The Outsider with a Resume

Lauren Pinkston on what elected officials owe us

Since Donald Trump came down the escalator, we’ve been talking about authenticity and outsiders, about elite failures and institutional trust. It feels to me like that conversation has almost become a caricature of itself.

Maybe (??) we’re reaching the point of “insanity is doing the same thing and expecting different results.”

My conversation partner today is Lauren Pinkston, independent candidate for governor in Tennessee. I was curious to talk with her about what it means to be an outsider who looks like an insider. She’s running without a party behind her. She has a PhD and has lived in multiple countries. Can someone like Lauren, who is polished, prepared, and professional have the authentic outsider cred that launches the career of someone like Graham Platner?

We hit on some themes that I’ll be thinking about for a while. Can’t wait to hear what this conversation sparks for you.

Topics Discussed

• Transparency and elected officials’ health, from Mitch McConnell to Tom Kean Jr.

• Graham Platner’s exit from the Maine Senate race and what it says about party incentives

• Elitism, authenticity, and what “honor” means in public service

• Money in politics and running a campaign without party infrastructure

• A proposed moratorium on data centers in Tennessee

• Rebuilding public education: vouchers, Montessori models, screen time, and special education

• Parenting lessons Lauren brings to how she’d govern

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Episode Resources

https://pinkstonfortn.com/en/about

https://www.instagram.com/pinkstonfortn/?hl=en

Tickets for the Pantsuit Politics live show in Minneapolis, Aug 29 (Eventbrite)

Episode Transcript

[00:00:00] Beth: This is Beth Silvers. You’re listening to Pantsuit Politics. Sarah is on her summer break. I am here with a very special guest, Lauren Pinkston, who is running for governor of Tennessee as an independent candidate. Several Tennessee listeners have told us about Lauren, and I got more interested the more I learned. Lauren is pretty fearless and has organized an impressive campaign from the ground up by herself. I’ve been honest about how much I struggle with the two-party system since we started recording Pantsuit Politics, so I want to hear about and from people who are trying a different way. Lauren and I talk about what elected leaders owe their constituents and her thoughts on education. A couple of things you should know about this conversation. Lauren spoke to me from a storage room in a public library where she’d been out meeting voters. If you follow Lauren on Instagram, you’ll see that she’s on the road in Tennessee talking to voters all the time. So it’s not surprising that she squeezed this conversation into a packed schedule. The library needed her to relocate to another small room in the middle of our conversation, and I wanted to tell you about this both so you understand why the sound quality varies and because she handled it really graciously.

[00:01:14] I’ve talked with a lot of people running for office. They’re usually in very controlled environments. I thought it was refreshing to see a candidate out in the wild. It feels like she’s walking her talk in a variety of ways. You should also know that we talked on Wednesday afternoon. As you’re listening on Friday or later, you probably know a lot more about Mitch McConnell, Graham Platner, and other news than Lauren and I knew as we talked. You’ll hear us talk less about the specifics of these headlines and more about them as a microcosm of a system that is struggling. One more quick announcement now is the moment to get your tickets to our Minneapolis live show afterparty. The afterparty is where Sarah and I really get to spend time with people, taking photos, chatting, giving hugs. It’s the best. It’s also where a lot of listeners meet people they end up staying in touch with long after everyone’s headed home. So grab your tickets by following the link in the show notes. And now, here is my conversation with Lauren Pinkston, independent candidate for governor of Tennessee Lauren, welcome to Pantsuit Politics. I’m so excited that you’re here.

[00:02:24] Lauren Pinkston: I have been waiting for this conversation. Thank you for having me.

[00:02:28] Beth: So I want to talk with you about leadership issues that are in the headlines right now because I think they correspond to your decision to seek office as an independent. Let’s start with transparency about health. We’re recording at 1:00 Eastern Time on Wednesday, July 8th. This episode will publish Friday morning, the 10th. The situation could have changed by then, but as we’re talking, we know that 84-year-old Senator McConnell of the Commonwealth of Kentucky, where I live, is hospitalized, has been since maybe June 14th. We don’t really know why, and the internet is abuzz with speculation about what’s going on with him. The big development today is that our governor, Andy Beshear, sent a letter to him asking about the status of his health, and I wondered what you thought about that and how you’ve been processing this absence overall.

[00:03:26] Lauren Pinkston: I’m someone who believes in term limits. I believe, of course, there is a learning curve when you come into office, and there’s a lot that does need to become... within your realm of understanding, right? When you’re running for public office, and then you start to serve. However, there is so much watered-down courage when someone has been in office for so long. And if you are not fit to serve, the first thing that you can do as an honoring of our republic is to say that out loud, especially if it’s clear that it has been a prolonged issue. When, our current president was elected in 2016, I spoke out against him and have been speaking to Christians about the dangers of his leadership since then. But in 2024, I said the exact same thing about President Biden, and I said that he was the most selfish man in the country at the time because it was clear that his health capacity had weakened, and his mental capacity had weakened. And to put his party in a difficult position, I thought was very selfish as well. So on both sides of the issue, on both sides of the political spectrum, we have this issue. But I think it’s important that we are transparent about our fit to govern, and especially when very serious conversations are being had, and very important conversations are being had with people’s tax dollars. It is unjust and it is not right to not use your leadership capacity to the fullest extent.

