In his run for the Wisconsin State Assembly this year, 31-year-old Christian Phelps identified with a political tradition that predates the young, gay candidate by over a hundred years: Progressivism, a reform movement born on college campuses in his home state at the height of the Gilded Age.
It was an economic and political era not unlike our own, when technology and wealth disparity threatened a restless working class.
The Robber Barons of today — “corporate greed allies” and “political tricksters” in Phelps’ estimation — are “creating false enemies and false villains of our neighbors, whether it’s undocumented immigrants or immigrants as a whole, or trans people.”
It’s an effort to divide and conquer anyone who works for a living, he says, adding, “The culprit is not my neighbor.”
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The soon-to-be assemblymember spoke with LGBTQ Nation from his newly drawn District 93 in Eau Claire, ground zero in swing state Wisconsin in the 2024 election. He’ll be sworn into office on January 6.
LGBTQ Nation: What are going to use to take the oath of office, and who’s going to be there with you?
Rep.-elect Christian Phelps: I haven’t thought about what I’m going to take the oath of office on, but it’s definitely not going to be a religious text. I’m vehement about the separation of church and state.
But my partner is going to be there, and also my grandparents, who do live in Madison, and then anybody else that wants to come, honestly.
It’s been four weeks since the general election. You won yours, and so did Donald Trump. What was going through your mind that night?
I was unwise enough to look at The New York Times app before I went to the Eau Claire County election night gathering. I thought it was pretty clear early on that he was going to win, and so I walked in already feeling, like, panicked about that.
And so it was a very bizarre evening with people elated to see me, who had been just kind of watching my results and seeing that they were looking good and congratulating me, while I was sort of internally panicking about the national picture.
We were already fighting against the status quo in so many ways, and now we’re fighting the status quo and authoritarianism. There’s a vacuum, I think. Left-wing populism can fill that vacuum when we say, “Listen, the message we need to put forward isn’t one that’s about defending the status quo, it’s also about changing it.” Just not in the Trumpian way — in a way that’s actually good.
So you see a similarity between busting up the status quo, which is what Trump claims he wants to do, and Progressives who want to do the same thing?
I don’t see any similarity. I just see a message from voters that if they don’t get the sense that you’re going to do anything other than maintain and defend a status quo that they feel is leaving them behind, sometimes they choose to simply break it. And I wish that had not been the outcome of the election, because the breaking it that Trump is offering is really to break it in favor of himself and his billionaire friends and to enable some of the ugliness that we’ve seen from him. But I do take that as a little bit of a sign from voters that they’re looking for something more than simply a defense of the status quo.
Trump said during the campaign that he would enact a national ban on transgender girls and women playing in women’s and girls’ sports, and with that, access for trans athletes to women’s spaces like bathrooms and locker rooms. Is that even possible, or do you think Trump’s interest in the issue will disappear after he used it successfully to win back the White House?
I find that predicting Trump’s behavior is a fool’s errand, because I don’t really see any evidence that he actually even holds a political ideology. He just holds an allegiance to himself and his own power. And so whatever is the most expedient way for him to consolidate that is where he stands in the moment.
But that doesn’t reduce the harm of relying on that narrative. I mean, regardless of what he tries to do policy-wise, damage has already been done by normalizing this type of rhetoric about our own neighbors and community members. We need to correctly identify who the villains are in the story, and they’re not trans people.
Trump’s first term was a failure by any reasonable measure. With that in mind, should Americans worry more that there’s going to be a fascist in the White House come January 20, or that there’s going to be a guy who wishes he had the respect that comes with being a dictator, but will never earn it, and his second term will be a litany of failures like the first one?
Probably the best blueprint would be to look at where he did not fail on policy in his first administration, since there were so many instances of where he did. He did not fail in passing task tax cuts for the rich. I think that he will probably be able to enact some economic damage on the working class, which obviously disproportionately hits LGBTQ people. And he will launch rhetorical attacks as far as his anti-democracy efforts.
Two of the highest profile out LGBTQ+ electeds in the country are from Wisconsin: Representative Mark Pocan and Senator Tammy Baldwin, who kept her seat after a highly contested race. Have you spent any time with either of them, and what’s something you’ve learned from them in service of your work in education advocacy and as a soon-to-be legislator?
