Michael Dorland

Michael Dorland's career experience includes working as an information technology professional.[1]

Who are you? Tell us about yourself.

I'm not uniquely qualified for Congress. Nobody is. I'm qualified — a smaller claim, and a true one.

I started as a dishwasher and worked up to kitchen manager. Four years on a retail floor at K-Mart and Walmart. Two years driving all over southern Arizona as a Dell field service tech. Sierra Vista, Benson, Douglas, taking apart people's computers and mostly listening to them. I've owned a comic store and a few other small businesses, so I know what making payroll feels like at three in the morning.

I grew up poor in rural South Dakota. My parents worked themselves raw and still lost the house and the business. I've been briefly homeless. I lost my own house in 2008 with two small kids, largely to medical debt. I live with mental illness, medicated, managed, not ashamed of it.

What I actually believe: be kind if you can manage it, but at minimum don't be a jackass and don't make things worse. I'm not a fiscal conservative, but you shouldn't spend more than you take in. Fund the arts? If you don't, the only people using the word inspire are selling you something. Government should be boring, honest, and useful. It's not there to make money, it's there to create community.

I've worked with computers since 1980, with a special focus on AI. I'm not afraid of the technology. I am afraid of the people selling it.

I take no donations. I've spent under $200. Every receipt is public and always will be.

Please list below 3 key messages of your campaign. What are the main points you want voters to remember about your goals for your time in office?

No party, no donors, no filters, no lies.

I'm an independent write-in running on my own money. Nobody funds me, so nobody owns a piece of what I say. The whole ledger is public, down to the $7.99 domain registration.

That second half matters more than the first. I'm honest to a failure. I'll tell you when I'm wrong, when I don't know, and when I've changed my mind, including when it costs me. Corrections go up in public and the old versions stay online. Ask me anything and you'll get the real answer, including the ones you were hoping I'd dodge.

If you had money set aside for this, spend it on yourself or your community instead. There's a list of ideas on my site. That's the actual ask.Don't make things worse.

Most of the damage I've watched get done was done by people who were certain they were helping. That isn't a partisan observation. It's just what happens when confidence outruns understanding and nobody in the room is willing to say "wait."

I've been on the receiving end of it. I lost a house in 2008 to a crisis built by people who were sure they had it under control. So I'd rather move carefully, read the bill, and be able to defend every vote I cast than move fast and issue an apology later.

Sometimes the right vote is no on a bad version of a good idea. I'll take the criticism for that.I don't know everything, and I'll say so.

The job covers healthcare, water, trade, defense, agriculture, tech, and a dozen other things nobody is an expert in all of. Anyone acting like they've got all of it handled is performing.

What I can promise is this: when I don't know, I'll say I don't know, go ask people who actually do, and tell you who I asked. Not lobbyists. Not the company selling the thing. Experts with no stake.

Congress used to have its own independent science and technology advisors. It shut that down in 1995 and has taken its briefings from vendors ever since. I want it back.

The people who scare me aren't the ones who admit they might be wrong. They're the ones who never do.

What areas of public policy are you personally passionate about?

Anti-corruption. Ban congressional stock trading, close the revolving door, real disclosure. I already live under them.

AI and tech. Transparency on what datacenters cost in water and power, none of it on ratepayers' bills. Safety tested before scale. Nobody should write tech law they can't explain.

One country, not fifty fiefdoms. Trade decisions made for other states land here first and Arizonans pay at the register. Border states need a seat.

Affordability and owning what you buy. Right to repair. If you can't keep it, don't call it buying. Homes owned by people, not portfolios.

The border and immigration I won't compress into three lines. It's on my site at length, with the rest.

Who do you look up to? Whose example would you like to follow, and why?

Robert Anton Wilson. He wasn't a politician and would have hated being cited in a voter guide.

The idea of his that stuck: everybody is looking at the world through a filter built out of everything that happened to them before now. Two people can look at the same thing and honestly see different things. Most people who disagree with you aren't lying and aren't stupid. They're standing somewhere else.

That's the single most useful thing I know for a job like this. It doesn't mean every view is equally right. It means if I can't explain why a reasonable person landed somewhere I didn't, I don't understand the issue yet, and I should go find out before I vote on it.

He also insisted on staying uncertain out loud, which is deeply out of fashion. Probably why I like it.

What characteristics or principles are most important for an elected official?

Representing everyone, including the people who didn't vote for you and the ones who think you're an idiot.

A district isn't a team. It's about 800,000 people who disagree with each other, and roughly half of them will be unhappy with any given vote. The job isn't to serve the half that likes you. It's to be reachable by all of

them, and honest with all of them about what you did and why.

I've lived in a rural red state and in the DC suburbs. I've worked minimum wage and I've signed the front of paychecks. Most of what's broken in politics is two groups of people who've never lived each other's lives shouting past each other. I've lived both. I can at least hear both.

That isn't the same as agreeing with everyone. It's just refusing to write anybody off.

What do you believe are the core responsibilities for someone elected to this office?

Be honest with people, don't make things worse, and don't be a jackass. That's the whole thing. Here's what it means in practice.

The actual job is smaller than campaigns pretend. One vote. The ability to sponsor a bill. Questions in a hearing. A microphone. Anyone promising you more than that is lying about the job.