[00:04:48] Beth: I’m not sure that Mitch McConnell thinks of himself as owing anyone that level of honesty about his capacity as one of his constituents. I have my feelings about him as a national figure and the way that he has played games with the Supreme Court, his failure to convict the president after January 6th. Both of those things I think are forever damaging to his legacy and to our country. But as a constituent of his, I’ve contacted his office many times. I find his responses really insulting and dismissive, and I think that they just show that he just doesn’t think he has to tell us anything.

[00:05:31] Lauren Pinkston: Yeah. You are experiencing something that people across the country are experiencing, and it is this fear of your constituents. I’m watching so many elected officials avoid questions from the people that they are serving or are supposed to serve of offices in Washington and at the state level, ignoring emails, ignoring phone calls, or as you said, writing blanket responses back that are incredibly dismissive because our elected officials now can’t think for themselves. They are required to vote along a party line and close their minds, close their eyes, close their ears, and just check a box, and that to me is the assault of intellectual freedom.

[00:06:08] Beth: Yeah. I wonder how you think as someone who’s seeking office right now about health issues in general because there are long-term issues that you know aren’t going to get any better. McConnell is 84, and there’s one direction with aging, unfortunately. So I think that’s one issue. I wonder what you think about Tom Kean, the New Jersey representative. He’s in the House. He’s 57 years old. He was basically missing for four months, and no one could find him. There were articles being written like, “We talked to his neighbors. They don’t know where he is. No one knows where he is.” He recently came out and said, “I was being treated for depression during that absence.” And I so believe in being treated for depression and appreciate people who take that step. I don’t want to stigmatize what he was going through in any way, and I think being gone four months without some kind of explanation is unacceptable for an elected official. So what do you think about those temporary situations? How much do you think if you were governor you would owe an explanation if you had to have a health procedure of some type?

[00:07:16] Lauren Pinkston: Of course, I believe in privacy, but when you choose to serve the public, you hand over the rights to much of that privacy, right? That is written into the understanding, in my opinion. This is not in the United States, but we could talk about Kate Middleton going through the procedures that she had, and how many speculations were said. When you hide or when you’re not completely transparent, people make assumptions, and those assumptions lead to things that are not true often. But the best way to get ahead of any kind of rumors or any kind of big feelings is just to be honest, to be transparent. We’re all humans. We are not infinite beings. We are going to experience things regardless of whether we’re elected or not. And so when you hand over the rights to that freedom, because, again, your presence is paid for by someone else’s tax dollars, I just think that you owe it to the general public to be as transparent as you can be and to make sure that the role of your office can continue in your absence.

[00:08:16] Beth: Yeah. It’s so much about judgment, I think, the way that you handle these issues and the way that you choose to communicate about them. I realize that in some ways, when you’re a public person, it’s never going to be enough, right? Even if you handle everything upfront very transparently, there will be theories, there will be lies, there will be smears. And I wonder if people who serve in these positions knowing that just think, “ Well, forget it then.” It will never be enough, so why say anything?

[00:08:46] Lauren Pinkston: I run into a lot of people who genuinely... I was going through a county recently and the women who were taking me through and introducing me to folks, they said, “The people we were introducing you to didn’t even realize you were running for office because you were just having a conversation with them first.” And I said, “Is it because I’m not afraid of people?” I just genuinely love people, and I love conversations. But there is such a guardedness around elected officials. Cameras are out all the time, and so they’re always afraid that they’re going to say something. I know that I’m going to say things that someone doesn’t like or that I may need to apologize for later. But I don’t think that gives me the right to only talk to people when I know exactly the questions that I’m going to be given ahead of time. Or to only get behind a microphone when I am completely prepared in a closed-off room that I have approved every person to be there. And so we need politicians, we need public servants who are accessible and who are living everyday life with the general public because when you lose touch of that, then you fail to govern effectively.

[00:09:47] Beth: I think losing touch with that is a definition of where Senator McConnell is at this point in his career. I wish him the best and his family the best. I hate the way people are talking about this. I think it’s ghastly the way people are talking about it. I don’t even like the governor’s letter to him. I think that was just a bridge too far and unnecessary. There’s enough swirling around this. It felt like an attention grab to me. I hope that he is doing as well as possible, and I wish the best for his family. And I also think that he is very divorced from what people in Kentucky need at this point in his career. I want to ask you about another very big story as we’re recording. Graham Platner, the Democratic candidate for Senate in Maine, has been accused of rape, by a woman, a 41-year-old Maine resident. She said this happened about five years ago, and there are calls across the spectrum for him to drop out of this race as we’re recording. I imagine he will have by the time this episode publishes. I hope so, anyway. what do you think about this story? What does this say to you about the larger state of our politics? I feel like how much more can we talk about Grand Platner as one man? I’m interested in the bigger picture that this is a microcosm of.

