FRANKLIN, TENNESSEE — Kristen Grimm has just realized she forgot to clean out her minivan. She gushes her apologies as she pulls open the driver’s side door, revealing a passenger seat littered with palm cards and newspapers. Her backseat, filled with yard signs, an extra coat, and a change of shoes is also not rider-ready.
But her dismay about the messy car doesn’t — or rather, can’t — last long before she’s on to the next thing: A phone call from a friend, which turns into a running recap of her campaign for state Senate. She’s still on the phone when she rolls down the window to call out to a man riding past on a bicycle.
Grimm’s been up since 4:30 a.m. Earlier in the morning, when the barista at a nearby coffee shop brought her a giant cappuccino, she paused, gripping the mug with both hands, and proclaimed that this was going to be the happiest moment of her day.
Williamson County is the wealthiest county in the state of Tennessee and the seventh wealthiest in the country. Its median income, which is more than $104,000 per year, is more than twice the state’s average of $47,423 and three times that of Hancock Country, where it’s less than $28,000.
It’s Williamson’s astonishing wealth that makes the thrust of Grimm’s campaign so remarkable. In her quest to take down incumbent Republican state Sen. Jack Johnson, she’s campaigning on, of all things, Medicaid. Or, as she prefers to frame it, it’s a campaign to represent the district and its residents for who they are.
“Some people have said, ‘You seem to focus a lot on the poor, and you live in a very wealthy county,’” she told me earlier. “This is what I know about my county: We are a compassionate community. And we need to be represented as one. We’re a generous community. We need to be represented as a generous community.”
She continued, excitedly, “And corporations, special interest groups who advocate for the profit margins of other corporations…they have had many seats at the table. Many seats at the table. And the truth of the matter is, people don’t understand that we’re all connected.”
How Grimm came to run is a long story, but the simplest version of it is that Medicaid has now, on several occasions, saved her son’s life. In order to protect his privacy, she doesn’t give out a lot of details, but her son, now 18, has had 23 surgeries due to a rare vascular condition.
And when he was young, those medical bills nearly bankrupted the family. Grimm still remembers the day when she went to check out at the grocery store, children in tow, only to watch as every debit and credit card she had was declined. She left a cart full of food in the store, gathered her children, and walked out.
She stopped taking them with her to the grocery store after that.
“I was one of those mothers who never thought in a million years that my child would need the Children’s Health Insurance Program,” she said. “That kept us out of bankruptcy…The amazing thing was, my family was on Medicaid and we didn’t even know what Medicaid was.”
One thing led to another and Grimm began working as a health care advocate in the state, pushing for Medicaid expansion (once she had realized what, precisely, Medicaid is) when it was under consideration in the state legislature for the second time earlier this year, when it was supported by Republican Gov. Bill Haslam.
But Haslam’s own caucus turned against him — again — and the expansion effort failed. Again.
Should Grimm win on Tuesday — a possible if unlikely outcome in this deep red district — she has vowed to carry on that expansion fight.
Asked about Medicare for all, the single-payer health care proposal that’s becoming increasingly popular on the left, Grimm says she doesn’t support it.
“My end goal is universal coverage for everybody,” she says. “Medicare for all, it’s a wonderful concept, [but] I’m not for getting rid of Medicaid, because I don’t think it’s possible.”
(It is worth noting, single-payer advocates argue that implementation over the course of just a few years is possible and that a Medicare for all system would offer recipients currently on Medicaid very comparable coverage.)
Grimm does passionately believe in expanding Medicaid access and lowering the age of Medicare. But, she says, “If we just got rid of Medicaid tomorrow and said, ‘We’re just going to implement Medicare for all,’ I think it would be fiscally wasteful because our entire children’s hospital system depends on Medicaid.”
This is the crux of her pitch to wealthy residents of Williamson County, many of whom are likely to never need or use Medicaid: Children’s hospitals. According to Grimm, nearly 50 percent of people who go to children’s hospitals in Tennessee are on TennCare, the state’s Medicaid program, and another 7 percent are on the Children’s Health Insurance Program. Highlighting the necessity of TennCare and CHIP for these hospitals, she believes, helps people understand its value on a more personal level.