I live in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, which was three competitive Assembly districts, one competitive U.S. House district, a statewide competitive Senate district and a competitive presidential race. So everybody came to Eau Claire a lot this year. So I spent time with both of them, and I think one thing that was helpful to me, is that the myth that rural and western Wisconsin voters will never elect an LGBTQ person has already been busted. She had already won twice and won a third time last month. So I didn’t have to teach the media or the party or the voting population that this type of a district is open to electing an LGBTQ person, because they already had.
Before the election, I spoke with Angelina Cruz, one of your soon-to-be colleagues in the Wisconsin Assembly, about a door-knock experience she had with a woman who was voting for both Trump and Baldwin. Can you describe or explain what a Trump-Baldwin voter is?
I met more than one myself, and in many cases it was somebody who, in my interpretation, seemed to be ideologically conservative, but they just sort of respected the hustle, and they viewed Tammy Baldwin as the harder-working Senate candidate and the more grounded, more approachable Senate candidate. And so they were actually setting aside some of their ideological disagreements in order to vote for her. She was able to appeal to more conservative voters than other Democratic candidates seem to be.
At a candidate forum in July, you were asked at the end if there were any issues you wanted to discuss that hadn’t been brought up, and you made an impassioned argument about the public discourse around LGBTQ+ issues harming kids. You drew a parallel to when you were 13 years old and Wisconsinites voted in favor of a ban on same-sex marriage. What’s different now and what’s the same versus when you were growing up in 2006?
Sadly, I think there are too many similarities. The debate is like, “Should trans girls be allowed to play sports,” and “Should drag queens be allowed to exist in the same neighborhood that children live in?” And it’s absurd. And I know from my own personal experience that there are children in formative years grappling internally with their own identities, and they are listening to those conversations. That does damage to a person and to a community. The children can hear us.
You’ve said you were lucky to have the support of your parents and teachers when you were coming to terms with your own sexuality. What form did that take? Did you come out to them one day, or was there an unspoken understanding?
I did come out to my parents, and I don’t remember if I came out to teachers or anything. But public educators do represent a certain foundation of a community. The tone that they’re able to set is the kind of thing that can protect kids, in a way, against some of the rhetoric I was just referring to. I definitely know that I was lucky to have teachers that did that in their classrooms.
And I had kind of an interesting identity, because on one hand, I’ve always been relatively feminine, or whatever. Like, the coming out didn’t shock anybody, I don’t think, as far as who I am. But I was also an athlete, and so I was in a lot of all-male spaces and there was a certain amount of normalcy, credibility. When teenagers are trying to conform, if you’re a good athlete, that helps you do that. But at the same time, that makes it harder to be different and to have a different identity. It’s kind of a double-edged sword in that way.
You earned a BA in Urban Studies from Vassar, which was well-known as a girls’ school before going co-ed in 1969. Even now, they maintain a majority-female ratio of women to men. Expanding women’s productive freedoms is high on your list of priorities as a new Wisconsin assembly member. What did you learn about women at Vassar?
Oh, interesting question. I don’t know. I learned a lot about East Coast old money at Vassar. It was certainly a different student demographic, in more ways than just gender, at that school than what I was used to. It probably did expose me to more interrogation of how gender plays out in our society, and how to interrogate your own and where you fall in that, but I guess I don’t really know. I’ve never really given any thought to that question.
Vassar is also well known for its embrace of the LGBTQ+ community. You were a tall, good-looking tennis player there. Were you out and about on campus, or the nerd in the library?
(Laughing) I was a better student in grad school than I was in college. Because I think when you’ve taken a few years to develop your professional goals — like, by the time I went to grad school, I had a much clearer goal about what I was doing there academically than I did in college. I wasn’t a bad student or anything, but, you know, Vassar, having a large LGBTQ population, and having a well-documented history as such, was like a huge factor in why I went there. And certainly, some of the friendships that I formed there are the deepest ones in my life.
You’ve described your political awakening as happening with the passage of Act 10 in Wisconsin. That legislation stripped teachers of the right to collective bargaining. What was the effect on the state’s teachers and school system?
Great question, because in some ways, it was obviously economic, and it came with huge cuts to public education that have not been restored yet. Our schools are severely underfunded, and I saw that when I was a special ed assistant. We were underpaid, and I had to get second jobs in order to pay my rent. But the bigger impact was just the cut to the morale.
