In a conservative congressional district, two Austin Democrats race to the left

When Julie Oliver lost to U.S. Rep. Roger Williams, R-Austin, in a closer-than-expected race in November 2018 she felt a numbness that by December thawed into a deep sadness.

“I felt like I had let a lot of people down, that I had failed in my responsibility to the people of the district,” Oliver said. "By early February I started thinking, ‘I could do this again,’ by the middle of February, ‘I should do this again,’ and by the beginning of March, I was, ‘I have to do this again.’”

And so she is.

But what Oliver, 47, didn’t realize at the time is that before she can get another crack at Williams, a 70-year-old car dealer seeking his fifth term in Congress, she must get past a Democratic primary challenge from Heidi Sloan, a dynamic 34-year-old activist springing from Austin’s fertile socialist movement, inspired to electoral activism by the success of fellow democratic socialists Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Williams, meanwhile, is facing a primary challenge from Keith Neuendorff, 53, a software engineer and political novice from West Lake Hills, who is running a low-budget campaign — he has raised and spent less than $6,000 — talking to voters about what he finds to be Williams’ "lack of connectivity with his constituents.“

Sloan, who had been involved in organizing campaigns with the Austin chapter of Democratic Socialists of America to pressure U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett, D-Austin, to embrace Medicare for All (he did), for paid sick days and to decriminalize homelessness, said that last spring, allies “just kept mentioning, `We really like organizing with you, we like your leadership style, have you ever thought about running?’”

She said she had not, but Mike Nachbar, a democratic socialist organizer, now managing her congressional campaign, “sat me down and he said, `This is what 2020 is going to look like. Obviously, DSA is going to organize for Bernie as long as Bernie continues to be who he has been for the last 4 years, but it can’t just be that. We have to build a coalition to win Medicare for All and a Green New Deal. And we have to get started right now.’”

Sloan is one of only three candidates nationwide endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America. One, Alex Brower, finished out of the money Tuesday in a primary for comptroller in Milwaukee. The other, in Chicago, is Anthony Clark, who is seeking to topple U.S. Rep. Danny K. Davis, a progressive member of the Congressional Black Caucus, in a March 17 primary.

If Oliver seems an unlikely target from the left, she will be tough to beat March 3 in a race that offers a glimpse at how, even as the center of gravity of the Democratic Party has shifted left since Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton, the battle for primacy among the party’s progressives is intensifying.

Much of the Democratic elected and progressive activist leadership and most of the Democratic clubs in Austin back Oliver, believing she has earned another shot in a tough, gerrymandered district, stretching from East Austin to Burleson, just south of Fort Worth. She sliced Williams’ 21-point margin in 2016 to 8.7 points in 2018.

In that campaign, Oliver said, “I put 40,000 miles on my car, actually two cars because one of my cars was stolen during the campaign.”

So far this time, she has driven 20,000 miles. She said her campaign canvassed 90,000 homes and hopes to hit an additional 25,000 by election day, sent 70,000 pieces of mail and 200,000 texts. (As of Friday, Sloan said her campaign had knocked on 80,000 doors.)

Oliver has a compelling story — born into poverty, running away from home, living in abandoned buildings and becoming pregnant at 17, but going on to graduate from high school the week after her daughter was born. She put herself through college and law school and has a 20-year career in health care finance and taxation, while raising four children, ages 11, 21, 23 and 29.

She was never part of Democratic Socialists of America and not the first choice of the Bernie crowd in the 2018 primary. That was Austin attorney Chris Perri, whom she defeated in a runoff. She has not disclosed her choice for president this time. But her platform is Bernie-perfect: Medicare for All. Green New Deal. Universal free public college. Cancel all student debt. Shut down for-profit prisons.

“Julie, I think she’s great and would be a great member of Congress,” said Austin City Council Member Greg Casar. But Casar, a member of Democratic Socialists of America, backs Sloan.

“I think we need more organizers in office, folks who can bring movements of people into the halls of power, people who can make folks, especially young people, rededicate their lives to politics, and I think Heidi is that kind of person,” said Casar, marveling that last Sunday’s Heidi/Bernie block walk in Austin drew more than 180 volunteers, including nearly two dozen first-timers.

“I think if you want to beat someone like Roger Williams, you need as many people knocking on doors, as many people excited, as many people feeling like this race is different than all the other races that they have previously voted in and so that’s why she’s got a real chance,” he said.

But for Julie Ann Nitsch, Julie Oliver is the real deal.

Nitsch, a democratic socialist elected to the Austin Community College board, backed Perri over Oliver in 2018, but says that, in the general election campaign, “I got to know her heart.”

Nitsch said there is no more persuasive advocate for Medicare for All.

“She knows the ins and outs of it. She can argue it better than anyone,” Nitsch said. “She connects with voters outside of the blue bubble that is Austin.”

“Julie goes out to the rural areas and talks to people in a way that is respectful and kind and understanding,” Nitsch said. “She’s not on a soap box. She’s not telling you how to live your life. She’s asking you what you need and responding to it and telling you how best she can fulfill your needs.”