[00:11:06] Lauren Pinkston: I think it’s a microcosm of a lot of things that we’ve seen across the political spectrum, as you just said, and that is when we have our candidate, and that candidate shows promise, then we will cover up as much as we can in order to win a seat. And when we do that repeatedly, over and over again, we lose the faith in the public institution of government, and that’s where people are today. I think that’s why people are so sick of politics on both sides is because it feels like whatever your candidate does and says and is accused of is fair game if they are showing that they’re winning in the polls. And, to me, that is a gross expression of our ethics and of the decorum that we enjoyed when we were kids growing up. Of course, we could go all the way back to the Clinton administration and what our parents said during that. We go back to the Nixon administration and things that happened. I don’t know what diagnosis I need to be stepping into the political arena at this era. But what I do know is that the honor that used to come with a political office, for the most part, has failed to exist. And you see a youthful generation that is rising up and is ready to burn it all down because they don’t trust it, and I understand why.

[00:12:24] Beth: Honor is an interesting word that you used there. I’ve been thinking a lot about Graham Plattner and what he represents because immediately as accusations started coming out about him months ago, the response was like, “Are you kidding? Donald Trump’s the president. Everything’s different. The rules are not the same, and he has good policies, and it doesn’t matter. We need somebody with good policies who will fight against Donald Trump to be in office.” And I think that some of that comes from this rejection of the elite that we’ve been talking about for 10 years since Donald Trump came on the scene. And I’ve been trying to consider, what is a word that captures what people really want? Because I think there is a problem with elitism, a sense that if you didn’t go to one of maybe ten, ten colleges, you don’t have a voice in the process, if your parents weren’t wealthy. There’s definitely a sense that we are no longer a citizen government. But what is a word that would say, “And we still have standards.” Like standards both of integrity and of experience and intellect and achievement. I was impressed when I saw that you just put your full resume on your website. “Hey, I am a person of excellence and merit in seeking this office,” and you’re not being apologetic about that in this climate that is very anti-elite. So how are you putting all that together? I like the word honor as a part of this portrait of who we’re looking for.

[00:13:58] Lauren Pinkston: Well, it’s honor not just in the office, but it’s honor in our fellow man and woman. it’s honor in the way that we approach humans and regardless of whether or not they’re going to vote for us, regardless of whether or not they’re in a part of a demographic that does vote, it’s the way that we treat people through and how hard we fight to earn their trust. I’m running a race where my opponents to the right have millions of dollars from Israel and from school voucher, supporters. One of my opponents has put 5 million of his own dollars in the race. And we are, yes, in a season where it takes a ton of money to run a competitive political campaign, but you cannot buy courage, and you cannot buy transparency, and you cannot buy a real connection with the American way. I feel so strongly that those who are going to do well in the next political era are those who fight the hardest and work the hardest to earn the trust of the public. Because since Citizens United was passed in 2010 or since the Supreme Court decided in favor of any corporation being able to give as an individual to a political campaign, we have just seen the rise of corporate interest across the political spectrum. And until we scale back that Supreme Court decision, we are going to continue to be so hungry. We are so hungry for authentic, kind, honest leadership.

[00:15:27] Beth: Well, authenticity is what really brought Graham Platner into the spotlight, right? Because people read his ruggedness, his working-class background, at least as he presented it, as authenticity. I wonder how you think about being a person who says, “I have a PhD, and I really have my life together. I’m a mom of four. I’m active in my community.” Do you worry about being seen as part of that sort of elitism that people are rejecting, or do you feel like people are hearing you as, an authentic political outsider as well?

[00:16:02] Lauren Pinkston: It was a choice to not put Dr. Lauren Pinkston on every card that we hand out. It was a choice to not throw letters behind my name every time we are putting branding out. I have been very critical of the academic institution because I just really believe that we’ve lost touch with the real human experience. And so I’m a qualitative researcher, so we’re probably on our high horse compared to quantitative researchers, but I really do believe that this was a major issue during COVID, and the way that we took good scientific data and we shoved it down the throats of people who were in rural parts of this country made that divide even greater. And when you govern with a broad stroke, even when you have really good data to back up your decisions, you have to make sure that it is communicated well and in a way that touches the reality of someone’s lived experience. And what happens in Chicago is very different than what happens on a farm in Montana. What happens in Nashville is very different than what happens in Bedford County, where I am right now. I’m meeting you today in a linen shirt and my Blundstone boots and just got off of a walking horse and it’s those moments of being with people who are carrying out the best of who we are in rural parts of this country that I think will save us in moments like this

[00:17:21] Beth: One of the questions that I have as I take in this news about Platner is what are the political parties for, if not helping identify issues like this in a person’s past well before the deadline to be on a ballot? It’s not just Graham Platner, right? It’s Eric Swalwell. It’s Max Miller in Ohio. It’s Tony Gonzalez and Cory Mills. This is a non-partisan, or bipartisan problem where we have people who’ve been accused of violence and sexual harassment and abuse. It feels exhausting to talk about that. I remember when Justice Kavanaugh now was nominated to the Supreme Court, and the allegations against him came out, and just feeling “Oh my God. Again?” Like, how many times are we going to go through this cycle? And I wonder what good are the parties if not at helping identify issues like this? You’re running without the support of a party. Do you worry about independent candidates not having anyone to check them on these issues, or do you think that you have strangely more accountability because the party is not with you?

