Why I'm With Her. Again.

Money raised is a lagging indicator. Hope is a leading one.

In 2022, I endorsed Andrea Hunley for State Senate while I was actively interviewing my way out of a city job.

A friend asked me, with real concern in his voice, “Are you trying to get fired??”

Reader, I was not. But also reader, I was jaded.

Hunley wasn’t the establishment pick. I had a city paycheck and a city email and a city ID badge and the very clear understanding that people like me were supposed to keep our heads down, clap politely at the right ribbon cuttings, and save our opinions for our group chats. The inherent politics of government jobs, you know how it goes. You can have a voice. You just can’t use it. You can have values. They just need to match the guy at the top who you serve at the pleasure of. What a fun little framework. I wasn’t trying to get fired. I also wasn’t getting promoted. I had read the room and the room had read me and we had reached a mutual understanding. So I publicly backed the candidate the political class had quietly written off. A traitor, in the way that government employees are traitors when they say what they think out loud. When Adam Wren mentioned my endorsement in his political newsletter, “Importantville,” it gave me a false sense of importance. It was sort of bizarre to think my voice carried any weight worth mentioning. But enough about me.

She went on to beat a crowded primary and then the general. She disrupted the establishment. She won because she knocked doors, because she showed up, because she’s the kind of person you actually want to sit next to at a kitchen table for an hour. And it turns out that matters when you’re asking thousands of neighbors to trust you with something.

Four years later and I’m still sippin’ on that Hunley kool aid. The room at Tinker House last Friday was electric. 1,500 people, packed into two floors because one floor couldn’t hold us. Goosebumps. Butterflies. That charge in the air your body recognizes before your brain catches up. Hope has a feeling, and the feeling was in that room.

One of her former students wrote her a note written in red crayon. “Go Mayor! I am lucky to have a former teacher as my mayor.” Kids know too. The best people in Indy were in that room on Friday. Imagine what it could be with her at the helm. The thirst for maternal & authentic leadership is real.

The IndyStar headline asked the question out loud: “Hunley has the vibes. Can she raise the money?” Hunley has $100K. Osili has half a million. Hogsett is sitting on $1.2 million and suddenly, mysteriously, no longer ruling out a fourth term. So yes, on a spreadsheet, she’s behind. The political press wants you to read that as a verdict. Frontrunner. Underdog. Long shot. Inevitable.

Sweetie. We’ve seen this movie.

Zohran Mamdani, New York City, 2025. A year before the election he was polling at one percent. ONE. Cuomo had the name, the machine, the billionaires. Pro-Cuomo forces spent something like $33 million, with Bloomberg alone dropping $8M into a super PAC called Fix the City (lol, ok). Mamdani was outspent more than three to one. Cuomo spent about $87 per vote. Mamdani spent $19. Mamdani won the primary by 12 points and the general by almost 9, and became the first NYC mayoral candidate to crack a million votes since 1969. What did it? He started early. He built a volunteer army. He talked about affordability like he meant it because he did.

Brandon Johnson, Chicago, 2023. This one feels almost spookily relevant. A former teacher and union organizer, virtually unknown when he announced, running against a much more established, much better funded opponent who had the political class circling. Vallas outspent Johnson nearly two to one. Johnson’s people knocked over 555,000 doors, made 1.26 million calls, sent close to 2 million texts. One organizer summed it up like this: “It was 100-percent people power.” Johnson is now the mayor of the third-largest city in the country. His own quote: if we won, it would only be because of organizing and our field operation.

Mary Peltola, Alaska, 2022. Different race entirely, US House, statewide, in a seat Republicans had held for forty-nine years. She raised about $379K. Sarah Palin raised over a million. Palin had a former-governor’s name recognition and a national fundraising machine and a brand. Peltola won, 51.5 to 48.5. Her line afterward was that Alaskans “Have an appetite for someone who isn’t partisan, and for campaigns that are positive.” Tell me that doesn’t translate to a city that is exhausted by the same five names in the same five rooms making the same five decisions.

Three races. Three places that look nothing like each other. NYC, Chicago, Alaska. One pattern.

When the money story is the main story the press and pundits are telling, it's often because it's the easiest one to tell this early. The numbers are easy to chart. The narrative writes itself. But it's a frame that tends to favor the people who already have the money. Dollars raised is a stat you can put in a chart in the first month of a campaign. It tells you absolutely nothing about whether anybody wants to actually vote for you in May 2027.

What tells you that is whether neighbors are texting their other neighbors about you. Whether teachers are putting your sign in their yard. Whether kids are writing your name in red crayon. Whether the people who normally don’t show up to anything are saying hold on, this one feels different. That’s what I felt during her Senate race in 2022. That’s what I felt at her ice cream social last fall. That’s what I felt at Tinker House last Friday at Party for the People.

Here’s the other thing I trust her with, and it matters: I trust Andrea to stack an administration with actual experts. Not political hacks doing a victory lap. Not the same recycled names getting shuffled from one department head office to another. Real people who know infrastructure. Real people who know parks. Real people who know public safety, education, transit, public health. Subject matter experts who have spent their careers doing the thing, not posting about the thing.

And listen, political folks can learn. I’m not saying career operatives can’t grow into a portfolio. Some do! But there’s a particular kind of innovation that only happens when you put genuine experts at the table and let them actually drive. Andrea will do that. I have watched her do it on a smaller scale already, surrounding herself with people who know what they’re doing, listening hard, then making the call. That’s what governing looks like when it’s working.

So yeah. Hogsett has more money. Osili has more money. Cool cool cool.

Andrea has me. Andrea has every former student of hers who’s now a voter (and at least one who isn’t yet, with a red crayon). Andrea has the neighbors. Andrea has the people who are also tired, and also jaded, and also ready to stop being good lil soldiers for a system that was never going to clap for them anyway.

Four years ago I bet on her because I was tired of betting on the wrong people. I was right then. I’m right now. Let’s fucking go.