State politics are often treated as background noise — procedural, incremental, easy to ignore unless something breaks. But in moments of institutional strain, state legislatures are where legitimacy is either rebuilt or quietly eroded.
I sat down with Nick Uniejewski, a community organizer and policy analyst running for Illinois State Senate in the 6th District, to talk about what representation actually means right now — not as a slogan, but as a governing practice. We discussed why he’s challenging a long-time incumbent, how lived experience and neighborhood-level concerns translate (or fail to translate) into state policy, and what voters are signaling about trust, fatigue, and expectations of leadership.
Our conversation focused on the tension between institutions and communities: how campaigns listen versus how governments act; how credibility is built outside election cycles; and how state power intersects with housing, transit, economic stability, and everyday quality of life in Chicago. Nick speaks candidly about the limits of rhetoric, the necessity of coalition-building, and the pressures facing candidates who come up through organizing rather than machine politics.
This interview is not about endorsements or horse-race dynamics. It’s about how state governance functions in a period where people are increasingly skeptical that political systems respond to them at all — and what it would take to reverse that trajectory.
