The Great Experiment
250 Years of America — And Why I Still Believe
We did not make the top two.
I want to say that plainly, the way I said everything else throughout this campaign.
We ran a David and Goliath race from the very first day. We stood across from machines that have been running for thirty years, against money we could never match, against names that have been on ballots since before some of my staff were born.
We were always the underdog but we had the biggest heart, we had each other, and we had a mission we believed in down to our bones. We ran a remarkable campaign in a highly unusual race — an Independent with no party machine, no PAC money, in a district that had never seen a serious challenge from outside the two parties.
We ran out of time before we could reach enough people with the message. The hunger for change was real — I felt it in every conversation, at every door. What was missing was not the desire. It was the BELIEF that something different was actually within reach. The people of CA-40 chose fear this time, and I understand why.
When people have been let down long enough, HOPE becomes a risk they are not sure they can afford. The comfortable story is hard to walk away from when no one has ever shown them there is another way. I do not fault them for it… I am sad for them, for us.
I poured my heart and my soul into this campaign. The passion for true change, for an honest Independent voice in a system that desperately needs one, was real and it remains real.
After the primary, I needed to step back — to recalibrate, regenerate, and reflect on what comes next. How do I serve the mission now, in this new form?
The mission is not over. It may take a different shape.
The love of this country, of its people, the belief that healing is still possible and more necessary than ever — none of that went anywhere. If anything, the urgency has grown.
This July 4th, the United States of America turned 250 years old.
I chose to spend this moment not in grief or naivety —but in the full weight of what that number means — and in honest reckoning with where we stand at this threshold.
Two hundred and fifty years.
Think about what that means.
In 1776, a group of flawed, brilliant, audacious human beings put their names on a piece of paper and declared something that had never truly been declared before: that all people are created equal, endowed with the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
They were not a perfect group. They held contradictions that would take generations and rivers of sacrifice to begin resolving. They owned enslaved people while writing about freedom. They excluded women from the very rights they proclaimed universal. They built on land taken from people who had been there long before them.
None of that diminishes the audacity of the IDEA.
The idea was radical then. In many parts of the world, it remains radical now.
A government that exists to serve the people, not the other way around.
A constitution designed to limit the power of those who hold office, not expand it.
A bill of rights that says there are things the government simply cannot do to you, no matter who is in power.
That Great Experiment — messy, imperfect, contested, and ongoing — is what 250 years of July 4th is actually about.
We have faltered. We have also grown.
The Civil War tested whether this nation could survive its own contradictions.
It nearly did not. The civil rights movement tested whether the promise of equality could be extended to the people who had been deliberately excluded from it.
Women marched for decades before the Constitution recognized what should have been self-evident from the beginning.
Each expansion of the promise required people who refused to accept that the America they were living in was the only America possible.
The arc of this country has bent toward justice not automatically but because people pulled it there, at great personal cost, against great institutional resistance.
I came to this country as a refugee from a nation torn apart by war. I arrived with nothing but the belief that this place was different. That the promise was real.
Public school taught me English and gave me a future. Law enforcement protected my family when we needed it. A Catholic church community welcomed us and showed me that strangers could become neighbors.
I have lived the promise of this experiment in the most personal way possible. I will not pretend it is not real, because for me it was.
I will also not pretend it is not fragile.
Thomas Jefferson, one of the men who wrote the promise, warned us himself:
‘The end of democracy and the defeat of the American Revolution will occur when the government falls into the hands of lending institutions and moneyed corporations.”
That was written in 1816. It has never been more relevant than it is today.
The erosion happens in patterns we have seen before — emergency powers invoked in crisis, framed as temporary, quietly becoming permanent.
After September 11th, the PATRIOT Act granted surveillance powers Americans had never authorized in peacetime. During COVID, emergency measures extended well beyond their justification.
Each time, a little more of the structure was removed. Each time, the removal was normalized before anyone fully reckoned with what was lost. Stone by stone.
This is how freedoms are lost — not in one dramatic moment but in a slow accumulation of exceptions that eventually become the rule.
We are living through another such moment right now, and the pace has accelerated.
In 2025 alone, the administration signed 217 executive orders in its first 100 days, dismantling agencies, reversing civil rights protections, and concentrating executive power in ways that legal scholars across the political spectrum have described as unprecedented.
The CIVICUS Monitor, which tracks civic freedoms in countries around the world, added the United States to its watchlist in March 2025 — a designation previously reserved for countries experiencing rapid democratic decline.
That is not a partisan statement. That is a documented institutional assessment.
