A few weeks ago, opinion editor Arwen Pelletier sat down with McCallum senior Reese Armstrong to discuss their campaign for Travis County Commissioner which goes to the polls for the primary election day this Tuesday, March 3. Below is a transcript of their linked conversation.

Pelletier

So, Reese, can you tell me a little bit about your campaign, how you started, how everything got started? What was your inspiration behind it all?

Armstrong

Yeah, I mean, I decided to run for Travis County commissioner back in January of 2025, which is almost a year ago now. Or over a year ago now. Because, you know, we wanted to expand our student socialist movement across the city with a campaign that could really energize chapters and people from a larger base than just one school or just even one district.

Being able to really build out a base of power that can, you know, really win left wing change in our county. You know, I’m going up against a ten year incumbent who has consistently failed to deliver on the things that matter: affordable housing, health care, education. It’s really quite concerning to me how we have let ourselves just go from one political machine to the next.

I think that we need to engage young people, and engage progressives to really, really beat the machine and actually, be able to win real material change. You know, as we face a housing crisis, as we face a health care crisis, and a federal government that’s cutting more and more of our services, we can’t let our county slip into austerity, because it seems like every time there’s a problem, the first thing to go is services for working people and not tax breaks for the wealthy.

Pelletier

You said that you’re up against that ten year incumbent, right? With a bunch of experience. Can you lay out your qualifications for the position?

Armstrong

I mean, the incumbent was a former city councilor back in the 90s, and has been on the commission for a long time now, you know. I don’t have the experience of selling out my constituents for, you know, my payday in terms of zoning, and trying to stop zoning reform. I don’t have the experience of taking $50,000 from people who voted and spent to a ton of money to try to repeal gay marriage in California.

I don’t have the experience of trying to, you know, constantly, bend to wealthy homeowners instead of our working class tenants that actually need relief. You know, my experience as an organizer with Students United and with the Young Democratic Socialists of America actually winning change in our communities. You know, when I was a union organizer, we were able to win the transition for teen employees from independent contractor status to that of W-2, full employment, which was able to give them Social Security and Medicare. It also bumped them up to minimum wage because they weren’t making minimum wage before then.

This was against a nonprofit backed by, you know, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel. I know how to take the fight to entrenched power and win for working people. And my incumbent has decided that she’s on the side of the entrenched power.

Pelletier

You want to take that power and put it towards the working people a lot through the policies that you’re trying to put forth. Can you tell me a little bit more about your proposals? I know some basic campaign messages of free ambulances, no new jails and expanded public health care. But how do you plan to achieve those goals?

Armstrong

So, you know, we’re running on building social housing by investing in our public housing authorities. We currently have the Housing Authority of Travis County, which does not get a dime from the county itself. We don’t have tax revenue going to it, and that’s a huge problem. We don’t have the actual investment infrastructure set up to allow for large social programs because we’re spending all of our money on jail and the punishment bureaucracy.

We spend over 40% of our general fund on just that system. We also have plenty in reserves, and we’re not utilizing that to actually build our programs. We’re not, you know, borrowing with the reserves as collateral. We’re not borrowing on new tax revenue. We’re not bonding, in a way that could actually allow us to really build out these programs that are so necessary.

And I think the main blocker to these ideas is not the practical implementation of them. Travis County has plenty of money. Travis County has the ability to borrow plenty of money. And it gets money from the federal government, gets money from the state government. There’s the infrastructure in state law that allows for a lot of things to get done.

We just don’t have leaders with the political will to actually organize working people to make it happen. So, you know, I’m running on expanding social housing. I’m running on expanding our public health care. We have a health care district called Central Health in Travis County. It doesn’t have a single public hospital. We do not have a public hospital.

We closed our public hospital. A good while ago now, it was Breckenridge Hospital, you know, for a lot of good reasons that it was closed. It was unsafe for patients. It was unsafe for staff. But what happened was it got replaced with a private, nonprofit hospital that has been ripping off consumers. You know, forcing our nurses to strike multiple times.

Instead of, you know, having a public authority that actually is delivering at-cost health care to people. And we need to reopen Breckenridge Hospital and we need to make ambulances free, which doesn’t take a ton of tax revenue to do, but it would improve the lives of so many who are afraid to call 911.

