YouSaid · the spoken record

Lauren Underwood

lines on the record: 89
first: 2019-08-05
most recent: 2019-08-05
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“That's because we need to move forward in a way that brings community with us. Because if I act unilaterally or what's perceived as unilaterally and leave my community behind, then it looks like a power grab”
2019-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rep. Lauren Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right, because you have to remember we knew that Illinois got hacked. Well, before the Muller report came out. We knew before my election in 2018. We knew that this was, that there were vulnerabilities that were exploited and that the Russians got in We knew this, and so two years later for Mr. Mueller to outline it in a report, it's like yes, next, almost. It's alarming, right? And there's certainly things we need to do about it. But I'm just saying, like, the ladies of the 14th I don't know that they're like across the board.”
2019-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rep. Lauren Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Love my job. I think it's very fun. And we get to solve a lot of problems now. With respect to impeachment and the investigations and all these other things, you know, in my community, there's a large cohort of people that shut down when you say Russia, that you can't even get to investigation or impeachment because it's just noise to them, right? It's been like this endless bickering. They don't really know who's at fault that doesn't care because it's not addressing the core issues affecting their family. And it feels like more of the same, right? Because again, the voter in my community is very familiar with what corruption looks like. And so this flavor is not necessarily more or less alarming.”
2019-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rep. Lauren Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Is quite candidly pretty despicable. And I was like, let's work on this. And so, you know, I decided to go to Congress and work on health care issues at every chance I get, right? On homeland, they've never had a healthcare person ever since this committee was created, since the Department of Homeland Security was created post-9-11. What an incredible opportunity when we think about cybersecurity and all the rest to really explore and dig deep.”
2019-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rep. Lauren Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. It's amazing. And so we really get to advance the healthcare agenda. I decided requested to serve on Homeland Security. I'm now the vice chair on Homeland Security. And we have jurisdiction over the U.S. Mexico border and what's going on, right? And so remember when I said the only issue that bumped healthcare was the treatment of the migrant children. Now we get to work on that, right? And I serve on veterans affairs. And the way that our country has continued to struggle to offer high quality healthcare services to our nation's heroes.”
2019-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rep. Lauren Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, so I'll answer the first part of your question first, which is what do you do when you win from a swing district? And so I recognized that healthcare is the number one issue in my district across the country. And that's what I went to Congress to do. So I serve on three committees, one of which is education and labor, which was always traditionally part of health reform conversations, but had a very, very small role As compared to the others, meaning ways and means and energy and commerce. Well, they put me, Donna Shala, and Kim Shreyer, the first female physician in Congress, on this small health care committee to work on healthcare. And we get to do whatever we want, right? And it's so fun. They are so smart.”
2019-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rep. Lauren Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Disgusted that this is what our country has become, right? Where children are scared to go to school So Barb is not like happy. Right now, Barb, I think, is pleased that, you know, her congresswoman shows up and is engaged and whatever. But she's concerned about the future of our country.”
2019-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rep. Lauren Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“She really wants someone to help her child not be terrified going to school in three weeks when they go back, right? Because those kids remember each and every active shooter drill And it is like this, I would use the word paranoia, but it's actually grounded in a very real chance that it can happen to us. And”
2019-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rep. Lauren Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So Barb, listen, Barb is pretty frustrated right now. Barb is pretty frustrated because gridlock is consuming. The president keeps tweeting, he's very offensive, right? He's using language that she would never tolerate out of her kids. That her kids would get suspended from school. If they said those kinds of things, she sees an administration whose officials are breaking the law by ignoring subpoenas. And even if she doesn't buy into the whole need of investigations, which she, depending on if Barb is a Democrat or not, she doesn't She's concerned about the flagrant breaking of the law. And she really just wants someone to help her with her health care costs. Right. She really wants someone to help her have reliable internet connection. Because depending on where she lives in my district, she doesn't have it.”
2019-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rep. Lauren Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“that in our community, we would not be successful if our race was about partisanship, right? This is not vote for the Democrat. That doesn't mean that much to a lot of people, right? Democratic Party in our state is run by a machine. The machine ends up being pretty toxic, doesn't have a lot of fans out our way. What we found is that if we were able to talk to our voters, mostly women, Women aged 35 to 70 in my district, their names are Pat and Barb and Sue and March, and they are the ladies of the 14th District. And we will go out and we would talk to them. Everything we put out is designed to reach them. We know what they read. We know what they watch. We know the language they use, how they communicate with each other.”
