Sam Powell for Senate

Why am I doing this?

Douglas Adams famously said, “anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.”

Of course, you could substitute “senator” and the sentiment is the same

So why am I doing this? Certainly not after any great ambition to be in the public eye.

But because every single day we see new atrocities. Any one of the atrocities that we have seen daily since January of 2025 would have been sufficient to end any career, but those who are elected to be checks and balances have abdicated their responsibility to the people.

And now it is time for the people to stand up and say enough.

We have spent too much of our time in fear:

Racism, greed, hatred, contempt, are all driven by fear.

First they caused us to fear black people and brown people, and immigrants, then gay and trans and women… if they can keep the fear going, they can continue to amass power to themselves.

They fill our news feeds and our social media with fabricated fears designed to increase their power and wealth:

“Who will keep Haitians from eating your pets? Who will keep trans people from entering your daughter’s bathroom? Who will protect you from brown people taking over the country? Who will stop people from speaking Spanish or Somali…”

I remember when they made us fear socialism, communism, humanism…

And this is the biggest fear of all: the fear that something must change. Drinking and driving, seat belts, helmets, the new deal, the civil rights act, the voters rights act: every single advance made by humans have been met with anger, rage and accusations of insanity.

Ignatz Semmelweitz was concerned about the high infection and death rates in his hospital. He noticed that when doctors finished the autopsies in one part of the hospital they immediately delivered infants in the other part of the hospital. He set up handwashing procedures for the doctors. Immediately the death rate plummeted, and at the same time, Dr. Semmelweitz was ridiculed, cast out, accused of insanity and died forgotten.

Why is there always such resistance for trying anything new?

I think it is because if it can be shown that the way our fathers did things was wrong, then perhaps they weren’t as wise as we thought they were. Or worse, maybe WE aren’t as wise as we think we are.

Maybe instead of trying to bring America back to an imagined past, we should be focusing on leading America to a thriving future.

And suddenly the old ways are coming into question. Women can vote, women can buy homes, black citizens can vote, Gay men can marry –

Everything is changing and we have to wonder if maybe there were some things that weren’t so great. Maybe slavery and genocide aren’t really a great way to build a nation. Maybe the way that women were treated wasn’t the best way to treat the nation.

And all of the sudden people started being afraid that they might have to do some soul searching. And then “Make America Great Again” came and justified every racist, misogynistic, hate-filled rant we ever had.

But this is now falling apart. There isn’t any way to go back. The maga crowd took a sledgehammer and tried to beat all of us back to 1850. But we can’t go backwards. We’ve tasted hope.

We’ve looked at how things could be and said, “We can do better”

Progress always involves saying “Maybe the way we have been doing things isn’t the right way of doing things.”

But then you have to admit that maybe you weren’t as wise as you thought you were, and maybe it is time to do it differently.

Maybe your ancestors were wrong. Maybe your church was wrong. Maybe the puritans were wrong.

Maybe we didn’t all turn out just fine.

We can hope for better days for Minnesotans. We can hope for medical care for all, it can be done. The plans are written. It is within reach.

We can hope for beautiful days to come, fishing on the lakes and walking along the waterfalls and hiking the trails. We don’t need AI. We need to breathe, and fish, and hike.

We can hope for days when ALL of us can learn about each other without fear.

Why do we insist on seeing the world in black and white, when there are so many beautiful colors and breathtaking ways of being so wonderfully different.

We can fund the MPCA and pass laws to keep outsider billionaires from raping and pillaging our land to add more and more and more to their obscene portfolios.

Let’s finally admit that there is no one – NO ONE – who is a self made man. Everyone needs all of us.

That isn’t Marxism. That’s just every religion on earth. This is wisdom that requires humility – that I need my immigrant neighbors as much as they need me, because we are all part of the same community.

When we think that we are self-sufficient and don’t need anyone else, life has a way of reminding us of our social contracts:

That I need healthcare, because I don’t know when my heart will stop.

That I need SNAP programs, because wealth is fleeting and comes and goes.

That everything I have can also be lost – so I will live generously without blaming and shaming another in need.

We must protect our most vulnerable. The woman who must flee her home because of abuse. The child who isn’t safe at home

The indigenous women who still disappear without a trace.

A society that doesn’t protect its weakest members must change or die.

