 Aloha, and welcome today to Hawaii Together on the Think Tech Hawaii broadcast network. I'm Keeley Ikeena. My guest today, Steve Lipscomb, ran recently for the Lieutenant Governor's slot in the Hawaii Republican primary in 2018, and it's our pleasure today to be able to welcome him to the program and talk a little bit about what it's like to go from a private life to a public one. What it's like to run for office and why anyone would do that. I want to introduce you to him now and welcome him to the program. Steve, Aloha. Thanks a lot for having me on the show. Well thanks for joining us here today. My pleasure. It's always a delight to chat with you and just to learn a little bit about your perspectives. Now tell me a little bit about your background. You were in the Air Force, weren't you? I was in the Air Force for just over 20 years, originally teaching young men and women how to fly in a trainer jet. I always say it's the only... Oh, so you were a pilot. I was a pilot. I always say it's the only airplane where the enemy's in the cockpit with you, so you had to be on your toes all the time. So then after that you were in the corporate world a bit. You worked for some pretty prestigious companies. I worked for two Fortune 500 companies. I worked at Dell for three years and then Microsoft for six. Out here in the Pacific my sales patch was Japan, Korea, Alaska, Guam and Hawaii. So in some sense America has treated you well. You've benefited by being a United States citizen. You know today our country gets so much criticism. What are your thoughts about the U.S.? I'm a big pro-U.S. sort of guy. I've been all over the world. I've lived all over the world. I've been in combat zones. I've been in peace areas. I've seen the best the world has to offer. I've seen the worst. I've seen where civilizations where people are sort of afraid to be a policeman or where the police officer force is corrupt. So America's a great place and I'm a big pro-American kind of guy. Does this mean you don't see any of the problems that we face today or the difficulties, the inequity? No, definitely. I mean of all the places I would live I'd still live in America and certainly there's always going to be challenges to overcome but that's what we do. Well now you live in Hawaii. Why do you make Hawaii your home? Well it's a good story. So we had my wife and I had a three year assignment out here in the early 90s, actually 98 to 2001 and so when we retired in 2007 we were in Germany as our last assignment and I said, hey you've followed me around for 20 years, you've sacrificed your career for mine, you've raised our little boys to where they are now at 8 and 11. Where do you want to live? Because the military gives you a one-way ticket and she said Hawaii. I was like, well we're not going to be able to afford that. No one joins the military to get rich and we're no exception. Her second choice was also Hawaii. So we moved out here and we knew it was going to be financially challenging but we were eager to make it work. We loved the environment. We loved the people. We loved that whole aloha spirit. In fact I tell people the first three words I learned were aloha, ohana and mahalo and those sort of concepts don't percolate to the top of all communities and that's what we really found attractive here. Well like a good number of people, you could be enjoying your Mai Tai down at the office club. We're at Fort Derusi now and living a life of relaxing retirement but you decided to throw your hat into the rink in the political arena and you recently ran for lieutenant governor in the Republican Party. I did. Why did you do that? Well I tell you. No, I don't mean to say why did you do that with incredulity. I just wanted to explore your mind and really understand your motivation. So there was two drivers. One is, first of all the motto here is no vote, no grumble. So the next level up from that is you can't complain about the system if you haven't tried to be part of the system to correct it. So the two glaring issues I saw was monopoly in government, which is a real challenge for democracy. When you have only one party it breaks the whole Republic democracy sort of model and there's no room for robust debate on topics and there's no real watchdog function to make sure that we the people's money is being spent correctly and I think we're seeing the result of that is increasing taxes all the time because there's no watchdog in the spending. Now when you talk about monopoly in government, you could be talking about either party depending upon who had the monopoly. Well I'm talking about the Democratic Party and what I mean is that regardless of which party it is, if it's a monopoly, there's no other opposition. It's a problem. Well so you remember playing the game monopoly when we were kids and whoever had the monopoly, it was only good for them. It was bad for everybody else and I think that's true in government here again, no opportunity for robust debate and really no watchdog function to point out the bad parts of any sort of legislation. Well there are lots of ways citizens can respond and bring an attempt to change the system. You could write op-eds, you could write letters to the editor, you can vote for good candidates and so forth, but you decided to actually become a candidate. How did you decide that? So another interesting story. So Ray LaRue and I decided to run. And Ray LaRue ran for governor in the Republican Party. He did. And so Ray and I worked together at Paycom back in the 2000 time frame and literally our desk was six feet from each other. So we got to know each other, built a friendship, worked together for about two years and just past Christmas time we had decided hey it's been too long we need to get back together, let's grab lunch and