2019-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rep. Lauren Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right. I mean, Donald Trump won our district. He got 49%. Hillary Clinton got 45. With that 45%, she outperformed Barack Obama in 2012. But Obama won our community in 2008. And then obviously everybody voted for him for senator. At the same time that I was running, we had a really competitive gubernatorial race. JB Pritzker won that governor's race in our state. He won by 16 points. He lost my district by eight And I won by five. So there's a lot of people who voted for Donald Trump. They voted for Bruce Ronner for governor, the Republican, and they voted for me. And we knew”
2019-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rep. Lauren Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I was not running against Trump. Donald Trump, this election in the 14th was not about Donald Trump. I didn't talk about the president. Was something that everyone knew was going on, but this it didn't really have a bearing on our race.”
2019-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rep. Lauren Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“We ran the race is very different than people typically do in Illinois, right? Like corruption is something that Illinois voters are very familiar with. So many of our former governors end up in jail, right? This community had a congressperson that deep betrayal. And so the idea that you're going to run a race with integrity and be honest and positive. So you wanted”
2019-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rep. Lauren Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So, the only thing that bumped healthcare is the number one issue was that those three weeks over the summer last year where we saw those images of kids in cages at the border. That's the only time that healthcare dropped. And so that stuck with me. The second reason we won is this representation thing I was talking about, right? Did our guy have our back in would he show up for us at home? For Randy Hulker, and the answer was no. And for a lot of the moderate Republicans and independent voters, they saw that and they were not happy with that level of non-responsiveness and accessibility and non-transparency. And then the third reason I think that we won is that we were willing to do the work. So it's not just alignment, right? You got to go out and you got to fight for it and show up for people. And the tone of our communications, the way that we...”
2019-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rep. Lauren Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So we won really for, I'd say three reasons. Number one, healthcare was the number one issue throughout the whole campaign. Cost cost cost so not just drugs right Premium prices, surprise billing, right? This idea that people can't afford to see their provider because they're struggling to pay their premium. They can't afford their insulin because they're struggling to pay their premium, right? And it just goes up, up, up, up, up, up, up, up, and it's gotten out of control.”
2019-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rep. Lauren Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Possible potential, right? Then maybe you don't follow the traditional playbook, right? To get to success. And so we crushed it. And then ended up in this general. Against. And in the general, that was, it was intense. Our district had never elected a woman. Had never elected a person of color, had never elected a young person, right? And so someone like me is very different. But the Republicans nationally thought that Randy Holcran could sleepwalk and get re-elected because he had that R for Republican next to his name on the ballot. And so that gave us some freedom to do what we needed to do on the ground because they weren't paying attention.”
2019-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rep. Lauren Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No, we did not. I never in the primary hit my D trip goal. The D trip wanted me to raise. I probably shouldn't even say this. The D trip wanted me to raise $400,000 in my first quarter. I was like, are you out of your mind? And we didn't, you know, maybe that's the traditional playbook, but I'm not a traditional candidate. Right, right. And so when you are a non-traditional person in a district that people, you know, think is.”
2019-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rep. Lauren Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And so when we would show up in their living rooms and their cul-sacs and their soybean fields and talk to them about their issues and then come back and then come back, people were like, oh, I guess this underwood girl is serious. Hmm, this is interesting, right? And then, you know, quite candidly, we outraised all my opponents combined. And so we had the resources. And when I say outraised, I'm not talking about millions of dollars, right? It was just more, right? And I just want to make that distinction because I know that so many folks, this is a very well educated political audience that we have here. And you all, I think, pay attention to quarterly fundraising numbers and, you know, who's up and who's down and whatever. But, you know, for my primary, we raised $350,000 total. And that was more than everyone in our race combined. And that led us to mail. It let us do cable TV. It let us do digital ads. It let us do what we needed to do to win our race. Did we hit our thresholds every...”
2019-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rep. Lauren Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In 10 years. And so it's like, how could that be? But we know that when you surrender seeds, meaning you don't have a Democrat running for county board, you don't have a Democrat running for state rep, then that means that there's no one doorking. If you don't have full slates of precinct committee men and women, then that means that there's no local representative from that Democratic Party. And so people just didn't hear from us.”
2019-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rep. Lauren Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think that I won for a number of reasons. The primary or the general two, just primary. Okay. In the primary, healthcare was the number one issue I had really rich background expertise and could speak credibly about the number one issue. Secondly, we had an approach that was non-traditional in our community. The traditional way that Democrats would be competitive because they've never really won besides for Bill Foster, be competitive is to target a few suburbs across the district and then just spend time in those areas. And I said, no, we're going to go everywhere. So I had seven counties. We set up volunteer operations in all seven and spent a lot of time in each of those communities. And what we found is that farmers would tell us that no Democrat had knocked on their door in 10 years.”