Sloan grew up in Cedar Hill, near Dallas.

“My dad delivered pizza, drove trucks, worked for the phone company installing cable,” Sloan said. “My mom didn't really work consistently. She has a lot of mental health things that we never could get the help we needed with. So that was like the main focus of my growing up.”

Sloan went to Baylor University on scholarship.

She moved to Austin where she worked at Casis Elementary School as a preschool teacher for children with disabilities.

“But I got a wild hair and decided I wanted to be a farmer,” Sloan said, an ambition she fulfilled the last six years working at Austin’s Community First! Village, a community for men and women coming out of chronic homelessness.

“In my organizing work, I knock on the doors with Trump stickers, and I talk to people about Medicare for All, and what is effective in those conversations is not talking about the left and the right, it’s talking about the top and the bottom,” Sloan said.

“I'm a democratic socialist who is a farmer. I take my baths at night. I try not to use four-syllable words,” she said.

Whatever the outcome March 3, Sloan’s candidacy might be the forerunner of more explicitly socialist candidacies in Texas Democratic Party politics. Casar, for one, is considering a run for the state Senate seat being vacated by Austin’s Kirk Watson.

This would all be more far-fetched were Bernie Sanders, a loud and proud democratic socialist his entire political career, not the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, devoting this critical weekend to four rallies in Texas — El Paso and San Antonio on Saturday, and Houston and Austin on Sunday — where recent polls have him running first.

“I think that folks, especially in places like Austin, overwhelmingly support Medicare for All and the Green New Deal,” Casar said. “Bernie won the Travis County Democratic primary in 2016.”

Sanders’ success is built on his popularity with younger voters, for whom socialism is the not the bugaboo it has been in American politics since the Russian Revolution.

In 2019, Democratic Socialists of America-backed candidates won seats on the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and the Los Angeles school board.

Last April, six socialist candidates won seats on Chicago’s 50-seat City Council.

Socialists also won city council seats in Cambridge, Mass., Philadelphia and Charlottesville, Va., in 2019.

Aside from the rise of Sanders, the big breakthrough came in 2018, when Ocasio-Cortez, a 28-year-old democratic socialist bartending at a taco joint, rocked the political world by defeating Joseph Crowley, a powerful Democratic incumbent from an overwhelmingly Democratic district in New York, launching a spectacular ascent to the forefront of American politics and popular culture.

Ocasio-Cortez did for the Green New Deal what Sanders did for Medicare for All.

It was also Ocasio-Cortez’s endorsement of Sanders after his heart attack in October that rejuvenated his campaign.

Recently Ocasio-Cortez launched a new PAC, Courage to Change, as a counterweight to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the campaign arms of Democrats in the House and Senate.

On Friday, Courage to Change endorsed six women nationwide running for the U.S. House and one U.S. Senate candidate — Austin’s Cristina Tzintzún Ramirez — who is seeking the Democratic nomination in a crowded primary field. Another Senate candidate, MJ Hegar, has the backing of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.

Both Sloan and Oliver are too far left — and the 25th District too far a reach — for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee to get involved.

The move into electoral politics for the Democratic Socialists of America remains fraught with angst within the organization.

Its National Electoral Committee statement on its electoral strategy wrestles with the question, “Why should a socialist organization engage in electoral work?”

“The question is an old one, but the Bernie Sanders campaign has invested it with new life. Today, socialist majorities are still on the distant horizon, but as Sanders and others have demonstrated, electoral work can make enormous contributions to advancing socialist politics and building a majoritarian left-wing coalition,” it reads.

“Yet,” the statement notes, “many socialists, including many in DSA, are suspicious of electoral work — and they’re right to be.”

It worries that socialist elected officials can find themselves caught between compromise and irrelevancy or “captured by careerist ambitions.”

Also, it reads, “the start-stop rhythm of the election cycle disrupts and detracts from the long-haul task of building mass movements for change.”

Sloan does not see her candidacy and others as part of a coordinated national strategy.

“It’s bubbling up from the ground,” she said.

On the other hand, she said, “The language around the ‘blue wave’ is fascinating to me as someone who hasn’t been in those spaces where electoral politics really get determined. It has the feeling of temporariness to it. A blue wave. It just makes me think it’s going to go away.”

In answering the American-Statesman candidate questionnaire, the GOP’s Williams said his mission in 2020 is “making sure capitalism defeats socialism.”

Most Republicans and quite a few Democrats think that running explicitly socialist campaigns in Texas — or having Bernie Sanders at the top of the ticket — will prove a disaster for Democrats and a gift to the GOP.

“Roger Williams will run an excellent smear campaign on me, and then I will go talk to hundreds and thousands more people in this district, and I will charm the hell out of them because I am a native Texan who loves this place and deeply believes in Texans,” Sloan said.

But first, she must get past Julie Oliver.

Julie Oliver

Money raised: $385,778

Money spent: $276,120

Cash on hand: $108,730

Heidi Sloan

Money raised: $176,663

Money spent: $87,901

Cash on hand: $79,253

Democratic fundraising through Feb. 12