so over lunch when we were talking about what's next for both of us, we both expressed the interest in moving in the government and it was there at Murphy's Barn Grill that we decided you know what let's do the governor, lieutenant governor team we can bring combined 50 years of military leadership, 10 years of business leadership, his 10 years of state and Department of Education leadership. We can bring that together as a package into Hawaii politics and we thought that was a winning combination. But still somebody else could do that. Or you could have backed Ray but you decided that you yourself would actually run for office and that must have been quite a decision. Did you talk to your spouse? I did as a matter of fact because as you know as soon as you make that decision you enter into a fishbowl and so here's a funny story. I had a sore throat and I went to one of the local urgent care or acute care clinics and as I was checking in and the lady was asking me what my name is another guy who was checking in heard my name he's like hey good luck on the on the primary I was like well we're definitely in a fishbowl all of a sudden you have to post all your financials up on the right for the campaign spending and I understand all that but it feels pretty intrusive but I understand it I'm not saying it's a bad thing but so you're right you are out there in the public and you've got to be on your game 100% of the time. Now you had to form a campaign organization did you find that easy getting volunteers contributions and creating actually a little company to run the business of the campaign? That was actually challenging and so people are willing to help to a point and I think sometimes people doubt their own abilities to jump in and lead a particular piece so I built out a org chart that said okay I need this kind of person here someone handling volunteers and I need this kind of person here handling media I need someone building policy statements that sort of thing I think people are hesitant to take on that large of a role so you have to be flexible and say okay that person wants to do sign waving that person wants to write a single policy and and understand how to bring all that together so at the end of the day to be honest it was me and my friend Luke Bilaki who drove this home and so we were talking this morning I said we did pretty good two guys four months of campaign time and we lost by about 200 votes point six or seven percent so well congratulations with the effort I wish we had had more time I think that would have been better but now you ran as a Republican in the state of Hawaii and it's no secret we referred to that earlier that we are pretty much have a single-party system here we have only Democrats as congresspersons no Republican in the state senate five and maybe yes five representatives in the state house the governor is a Democrat what's it like to go door to door or to just run for office as a Republican in this state you know it's challenging and I think that's one of my lessons learned here I was going to talk about a little bit later but I think people treat political parties like their sports teams and they're like that's my sports team I'm gonna that's my party I'm gonna do whatever you know I'm gonna be with them forever and I really encourage people to get out and listen to the candidates the other the real challenge is it was supposed to be a three-way race on the Republican Lieutenant Governor but tongue in cheek there was a fourth candidate some some person named blank vote pulled pulled about 5000 plus votes out of you know I got around 9500 and about 5500 were blank votes that tells me people were confused or we hadn't gotten our message out there there's something wrong where blank votes were that high so so even within the Republican primary balloting you had 5000 people who simply left the Lieutenant Governor slot blank all together and one would think that would so prominent a race that they would not necessarily vote for you but they'd vote for somebody for somebody right because if you're going to pull that ballot you don't want to waste your opportunity to weigh in on the Lieutenant Governor right and it was disappointing for me to see the blank vote count so high again that either that means the three Lieutenant Governor candidates together on the Republican side we didn't do our job to get our message out to people and well let's extrapolate that even larger and not only did you have low voter participation in your race per se but overall we have one of the lowest voter participations in the entire country the lowest per capita and what did you encounter as you went door to door as you talk to people in terms of their attitude toward voting so to be honest I did not get a chance to go door to door very much we we focus on the broader piece we focused on social social media and the conferences and but you talked to lots of people we did talk to a lot of people and so you're asking what they felt about a republican running in a democratic state or just what your impressions were as you met met people in the state which has the lowest voter participation you know that's that's what did you learn well so one of the one of the things I learned was again people they focus on one issue and in fact the the one I ran into one guy around the Oahu vet center after a neighborhood board meeting I was struck up a conversation with him and eventually as we developed a conversation a little bit and he found out I was a republican because I want truth and advertising I try to be up front with who I am he he found one issue that really has nothing to do with Hawaii it's already solved at the national level but that was his issue and because I had a different view he started yelling at me and telling