Why I Never Ran for Office
In the mid-2010s, calling me "active in the community" in Portland would have been an understatement. I was serving on the boards of nearly a dozen organizations: neighborhood prosperity initiatives, community development groups, human rights organizations, higher education boards, arts nonprofits. All while working full-time at an environmental policy think tank, teaching part-time at several colleges, and touring in The Slants. Outside official roles, I was volunteering at community events, leading talkback sessions, showing up wherever there was a room full of residents trying to figure something out together.
People started telling me I had the right temperament for office. That I could bring together coalitions of people who usually couldn't stand being in the same room. That my habit of going deep into policy with an equity lens was exactly what people at the margins needed in someone with actual power. I started to believe some of it myself.
Around me, people were doing something about it. Friends and colleagues were enrolling in programs like Emerge, the kind of leadership pipeline built specifically to groom people for campaigns and elected office. Several of them won. The ones who didn't kept doing what I was doing anyway, consulting with policymakers, weighing in on legislation, organizing people toward action.
But I never ran.
There wasn't one moment where I decided against it. It was a series of smaller decisions that added up to the same conclusion.
Some of it was wanting to keep something private. I was planning to get married, and I didn't want a campaign putting that life under a brighter microscope than it needed to be. This was before the Supreme Court case made that decision for me anyway, in a different way, for different reasons. Some of it was watching people I respected, genuinely ambitious and idealistic people, walk into elected office and slowly get worn down by what the system required of them to get anything done. Compromise after compromise, each one defensible on its own, until the shape of what they'd originally wanted to build was barely visible.
More than either of those, I came to believe something that's stayed with me. The biggest changes rarely come from the people inside the room. They come from the agitators outside it, the troublemakers, the people whose entire value is that they don't have to compromise, because their job is to hold the people inside the room accountable to something purer than what the room allows.
My best work has never come from being the leader of something. Leadership, when it's happened, has mostly been a byproduct of doing good work rather than the goal of it. I don't tend to seek out the position, and despite whatever assumption people make about performing artists and public speakers, that we're all chasing the spotlight, I never have either.
I play bass, after all.
A bassist holds the rhythm and the groove. It's rarely the instrument anyone's watching, and that's the point. A good bass line is a quiet revolution happening underneath everything everyone else is paying attention to. The song doesn't work without it, but it isn't built to be noticed. That's where I fit best in civic life too. Leading from the pocket rather than from the front.
Eventually I left Portland, partly for distance, partly for a reset. The move let me try new ideas in both art and activism without the gravitational pull of a city where everyone already had an opinion about who I was supposed to become. I kept serving on boards, in Portland and elsewhere, but I leaned toward quieter roles, ones that gave me room for my own projects: writing my memoir, publishing legal scholarship, speaking to law schools, universities, and civic organizationsabout what I'd learned rather than legislating it from an office.
Some people are meant to be the star athlete. Some are meant to be the coach who helps other people become the best versions of themselves. Neither role is more important than the other. Most people, if they're honest, already know which one they are. The harder part is admitting it instead of chasing the version everyone else assumes you should want.
I don't regret any of this. The future isn't written, and there's always a chance I end up involved in something I can't currently imagine. But I want to keep leaning into the place where I can actually make the most difference, which in a band has always been the rhythm section rather than the frontman. Maybe that's true in civic life too. Someone who helps the next generation find their footing. Someone willing to speak plainly to people who hold real power. Someone holding up a window so other people can see what's possible, even if I'm never the one standing in the frame.
I speak on civic engagement, leadership, and what meaningful participation in democratic life can look like outside elected office, at universities, civic organizations, and leadership programs. If this resonates with work you're doing, simontam.org/civic-engagement-democracy is the place to start.