2019-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rep. Lauren Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And starts writing things down at lunch. And that's how we did it. We spent the summer of 2017 figuring out how to run. And I made the website. And it's the website that we still have up right now. You know, we wrote a launch video and got some friends to shoot it. And, you know, it was a very DIY campaign. And we ended up launching in August of 2017. I ran in a primary against six guys. I won. I got 57% of the vote.”
2019-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rep. Lauren Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Didn't appear in public, didn't have any kind of engagement. And so, you know, at the time that I got mad, right, this is your question, spring of 17, did I have a, did I think that we could win? Yes, I thought that we could win. Did I know how we were going to do it? I did not. Did I know how to run for Congress? Not necessarily. A friend and I went to lunch. Her name's Sarah Feldman. And I was like, yeah, you know, I have this idea, you know, I'm going to run for Congress. I'm really thinking about it. And she takes out her notebook.”
2019-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rep. Lauren Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“At every turn. And so a lot of folks in our community, you know, Illinois 14th is a very nice, beautiful, half suburban, half rural community. A lot of folks are not looking to the federal government day to day for help, for assistance, for much, right? And so for a long time, people were comfortable and didn't need to interact with their congressperson, weren't looking to watch what their congressperson was doing. And so then when Trump wins and you start to see all this stuff happening, people are like, well, who's our guy? And then they saw. That our guy didn't have our back, right? He wasn't showing up for us in Washington, he wasn't engaging folks at home, refused to do town halls. He did that one, and then went away for 16 months”
2019-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rep. Lauren Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He won the special election. He's a physicist after Denny Hastert left. He did not get re elected. Randy Hulkren, this Tea Party Republican, beat him in the Tea Party wave and then had continued to get re-elected. Randy Hulkren is a very nice man, presents as a moderate, and then stood right by Trump.”
2019-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rep. Lauren Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Randy Hulcran had served for four terms when I beat him. Right. So Randy Hulkren was a Tea Party Republican, but our district is probably most notable because it was Denny Hastard's seat when he was Speaker of the House. So Denny Hastard is the longest-serving Republican speaker. Then in 2006 in the election, right, under Ram Emanuel's leadership at the D-Trip, right, the Democrats win the House. Speaker Pelosi becomes Speaker for the first time, and then Dennis Hastard steps down. Shortly after he steps down, all of the news of his sexual misconduct and sexual abuse of his students came out because he was making these inappropriate payments, payoffs. And so then he went to jail. So that's the history of the 14th. But most notably, there had only been one other Democrat ever in history that represented our community in Congress.”
2019-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rep. Lauren Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Eating healthy and then baking and eating whatever I baked. And then hanging out with my girlfriend and the process of buying a house. You know, I was like really living my best life. Okay, by most standards, I think. And so maybe millennial life.”
2019-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rep. Lauren Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The makeup of your district. So the Illinois 14th was on that very first targeted list from the D-trip. So they put out a list at the end of January, which I saw. They put out the Illinois 6, which was Peter Roscom, and the Illinois 14th, Randy Hulkren, and my town of Neighborville has actually been gerrymandered into three congressional districts. So a town of 140,000 people has just been carved up. And so one Democrat and two Republicans represented our community. And so I was so excited to see that somebody at the D-Trip thought that our community was winnable because they had not invested. In our community, in many, many, many, many years. And so at that time, I was like, oh, I wonder who's going to run. I'd love to help them, right? And went on living my best life. And so, you know.”
2019-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rep. Lauren Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Right? We have nurses working in many different settings, including in health policy. There's just fewer of us, but it's very important that we bring our expertise to these spaces because our patients, their families, and our communities are counting on us sharing our expertise. So I don't want folks to walk away and think that I left it behind, right? Or that I'm somehow not a nurse because I've spent my career in these spaces.”
2019-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rep. Lauren Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The president's doing all kinds of crazy things. And I felt like we as citizens needed to engage. So had you ever thought of that before? I mean, you worked in the Obama administration. A lot of people do run from there, Ram Emmanuel, all kinds of people. Had that been a plan of yours? Well, I was always interested in service. And serving an elected office is something that I thought could be an interesting To do later in life. I was not at all planning to launch a campaign at 30. Right. So, and you didn't want to go back to nursing, you just want to continue working in healthcare in some way and health policy. So you do this and then you want to actually... Be specific. You know, nursing is a very broad profession.”