me I wasn't fit for office and all this stuff and I'm like okay so that's really not a I think that's sort of the facebook environment that has gotten us to the point where we don't really treat people with respect or respect other people's ideas or viewpoints people are trying to force their own viewpoints on others and that's not always it's not the right thing to do as a republican did you come across people who kind of imported their view of national republican politics and even at the administration level their view of president trump and brought that down to the local level and applied it to the only the only time I actually saw that and it wasn't really quite the way you framed it up but when I was doing my hawaii news now interview they did ask me what my thoughts were on president trump and if I supported him or not and and I definitely supported him and we didn't have enough time to go into uh detail by detail why that is or what his ideas are and how I interpret that but but again I think people are they're getting confused with what hawaii needs because I feel hawaii is in really desperate times especially if you look at the financial side of it and what their sort of overall ideas are on national level and also that political party sports team analogy where this is my team we've got a couple minutes before the break I wanted to ask you what were the issues that you felt were most important to bring to the public during your race so for me realizing that the lieutenant governor's job is to support the governor's agenda that was my number one platform if you will but my my three E's were my private personal interest items three E's stood for economy education and environment and we need as we mentioned as I mentioned earlier hawaii's number one industry is tourism and it's a fragile industry and so with hurricane lane just off the side if that turns to us and hits us all of a sudden we're going to have significant impact to the government because of lost taxes we're going to have significant income or impact to the people who are in that service industry because tourists aren't going to come just like during hurricane aniki obviously you believe government needs to look at some changes or do something different than it's doing now in order to boost our economy what would you propose well so if you look at all the state to state comparisons we are routinely really low on all the lists we want to be high on so voter turnout we're really low best place to start a business really low highest taxes we're really high on that one most value for taxes paid we're low on that one and so we need to be business friendly we need to diversify our economy and expand it we need to make sure that people have good paying jobs so that that does two things gives people an opportunity to live and that would positively impact the homeless problem and give people a chance to actually make some money and then the other piece is that it would it would develop our tax base well that's a strong message we're going to come back after a short break okay my guest today is Steve Lipscomb who ran recently for lieutenant governor here in the state of hawaii in the republican primary and i'm keely akina on think tech hawaii's uh hawaii together we'll be right back after the short break hello everyone i'm desoto brown the co-host of human humane architecture which is seen on think tech hawaii every other tuesday at four p.m and with the show's host martin despang we discuss architecture here in the Hawaiian islands and how it not only affects the way we live but other aspects of our life not only here in Hawaii but internationally as well so join us for human humane architecture every other tuesday at four p.m on think tech hawaii and aloha my name is calvin griffin the host of hawaii in uniform and every friday at 11 o'clock here on think tech hawaii we bring in the latest in what's happening within the military community and we also invite all your response to things that's happening here for those of you who haven't seen the program before again we invite your participation we're here to information not disinformation and we always enjoy response from the public but join us here hawaii in uniform fridays 11 a.m here on think tech hawaii aloha welcome back to hawaii together on the think tech hawaii broadcast network i'm keely akina my guest today steve liftscomb has just experienced what it is to go from a private life to a public one a very public one as he ran for office he didn't succeed in the 2018 primary of the republican party but got very very close more than that however he learned a lot in the process not only about electioneering campaigning but also about the people of hawaii we've got him back here again steve well what's one of the biggest lessons that you learned in the campaign well interestingly as i was out talking to some people i would invariably run across the the person i would say i don't get involved in politics steve and at first it it sort of took me by surprise but afterwards i developed developed my response which is you may not want to get involved in politics but make no doubt about it politics will be involved with you ask yourself a couple questions why are my taxes so high why does why do goods cost so much here why is housing so expensive why do or why are the schools struggling you can trace all that back to political decisions it sounded it sounds like you had a two-step you had to do not not merely to get the interested in steve lipscomb but first even interested in politics exactly and so just to get as you know we've got the lowest voter turnout we've got if you look at the numbers for this last election about roughly about just really rough numbers 250,000 people voted on the democrat side roughly about 50,000 