 COVID-19, it really has changed a lot. I know that to one extent it threw a wrench in, you know, your plans because as a grassroots candidate, the key to your success oftentimes for a lot of these types of campaigns is knocking on doors, talking to people. So it changed it, but at the same time, you know, in this red to blue district, there's this underlying assumption that, you know, you can't be too radical. And before this pandemic, I think that it would have been a campaign against you by, you know, conservatives in that district to say, well, she's too radical. She supports something like Medicare for all. But now in a COVID era, you're not the radical. You're actually able to position whoever you're running against as the radical if they don't support it. So talk about how COVID-19 has impacted your district and the way that you're able to sell Medicare for all now, as people see firsthand, the necessity of healthcare. You know, the interesting thing is back in 2019, when I was talking about scaling the healthcare infrastructure that when we go to single pair, we actually save money. When I talk to whether it's a Republican or an independent or a Democrat that doesn't, you know, support Medicare for all, it's primarily because they don't understand what Medicare for all is. So, so this is the argument that I give. And by the way, this works every single time. And if you're trying to convince anybody of Medicare for all, use this. In 2018, we paid $3.68 trillion for healthcare, but that's still left out over 80 million people from being able to actually see a doctor. It didn't matter whether you have insurance or you don't have insurance. You could not see somebody when you were sick. However, every single study, including conservative think-tank studies say that if we go to single pair healthcare for all, Medicare for all, it should cost somewhere between $2 and $3 trillion. Well, guess what? $2 and $3 trillion is a lot less than $3.68 trillion. And every time I give this argument, people are like, wow, that makes real sense. I think I can get on board with that. That's number one. Number two, I explained to them that Medicare for all keeps every single provider private. And it is very different from the system in the UK. And it is also different from the system in Canada, by the way. Canada does not have what Medicare for all does. It separates it into their various provinces. Medicare for all takes it and says you can go see any doctor, any nurse that you want to when you need to. And it is cheaper because it's pooled because there's only one pair. And you're taking out the billions of dollars in profit that health insurance companies are making in the middle that impact nothing. It doesn't impact the quality of your care. It doesn't impact the fact of your health. It doesn't do anything. It's just sitting there as fat. And we need to cut this fat out if we're going to survive. So that's how we're still talking to people. Now, the interesting thing is in March after the pandemic hit, every article in the Washington Post and New York Times article was talking about scaling the healthcare infrastructure because they were putting up these tents in Central Park to put, you know, because they didn't have enough hospital beds. And in 2019 we were talking about scaling the healthcare infrastructure and people were like, Donna, what do you mean by that? And what I meant is very simple, that our country has a lack of primary care physicians and nurses at the primary care level. And if we practice preventative healthcare, the cost of healthcare will go down even more than $2 trillion because you will attack these underlying causes and people will get sick less. People will not end up in the hospital. We will not use ER as our first line of defense. And it also would mean more things like more ventilators, things like, you know, when the first time the masks came out, and they were like many of these masks have molded in it that nobody was actually looking at our supply chain of medical supplies for PPE and doing first in, first out, for example. This is what I mean when I talk about scaling the healthcare infrastructure. So we try to talk about solutions in terms of, in terms that people understand. And when you take away these labels, all of a sudden people are receptive. Because the minute you put labels on your solution, it becomes like a sports game, right? Oh, I'm for this team and you're for that team. But when you start talking about, look, do you want the kid that is going to school with your kid getting sick and dying from COVID because their parent doesn't have health insurance coverage? Do you want your neighbor? Do you want the person who cleans your house to die from coronavirus? And people will say, no, I don't want that. And that's why we need healthcare for every single person because that is who we are as human beings. And that is the American way. And I want every single person to know we can do this for a lot less money. And this is great long term, whether you have great health insurance or not. And I'll tell you that in Williamson County, remember I just told you that we have all these tech companies, these software developers and business people make six figure salaries. And if you go talk to them, they'll tell you, I'm not happy with my private health insurance. And they have health insurance. And every single person has gone through a layoff in their life these days. They understand what it's like to be in between and not be able to cover their children. So these are solutions that relate to every single person. We have to stop dividing us up into pieces and reaching out because these things impact middle class people. They even impact some upper middle class people as well. Remember middle class people, upper middle class people, they don't get any assistance for their kids when they go to college, zero dollars of assistance. They know how hard it is to send two kids to college. It's like two mortgages. So they are on board. And when you talk to them in these terms, they're like, I want to vote for your campaign. You make sense to me. And that's how we're winning people over in our district. And that makes sense because when you sanitize, you know, the issues that we're talking about, or you kind of depolitify them in the sense that you talk about it on a real concrete human level, people are receptive to that because I think that people are primed or at least conditioned to think about political issues in partisan terms. But these aren't necessarily partisan issues. I mean, political parties make them into partisan issues. But these are issues that affect everyone. And you know, in this COVID era, you know, like pre COVID era, I felt like it was really easy to make the case for Medicare for all and sell it. Now COVID makes that case for