[00:18:36] Lauren Pinkston: That’s a fantastic question. And if we were watching accountability happen on either side of the political spectrum right now, then I would say sure, I’m worried about that. But I have had to build this entire campaign from the ground up without anyone willing to help from an organized political spectrum. So I contacted Republican and Democratic campaign managers over the year before I launched this campaign, and they all refused to work with me. They said it would kill their business. And so we have built a grassroots campaign with now over forty people on my team and over four hundred volunteers so far and we’ve raised over a quarter of a million grassroots dollars with people who have never even given to political campaigns before, and those are people that I text regularly. They have my phone number. My calendar is on my website. Anyone can sign up for a call from me, and they know that they have direct access to me, and I have asked them to hold me accountable. I have a spiritual director that I meet with every month. I have another somatic therapist that I meet with every month. I will not speak for every independent candidate because everyone is different, and there are some really wild independent candidates out there as well. But I really believe in the power of looking people in the eye and asking for their accountability because this is hard. And I know that I won’t make everyone happy.

[00:20:06] Beth: Let’s talk about education. I was really excited as I was looking at your platforms to see some specificity about education. I know this is part of your personal experience, so why don’t we start there? What’s your personal connection to education?

[00:20:23] Lauren Pinkston: Started my career in the classroom. My undergraduate degree was in education, and I taught fourth grade for three years. I taught in a private school first. It was the only job that I could get in Memphis when I moved there after graduation, and then taught in public school for two years. As a mom of four kids, we have had our children in Montessori schools, in international schools, in public schools, private schools, online schools. I homeschooled for a semester when I had to because we were moving around the world. So we have touched all kinds of different forms of education, and that has been very humbling for me because I was a product of public education. I graduated from a public high school that was incredible, and I have always been one who has championed public ed. And now the profession itself is one that I don’t recognize. A lot of the mandates that have been handed down from No Child Left Behind have been unfunded mandates that local governments have had a hard time keeping up with. And now we’re just looking at cookie cutter classrooms that really don’t meet the developmental needs of so many kids. And I’ve had to change my mind about my understanding of people, who choose to homeschool, who choose to pull their kids out of public school, who are sending their kids to private schools in a way that I probably, if I’m being transparent, judged that in the past and didn’t understand why we wouldn’t pour everything that we had into public education. But the reality is that the policies that are there now, the practices of the classroom are not meeting the needs of many children that are growing up here. And I, as a mother, don’t love my children being on a screen for six hours a day when they’re learning, and so there’s a lot of reform that needs to be happening. And with the Department of Education being dismantled, as much as I reject that and am concerned about the protections for children under IDEA, I do think that we need real leaders who will innovate on this moment in education and give us some new paths forward through public schools.

[00:22:19] Beth: I want to hear more about that. I was interested because I just said in our conversation with Ezra Klein last week that I feel like we don’t value pluralism in education, that we want that cookie cutter model. We want to say everything is standardized, that we have evidence-based practices that work in every single scenario. So when I read that you support diversifying public school models to meet the needs of different learners, I was really excited to hear more about that.

[00:22:47] Lauren Pinkston: Yeah. Montessori education is one of the most remarkable forms of education that has been created in the last two hundred years. And Maria Montessori was a woman who designed this model on the streets of Italy, meeting the needs of orphan children who were there on the streets. And so it is really a trauma-informed model that allows kids to play and for that play to lead to their discovery. It’s incredible. And right now we have several Montessori schools in Tennessee, but we have one that has figured out how to function within the public school demands of benchmark testing with i-Ready and AimsWeb. These are names that parents are going to hear and recognize, but they have figured out how to manage their benchmark testing requirements while allowing for a classroom of 15 to 20 kids to all be on a different learning pace. Teachers are incredibly creative. We got into the profession because we love to create, and now with the pacing guides that have come with the Common Core standards that you are handed a PowerPoint to go with your pacing guide, and that PowerPoint has a script along with it. We have taken all of the fun out of education, and that’s why we see the lowest number of teachers graduating with degrees now than ever because the profession has become something that it wasn’t designed to be. We are not robots as teachers. We are professionals. We are scientists. We are excellent at our craft, and we haven’t been trusted in the classroom. And so we’re also spending way more money than we should be on benchmark tests that do not help us or give us more information about the students in our classrooms.

