponized by the Republican party, so that we don't even agree on most of the problems. And it's annoying to me. We have a huge housing crisis in New Hampshire. We have an opioid crisis. We have an intense childcare crisis, which is super important in terms of children's development and the economy, right?
Paige:
We wanna make sure young people are coming to New Hampshire and staying here to build our economy. So we've got infrastructure problems. So those are the things that I think, you know, healthcare access, things like that, I would much rather be talking about that
But, that cloudy, brisk Thursday morning in January, she was not voting on infrastructure of childcare, or the opioid crisis.
[Scene setting audio, murmuring and walla]
Paige arrived at the ornate statehouse and took her seat.
Paige:
I have a T-shirt that has an image of New Hampshire with trans colors, and it says, believe protect love trans kids with the New Hampshire symbol. So I was really proud to wear that.
Hundreds of representatives filed into the massive room. The bill banning gender affirming care – bill HB 619, was coming up.
Paige:
Now, right before we voted on that, minutes before we voted on it, Democrats had put up two gender affirming bills…
[New Hampshire house speaker: “House bill 368FN, relative to protections related to receiving gender-affirming healthcare.”
New Hampshire legislator: “Please pass HB368 to protect our medical professionals, the families of these transgender children, and most importantly ensure that parents have the right to make decisions in the best interest of their children…”]
… and both of them got voted down by, you know, a few votes even for some of them, because we are so razor thin.
[House speaker: “186 voting yea, 188 voting nay, the motion fails.”]
Then came the time to vote on HB619.
Paige:
And I say to myself, well, this bill is coming up and this is gonna pass. This awful bill is going to pass.
[House speaker: “199 voting yea, 175 voting yea. Committee report of ought to pass as amended…”]
But in the end, it did pass 199 votes to 175 – though it was amended. The version the New Hampshire House ultimately voted on was milder – there weren’t any references to hormone therapy or conversion therapy.
With the amendment, the bill would only ban gender transition surgeries for minors.
Paige:
I thought to myself, okay, this isn't really taking anything away from trans kids and it's gonna protect them from these other pieces. Now, the, the Democrats suggested voting against the amendment, um, just, you know, really in support because we don't think any of it is okay, right? In support of our trans kids. In my mind, as a new person, I'm saying, I cannot let this bill pass. I can't do this.
There’s a lot on the shoulders of state legislators who are trying to represent everyone. Mitigating the harm posed by these bills is complicated. After the vote, Paige learned what the backlash could look like. Paige supported the amendment because of how it reduced the threat of the bill, but some constituents got the wrong idea about her views.
Paige:
I have received emails thanking me for being a Democrat that is thinking for being against trans rights.
And I have gotten hate emails saying, the kids were counting on you and you voted against them. You are a jerk with worse words than that. Um, and so it was like a, this is my first day in the house, and it was such a, yeah. This is something that I think is really interesting and complicates things because you can go and you can look at how a, a, a representative or a leader voted on something and you might not understand the intricacies of the bill or what, you know, I can agree or disagree with a sentiment, but the specifics of a bill make a big difference.
Local legislators like Paige have a huge responsibility to their constituents. All of the same polarized national conversations are playing out on the state level. And often, with issues like abortion and access to care for trans people, state laws can change peoples’ lives.
The more people bringing science, research, and empathy into their voting, the better. Someone has to speak out against bills like these. Those voices matter – inside and outside of government. You can vote. You can volunteer, like Lala. You can run, like Paige or Regina Wallace-Jones.
Regina:
When it comes to matters, matters of governance, when it comes to matters of values, when it comes, uh, to, you know, putting people in spaces that can make decisions for all of us, um, in the, in, in the seats that they are, are in, in inhabiting, it becomes really important to make sure that, um, those who are sitting at the table are people who actually can realistically, authentically and, um, ideally through some lived experiences, connect with the people, um, uh, for whom they're making decisions.
When Regina assumed her role as mayor of East Palo Alto back in early 2020, we all know what happened next. All of the things Regina wanted to address – traffic, housing, schools – were overtaken by a much greater need.
Regina:
In fact, no car was moving. Everybody was home. Um, and so the problems that I had signed up to solve were not actually the problems that I needed to solve, um, in that moment.
There was national guidance for the COVID-19 response. But the guidelines didn’t always reflect the specific needs of Regina’s constituency. So from the local level, she had to use her knowledge and care for her community to show up for them, to allocate resources in the way they needed. Ultimately, a lot of decisions came down to state and local governments.
And Regina put so much of herself into that term.
As her time in office came to an end, she took a six month break to reflect.
Regina:
You know, a covid, a covid term is probably equivalent to three local elected terms. So it would not be uncommon for, you know, the vast majority of people who served inside of Covid un anticipating, uh, you know, a pandemic at all to feel utterly exhausted by the end of their term. That is how I felt.
Regina:
And it was in that moment that ActBlue approached me with their search for their next CEO.
ActBlue enables small-dollar donors to get involved in the political causes they care about through their fundraising platform. The nonprofit sought the right combination of technological know-how and political experience – from both behind the scenes and in a legislative seat. Regina doubted there was a way to combine all of her interests into one role, but here, the perfect opportunity arose.
Regina:
it was, you know, this really sort of, um, you know, in all honesty, this moment where I moved from self-doubt to conviction
Regina:
You know, if I, if I think about, uh, the underpinnings of ActBlue, uh, ActBlue is an organization that was really questioning at the time that it was created, the extent to which, um, millionaires and billionaires were defining the political process and picking the political candidates on behalf of people. So what we endeavored to unlock there from a giving perspective, was the power of the small donor to weigh in with their small dollars to say, this is who I believe in.
Individual people like you and I are at the core of some of the most impressive changes we’re seeing right now.
My call to action for you today: Who are your local candidates? What issues are on the ballot for this upcoming season? There are so many ways to influence the things you care about most – calling your representatives, donating to their campaigns, volunteering to knock on doors or make calls. Or, hey, if you live in New Hampshire, maybe even propose a bill.
Every vote, every volunteer, and every dollar counts in these elections, which are so often determined by single-digit margins.
And as we move through this season, you’ll find that there are so many ways to use your voice.
You can learn more about these organizations and find out how you can support the candidates and organizations you’re passionate about visit actblue.com/buildthechange
See you next time.
Build the Change is created in partnership with ActBlue, produced by Wonder Media Network, and hosted by me, Alok Vaid-Menon.
Our production team includes Edie Allard, Lindsey Kratochwill, Sara Schleede, Abbey Delk, Hannah Bottum, and Paloma Moreno Jimenez. Our executive producer is Jenny Kaplan. Our showrunners are Rohita Javangula and Maria Jose Hurtado.