So the responsibilities are ordinary ones. Read the bill before voting on it. Show up. Answer your own mail. Cast votes you can defend out loud to somebody who disagrees, and then actually defend them. Say so when you got it wrong. And don't do damage on the way through, because most of the damage I've watched get done was done by people who were certain they were helping.

Constituent service isn't the boring part of this job. For most people it's the only part that ever touches them.

What legacy would you like to leave?

I already left my legacy. I have kids. That part's done, and it's better than anything I'll manage here.

What I want now is smaller and harder: to hand them a country that works about as well as the one I got. Not better, necessarily. I'd settle for not worse.

Mine had plenty wrong with it and I'm not nostalgic about it. I'm not asking for 1985 back. But it mostly functioned. You could get a hearing. Most people could see some kind of path forward, even if it was a hard one. That's a low bar and we're getting close to it.

That's the whole reason I'm doing this. It isn't a career move. I'd like the thing to still be running when it's their turn, and I'd rather have tried and failed in public than watched and said nothing.

What was your very first job? How long did you have it?

Dishwasher. About four months of it, then they moved me to graveyard cook and, not long after that, to shift supervisor.

Four months is not a long time to go from the sink to the line. It happened because somebody bothered to notice a kid showing up on time and decided to find out what else he could do. I've thought about that a lot since. Most people never get looked at that closely.

That turned out to be the pattern of my whole working life. I have never once walked into a job at the top of it. Kitchen, retail floor, field service, my own businesses, and IT. Every one of them started with me at the bottom learning the actual work.

Many people talk about how the country works this way, but it doesn't. I would like the country to still work that way.

What is something that has been a struggle in your life?

Nobody was looking for ADHD in a quiet kid in the seventies. I wasn't bouncing off walls; I was in a corner with a book. What my parents had was a weird kid, not a diagnosable one. Back then, getting caught might have been worse than being missed.

So school was hell, and "lazy" became the explanation, and I believed it. That took most of my self-esteem before I was twenty. Drinking and drugs came after, which is what people do when they're trying to turn something off.

It took thirty-some years before anybody named it. Treatment is the reason everything since has worked.

I'm not putting this on a platform. It shouldn't need one. It should just be an ordinary thing a person can say about themselves

What qualities does the U.S. House of Representatives possess that makes it unique as an institution?

It's the only body the voters can replace entirely, all at once, every two years. No other part of the federal government answers that often. Madison said that was the point: frequent elections were the only way to keep it dependent on the people.

Every federal tax bill has to start here. That's Article One, Section 7; written in, not tradition. The Senate can amend it past recognition, and does. But it can't be the one to write it first. That's a real power, and it's used as a formality.

That's what's made the last fifteen years frustrating, at least as I read it. The House hasn't lost power; it's declined to use it. And what a legislature won't use, the executive and the courts absorb, and nobody hands it back.

Meanwhile, the body built to sit closest to the people has been drawn so it can't answer to them. Thirty-seven of 435 seats are competitive this cycle. Ninety-one percent are settled before anyone votes. The Supreme Court took federal courts off that problem in 2019. So it falls to the states and to Congress.

I'd fix that first.

The tools are still there. Somebody has to pick them up.

What do you perceive to be the United States' greatest challenges as a nation over the next decade?

That we stop being one country, without anybody ever deciding to.

Politics has turned into a football game with two teams, and once you're on a team, you don't have to think anymore; you just have to root. Everything becomes a win for us or a win for them. Nothing is just true or false.

What worries me isn't that politics is ugly. It has always been. It's that the fracture is leaking out. It's in who people will work with, live near, and still talk to at Thanksgiving. That isn't a political problem anymore.

This country turns two hundred and fifty this year. What we built was a way for people who can't stand each other to still share a nation.

It would be a stupid thing to lose over a game.

Do you believe that compromise is necessary or desirable for policymaking?

Necessary, yes. Desirable, usually. But it's a tool, not a virtue.

The real skill is negotiation. Compromise is one outcome, usually the best, because it's the only one everyone still has a reason to keep after the room clears. Anything won by steamrolling is defended forever.

I don't think either side is entitled to more than the other. I'd rather find a solution both sides can accept than win clean and then watch half the country spend a decade undoing it.

Occasionally it won't work. Some things don't split down the middle, and pretending they do is its own dishonesty. But that's the exception, and you should have to say why.

It isn't a standard you hold. It's a direction you face.

What was the first historical event that happened in your lifetime that you remember?

Nixon resigning. I was six. I could tell something enormous was happening by how the adults were acting, and I understood none of it.

The first one I actually understood was the Iran hostage crisis. Fifty-two Americans held for 444 days, on the news every night for over a year. Then in April 1980 a rescue attempt failed before it ever reached them, and eight servicemen died in the desert.

What stuck with me wasn't the failure. Things fail. It was that the next morning the President went on television and said out loud that it was his responsibility and it hadn't worked. No spin.

"It was my decision to attempt the rescue operation. It was my decision to cancel it when problems developed... The responsibility is fully my own."

He just said it.

I was eleven, and I thought that was what a grown-up was supposed to do. I still think so.