us, you know, and at a time when so many people are losing their jobs, as you noted, and they're losing their private insurance as a result, you can't make the case that, well, you know, what do we do with all these people who love their private insurance? One, that's not actually true. And true, people are losing their private insurance. So it's really important that now more than ever, we push hard for Medicare for all and to make sure that everyone has healthcare. Because, you know, with the end of the Democratic primary, the national election, it seemed like it was a lost cause. Like, I felt really defeated. Because, you know, if we don't have a president who would sign it to law, then, you know, is there any hope? But I think that there is hope, because this is something that it can happen, but it has to be from the bottom up and not the top down. I think that's one thing that's clear. I wanted to ask you about the representative currently. He's a nine time incumbent, nine term incumbent, John Carter. How has his response been to the district with regard to COVID-19? Because I think that now is the time more than ever for leadership to make sure that people in Congress are caring to the very specific concerns of each unique district. How would you grade him? Well, my experience has been very dismal of what he's been doing. And I'll give you specific examples. So when, first of all, Corona hit and everything was struck down, as you know, Texas lost over two million jobs. So one of the first questions that people had was, how do I get my stimulus check? When the stimulus check actually came about, you know, in late March and people were talking about it. That was the first question. Second thing that a lot of people may be aware of is that there are more veterans in my district for square mile than anywhere else in the entire state of Texas. So there are a lot of veterans who actually don't file taxes. And one of the requirements was that you had to file either 2018 or 2019 taxes and people on really low income that were getting SSI, or if you were a veteran, sometimes you didn't even file taxes. So one of the biggest issues people were reaching out to us was, how do I get my stimulus check? And think about it, as a representative, that should have been the first thing that he should have communicated either via email or letter or some public way that every single person would know. They didn't. Our campaign got in touch with people and helped them maneuver the IRS website to figure out how to get their stimulus check. Number one, number two, simple things like if you type in your address and capital letters, you can actually find out whether you're going to get a check or not. And then we informed them that they didn't need to file a tax, for example, if they weren't required to file a tax that they would get their stimulus checks anyway. But there are still people to this day that didn't get their stimulus checks and don't know how to get it and have no clue. And we still try to work through them. And the way we did this is two ways. One, we did it digitally through various Zoom calls, town halls. And second, we did it through a 30 minute radio segment specifically targeted in areas that we know have people that are worried about their stimulus checks. So areas that their income is under $75,000 and they've lost their jobs. We did some programs to make sure that they would know that. So that was one. Number two, I personally picked up the phone and called lots of mom and shop small businesses. And to my dismay, what I found is that most of them, almost all of them had no idea that there was any assistance available. That was the saddest part. Many of these small businesses, especially ethnic restaurants, are run by people of color. And they are both the owner of the restaurant. They also cook in the restaurant. They serve in the restaurant. And they were really struggling to pay their bills because people weren't going out to restaurants anymore. And when I picked up the phone and said, hey, do you know that you have this ability to get some assistance, to pay people, to keep them on payroll, they were like, we didn't even know that was available. Where do we get it, Donna? So we tried to direct them to resources. But unfortunately, many of these small businesses, when they reached out to the banks, they were told that the money had completely dried up and it was completely gone. So I would say based on our interaction with the community, that the representatives, the current representatives, you know, performance has been dismal to none. It's been very disappointing because we remember we wrote a $6,000 plus. I think it was $6,000 plus check on every man, woman and child in this country. They have taken out a loan on your children to pay this. And most of this money went to major corporation over, you know, $600, $700 billion. And even the small business amounts, they went to chain restaurants across the entire country. They went to paying, we heard of, you know, people paying up their royalty fees for McDonald's chains, for example, people who didn't need that money, but actual mom and pop shops, they lost out and they're still struggling. And today, we still have millions of people in this country with completely no way to go back to work. By the way, right now, the cases in Texas have been spiking day after day after day, both hospitalizations and the number of cases. We have no plan and place for contact tracing. And because we are one of the countries that handle testing so poorly from the very beginning, that we are not prepared for opening up in a safe way. And we talk about our Congress and our leadership, right? Yet they know these things. It's not like the United States doesn't have the smartest people in the world. We do. We have the smartest scientists in the world. We have the smartest engineers in the world. But nobody's taking the initiative to say, you people in Congress, do you understand that 120,000 families had to bury somebody over the last eight to 10 weeks in this country? Do you know how painful it is to put your grandmother away early, 10 years early, because she had an underlying condition and couldn't survive COVID? And how many families are going through this? This didn't have to happen in our country. Yeah. And as you explain the failure there, it's definitely a failure in leadership. But I also get a sense that there's just ambivalence there. Because I mean, if you are up for reelection, then you want to brag to your constituents about what you helped to accomplish. So if he voted for the CARES Act, assuming he did, then you'd want to let them know that they have access to these benefits. You'd want to assist them in getting their stimulus checked. But to not even do that, I mean, you're not doing the bare minimum at that point.