“Nobody walks into a hospital as a Republican or a Democrat,” she says. And care for children, she argues, is the least political of all.
And it’s not just her experiences with her own son that ultimately drove her to run. Working as a health care advocate helped open her eyes, she tells me, to the poverty that exists even here in Williamson.
Grimm introduces me to Joey Walker, who she met during her health care advocacy work. Walker currently resides in a group home with several other formerly homeless men in Franklin, but today, he and Grimm want to show me where he had been living previously. About five houses down from Walker’s current residence, through an empty lot, we come upon a small patch of land and a shack, fashioned from plywood. It was here that Walker lived for three years.
“You can go in. It won’t hurt you,” he says.
For the entirety of the time he lived in this shack, Walker continued to work in restaurants and factories in town. The natural cushioning of his knee, he tells me, wore out, leaving his joint in excruciating bone-on-bone discomfort. He lived with the constant pain, until finally, one day, he collapsed at the local Dollar General. He was taken to the hospital, but without any insurance, they could only give him a brace. He walked home that night.
“This knee right here, it ain’t no joke,” he said. “But I still go to work…I tried to get [Obamacare] but” — here he stops, and makes a sound almost like a laugh — “I can’t afford that!”
Much of Grimm’s campaign, in this wealthy county, has been dedicated to getting rich people to rethink Medicaid. Grimm says that one argument has been a constant refrain: I worked for my money, why should I help someone else? People on Medicaid are lazy, people tell her.
Walker — whom Grimm calls her best friend — is living proof they’re all wrong.
“When people talk about how lazy people are…I take it very personally,” she told me earlier. “The majority of people aren’t mooching. They’re working hard. They can’t get ahead, and they’re trapped in poverty because our lack of sound public policy.”
As we stand in the shack he built, I ask Walker how it feels to hear some of the responses Grimm gets as she talks to voters in the county.
“I feel hurt and mistreated,” Walker says. “I lived like a rat…I’ve never been lazy. I was raised up working all my life since I was a little kid. I’ve got to work. You look around at these people, they don’t know what hard work is. You’ve got to earn it, and I earned it.”
While we were having coffee, Grimm told me that the first time Walker showed her the plywood shack he called his home was one of the moments she felt a deep compulsion to run for office. Someone had to do something, and if it wasn’t going to be her, then who would it be?
First, however, she dedicated herself to getting Walker on disability as well as helping him obtain the knee surgery he so desperately needed. The process turned out to be a community effort. Walker’s name — the name his mother had told him was his full name his whole life — was not the name listed on his birth certificate. Eventually, Grimm and a hodgepodge team of health care advocates managed to sort it out, and Walker was able to get his surgery.
Grimm drives me around the block. She points to one of the smaller houses and tells me it recently sold for some $800,000.
Poverty isn’t foreign to Grimm. When she was growing up, she tells me, she lived in a mobile home. She remembers how she once thought that if your mobile home had doorknobs, you were rich. She points out what she means later in the afternoon, when I join her to canvas in a neighborhood of mobile homes.
Grimm is hardly a radical. She’s comfortably wealthy, white, and nearly middle-aged. But she’s ultimately running a radical campaign, I realize, as we knock on doors in this neighborhood. Many of the people who answer the door are young mothers. Grimm has brought along a friend who speaks Spanish to translate.
Here, she tells me, she’s thrown the advice of the Democratic party and establishment consultants out the window, who told her not to knock on the doors of unregistered voters past the voter registration deadline. Instead, she’s knocking on every door. If the person inside can’t vote, she has them take a picture of her palm cards and tells them to send them to people who can.
She wants to talk to everyone. She wants the people to whom she talks to talk to their friends. That just makes more sense to her.
She smiles and turns to me as we walk to the next house. “I don’t know how to do any of this,” she says. “And I’m doing it anyway.”
Correction: A previous version of this article said Grimm’s son had a rare brain condition. It is actually a rare vascular condition. Additionally, it was updated with additional information about how reliant children’s hospitals are on CHIP and with information from Grimm about when she was told not to knock on the doors of unregistered voters.