[00:24:22] And when it comes to the data that is handed to so many teachers, what are you going to do with that data when you already know which of your students are behind? So I think it’s wrong to use a quarter of the entire school year on testing when we are missing direct instruction. And I think it’s wrong to put iPads in the hands of kindergarteners all day long when they need to have their hands in dirt, and they need to be exploring the world around them. We need STEAM schools. We need nature schools. There are children who learn in very different ways, and if we’re going to create paths to TCAP programs here in Tennessee, our Colleges of Applied Technology, you can’t start that when someone’s 19. They’re not even going to finish high school if they don’t see a path for them in academia. They’ll leave in 10th or 11th grade, and they’ll just go to work. And if you can start your career with $70,000 as a lineman, you should have that pathway mapped out for you through really great technical education in high school and we’re not funding those positions. So from elementary school all the way through high school, I think there’s a lot of work we need to do, and this is again my criticism of the academy, right? But yes, we have great data around teaching methods, but we’ve forgotten the human experience, and those two have to be hand in hand, or we’re going to fail the public.

[00:25:39] Beth: It seems like all the data tells us that we need smaller class sizes, and has forever. So I’m really glad that you raised the cost of benchmark testing. And I think about the cost of the tech in classrooms, not just the iPads, but the chargers and the professionals who have to maintain all of that, and the software licensing. And I just look around and feel like isn’t the money here, just the dollars are being misdirected? Couldn’t we have more people in the classrooms, more teachers doing creative things with students if we reimagined how we allocate our budgets?

[00:26:17] Lauren Pinkston: What a novel idea. During COVID schools were given huge grants in order to help kids get online to be in the classroom. And even after the school closings were coming to an end, I was watching our school district continue to apply for grants so that kids would have laptops to take home. And while I appreciate everyone having access to technology, I thought, that money could’ve been spent on occupational therapists. That money could have been spent on funding positions within our public schools to give them a real competitive edge on the private schools that were on the rise. And so I don’t understand the misplacement of that. It felt like everyone thought that they had to do it in order to be a tech-strong school. But parents are asking for that to be recalled, and they are asking for that to be pulled back. And it will be hard for school boards to hear that after all they’ve invested in technology. But the reality is that our parents don’t want our kids on a screen all day long because that’s not what we are practicing in our home. And if we’re being really honest, those kids know exactly how to watch anything that they want to on YouTube through Google Slides. They know how to text their friends on Google Docs when they don’t have access to a phone. I have a 16-year-old and a 13-year-old daughter. Neither one of them have phones yet. My 16-year-old is in a unique education environment as well herself, so she doesn’t need one. But I have tried my hardest to protect my kids from what the internet can show them, and they can access it at school when I’m not around, even with all of the firewalls, and that’s a problem.

[00:27:51] Beth: So I feel like a lot of the ed- tech and benchmark testing reflects a fundamental desire for accountability for this massive investment in public education and some kind of assurance that we’re making progress, that kids are learning what we want them to learn. If you redesign and you diversify, how do you let people know here’s the goal and here’s our progress toward the goal?

[00:28:18] Lauren Pinkston: Yeah. I’m not opposed to kids learning how to use technology. I think that’s important. They’re going to grow up as digital natives, and they need to learn how to use AI. It’s not going away. So as much as we’re concerned about it in the academic environment, we need to be teaching our kids how to feed AI better rather than just waiting on it to feed them information. And so that is definitely a skill that we need to be teaching, but I want to make sure that teachers have the funding to print paper tests if they want. That there is a budget for paper books. The data also shows you that handwritten notes are seven times more effective than a typed note. And our bodies are physical in nature, and our brain responds to the way that we move our body. And so kinesthetic learners need the ability to use their body to learn, and that comes down to paper and pencil many times. I’m not trying to take us backwards, but I am trying to help us to be really sound with the way that we’re delivering education because I don’t want the next generation to enter the workforce and have no real skills when it comes to problem-solving. And if we’re worried about the gap of the elite versus the working class, you’re going to see that so much more because the elite are going to send their children to schools where there’s not technology. They are sending their kids to the nature schools, to the alternative learning environments. And so we’ll just see that gap continue to widen if we don’t address this in public schools.

[00:29:42] Beth: What are some of the biggest concerns that you’re hearing from parents? I know you’re all over the state talking to people. What are people really worried about?

[00:29:50] Lauren Pinkston: In Tennessee, they’re worried about our voucher program that was pushed through our state legislature two years ago and then expanded last year. They’re very opposed to it. They’re very offended by it. And they are upset that the average income of someone who is receiving a school voucher is $170,000 in Tennessee. And so especially in our rural communities, they feel that they are funding a tax break for the rich and they hate it. And I agree with them on that, and I think that’s wrong. When it comes to education as well, they’re worried about safety in schools. They’re concerned about sending their kids there. A lot of the concerns are around technology, and in Tennessee right now our state has said each school district can decide what they’re going to do about cell phones. I read an article from Kentucky last year after Kentucky banned phones at Bell-to-Bell. There was a school in Kentucky that had more books checked out in August than they had the entire school year before, and that stuck with me. Our kids are hungry for eye-to-eye conversation, and they want adults in the room who will give them a break from the screen, who will give them a break from social media. And they are actually enjoying playing cards at lunch or putting together puzzles in break times. They’re hungry for that and their bodies are hungry for that.

