From Where I Sit: How Much is Enough?

I don't know what I am politically anymore.

I used to. Now I'm not so sure. And I've decided that's worth saying out loud.

My dad was a ceramic tile setter. A laborer. He worked with his hands his whole life, watched every penny, and believed people deserved a fair shot. He was also the quietest man I have ever known. Every evening after work he sat down with the newspaper. Every morning he was up before the rest of us — lunch pail and thermos at the ready — out the door before the world had fully started. Before he left he'd come into my room and wake me for school with a back rub. He rarely watched TV. He didn't need to be loud to have conviction.

My mother was a homemaker and volunteer. She wasn't the type to say oh you poor thing when something went wrong. She'd listen, and then she'd ask: "What part did you play?" I didn't always love that question in the moment. But I've never stopped asking it. Including right now. Including about all of this.

They both shaped how I move through the world. One with a lunch pail and a back rub. One with a question that put the mirror in my hand.

As a younger woman I drifted toward the Republican party. Fiscally conservative, socially liberal — that felt honest to who I was. I spent time in conservative media, producing a morning talk radio show where Democrats and Republicans could sit across from each other, disagreed, and then go to lunch. Friendships across party lines weren't just tolerated. They were celebrated. People like Amy Klobuchar — who is now running for governor of Minnesota and who has spent her entire career trying to find what works across the aisle rather than what scores points — were not unusual. They were the norm. That's just how serious people operated.

I miss that. I think a lot of us do.

Later I was producing a podcast, and at a fundraiser at a brewery I ended up in conversation with Tim Pawlenty — a former governor of Minnesota thinking about another run. He told me quietly, without drama, that he didn't believe in everything on the platform he'd be running on. But to get in the race he needed the party endorsement. And to get the endorsement he needed to say what they needed to hear. Because without the endorsement there were no funds. And without the funds there was no campaign.

He wasn't complaining. He was just telling me how it works.

In one sentence at a brewery, he explained the whole machine to me. I have thought about that conversation a hundred times since.

I want to tell you something about myself that I don't mention very often.

In the late 90's I was tapped to run for mayor of Roseville, Minnesota — as a write-in candidate. No party infrastructure. No war chest. Just a name people had to remember to write in on a ballot. I took 32.5% of the vote. I lost — but not by as much as you might think.

After that campaign, I was contacted by Steve Sviggum, who was the leader of the Republican party in Minnesota at the time. He wanted me to run against Mindy Greiling, a DFL state representative who had served the Roseville area since 1992 and was, by any honest measure, beloved. Mindy had started her political life as a Republican before crossing to the DFL. She went on to serve twenty years in the Minnesota House, build the state's first bipartisan mental health caucus, and fight for people — her own son included — who had no other advocate at the table.

The man who beat me was a 28-year-old disgruntled homeowner. His first stated priority upon winning was to disband the ethics committee.

I've thought about that a lot lately.

I turned Steve down. Politely. Because I respected Mindy and what she was doing. Because running against someone simply because your party tells you to — someone who is genuinely serving people — felt wrong.

I tell you this not to be self-congratulatory. I tell you this because I think it's the most important thing I have to say in this entire piece:

There are still good people in both parties. There have always been good people in both parties.

The problem is not the people. The problem is the machine around them.

Think about what's happening in medicine right now. The actual doctors — the ones doing the work, seeing the patients, making the calls — are increasingly being controlled by administrators whose incentives have almost nothing to do with patient care. The doctors didn't change. The structure around them did. And the structure is now running the show.

Politics works the same way. Consultants, strategists, party leadership — the people who have never been elected to anything — are pulling the strings. Good people on both sides are being managed by a machine whose only actual goal is to keep itself running. And the machine runs on division. The moment the people in office start genuinely cooperating across lines, the machine loses its purpose.

We are the product. Our outrage is the revenue.

I don't recognize either party right now — but I want to be precise about what I mean. I still believe in a lot of the people. It's the machine I don't trust.

The Republican party has been taken somewhere I've genuinely never seen before. The Democratic party feels like it's playing defense without a clear through-line that reaches people where they live. And both parties have been captured by consultants whose job — literally their job — is to divide us. Not lead us. Not serve us. Divide us.

I also want to say something about faith, carefully, because I respect it deeply. But I am watching faith being used as a political on ramp. A way to make people feel that their vote and their salvation are the same decision. That to question the party is to question God. When that happens, the conversation is over before it starts — because you're not disagreeing with a policy anymore. You're disagreeing with something someone holds sacred.

That is not faith. That is a strategy.

I have close family members across the full spectrum. Some of modest means who have been pulled toward a narrative I'm not sure serves them — partly through faith communities drawn deep into political alignment. Others for whom the current moment is frankly working fine, so the talking points cost them nothing.

I navigate all of this because I love every one of them. That's not a diplomatic thing to say. It's just the true thing.

But love doesn't make the conversations easy.

At a recent family gathering, someone was insisting that a woman who accused our current president of sexual assault was lying. The reasoning? That a man of his stature wouldn't need to do such a thing.

I shared with my family members that I was raped in college. By a high-profile athlete. I never reported it. I've talked about it publicly since — on a podcast, in conversations with women I trust, and with my own daughters, who I have raised to know they have a voice and the right to use it. I did the work. I had EMDR therapy. I came through it. But I didn't report it in 1978 or 1979 because I knew — with certainty — that I would not be believed. Women weren't believed then. Many still aren't.

