Prefer the Hard

I’m writing this on the eve of the crucial Michigan primary, where voters will select Republican and Democratic nominees for governor, members of Congress, state legislative seats, and a variety of other elected positions across the state.

Over the next couple weeks, upcoming primaries in Minnesota and Wisconsin and a handful of other states will also take place. And for the most part the dynamic is similar in those states as in Michigan: voters are choosing between a variety of “progressive” or “moderate” candidates to head into November.

I use quotations because there are many different candidates with many different personalities and positions and not all of them fit into a neat space within “the Left” or “the Center” or even anywhere in between.

And I’m looking at all this as someone who’s been in 25 states over the last couple years—nearly all red or purple—working on a policy area of intense political debate.

In Michigan, the Senate race has dominated national headlines. But I recommend the New York Times excellent panel-based profile if you want to get some real expertise and flavor on the ground from Michigan-based political and media sources.

There are also a handful of frontline congressional seats, most notably the Michigan 7th and the 10th districts.

Many of you know I was, for short time last summer, a candidate for the 7th District. I was proud of the brief campaign we ran—focusing on issues related to kids and families, and raising $210,000 in just 11 weeks—but the lane for what I was trying to do was narrow and closing fast even back then. I withdrew and endorsed Ambassador Bridget Brink, who served most recently under President Biden as envoy to Ukraine.

I felt like I owed the folks who supported me an opinion on who I’d back in our district, and Bridget is the only candidate anywhere I formally endorsed—mostly because I don’t think anyone cares about my endorsement anywhere else in most cases.

But as far as Michigan primary candidates go, I do know many of them personally. Including Rep. Haley Stevens, who I admire from her work on the U.S. House Education and Workforce Committee. I chatted with Haley here just a few weeks ago for The Forum.

Jocelyn Benson is the likely Democratic nominee for governor. She has some great thoughts about next steps for Michigan schools.

I also know and admire Christina Hines, the candidate in Michigan’s 10th District who I think has also been very thoughtful about issues and policies concerning kids and families.

In addition to the chat with Haley, you can check out my conversations with Jocelyn, Bridget and Christina, and can read or listen to another 20+ interviews with other candidates and elected officials on all these questions in The Forum’s archive if you’d like.

Including just this past week, when I talked to Congressman Greg Landsman (D-OH). More Forum conversations are coming.

I am always ready to engage, work with, support—where I can—people who put their hand up to help provide common-sense solutions in public policy.

So those are my cards.

Believe me when I tell you this: there is not a single policymaker in either party who cares about evidence, facts, or data, who would also make a policy choice without hearing from someone who disagrees with you.

The through-line across my entire career has been the use of evidence and data to inform decision-making. Although I recognize the value of research and scholarship for scholarship’s sake, I’ve always worked on questions that have some bearing on policymaking.

That doesn’t mean, except in rare instances, the result of a particular study or even set of studies I’ve been apart of were fully determinative. One piece of data rarely ever leads to a single decision. That’s just not how research in any industry works. You hope your work can provide a little light to a very heated space, but leaders need to take their own steps within that light.

In policymaking that means asking not only what programs work but also: who do they work for, and why? And when they’re not working, is it because they’re the result of a bad idea, or bad implementation (the difference between those two explanations is not always very big)?

It’s also an unfortunate fact of policymaking that sometimes programs that work, work less well for historically at-risk families. And programs that don’t work? They can often hurt those at-risk families most of all.

There’s a trend in Democratic politics right now—and it’s been ongoing for awhile— that is very issue and policy-based. Medicare for All! Tax the billionaires! Green New Deal!

Let me tell you something. As far as data and evidence go, in the education space there are only a handful of “home-runs”—interventions that unambiguously work for everyone. For example, we know that universal school meals improve not only child health, but also academic outcomes. It’s good that we have evidence to back that up, but keep in mind that this is also common sense: hungry kids learn less well.

Introducing free school meals to everyone is very specific policy intervention or program that has both immediate impacts on kids, and downstream system-level impacts. It lowers also community grocery store prices.

Then there examples of system-wide interventions that go the opposite way: you make a big change but the details in individual communities and local markets matter. An example here is that increasing school choice is on its own not enough to move the needle of opportunity. You need to invest in high quality options. You have to provide meaningful oversight of quality providers. You have to provide information to parents and you have to address barriers like transportation.

Whichever direction you’re working in—small interventions that have big downstream impacts, or big system-wide interventions that take localized attention and supports—the use of data and evidence at its best is ongoing and feedback-oriented. No one knows anything, all of the time.