[00:31:06] Beth: Yeah. I think about my daughter playing cards at school a lot. She loves days when they get to play cards and they’re at a homeroom or something. She’s thrilled. And she loves going to summer camp. She’s actually at a camp right now that let her keep her phone, and she was mad about it. She doesn’t think she should be able to keep her phone at camp because it’s stressful and distracting. So I feel like the kids have really internalized this, too.

[00:31:32] Lauren Pinkston: They have. And those who we did not serve well, the young adults that are in their early 20s. I met two voters yesterday at an ice cream shop. I just introduced myself and they said, | “What do you want to do about education?” And I was talking about these very things, and they got so jazzed. They said, “You have my vote.” They were like that is what we needed and nobody gave it to us.” And that alone, it speaks volumes when it’s our 20-year-olds who are asking for the adults to step up.

[00:31:59] Beth: Now, I want to ask you about the vouchers because you said at the top of this conversation that you had opened your mind and become less judgmental about people who opt out of public schools. So how do you put all those pieces together? What do you think is a good mix of educational offerings across the state?

[00:32:15] Lauren Pinkston: I appreciate that opportunity to respond to that because what I think we’re not doing well is helping families who have children who are unique learners, and I’m a mom of one of those kids who could not find a good pathway in a public school or a private school or a traditional classroom. And I know that people are really upset about the Supreme Court decision last week that kind of reversed some of the Obama-era policies that required all learners to be in an inclusive environment. But the reality is that some of our children cannot function well in an inclusive classroom, and we have not supplied the greatest amount of resources to those families who are spending between two and six sometimes $10,000 a month on the education supports that their kids need. I’m not for institutionalizing children just blanketly because we don’t have anywhere to put them. But there are some situations, especially thinking about children who may be nonverbal, on the spectrum and who have families who cannot care for them appropriately. Where do those children go when things get violent between the child and between the parents to the child? They are much more at risk of abuse in those situations. And so I just don’t think that we can, with a broad stroke, say no child should be institutionalized. I think we look at therapeutic environments, and we have a school in our community, King’s Daughters School, who serves children with all kinds of unique needs from across the country, and those families cannot get access to grant dollars to help them fund that because of some of our policies nationwide. And so I get concerned when we aren’t listening to a broad spectrum of voters and of families’ experiences when we make some of these policies. I think that’s what’s happened, of course, over and over again.

[00:34:05] But in this moment, I would like for the dollars that we have going to vouchers to go to two different groups of people. One, the families who have children with very unique needs that cannot be met in any school environment and in early childhood education, zero to five. That’s where the greatest gaps start to happen. We’re ninety thousand childcare slots short in Tennessee, and we need desperately to be investing in early childhood development centers because we can’t attract industry if families don’t have anywhere to go. And in this economy-- this is a long, rambling sentence, but this is what I really need to put a pin in. In this economy, we have created a system that really does demand two incomes for most families. And if your healthcare costs as much as your mortgage and your childcare costs as much as your income, you have put families in an impossible situation where it costs more to work than it doesn’t, and they will remain on government welfare, and their mental health will decline because they cannot contribute to society in the way that they were designed to do. And so we’ve got to close those gaps really quickly.

[00:35:06] Beth: Those gaps are especially prevalent for families of children who have exceptional needs. I did a series a few months ago about special education, and I spoke with lots and lots of listeners about their experiences with special education. And what I heard over and over again is “Look, my life has to be about caregiving. We can’t be a two-income household because the caregiving needs of our child are so significant. And we have to spend extra money on those educational supports because we can’t get everything that we need in school. And the rest of my time, to the extent that I can find any, is advocating within the public school system for the needs of my child.” and I heard that across a huge spectrum of physical, mental, emotional conditions, and really different desires from families about what they’re looking for. Everyone wants their child to feel respected at school, to be seen, to feel like the school cares about their needs. But as you said, there were families who said we don’t need to be in a mainstream classroom. We need to be in a place where if one occupational therapist is absent, there’s another one because this school is designed with my child’s needs in mind. And others who said “I absolutely want my child to be in the same classroom as other children their age and for those children to see my child as a full and complete person and for my child to be exposed to what those other children are doing and how they’re interacting with each other.” So I don’t think anything about it is easy. It seems to me that just beginning to discuss it more often would help us find some paths forward because right now the conversation feels entirely defensive. We have to protect the Department of Education because that’s the only place that anyone is talking about IDEA and the rights of kids with special ed needs. It’s the only place and it does some good work, but it’s not there, right? We haven’t crossed a finish line where we can say we’re doing a great job for these kids and families.