Teachers, instead of being revered and respected members of our community, were instead like a political wedge. And the emotional toll is, I think, greater than the financial one in some ways.
Didn’t Scott Walker accuse working teachers of having “Cadillac benefits”?
Yes, exactly. And I think this whole cushy job narrative really took hold because of that movement. And it’s taken at least 13 years to start crawling that back.
The privatization of Wisconsin schools is a major issue that you ran on. Democrats have faced a nearly 2-1 Republican majority in the assembly and in the state Senate the numbers are even worse. What are your prospects for making change in the face of that kind of opposition?
Well, it won’t be that kind of opposition in the new session. We’ve narrowed the gap significantly because of the new legislative maps, so it’s going to be 45 Democrats to 54 Republicans in the Assembly this session, for the first time since the maps that they drew right after Act 10 that gave them that 2-1 majority. That means that the veto from our Democratic governor is no longer under threat.
Now, I think when we have a little bit more of a cushion, it means we can push on the things that have been in the Republican status quo. Like, the next budget can be less bad than the last one. And even if they dig their heels in and don’t let us make the policy changes, I do see better prospects in 2026 when their constituents in more competitive districts are more aware of how they’ve been underfunding public education and siphoning money off to private schools instead.
Would you support national mandatory service for young people in the military or some other form of public service of their choosing, like the Peace Corps or Teach for America?
I’ve never given much thought to that, but probably not. I don’t think that a national mandate is necessary or makes a lot of sense there.
Protecting the environment is high on your list of legislative priorities. What’s the single most important thing the world should do to address the climate crisis?
I think correctly identifying who is really culpable, which are the high-polluting mega-corporations. I want to be really good about messaging that that doesn’t mean we’re trying to control individual behavior. It means we’re trying to crack down on corporations that are profiting off of the continued damage to the planet.
Before running for office, you served as comms director at Wisconsin Public Education Network, a statewide nonprofit advocating for public schools. What did you learn in that role that’s going to inform your work as an assembly member?
I’ve seen how to communicate with members of the community from all stripes around the things that we are united on in a strategic way that builds the relationship in advance and gets something done and then continues that relationship. Change works a lot better when you have existing relationships that you’re building on, rather than going to the community and saying, “I need this from you now,” and I’m popping up out of nowhere.
You mentioned you’re a fierce advocate for the separation of church and state. How do you think that is going to play into your time as an assembly member? And are you religious in any way?
I’m not. I haven’t really talked about that because I just don’t think that whether I am or not should be relevant to somebody running for office. This is a public service position and it should not prioritize anybody’s personal religious practice or lack thereof.
Education is my field, so when I talk about separation of church and state, that means a misuse of public funds to give them to private and religious schools that can pick and choose their students and pick and choose their curriculum to advance their religious agendas. That violates what the public is all about, and working in the state house means you’re working on behalf of the public.
You’re a Progressive. How do you define Progressivism?
To me, it means understanding working-class solidarity. I mean, we’re all, to a certain extent — unless you’re a multi-millionaire or billionaire — the working class. You’re somebody who works for a living, and you work to contribute to your community. To me, our Progressive tradition in western Wisconsin is strong when we recognize that, and we say we can’t succeed unless we lift all boats. The culprit is not my neighbor. The culprit is a political trickster trying to tell me that my neighbor is the enemy or the corporate greed allies that got things like Act 10 passed.
What can you tell us about your partner?
I met him at Vassar. He’s actually in grad school right now to become a teacher, so he also is super passionate about education, and we’ve been together 10 years, which blows my mind.
Do you have any marriage plans, and if so, who’s going to propose to whom?
I’m the kind of person that can only handle one major life thing at a time (laughing). So we have specifically talked about how this whole running for office thing is a pretty major thing. So we’re going to have to revisit all the other major life-change conversations a little bit later.
What are you most looking forward to when you start serving the constituents of Wisconsin’s Assembly District 93?
I’m looking forward to continuing the relationship-building that we’ve already been doing and learning from all the people I’ve already been learning from. The whole reason I did this in the first place was because I saw that in a newly drawn district, we had an opportunity to put new people in the Capitol that want to co-govern with the community, that see movement builders and community organizers as key partners. That was the philosophy that I tried to carry into the campaign in the first place, and I think the fact that we won proves that that was a winning strategy.
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