We sat with Jennifer Nguyen Moore, a St. Paul organizer and environmentalist. She previously ran for Ramsey County Commissioner in 2018 but did not win the election. As we sat for lunch, we talked about running for office, the struggles of being Asian American and being a mother, and the importance of representation. At the end, Nguyen Moore provides some insight and advice for any young people interested in running for office.
This Q&A will be split into two parts. The second part will be posted next week.
You ran for Ramsey County Commissioner’s Office this past election – can you tell me a little about that experience?
It was a rollercoaster. I didn’t have anything to gauge off of it, like what it would be like or how it would take my time or how it would affect relationships in a positive or negative way.
Everything was really brand new to me. I learned a lot about the skills that I had. [Running] was really fulfilling, like being able to build relationships and make connections.
I knew that sharing information to the public and to people to bridge between government and people is really my calling. We need more of that, we need to do more civic and community engagement.
It’s a lot of work, and it challenges you a lot to. I’m an introvert and I have the ability to learn how to turn on and off my extrovert qualities. It really pushed me to share more about myself which I usually don’t do. It also really pushed me to learn how to interact with people in a way that I’m not usually comfortable doing. This experience allowed me to be more comfortable to put myself out there and share my story in the hopes of pushing for inclusion and representation.
How did it feel to run without ever being part of a campaign? Was there anything you did to prepare yourself for it?
Back in college, I studied environmental policy and social justice and I really wanted to go into law. That was one of the paths that I wanted to do. Then I thought I wanted to do policy development and ultimately become a U.S. Senator of Minnesota. That was my ultimate goal.
I had the idea of running for office in my head but it had changed over time. So that mentality was always with me but I never really prepared myself to do it.
What really propelled me was seeing how our federal policies would change and seeing how dire the situation was with the new administration. I considered what implications would impact my community, Asian folks, young folks, children — we can’t just live in a political depression. So I thought, what can I do in my backyard to make it better? To fight against these racist and blatantly degrading policies?
And so I saw that other people were running for office, and I saw that they were running against my commissioner and I thought — I don’t think they represent me or my community. If they were to win, they won’t worry about the neighborhood I’m in. I’m in the North End, a community in Saint Paul where 70% of people are Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC), 35% of us live under the poverty rate, and a lot of us don’t vote for various reasons.
And that really struck me, how do we engage people to vote more? And it’s not just like, let’s go out and tell them they need to vote. We need someone that is inspirational, able to speak truth, authentic, passionate and have the lived experiences of facing the socioeconomic challenges. We need a leader that has solutions that will create opportunities to ensure our communities grow and evolve while having an anti-racist and anti-discrimination lens. We didn’t have that person running for office and so I just decided that I needed to do that, that I needed to be in that space.
Another reason why I decided to run was because of my experience with a former employer. I was invited to participate in racial equity work for a government entity. I soon realized that I was a token and wasn’t expected to come up with tangible actions to achieve racial equity. I realized that if you want to make any significant changes here, you have to be a council member, you have to hold and have authority. So I’m like oh, okay. I need authority?
Let me run for office.
Let me have the authority to allocate the funds needed for our community and make a huge difference.
How do you feel about the elections afterwards?
We did a lot of preparations to prepare ourselves regardless of what the election results were going to be. My team decided to pursue the DFL endorsement. We went for it because we wanted to make sure people knew I was there, I was running. However, I knew I didn’t have a chance at winning the endorsement. I didn’t receive the DFL endorsement.
And so it really disappointed us when we didn’t win and I was at the point where I was like, should we continue? Should I continue?
It was basically like a David and Goliath situation where someone with a huge amount of money, a machine, all the resources and political support versus me, which is like, nobody knew me. This endorsement process is extremely exclusive and unattainable for many candidates. There are about 200 individuals out of a voting pool of thousands of potential voters. This process is not democratic and doesn’t allow the entire community decide who should be representing them.
After that “loss,” I thought, this is hard. Our group sat down and we hit the reset button. We said you know what? This is not about winning. Why are we even thinking about winning when we should be thinking about how many people are we going to connect with? What’s the impact going to look like if someone like me challenged a typical candidate and really talked about the issues that matter to our community and what if we used this as a way to talk about real issues like racism, poverty, all of these barriers our community faces. We would force them to talk about it too and bring these real-life issues to the forefront.