for everybody else together that's about 300,000 we've got about 750,000 voters so that that gives us or registered voters so that gives us a 40 ish percent turnout plus or minus but you you actually did something quite remarkable you got onto the map and you amassed a good number of votes in your in your market so to speak if you had the money and the time what would you have kept doing so for us to reach out to the masses as quickly as we needed we needed to leverage social media and so we leveraged social and robocalls and I wanted to leverage email campaigns but what I found out was even though the supreme court has said bulk emails from a political candidate to the constituency is absolutely a first amendment right because that's that isn't count does not count as spam the companies that allow you to do that like go daddy constant contact mail chimp they will not allow you to buy a list of people that haven't already opted in to receive emails from you even if you're a politician so the supreme court says yes you can bulk email and the companies that provide that functionality say no you cannot and I think that's a real challenge and something that needs to be looked at she had some challenges we did you know and your your emails might even be marked as spam going into various browsers right so two things that would happen then is either I get shut down on my email piece or the negative impact for those companies to have so much spam is more than they would tolerate so so were there activities you engaged in that ultimately proved not to be very valuable well it's it's hard to measure the value of sign waving so that's there's there's no idea what returning on investment is on that one but I will say really quickly it's a right of passage I see that we people in Hawaii want to see our candidates go through exactly exactly so and it's it can be fun but especially in the rain right and the burning sun so but interestingly so I'll give a shout out to Waimea Community Association so a lot of the forums that I went to were very structured you had all your candidates up on stage Republicans and Democrats and oftentimes there was only two occasions actually where everybody was invited oftentimes there was a subset of people that were invited and so one person gets asked the question next person same question same question it's it's not really boring all right it's it's boring and so the guy at the end has listened to everybody's answer and then can shape his answer what what WCA Waimea Community Association did is they called it speed dating and in the cafeteria they had people set up at the different tables with an open space you went around shotgun start all the candidates went out to the tables and then we changed tables about every nine or ten minutes so it gave us a chance to sit down eyeball eyeball with people and really hear their issues and and experience their issues versus sort of a moderator running through a question that doesn't have that same impact so in a campaign you've got to have that mix of personal interaction with people and mass media social media impact how did you find the media as were they helpful in getting your message out or did you find challenges there so there were there were a few challenges some of the challenges were with individual organizations that would only have forums for a particular partisan side so usually it was if there was a forum only democrats were invited to it and that was disappointing for me and I think that's bad for democracy as well as we're trying to give people a cross section of what's available and what people's thoughts are on the media side as an example I guess I can call out their actual names here but when the Republican governor debate came up for Hawaii news now my running mate Ray LaRue wasn't invited and even though the party and Ray engaged to try to get a seat on that stage it wasn't allowed for some reason I think that's unfortunate for me in particular I had a couple instances with civil beat where I was left out of the list of Republican Lieutenant Governor candidates Steve Lipscomb was left off the name in an article in June and then in July they actually did a poll they did a poll of several hundred people and my name wasn't one of the response options so that gave my competitors sort of an unfair advantage and when we went to civil beat to try to say hey this this happened what are we going to do about it at first they just said it was an oversight and then eventually they said you're not a frontrunner and so when I tried to show that they were covering other races in their entirety and not just picking a couple frontrunners but they weren't treating the Republican Lieutenant Governors that same way I didn't get any answers from that email so I think that speaks to the difficulty of anyone who's a newcomer without large name recognition being able to get on the map but regardless of their qualification regardless of their education you you've been in management positions you have been a leader you have served the country you've got two master's degrees you've worked in corporate America and yet being able to position yourself has been a great challenge it's definitely hard especially in a state with one party system as you think about it what are some of the solutions what are some of the ways you think you could break through should you run for office again well I think we the people need to demand that when we see a Democrat only forum going on that people rise up and say hey that's that's not right we want to hear from the whole cross section so that happened several times across the islands there was a couple by the way the I'll give a shout out to Hawaii neighborhood board they invited everybody so that was the first time I got to meet some green