[00:37:11] Lauren Pinkston: You’re right. the legal structure is there, but families are not being served, and thousands of those families have cases that have not been supported or solved through that reporting process. And so, again, that’s a case of federal mandates that were unfunded mandates handed down to states that get handed down to local school boards that cannot meet the demands of the federal regulations. And I see the value in the federal regulations. I do. And I will fight for human rights all day long, but we have to make sure that the mechanisms are there to really carry out the ideals. And to be fair, when our Founding Fathers wrote the Declaration of Independence, I don’t think that they knew how sacred the words that they were writing were. When the Preamble was drafted ensuring the rights of so many, those men were not even carrying out those rights in their own lives by the people that they enslaved. And so the reality is that we have these ideals, we continue to fight for them, we continue to push for them, and when people tell me that the United States is ending and it’s all over, I have to steady myself and ground myself and remind myself, too, that this country has been in seasons of real distress, but the ideals that have carried us for 250 years are still here, and they’re so baked into our DNA that we will continue to fight for them even when it feels like the walls are crumbling around us here.

[00:38:33] Beth: What do you think are the biggest obstacles to real education reform in Tennessee?

[00:38:38] Lauren Pinkston: In Tennessee, it’s going to be figuring out who those dark money funders are and identifying where my blind spots are because I’m not in the room with either party. I know who is pushing a lot of the legislation for school vouchers, for example, but I don’t know where all of those conversations are being had in a caucus with the Republican Party in Tennessee. I am not someone who wants to come in and shake up every commission office in Tennessee. I’m not looking to fire every commissioner and start from scratch. I think that’s very destabilizing. But I am looking for people who are thinking outside of the box and who are not being placed into commission seats because they have paid for it or they have been a loyalist to someone in office. And I think that’s what it’s going to take to get us on track, is putting the right people in the right seats because they have proven to be incredible leaders and creative problem solvers. And so that’s, in my opinion, what it’s going to take to really get us back on track. And it might actually require a Supreme Court case where public school families are pushing back on some of the No Child Left Behind era policies because I think we’re in an era where we’re going to need to push back on some of those, and that’s going to be a lawsuit that needs to make its way all the way up to the Supreme Court.

[00:39:59] Beth: You mentioned that you’re not in the room with either caucus, and I want to touch on that just for a minute before we move on to Outside of Politics. I heard you say in an Instagram video that you had called for a moratorium on data centers being constructed in Tennessee, which I think is really interesting. But the thing in your video that really grabbed my attention was when you said, “I don’t have to run that by a party committee. I have listened to the voters. I have gathered information. I have done research. I have considered it. This is my best judgment, and I get to just say that to you.” And I thought, “Now that is the sort of outsider, authentic, campaigning that I’m looking for.” So talk for just a second about why you think specifically in an executive role there is an advantage to running as an independent and governing as an independent.

[00:40:53] Lauren Pinkston: The ability to pivot and to pivot quickly is so refreshing. I had a strong assumption that data centers and the future of tech were going to be at the core of this election, and that has proven to be true. That’s why I came in with a plan around data centers and how we would construct them in places where we would preserve our land. We could trap the thermal energy that they give off by putting them underground and moving that thermal energy above ground to heat greenhouses year-long through vertical farming. And I presented that as many places as I could and with great respect. However, the reality remains that politics is downstream from culture. And because of where the data centers are being proposed across our state, they are the boogeyman of this election. And I hear that, and I understand that, and so that’s why I also was the first candidate to call for a moratorium because I saw where people are, and I believe that we need to pause. When people are con-concerned and they see elected officials that look like they are bending an ear to a large corporation with a lot of money, then they feel left out. And we need everyone at the table for these conversations. That’s why I’ve called for citizens’ councils across the state so that we would have real listening ears on the ground in every county that were nonpartisan. That’s why I’ve called for a nonpartisan redistricting commission that would propose where our congressional districts are aligned so that we have our ear to the ground across the state. But that’s the beauty of running as an independent is that I don’t have to ask, “Can I say this?” Or “What’s the party position on that?” I don’t have to sign any creed. It’s just me and the people and that feels really important in a moment where we’ve had a super majority in our state that has completely close their eyes and ears to the general public and people are not voting because they feel like what’s the point? Tennessee had the lowest voter turnout in the entire country in our last midterm election, and I had to ask why are you not voting? And it’s that defeat, what am I going to change? Nobody’s going to listen to me anyway. And that defeat is so demoralizing and it obstructs the beauty of a representative democracy. So that’s the importance of electing independents that have worked to earn your trust in this political environment.

[00:43:15] Beth: Let’s take a hard turn and talk about what’s on our minds Outside of Politics. You have four kids. I’m wondering, especially as you’re out campaigning and doing something that you seem very prepared for, but that also has to be brand new to you, what are you learning about yourself that you think, “Oh, this came from being a mom. This part of me is directly related to my experience parenting”?