We need shelters and protections. We need reform in our family courts. These are my passions.

And to do that, we need to strive for justice – that the same laws are applied the same way to everyone, whether foreign born or native, undocumented or documented, rich or poor

And we need to keep our covenant. Our treaties, our word, our contracts.

And we need the humility to listen. And if we need to change, let’s face that head on.

Who is Sam Powell

My name is Sam Powell, and I am running as a DFL candidate for Senate District 19 in Minnesota. I am seeking your endorsement.

Please allow me to introduce myself. I was born and raised in California in an extremely conservative environment. My father was a pastor of a congregation that was Christian Nationalist, before it became a household word. In that congregation, the seeds were sown which eventually gave birth to the Heritage Foundation and project 2025. My father learned it at Bob Jones University and it was in the environment that I swam in every day.

(My father with Bob Jones Sr., 1961)

None of the platforms of Project 2025 are a surprise to me, because this is what I heard and what I was taught from a very young age.I was wrong, though, in thinking that these ideas were fringe, as I would soon find out.

I eventually became a pastor in that denomination, thinking that I would be able to slowly turn them away from their politics of distrust and separatism towards a more open and accepting love as Jesus taught us.

The congregation were having none of it, and when Covid hit, a large faction tore my congregation apart.

My wife and I moved to Faribault in 2023, looking for a fresh start.

Before I pastored, I worked in Food Service so I put my management background to work. I worked Human Resources for Hy-vee before moving to Walmart, where I am currently serving as their People Lead (Human Resources Manager).

At my job, I work with many from various cultures – Somali, Hispanic, white, disabled, deaf – and see so many hurting and desperate people.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

But somebody needs to step up. So here I am. Brand-new to politics, but not brand new to compassion, community and courage.

I believe that we don’t have to be divided and distrustful. We can listen to our communities. We can honor cultures and religions as well as common humanity. It is what our country was founded upon.

We can mutually make our communities stronger – first by listening and finding our common ground.

We all need healthcare that doesn’t bankrupt us. We all need to be able to have preventative care and mental health care, whether we are trying to scrape pennies together to make ends meet, or whether we have cushion in our bank accounts.

I’ve sat in enough hospital rooms to know that when our loved ones are sick, desperation and fear of the unknown are universal. Illness doesn’t discriminate. But together we should be able to take away the fear of one choosing health care or housing, or health care and food.

And I’ve worked with enough people to know that those are very real choices that our communities have to make daily. Should I buy groceries, or should I get my baby to urgent care?

This is not the way that healthy communities should operate.

A woman should be free to make the best choice for her health with her doctor, without fear.

We should not have to fear being tackled in the streets and tased because of the color of our skin.

Together we can keep Minnesota beautiful, strong and welcoming. But we can’t just sit by and wait for someone else to do it.

For this reason, I am seeking your endorsement. I don’t know everything and I am relatively new to Minnesota. But this is my home. We loved it the second we drove in on that snowy day in 2023. The community called to us and we are here.

It’s our home. Our safe place.

I want to work with you all to bring that safety and belonging and peace to EVERYONE, because, as Maya Angelou said, …”if we aren’t ALL free, then none of us are free.”

We spend so much time and attention on the movers and shakers, the money people and the builders and the leaders. And yes, every community needs them.

But in the corners are those that are left behind, forgotten, left without a voice.

They are the ones who are too busy trying to eat today and tomorrow; they are the disabled, the outcasts, the strange, the lonely, the poor.

You walk past them and don’t notice. You don’t see the fears. The diagnoses that they can’t afford the treatments for; you don’t see the single mom that loses her job because her childcare canceled at the last minute one too many times.

The desperation and the rejection are painful to see, so people ignore it. And if they are forced to look and see the hopelessness and the dying, they will convince themselves that there must be some moral failing.

If you can blame the sufferer, maybe you can make better choices so that the same thing doesn’t happen to you…

I have a better way.

Let’s look right at it and solve it.

Let’s take on hunger and housing and healthcare. Let’s quit looking away.

Let’s stop pretending that there is some moral failing, or some reason that the fringes deserve to be the fringes.

Let’s quit giving billionaires more dollars, and more corrupt contracts, and actually make some hard choices.

No one should ever avoid healthcare because they can’t afford it.