So when you get to what policymakers call a decision point, information is almost always incomplete. And that’s before we even bring in other factors like cost.

Or the need to build a real, and durable political coalition. Which is certainly true when you need legislative votes to create or sustain your idea. But it’s even true when you have those votes, especially for ideas that take local stakeholders, managers, educators, health care practitioners, or business leaders to really carry out.

Because that’s other thing about this: policymaking is a team sport.

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You should love your friends and family—not your political candidate. A candidate who wins will, if they are effective, have to make a choice down the line that upsets you or even leaves you feeling betrayed. But it will only FEEL like betrayal. Sometimes it’s just called government.

My home area of education policy is a good example of how many different decision-makers, organizations, and agencies are involved in executing one particular policy agenda—even when that agenda is determined ultimately by one leader.

On any given day, you might encounter federal (agency or congressional), state (governor, education agency, health care or child and family agency), and local (school board, county, town) government. Some of these encounters will be with elected officials or political appointees. Most will be with staff or civil servants.

Any given decision may require funding from all three levels of government—a typical school district alone relies on equal parts state and local revenue, topped off with federal funding to varying degrees depending on student population.

Most of that funding is determined by passing a budget—again, federal or state for sure, alongside a variety of different local district budgeting decisions.

And in nearly every instance, even the final decision point for policy change can only determine the direction at one level of government.

It’s a process of acting and reacting.

As a researcher, what you hope is to put some solid data—dollars, measures of output and outcomes, stakeholder feedback, whatever it is—into that decision process. If you’re really lucky.

But you know that whether your work is showing a set of policies or programs work—or don’t work—yours is only one in a series of conversations that lead to the final decision point.

Even if you’re in the room where it happens.

And believe me when I tell you this: there is not a single policymaker in either party who cares enough about evidence, facts, or data, who would also make a policy choice without hearing from someone who disagrees with you. And there is almost no circumstance in which even after having made a decision, they would be free to fund or implement it without gaining votes, approvals, or (sometimes) judicial rulings from folks who disagree with them.

This is true whether that leader is a governor, a legislator, or an agency chief.

All of which is to say that while you are inundated with political promises in Michigan, Wisconsin, Maine, or any other state, it’s really important to remember that a leaders’s ability to negotiate, pivot, and compromise—on policy, though not on values—is far more consequential to delivering a given plan or proposal than their ability to film a selfie.

And believe me. It also means you will be disappointed. You love your friends and family, not your political candidate. A candidate who wins will, if they are effective, have to make a choice down the line that upsets you or even leaves you feeling betrayed.

But it will only feel that way. Sometimes it’s just called government. And governing means making difficult choices.

The hard work ahead is going to be done at conference tables, appropriations hearings, and not a few courtrooms.

There’s a quote commonly attributed to Marcus Aurelius that reads something like “prefer the hard.” The idea also part of pop culture and psychology these days, and basically means: work, relationships, and life itself are difficult no matter what you do. So why not lean into the difficult path intentionally.

Maybe a more inspirational version would be Glennon Doyle’s “we can do hard things.”

Here’s why this matters to governing. Even if Donald Trump had never existed, policymaking in the United States would still be one of the most difficult professional environments to work in, especially if you planned on using impact and change as your benchmarks for success.

The entire political system is set up to change politics and policy slowly and with great difficulty. That’s been true for 250+ years.

Now. Donald Trump created massive upheaval, and some fundamental change, both in his first term and in this second administration. But almost all of that change has been to break apart certain structures of government—in my area, the obvious here is federal education policymaking—not building a durable collection of laws and policies or a durable coalition to implement them.

You’ve heard the cliche: it’s always easier to break things rather than to build them.

What’s going to be needed for the rebuild after Trump is the careful, consistent work of negotiation, stakeholder management, and implementation alongside the vision, creativity, and strategic goal-setting that the moment demands too.

That’s true even or especially given the fact that one lesson of the Trump era is just how vulnerable our legal and political system is to takeover and impulse. And how much we have relied for decades on a certain set of shared norms and processes around governing, rather laws themselves.

The hard work ahead is going to be done at conference tables, appropriations hearings, and not a few courtrooms. Some will be streamed and televised. Most will not.

There will be room in those places for many different skill sets. But the most consequential of those rooms will include people who disagree with each other.

I wrote a few months back that I’m looking for repairers of the breach. Trust is about effectiveness. It’s also about endurance.