[00:43:43] Lauren Pinkston: That’s such a good question. I say in a lot of my stops, “I’m a mom with two teenage girls, so you can’t hurt my feelings. I’ve been tested and prepared for this every day.”

[00:43:54] Beth: I got an 11 and 15-year-old girl. I feel that.

[00:44:00] Lauren Pinkston: You get that. you can ask me anything. I’m asked questions all day long, and I’m very used to explaining things, and I’m also very used to saying, “I don’t know. Let’s go find that out together.”

[00:44:09] Beth: Yeah. my girls will comment on my outfit every day, and they will be very honest about what they think of it. My hair, my makeup. I get constant feedback from very honest advisors about that.

[00:44:25] Lauren Pinkston: Exactly. “Mom, why are you wearing that? Mom, why did...” Yes, 100%. And our kids are our greatest critics, but they also give us some thick skin, so that’s so good.

[00:44:36] Beth: I was thinking about this question for myself, and a, couple of things occurred to me lately One is just I think I have deeply internalized from parenting that my plan is not the only plan. As much as I want to be in control of a day and a schedule and a method, this is how we’re going to do this thing, my plan is not the only plan. And my plan can be meaningless by the end of the day sometimes if someone else’s needs supersede mine. I can imagine that that’s something you’re encountering on the campaign trail quite a bit too.

[00:45:11] Lauren Pinkston: Absolutely. As a family, we’ve lived all over the world. We have four kids that were born on three continents. We’ve worked through the USCIS process. We have a certificate of birth abroad. We have shared tables with so many unique people around the world. I took my four-month-old to stay the night in the Middle East when we were on our way to Uganda a few years ago. There’s not a place that I have been afraid with them there with me, but that also means that I’m not afraid of our neighbors here. And we’ve been in our home now for almost seven years. And over the course of those seven years, we’ve had people living in our upstairs, three of those people who needed a place to stay or people who were in transition, and we’ve just lived in community with them. And I think that’s what it’s going to take to heal our politics too. So another thing that I’d say has prepared me is that rub of sharing space with people who weren’t just like me. Our home is a sacred place, but it’s not closed off to others. And so my commitment to Tennesseans has been we haven’t had children in the governor’s residence since the 1970s when Lamar Alexander was our governor, and we will be having family dinners there. And you will hear from me that there will be a Republican representative and a Democratic representative at the dinner table with my family, with their families invited, and we are going to humanize one another. Because if the only time that we are arguing is on the floor of the House, then we will never pass effective legislation together. And we have to see each other as humans first if we’re going to solve problems together. And so that’s my commitment to how I will govern.

[00:46:45] Beth: That’s really related to the other thing I was thinking that I’ve learned from my kids that’s, been so prevalent for me in the month of June and July, as we are in the summer here, I have learned from my kids that almost everything is a skill that you have to learn. Sleeping is a skill. Eating is a skill. Going to the bathroom yourself is a skill. Taking a shower, skill. Cleaning your room, skill. And I feel like that kind of communication politically is a skill that has been allowed to atrophy. And so I love the idea of establishing a practice. That’s how you teach a new skill, right? We’re just practicing over and over again, and offering feedback as we go along. So I like the idea of you saying, “We’re going to relearn this skill, everybody, right here at the dinner table.”

[00:47:34] Lauren Pinkston: That’s exactly it. And my kids amaze me all the time, but I remember my daughter is a Ugandan American, and we were at a doctor’s office once and the doctor was working on her and it was during the ‘24 election-- sorry I’m bringing it back to politics. But it was during the ‘24 election, and she said, “That Kamala Harris is going to ruin our country and turn us all communist, so we can’t vote for her.” And my daughter, who is watching Black representation that looks like her, so powerful for her, regardless of where you are politically. That is an important moment for her. I was just so taken back that someone would say that to her with such lack of understanding. And I looked at her and she goes, “That’s really interesting. Tell me more about why you feel that way.” And it just was such a proud mom moment where I thought, “Okay, you’ve seen this modeled, and you are learning how to carry this out,” and that’s the future that I want for my kids, and that’s what I want them to, contribute to the world. And I think we’ve been practicing that so well in our home, and I want to bring that to the state because it’s so lacking. And women are so good. Women are so good at connecting these dots. Another conversation about women in politics, but that’s why we’re talking about this.

[00:48:47] Beth: I think that’s right. Good for your daughter and good for you, and thank you so much for spending time with me today. I’m excited to see where your campaign goes, and I hope that you’ll come back and give us an update as the governor.

[00:49:00] Lauren Pinkston: I can’t wait. Thanks so much for having me.

[00:49:04] Beth: Thank you so much to Lauren for joining me today. If you’d like to learn more about Lauren and her campaign, you can find her at pingston4tn.com. We’ll link that and her Instagram profile in the show notes, along with the link for our live show and after party tickets. I’ll be back with you next week with new episodes of Pantsuit Politics. Until then, have the best weekend available to you

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