No one should ever lose their job because of childcare.

No one should ever go hungry because some billionaire isn’t raking in enough.

No one should ever be tackled in the streets or tased because of the color of their skin.

If we lose compassion, we lose community.

And building community takes courage.

Let’s build community together with everyone.

Sam Powell for Senate District 19.

Courage, Compassion, Community.

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Hello World!

Three years ago…

I have mixed feelings about this.

First, this is the week that my former denomination would hold its annual meeting. So those memories come up in my feed.

I remember how miserable those meetings were.

The horrible things that leaders of the church would say out loud.

The pride and entitlement that they didn’t earn

The hardened hearts and disregard of covenants

For the last ten years, I was just looking for an out. I stayed too long, but I kept thinking about the women and children still left there and the horrible things they were enduring and didn’t want to abandon them.

And it is hard to break away from the church of your childhood…

Then they tried me for “false teaching” without telling me what that false teaching was, tore my congregation apart, and left us to pick up the pieces. There were a handful of families left who hadn’t bent the knee to Baal, and we decided to sell the building and close the doors.

Three years ago, my wife and daughter and I said goodbye to my daughter, my son-in-law, and my grandchildren. We had one last breakfast at their house and hugged, and then left California for good.

This is where the mixed feelings come in. I miss them intensely and still get choked up.

I had a few very close friends that went through the fire with me and I miss them so much it hurts.

But when I think about everything else we left, there is a lightness in my heart and a spring in my step. I see the old pictures of our meetings and shake my head.

“I can’t believe I sat through that garbage. I can’t believe I participated in it.”

And I’m so, so glad I’m out. And I love our new town and our new community. I get asked so many times about “why I left California”, and it is always asked with a sort of hushed incredulous tone. I left because after spending most of my life there, and being born and raised there, it wasn’t home.

My niece told me a while back “You were just in the wrong circles…”

For the first time in my life I feel like I’m home, like I belong, like this is where I fit. I think she was right.

I know my old circles think that I’m a far left, liberal lunatic, who has gone off the rails. I know that they tell each other that I left the safety of the “church” and now I don’t have any rails on my thinking…I know that I am the topic of many conversations as a warning…but I don’t care.

Those in the cave never understand the ones who got away. Those who are afraid that God will punish them if they step out of line will never understand a God who loves freely and unconditionally and calls us to freedom. To release fear and suspicion and hatred of the “other”.

But those who got away understand completely. They are my people.

A lot has happened in three years. My thinking has become for firm, and less dogmatic all at the same time. The destruction caused by conservative Reformed churches is reaching its peak and will burst soon.

For those who don’t know, Pete Hegseth is a member of a cult lead by Doug Wilson from Moscow, Idaho, who has been corrupting Reformed churches for thirty years. Those who think like Wilson and have his books on their bookracks in church were those who destroyed my congregation.

The breaking of covenants that I saw repeatedly in my denomination is now carried out internationally and is destabilizing the whole world.

This is one area that I really wish I wasn’t right about. But I had warned about it for years. And then I see the architect of patriarchal rot standing in the Pentagon “preaching” and I say – I was right about this.

Those who whisper in hushed tones about feminism like it is a dirty word; those who crush the poor and the widow, those who mock the orphan and the fatherless…

By the way, in those circles a “feminist” is a woman who expressed disagreement with her husband or her (male) church leaders. They believe that “feminists” must be defeated or society will fall apart.

But this rot will tear itself apart. We live in similar times to Isaiah, who wrote to the faithful outcasts:

“Fear not, says your God, I will never leave you, nor forsake you.”

And he never has. Even through fiery trials, hard times, hard goodbyes, nights of vomiting, heart palpitations, heart attacks,

He is still there, walking with us. He hates what is happening because he hates injustice and cruelty. The one who loves me also loves Iranian schoolgirls and hates what happened to them. And he will come in vengeance when the time is right.

For now, he is giving us all a chance to reflect and turn away from this course before it is too late.

For this reason, I have decided to run for Senate in District 19 in Minnesota. If not me, who? If we don’t stand up for that which is good and right, who will.

Until then, hold on. Be kind to each other. Encourage your neighbors. Give to the food banks. Fight for justice and integrity, and walk humbly with your God, and he will lift you up.

I will see you at the polls