The powerful few and the exhausted many — this is not a new tension in American history.
The founders themselves argued about it. The question of whether concentrated wealth and power would eventually overwhelm the democratic experiment was raised before the ink on the Constitution was dry.
What is different now is the scale and the speed. The wealthiest few hundred individuals in this country hold more combined wealth than the bottom 98 percent of the population.
The lobbying infrastructure that shapes legislation is funded by interests that have no obligation to the working families those laws affect.
The campaign finance system, as it currently operates, means that a candidate without access to large donors faces structural obstacles that have nothing to do with their ideas or their qualifications. The parties themselves only care about party agendas and winning.
I know this firsthand. We ran this campaign with limited resources against well-funded machines.
The people who wanted change were out there. I had endless conversations with them. They were desperate for something different. Many of them did not vote.
That I do not understand. How do you forfeit that freedom to have your voice counted?
I was recently watching a podcast featuring two political commentators who were once staunch supporters of the current administration. They have since become disillusioned — genuinely, visibly, painfully disillusioned — in the face of what they describe as obvious corruption and a governing agenda that serves the powerful at the expense of everyone else. They said they no longer believe in voting. That the system is too broken because if they vote for their party, it is complicit.
I understand that feeling. I have sat with it this week. The disappointment of this race is real, and the structural advantages that incumbents and party machines hold are real. The sense that your vote disappears into a machine that does not respond to it is a real and earned feeling for millions of Americans.
I disagree with the conclusion.
Your vote is the only form of power that the system cannot buy, cannot suppress without consequence, and cannot entirely neutralize as long as enough people use it.
When we believe our vote does not matter, we make it true.
When enough of us believe that and stay home, the people who benefit most from our absence — the incumbents, the party machines, the well-funded interests — win without competition.
Many of our Independent voters felt exactly this way in this primary and did not come out. That saddens me more than the results themselves. The people who were most desperate for change — who told me so, door after door, conversation after conversation — chose not to participate in the moment when change was possible.
This is not a CA-40 problem. This is a national crisis of civic faith.
Affordability is rising and freedoms are eroding in every district in every state.
The exhaustion is real everywhere. Disillusionment is everywhere.
The temptation to disengage is everywhere.
The answer is not disengagement.
The answer is MORE OF US.
46% of Americans now identify as Independent, the highest in recorded history.
62% percent say the two-party system is so broken that a third party is needed.
The hunger for something different is not fringe. It is the majority.
What is missing is not the desire for change.
What is missing is the collective belief that showing up will produce it.
History has never been changed by the people who stopped showing up.
Every expansion of this country’s promise — abolition, suffrage, civil rights, labor protections — came from people who stayed in the arena when leaving would have been easier.
Frederick Douglass, who knew more about the gap between American promise and American reality than most of us ever will, said:
“I prized liberty as a good to be striven for, and not a good to be sat down and waited for.”
We do not sit down and wait for it.
We did not walk away because the first race did not go the way we planned.
This 250th anniversary of our country, after you’ve watched the fireworks, I want you to hold two things at once.
Hold the beauty of what this experiment has been at its best — the audacity of the idea, the generations who bled and marched and organized to expand its promise, the genuine miracle that it has survived 250 years of human fallibility and ambition and greed. Hold that.
Hold alongside it the honest reckoning: that this experiment is not guaranteed to continue. That democracy is not a permanent condition but a daily choice. That the freedoms enshrined in that document are only as durable as the people willing to defend them. That the powerful few who continue to pursue more power are counting on the exhausted many to give up and go home.
Do not go home. Not yet. Not while there is still a 250th birthday to celebrate and a 251st to build toward.
Our campaign was never about a single seat.
It was about moving people back to the middle, treating root causes instead of symptoms, reminding one another that we are not as divided as we have been told.
That work is not finished. The calling has not changed. Only the form it takes.
I will be back. The timing and the form are still becoming clear.
What I know for certain is that the 80 percent in the middle — the people exhausted by the fighting, hungry for something honest, desperate for representatives who work for them instead of for the machine — are still out there.
They are still waiting. They are still worth fighting for.
Happy 250th birthday, America. You are imperfect, embattled, exhausted, and extraordinary. You are worth the effort.
Abraham Lincoln, in the depths of a war that threatened to end the experiment entirely, called this nation : “The last best hope of earth.”
He was right then.
The question of whether he is still right is one that only we — the people — can answer.
With love for this country and belief in what it can still become --
Nina Linh
WonderSeed Foundation | True North | A New Way Forward