2019-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rep. Lauren Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And decided, you know what? It's on, I'm running. Wait, no, come on. No, seriously. Really? You know, some people get upset and they're like, oh, I'm going to do something about that. And then life happens, right? So people have had these ideas to write a book and then life happens or start a business and then life happens or organization. For me, I just could not let this go. Couldn't let it go. This is like three months after the women's march and”
2019-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rep. Lauren Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Millennial and do millennial things. Honestly, and it was fun while it lasted, but I went to my congressman's town hall. And so this is during the time that there was all these different versions of Obamacare repeal being considered in the Congress. And so there's all these different bills that did slightly different things. And so at that event, he said he was only going to support a version of repeal that let people with pre-existing conditions keep their healthcare coverage. So I'm a nurse. I have a pre-existing condition and I worked on the ACA. So when he made that promise, I believed him because it was personal. And two weeks later, he voted for the American Health Care Act, which is the version of repeal that did the opposite, made it cost prohibitive for people like me to get affordable insurance coverage. And I got really mad.”
2019-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rep. Lauren Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Fly wherever there was a natural disaster, an emerging infectious disease, right? Not going abroad at the last minute because something had happened, right? Being able to plan my life and do work I cared about, but have some balance, like work-life balance. And then I decided to run for Congress, right? So out the window that went. But at the time, I was just so excited about this idea of being able to”
2019-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rep. Lauren Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Found myself at my congressman. Wait, what is your best life? What is my best life? My best life at that time was, you know, not having to.”
2019-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rep. Lauren Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“2016 election happened. And I thought Hillary was going to win and that we'd have this chance to hand off our work on Flint and hand off our work on health reform to a team that cares, I hope, and to Ebola. Well, Ebola, by 2016, it was on a downturn. It has researched now. Yes, it has in Africa. But then it was not at crisis levels. Well, just a little bit of a bola as a problem as far as I'm concerned. But go ahead. Thank you. Yes. And so, you know, when the Trump transition team came in, they made it immediately clear that they wanted to take away healthcare coverage from the American people. And, you know, I didn't want to help them do that. So I had an opportunity to convert back to a career employee, decided not to do that. And so I went back home to Illinois. Our state expanded Medicaid. And so I began working for a Medicaid managed care company in Chicago, was living my best life.”
2019-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rep. Lauren Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Which is a half suburban, half rural community outside of Chicago. I live in a town called Naperville. It's 45 minutes west of the city. We have a neighborville contingent specifically Niqua Valley Wildcats in the room today. I'm so excited. But our community is 45 minutes west of Chicago. And I'm a nurse, and I've spent my career working to expand healthcare coverage in communities across our country. So I work to implement the Affordable Care Act at the federal level. worked on private insurance reform, worked on health care quality in Medicare, preventive services, those free screenings and vaccines and contraceptive coverage, basically anything the Obama administration was getting sued on related to the ACA was in my portfolio. Okay, all right. And then I joined the Obama administration and worked on public health emergencies and disasters. So we did Ebola. We did Zika, the Mosquito Illness. Y'all remember that. And the water crisis in Flint. And so it was during our time in Flint that the”
2019-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rep. Lauren Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Talk about people who don't know you, how you got to where you got, because you're one of the more compelling stories of the many compelling stories of the freshman class. Thanks. Well, I'm Lauren Underwood. I represent the Illinois 14.”
2019-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rep. Lauren Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To be from a district that is a swing district, essentially. You have a swing district. It definitely has a different flavor on the job. Yes, exactly. Some of my other colleagues. So we need to talk about that because I think people need to understand what's happening beyond just the regular thing. So let's talk a little bit about your background first.”
2019-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rep. Lauren Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I apologize in advance for the glasses. I left my glasses at home. I lived near here. No problem. I didn't want to be late for this. The cool shade. Cool shades. That's right. They work just as well. I have really bad eyesight. So anyway, I'm really excited to interview Congressman Arberwood. I want to, because I interview a lot of tech people and I interview a lot of people who have opinions about tech. Great. And you don't have that many opinions about tech, but we might have some. But what we want to talk about is where we are in Congress and freshmen. And a little bit about your journey and what's going on now because I think it's hard.”
2019-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rep. Lauren Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When you say Russia, that you can't even get to investigation or impeachment because it's just noise to them, right? It's been like this endless bickering. They don't really know who's at fault that doesn't care because it's not addressing the core issues affecting their family. And it feels like more of the same. This interview was recorded live at Manny's, which is a bar and event space in San Francisco's mission district. So let's go there now to hear my interview with Congresswoman Lauren Underwood.”
2019-08-05 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Recode Decode: Rep. Lauren Underwood · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT