In addition to winning several department awards and the 2021 Undergraduate Research Award from the Edmond Low Library, Emilie Tindle also ran for Oklahoma House District 11 in 2020. In this interview, Tindle shares why she chose to run for office and what that experience was like as a full-time student, in the middle of a pandemic.
What was behind your decision to run for public office?
When I saw that our district (HD 11) didn’t have a general election in 2018, only a Republican primary, the thought entered my head that I wasn’t too happy with that kind of representation. Then, I learned that we had not had a general election since 2004! I grew up in a different district in Tulsa where we nearly always had contested elections. So, after a friend reminded me it was possible to run, I decided to try. At first, I was running so that my district would have a general election, a contest between two candidates of different parties. But everything changed in April 2020. The incumbent, a man I hold high respect for even though I was running against him, drew a primary opponent from the fringes of his party. When she beat him in the June primary, my reasons for running changed from having productive conversations with voters to championing public education, reasonable public health investments, a science-aligned response to the COVID-19 pandemic, and economic diversity in Oklahoma – all policies that my fundamentalist rival strongly opposed. So, like a good research question, my reasons changed over time with new information!
How does your pursuit of a BA in History inform your public service goals and vice versa?
All policy issues we encounter in the present have longer histories, but not everyone in public policy environments assumes this to be the case. With rapid news cycles and heightened political rhetoric, it is politically expedient to emphasize some aspects of policy over others – especially for those who like to toss around words like “socialism” and “communism”. Studying history and having a deeper understanding of how academic history is performed have given me the perspective and tools to move past rhetoric towards actual knowledge. Rather than informing my goals, my pursuit of a BA in History informs my entire perspective on policy and public service. Conversely, while I know historians must be careful when engaging the past with the present, my public service goals and policy ideas shape how I interact with the field of history and have influenced the research projects I have done. For example, the Trump Administration’s zero tolerance and family separation policies led me to research how historians have understood the U.S.-Mexican War across the 20th century. All policies have historical and cultural roots.
What was it like trying to balance running for office, taking courses, and keeping up with other responsibilities in your life all in the middle of a pandemic?
It was a total mess at times and a total joy at others to balance everything. Prior to running, I had been working full time and enrolled full time while commuting from Collinsville to Stillwater 4-5 times a week on the BOB. So, honestly, balancing a campaign and classes pushed online due to a pandemic was easier than my former schedule. However, it was still a tricky balance. I barely turned in my research project after a year’s extension. I missed a couple assignments during our Get Out The Vote (GOTV) push in October because the brain can only go so many directions. Like most people would, I had to find ways to cut corners in my personal life just to manage school and the campaign – so now I am catching up on sleep and getting my health back under control, both elements that suffered over the last few months. I also watched some amazing people, like newly elected Senator Jo Anna Dossett, balance more than I thought possible during her campaign – kids, work, and a stellar race. So, I felt motivated by the visible and invisible hard work of the people around me. Finally, no one ever does anything alone – my husband would clean the house during his monthly visits from his out-of-state work in GA, my mom knocked doors/dropped literature with me, my aunt dropped lit so I could write papers, and we assembled a crew of 100+ volunteers from March to October that sent postcards, dropped literature, and texted voters. There wasn’t balance so much as survival.
What was the most important thing you learned in your run for office?
The most important lesson I take from this first campaign is that the candidate is only as good as the people around them. When Leslie Knope says, “Whatever that work is that you find worth doing. Do it, and find some people to love who'll do it with you” in the last episode of Parks and Rec, she is speaking truth. Not only do you need a diverse set of voices surrounding you and teaching you, but you also need the person who will cry with you, the person who will text you every 2 hours on election day to tell you it will all be ok, or the spouse who spends his vacation days driving you all over a precinct to talk to voters. Most importantly, when you have those people that love you and that you love, you know for whom you labor, even on the darkest days when your feet ache from 8 miles on doors in Precinct 54. You see the teachers’ faces – the faces of people who have tirelessly advocated for public education and spent their Spring Breaks in Capitol offices – and you know your “why” again. And fundamentally, win or lose, campaigns should be about people – because politics should be about people. Knowing how to operate a campaign – strategies, fundraising, mailers – is fundamentally different from connecting political action with the people of the district. While we lost, we kept the high road and we lost with zero regrets.
What advice do you have for others who are thinking about running for office?
First, talk to people who have run before, especially for the level of government you are pursuing. If you are a woman in Oklahoma, connect with Sally’s List, attend the Pipeline to Politics seminar held in January by the Women’s Leadership group at OU, and participate in the Oklahoma Women’s Coalition. Next, make sure your community roots are strong. If you haven’t been on local boards, participated in community groups like Rotary or the Chamber of Commerce, then get involved as early as possible. Next, identify the people you want on your “committee.” This is your team of community advisors. Also, find reputable political consultants (there are bad ones out there for sure) and work closely with them. Take their advice and use your gut on community issues. You will have 2 jobs – raising money and talking to voters – everything else is delegated or handled by the consultants. Yes, that’s all technical advice, but campaigns aren’t glamorous and they really don’t deal with policy. You only get to do the policy if you win the race. Finally, YOU CAN DO IT if your motives are good and you are committed to the process of the campaign, win or lose. There is value in a race well run even if the result is loss at the ballot box. Campaigns are a vital part of democracy and the political process and should never be discounted as “failures” (unless you just didn’t do your job well).
What’s next for you?
Unfortunately, my community goals and academic goals for research do not coincide, at least from a graduate school standpoint. In the short term, I am hoping to graduate next fall and apply to the MPA program at OU Tulsa. I would like to pursue graduate work in History, possibly to continue with research on the U.S.-Mexican War, but I can’t really do that and meet our organizing goals for Oklahoma and Washington County right now. I’ll keep up with the field as best I can, but my focus will stay on public service opportunities in the short term.