Lee agreed. I asked if the amount of spending had gotten into her head and influenced the way she approached the issue. “Yes, absolutely, and not just with me, I see it with other people. I see people who are running for office or thinking of running for office in the future and they feel deterred because this is a topic that they know will bury them,” she said. “There’s absolutely a chilling effect. … I’ve heard it from other folks who will say, you know, we agree with this, but I’ll never support it, and I’ll never say it out loud.”
More broadly, though, it makes building a movement that much more difficult, Lee said: “It’s very hard to survive as a progressive, Black, working-class-background candidate when you are facing millions and millions of dollars, but what it also does is then it deters other people from ever wanting to get into it. If you’re somebody who sat through my race as a supporter or not, someone in our district, who’s witnessing the movement that we’ve been a part of, they will look at the onslaught, they will look at what they said about me and how they conducted those campaigns, and then they would say, ‘I would never want to run myself.’ So then it has the effect of ensuring that the Black community broadly, the other marginalized communities, are just no longer centered in our politics.
“It’s a way of maintaining that status quo,” she said. “But also it’s just disingenuous when we say that we’re not winning because we’re not winning on the issues. No, we’re not winning because we’re not winning on the resources.”