party representatives and I think that's that's the job I think you know with President Trump's calling out about the media being the enemy of the public that's probably pretty strong but the media I grew up understanding the media to be a watchdog agency hey you guys are out there to make sure that things are kind of running right and so when they only cover a certain party I think they're neglecting that idea that their job is to inform the public not to form the public so they're not trying to they shouldn't be trying to form and shape opinions I think they should be reporting to inform whether you're a Democrat or a Republican I would ask you what you think of the condition of your party and what are the challenges that your party may face well that's a fair question for sure I think there's no secret that the Republican Party has atrophied over the years here in Hawaii I think I'm really encouraged and in fact I was one of the reasons I stepped up was I saw strong leadership in the Republican Party right now with Shirley Nostrov so she's a retired Air Force 06 colonel she's leading the charge there and she's got Aaron Wilson as her executive director and a staff of people that are willing to jump in there and help the other encouraging thing is the training team at the Republican Party gave us a 10-week training course on candidacy and covered everything from marketing to fundraising to I mean just across the board so that was that was really encouraging to see the dedication of people giving up their time and not just the time on a Saturday but the prep time to bring all that together that was really encouraging so what I had sent set over to Shirley and is I'm willing to be part of that effort now that I don't have to focus on running for office any longer I'm happy to get in there and start building the Republican Party from the grassroots level and again the main thing here is we have to have we talk about diversity all the time you have to have the diversity of thought inside of your government or else you've just got a monopoly now we've already talked about the fact that you were a first timer when it came to politics and didn't have that name recognition but you have another challenge and that is you're a Republican in a one-party state right how do you conceive of overcoming that challenge for the Republican Party in the years to come especially since there's been such a downward trend in terms of office holding by Republican so I think it's a multifaceted approach I think one is having the strong leadership to take the party out of the ashes if you will and make it a viable entity I think the other part is having people step up to be candidates and letting people see that there are great candidates we have a lot of great candidates in this race in this this election cycle in the various races I'd like to see that expanded because there's still a lot of uncontested seats out there that I think we can go after but but I think that's the key is making sure strong leadership making sure that we have great candidates and then the last piece is targeting that white space so we talked about the 250,000 Democrat voters and around 50,000 other non-democrat voters but there's still a system of about 700 plus thousand people in there that aren't voting and they're just out there we need to get them energized and again making sure that they understand politics is involved in your life you if you don't want to owe the responsibility to the state or to your friends you owe it to yourself to make sure that you're getting involved in politics and making sure that the people that you put in office are working in your best interest did you gain any sense while you're campaigning of any issue that really touched the hearts of people something that they might rally around well that's an interesting question I with me with my three E's and and Ray LaRuse was pretty similar he had infrastructure in there in fact when we did our nomination or announcement we did it in front of the white kiki what's it called the natatory on the world and we wanted to use that as a symbol of sort of the crumbling infrastructure across the state and I think those are some of the issues that people hot button topics is hey I don't have enough money to make ends meet I've got to work two or three jobs so high cost of living high taxes again low paying jobs we have some of the lowest unemployment in the country but we have people working two or three jobs in order to make it all work last year we had 13,000 people leave hawaii net because they can't make it happen anymore and so if you extrapolate that out into the future where does that end you've got you know that that's not the low income people who can't afford to leave and it's not the rich people that can afford to stay it's the folks in the middle that sort of make the economy run that are leading so if you extrapolate out to the future a little bit where does that that's right take us everybody's concerned about whether we can live in paradise any longer right exactly well thank you Steve so much for being on the program all my pleasure enjoyed your insights and I want to wish you the best in the future thanks a lot thanks for having me I appreciate it thank you thank you my guest today Steve Lipscomb ran for office learned quite a bit in the process and has become an even more committed citizen here of the state of hawaii and the united states and my hat goes off to him and everyone else who has been participating in the political process it's easy to say things are bad and they won't change but as the saying goes no no vote no no grumble no vote no grumble no grumble there you go Steve's got that down better than I do see you next time I'm Kili Akina on think tech Hawaii's Hawaii together aloha