I want to be extremely clear, as a nine-term member of the United States House of Representatives: nobody told me this could happen.
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Tuesday night, ten House incumbents got voted out, and I was one of them, and the phrase everyone on cable keeps using is “the voters spoke,” which strongly implies that at some earlier point the voters were merely thinking it. Nobody flagged this for me. My district was drawn by professionals. I helped. I know where those lines are because I personally moved my mother-in-law into a neighboring district out of spite. That seat was engineered like a submarine hatch, and some kid in a bucket hat opened it with a doorknocker.
Let me tell you about the kid. Thirty-one. Ran a mobile IV-drip van — vitamin infusions, hangover bags, one of those wellness businesses that’s technically a Sprinter and a cooler. He filmed his campaign from the driver’s seat. His entire platform, and I am not exaggerating, was: have you ever tried calling his office?
The Phone Thing
Okay. So. In 2022 my chief of staff moved constituent services onto an AI voice agent. It had a name. Its name was Brayden. Brayden answered 61,000 calls last cycle with a 94% “resolution rate,” which we later learned meant the caller hung up. Brayden told a woman in Lorain County that her son’s VA claim had been “escalated to the appropriate stakeholder.” There was no stakeholder. There was a Google Sheet, and the Google Sheet had gone read-only in March.
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The autopen letters were worse. We sent forty thousand of them. One thanked a retired schoolteacher for her “continued service to our nation’s Navy.” She had written in about a pothole. She sent that letter to the local paper, the paper put it on Facebook, and Facebook did what Facebook does to a man my age.
I have not held a town hall since 2013. That was at a Golden Corral, and I stopped doing them because a man stood up and asked me a question. Not a hostile question. Just a question — an actual thing he wanted to know the answer to — and I remember thinking, with total sincerity, this is not what this is.
Where The Six Million Went
We raised $6.2 million. You want to know where it went? A consulting firm called Cardinal Northwind. That’s the whole industry now — every strategy shop is named like a hurricane or a bourbon. Cardinal Northwind ran forty focus groups and produced a memo whose central finding was that voters in my district wanted “a champion who listens.” We spent $180,000 acting on that insight by purchasing digital ads. Not listening. Ads about listening.
The kid spent $340,000. He knocked on doors. Physically. In person, in the rain, like a missionary, like a man selling freezer meat out of the back of a truck. My data director showed me the canvass numbers in October and I said, and I quote, “nobody answers the door anymore,” and he said, “sir, they do,” and I said, “for whom,” and he didn’t have an answer because the answer was obviously for anyone, ever, at all.
Election night was at the airport Marriott. We ordered shrimp for four hundred. The balloons stayed in the net. At 9:40 my pollster stopped making eye contact and started making phone calls, which is the political equivalent of a doctor leaving the room to “grab something.”
I called the kid to concede and he picked up on the first ring. First ring. Eighteen years I’ve been unreachable and this son of a bitch answers his own phone in a van.
So now I’m one of ten House incumbents voted out, which makes me a “warning sign” on three separate panel shows, and the panels are all having the same conversation, which is: were people angry about groceries, or were they angry about something bigger? Nobody has floated the third option, which is that they were angry about me specifically, personally, by name, and had been for some time, and simply waited.
Here’s the part that should upset you more than it upsets me. In four months I’ll be a senior fellow somewhere. There’ll be a board seat at a logistics company that is technically not a defense contractor. Somebody will give me a podcast and a lapel mic and I’ll say the word “institutionalist” about nine hundred times. I lost my job and my income is going up.
The office phone works now, by the way. They fired Brayden and put a real person on it. You can call it. It rings in an empty room.