Pelletier

You’re talking about, taking this different tax revenue and everything and changing it around, and how Travis County has the ability to borrow money and everything. But could you expand a little bit more about how your policy agenda would affect taxpayers and the daily taxpayer?

Armstrong

I think it will come down to, you know, we can’t raise tax revenue without a vote of the majority of the people who the tax rate would increase for. So it’s not like it would happen overnight. But the main thing is trying to put our money that we do have access to currently, in a place that makes sense.

You know, we just passed a big tax rate increase for flood relief, but we didn’t cut a dollar from our jails to pay for that. And I think that’s really the problem is we give, for example, over $300 million off the taxable value for, for Tesla, to build out their factory without union protections, without a labor peace agreement, without any of these things that would even make those jobs good.

Let alone the fact of the fact that they’re depriving so much tax revenue from our county. So I don’t think we need to raise taxes right away. And if we do, we need to raise taxes on the wealthy, and we need to push the state government to tax the rich in order to pay for social programs.

But locally, we have the ability to, you know, to increase property tax. And if you increase property tax while increasing social services, if the social services pays for the property tax increase, which, for example, I want to run a study on whether or not implementing single payer health care via property tax would save the taxpayer money because robust social services, when they’re done across a population, you could do them at scale and you can do them, at cost.

And that’s a big difference compared to private services that we’re all paying for now. So it’s not that there would be no tax increases, it’s that we just spend our tax increases more wisely. We need to spend our budget more wisely. We need to dip into reserves, and we need to bond on existing money. Because I do think that we are underutilizing it.

We have plenty of bond capacity that we could be utilizing to actually make a difference in the lives of working people. And we’re not.

Pelletier

You said that there probably wouldn’t be immediate tax rises on Austin residents, but, you know, there was the election or, sorry, the vote, excuse me for Prop Q and that was rejected just due to a lot of backlash from the public. If those tax raises ended up happening, what would your response be and how would you deal with that backlash from Austin taxpayers?

Armstrong

Prop Q failed for a variety of reasons that are, I think, unrelated to Austin residents in a lot of ways. It failed because of really poor campaign management from the city side, from the proponents of it. There were a lot of factors. Basically, the Republican Party was really able to get out first and define the narrative. You know, people are saying 20% tax increase.

It was barely 6%. And so which was definitely some money, but not, not nearly as much as, as people were saying. And I think that, you know, there is organized capital is always going to fight back. You know, whether it’s a tax increase, whether it’s the construction of a social services that would deprive them of profit.

It’s, you know, it’s always a struggle. But, you know, the backlash only exists because we failed to organize constituents properly. And I think that if we have a county that is spending well and have a organized working class base that is able to, to win things, that can make a real difference in people’s lives.

And, you know, organized people can beat organized money, but we all have to be organized in order to do that.

Pelletier

You said a little bit about how the campaign didn’t really define their narrative. How would you and how do you plan to continue to organize your people in your campaign to define your narrative?

Armstrong

I mean, you’ve to say what it’s for. You actually have to have a plan for what it’s for. And you actually have to build the campaign around what you are going to deliver and not just who you’re against. You know, I think the campaign made a big mistake trying to pin it as anti-Abbott and anti-Trump to vote for Prop Q, but realistically, that is not what persuades voters.

What persuades voters is actually having a robust social services agenda to expand the welfare state. And I think that is what we need to focus on is how can we expand the welfare state, how can we build buy-in from labor unions, from democratic groups, from working class people in order to win? Because the failure of Prop Q was not that the underlying proposition was a mistake, it was sorely needed.

Our budget is now facing, you know, seriously we’re in a serious fiscal crisis because of the failure to pass Prop Q, but the fact that we would be in a serious fiscal crisis was not communicated. But rather we communicated that we should stick it to Trump and Abbott when realistically it’s about taking care of one another. And that was the real issue is that we didn’t have a real coordinated effort to actually make city government work for people. And so we paid a price for that at the polls.

Pelletier

The coordinated effort, it takes a lot to bring that awareness, and it takes a lot to have awareness about campaigns in general. How do you work during your current campaign to bring awareness to your policy agenda and different things like that?