Somewhere in that same conversation, a close family member said: women have been known to lie.

I took a breath. And I talked about the statistics. About how rare false reports are. About how the fear of not being believed is exactly why most assaults go unreported.

And then I thought about Al Franken.

I am not defending what he did. I'm not. But a man lost his United States Senate seat over a photograph taken at a USO rehearsal — and he admitted it and he apologized. Meanwhile we have a sitting president with a civil court finding of sexual abuse against him, multiple credible accusers, and his own recorded words about his own behavior.

I'm not saying that as a partisan. I'm saying it as a person.

What level of bad behavior is acceptable? And who decides? And why does the answer keep changing based on which team someone plays for?

I want to acknowledge something. Naming a rape is jarring. I don't do it lightly. I spent years feeling guilt and shame and blaming myself. I started talking about it when it felt right — but I really started talking during the Kavanaugh hearings. It was a similar story. And I thought: if the person who raped me were ever running for something that required them to vote on things affecting the lives of others, I think I'd need to stand up too. I don't know what became of him. I've done the work so thoroughly that I can't recall his name right now.

Protection for my soul? Perhaps.

I've been learning that a lot of the confusion we're all feeling isn't accidental.

When someone delivers a false statement calmly — composed, almost serene — and you feel something wrong but can't quite name it? That dissonance is intentional. Hostility without heat removes the signals that would normally tell us something hostile is happening. It's designed to make whoever reacts look like the problem.

When there are so many things to fact-check that you just give up? That's an actual strategy. The goal isn't to convince you of anything. It's to exhaust you. A tired, overwhelmed person is easier to manage.

When a reporter asks a straightforward question and gets called a disgrace — calmly, almost pleasantly — that's designed to flip the accountability. To make the questioner look like the aggressor. To make everyone forget what was being asked.

These aren't character flaws. This is a playbook. And it works best when we're too tired or too divided to name it out loud.

So. Here I am. Naming it.

Here's what I keep coming back to. In my actual daily life — in the professional organizations I belong to, in the rooms where I work and speak and show up — I'm surrounded by people who see the world differently than I do. Politically, personally, all of it. And we navigate it. We find the common ground. We disagree and we still show up for each other.

I also know that when I post this on LinkedIn, it will be read by people who work across political lines every single day — because their clients, their colleagues, their livelihoods require it. They do it without fanfare. They do it because that's what people in professional life do.

So if we can do this in our real lives — and we can, and we do — then the division we're being fed is not inevitable. It is manufactured. And we don't have to keep buying it.

Which brings me back to my mother's question. What part are we playing in all of this? Because calling myself an independent isn't a passive thing. It means I've decided to do the work — to vote for the people who most align with what I believe, across party lines, race by race, person by person, without the shortcut of a team jersey telling me what to think. That takes effort. You must pay attention. You must resist the noise. You must decide for yourself every single time.

But I think that's exactly what this moment requires. And I think my mother would agree.

The good news — and there is good news — is that 45% of Americans now identify as political independents. That is not a fringe. That is the single largest political identity in this country, bigger than either party. More than half of registered voters don't feel represented by anyone currently in power.

We are the majority. We are just scattered and quiet and tired.

I've been doing some homework on organizations that are trying to do something about this. A few I'm going to check out myself:

Braver Angels (braverangels.org) brings actual Republicans and Democrats into structured conversation — not to agree, not to debate, just to hear each other. Volunteer-led. Local chapters. The unglamorous work.

The Independent Center (independentcenter.org) is building what they literally call a home for the politically homeless — and working to elect independent candidates to Congress.

Independence.org is focused on the structural stuff — open primaries, ranked choice voting, redistricting — the mechanics that keep the machine in place and the rest of us locked out.

And if you want to understand what the parties actually stand for versus what they perform, Pew Research Center (pewresearch.org) is data without spin. Vote Smart (votesmart.org) shows you what politicians actually voted for. And OpenSecrets (opensecrets.org) follows the money — which honestly explains most of the rest of it.

My dad the ceramic tile setter believed people deserved a fair shot. He got up before dawn, picked up his lunch pail, came home, and read the paper in silence. He woke his daughter with a back rub. He was the quietest man and somehow always the most important voice in any room he was ever in.

My mother handed me a mirror and taught me to use it. She didn't raise someone who points fingers without first looking inward. I'm trying to honor that right now too.

I don't know what I am politically anymore.

But I know what I believe. And I still believe in the people — the ones on both sides who got into this because they wanted to serve. The ones the machine is slowly grinding down.

I'm starting to think the most radical thing any of us can do right now is just say that out loud — honestly, without a jersey on — and see who else raises their hand.

If that's you, I'd love to hear from you.

#FromWhereSit #PoliticallyHomeless #IndependentVoter #Democracy #BridgeTheDivide #FaithAndPolitics #BeyondPartyLines #WomenWhoWrite #Minnesota #MNPolitics #BelongingWithoutPermission #KatieHarms

Katie Harms is a writer, speaker, and podcast co-host based in Minnesota. This essay is part of her ongoing series, From Where I Sit.