Transcript
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Kyle Sweetser (0:25)
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Sarah Longwell (0:58)
Hey everyone, Sarah Longwell here, publisher of the Bulwark, and I am joined by an old buddy of mine, Kyle Sweetser, who is running for Senate in Alabama as a Democrat. But I know Kyle, because back in our Republican voters against Trump days, you were somebody who had voted for Trump, who then broke hard with him, began to speak out against him. You, you spoke at the Democratic National Convention, you just were a vocal opponent. And here you are now running as a Democrat for Senate. You're in a, in a, in a primary where it looks like not a lot of polling in the Democratic primary in Alabama. Maybe you can tell us where you are, but I see Kelsey has you as an 81% chance of winning. So Kyle, why don't you just introduce yourself to the audience and talk a little bit about like your journey. How did you go from a guy who voted for Trump twice, business guy, who then now finds herself running for Senate in Alabama as a Democrat.
Kyle Sweetser (1:58)
Hey, thanks for having me on. It's great to see you again. I know years ago, back at a principal's first with Governor Larry Hogan, he asked me if I planned on running for office. And that was the first time someone really asked me that. So interesting because now we're here. I'm a former Republican voter. I've voted Republican my whole life up into the point where I flipped and you know, got a construction background. I've worked hard My whole life was pretty much born into construction. And when the Deepwater Horizon blew, I went out to work during the oil spill, getting after it, keeping the oil off of our beaches. So needless to say, I have a lot different background than most people in Washington D.C. started my own business in 2016, going in and out of people's houses, working on garage doors, waking up at 4 o' clock in the morning so other people could get out of their garage to go to work. And through that, going in to these homes and talking to people and seeing how they changed through. As I learned maga's rhetoric was to blame Donald Trump, it disturbed me to the core. Hearing an increase of xenophobia, racism and sexism, to where folks were more open to say these things to, to a stranger, just really alarming. The fabric of our society was being torn apart and is being torn apart by this MAGA movement. People can't even eat Thanksgiving dinner with each other anymore because of what's happened after Donald Trump. When steel tariffs hit back in 2018, I got to see how they actually worked. There wasn't a whole lot of government outreach on it. And in my understanding of the Republican Party was the party of, of free markets. And, and now you had this very confusing situation where the Republican Party was pushing something that Bernie Sanders used to push. These, these, these tariffs increase cost. And so this abandonment of what would be traditional conservative principles and values in the economic sense was sort of a, the beginning of a wake up call for me as well. I got to see the price of products increase and those costs get passed down to consumers, they get passed down to the small businesses and you eat some of it, some of it gets passed on. Some people down here in Alabama, where we're ranked 49th in income, they can't even get a project finished or something they thought they would be able to do. They were, they weren't able to do it because of these tariffs. So witnessing that and living that, that is a big part of why I'm doing what I'm doing today. But after January 6, that was it for me. I started doing everything in my power to speak out against the MAGA movement. I was never involved politically in the past, so it was a real turning point for me. And it didn't take a whole lot of thought. It was just something had to be done. I made the right people mad. And because of that, I was invited to speak at the Democratic National Convention by the Harris campaign, where I delivered a speech about tariffs and isolationism in the direction that Donald Trump was taking our country. So now I'm running to rein in the executive office at the top of my tattoo list. I really think it's so important that we put people in Washington, D.C. that are going to hold the executive office accountable, that are going to hold Donald Trump accountable. I want to pass legislation that undoes a Supreme Court ruling that says the president is above the law, which is outrageous.