Armstrong

You know, we just talk to voters. You know, you see all these big signs up for people. We haven’t spent a dollar on signs, or I should say, the big signs or advertising or mailers. You know, none of that matters in comparison to actually talking to voters. And really building power around the policy agenda.

To be able to take that into the next session, or the next term of the commissioners court, and really be able to to extract concessions. You know, I see this campaign is not one that is built around an entity in and of itself, but rather it’s just another campaign of a movement that will hold more campaigns. It’s not the be all, end all of campaigning in the way that, you know, some candidates build their campaign around themselves. And when the campaign ends, there’s nothing for people to plug into because it wasn’t ever about winning, it wasn’t about winning power for them. It was about winning power for the individual candidate.

And that’s the real difference, I think, is being able to- we haven’t we’ve successfully leveraged this campaign to build an organized student socialist movement. I mean, we just saw that with the strike against ICE last week. We’ve seen that with the creation of multiple new YDSA chapters in the city. And so the electoral campaign is people see themselves through the avatar of electoral politics. And I think that we have been focused on leveraging people’s understanding of electoral politics into larger working class movements that can actually win things.

Pelletier

I just wanted to expand a little bit into that anti-ICE strike and everything that happened last week. You talked a little bit about just now how the campaign is more than just the person trying to get elected. It’s the movement as a whole. Can you tell me how it felt to see your movement expanding so widely, especially with kids in our age range?

Armstrong

I mean, it was incredible to watch, to watch years of organizing finally pay off. And, you know, I think the strike is meaningful because it shows the power that we have, to really win and the numbers that we have, I think, you know, seeing the organizing efforts for, for years and years. You know, going back to, the student union at LASA to going back to, you know, our district organizing, even a few years ago against some of the Edutech that was trying to replace teachers. Consistently building up relationships with students and building up an

activist base has allowed for stuff like that to happen and allowed for it to be coordinated across the city. I think that was the real difference between us and other cities that participate is because we had had infrastructure to make stuff like that happen when people were ready to mobilize. We were able to successfully respond in a way that was coordinated and drew people to the Capitol and really bring together students from across the district in a way that I think most other places did not see such a coordinated effort because there wasn’t the organization set up to actually deliver on an activist action like that.

And so that has been the real takeaway is, you know, we’ve built up an organization and we need people to get involved in it. But watching that happen was, you know, very rewarding for us. But the work is only beginning, you know, that didn’t lead to a win. It led to momentum. And so the next step, after that is trying to think well, how can we actually make a change?

How can we pressure APD? How can we pressure the sheriff’s office that are both collaborating with ICE? Willingly to actually, you know, use our power that we have just shown to actually force them to do something about it and not just, talk platitudes about how much ICE is bad, but just throw their hands up and do nothing.

Pelletier

You talked a little bit about the future plans, but how did that entire thing make you feel about the future of the YDSA and that whole movement in general?

Armstrong

I mean, look, we’re up to five or six chapters in the area. Or I should say five or six organizing committees, and two or three chapters. And so that is one of the highest densities of what you say is in the country, in one metro area, with the exception of probably New York and LA. And so it’s the sort of thing where you know that those, those organized committees need to become full chapters and there needs to be regional infrastructure.

That’s what we’ve been working on, is trying to get a regional coordinating group going with delegates from the different chapters. At-large members from the city who do not belong to a chapter, engaging them with the national organization properly at conventions. So there’s definitely still work to be done in terms of building the organization. But I feel happy with the fact that we have so many chapters, and we’re always looking for new, for new chapters, at schools where we don’t currently have one.

And, you know, bringing all these groups together from, from college to high school to middle school is going to be key to really building student power in Austin. But, you know, I think we’re on the right track.

Pelletier

Talking about connecting that college and high school and middle school levels with you when you were a high school senior, if you are elected to Travis County Commissioner, how do you plan to continue your education? How would that work going into college? And have you thought about that?

Armstrong

I mean, I would continue college. I just take it on an extended timeline with classes. You know, education, something that’s deeply important to me. I, you know, will pursue a college degree no matter what happens. You know, I think, being able to stay in that sphere while serving as commissioner will provide a much needed voice to students.

Because, you know, I will always be grounded in that, in that fight. As you know, someone who will be a current student, as commissioner. 

Pelletier

Awesome. Well, I think that’s all we have for today.