Microdosing Democracy

I recently watched a video from a woman I follow online. She said she made up a new term for a practice she has been perfecting for a few months. It’s called microdosing.

Not the kind you might do with weed or a new herb. She microdoses travel.

She described leaving home for a short trip — maybe two or three hours away. She finds a cheap motel and then just sets out for town. She eats at a local restaurant and she drinks coffee from a local shop and has a beer from a local bar. All new to her, but close to home.

A short trip for the specific purpose of experiencing something new somewhere close.

I also microdose travel. I’ve traveled thousands of miles this year alone to speak and listen and learn.

A frozen pond in Warren County, Indiana.

I was asked to speak in Warren County, Indiana, several months ago. I have driven through Indiana a few times, but aside from staying a night at a Holiday Inn, I have never spent any time in the state.

Last weekend, I stayed at a Bed and Breakfast set on 60 wooded acres in an old farmhouse with big windows looking over the landscape.

The homestead has streams and ponds and outbuildings and a tree house overlooking the pond you see in the photo above. The owner of the home is as kind as you could hope, and we sat and talked over coffee and Diet Coke and tea and so much food I didn’t know what to do with myself.

I felt like I’d known her for years as I looked through her bookshelves and thumbed through her magazines. We have read many of the same books, and she orders seeds from the same catalog. I also spied gay pride signs in the mix.

I knew I was in a safe place.

I had been invited to speak at the annual Warren County Christmas Supper. They can usually get about 30 people to the event. I spoke to 150 folks. There were people from Illinois and counties several miles away.

Another sign of progress in a red state.

It was a good event — the supper was at a local steakhouse, and when I tell you the food was good, I need you to know that I haven’t had better food in a long time.

We started with salad. There were bowls with a white dressing and reddish dressing on the table. I knew the white was ranch, but I wasn’t sure of the red. It could have been French or Catalina.

I asked my neighbor at the table if it was Dorothy Lynch…if you are from the Midwest, you know.

She repeated, “Dorothy Lynch!” and then nearly became teary-eyed. She is originally from Nebraska, and the thought of the sweet reddish/orange dressing immediately made her think of home.

We asked everyone around the table if they had heard of Dorothy Lynch dressing. Not one other person had heard of it, and I felt a little surge of pride — we were obviously the most Midwestern at the Midwestern table.

Ope!

Warren County Democrats Christmas Supper. 12/7/25

Indiana. It is a lot like Missouri in some sense, but also quite different.

Gerrymandering. An abortion ban. School vouchers. A GOP supermajority.

I learned of all of those things before I came to Indiana, but what I gleaned is that I need to actually see things to understand them. I needed to come to Indiana to find out some things about Missouri.

Indiana has not defunded public schools the way Missouri has, but school vouchers will do the same damage. Missouri has a citizen initiative process, but Indiana does not. Both Missouri and Indiana have a gerrymander underway — it was ordered by the maniac-in-chief, not the people of either state.

The difference? Several Indiana Republicans have pledged not to vote to gerrymander, while Missouri Republicans plan to gerrymander even further.

Here’s where the citizen-led petition process comes into play: Missouri activists have gathered enough signatures to force the gerrymander onto the ballot. Signature gatherers needed 110,000 signatures to put the gerrymander to a vote.

Activists collected over 300,000 signatures.

That means the legislature can’t gerrymander the Kansas City congressional district unless voters give them the say-so. The signatures were sent to the Secretary of State on December 9, 2024.

Hell yeah. We are going to do this.

And then I woke up this morning to see this report:

The campaign to repeal Missouri’s gerrymandered congressional map turned in 300,000 signatures Tuesday to put it on the 2026 ballot. But Secretary of State Denny Hoskins says that won’t stop the map from going into effect on Thursday.

Hoskins argued he has the power to unilaterally declare the referendum unconstitutional if it is determined enough signatures were collected to place it on the statewide ballot.

I am so sick of this. Of them.

No matter what voters in Missouri approve or disapprove, our voice is dismantled in Jefferson City. We are told we don’t understand what we voted for or that we have no right to vote for anything — that the lawmakers have a mandate from God to create legislation, and we need to sit down and shut up.

A disgusting example of paternalism. A condescending pat on the head.

Missouri is the Show Me State, and we often show our legislators that we are not happy by sidestepping them straight to propositions and amendments on the ballot, but it often doesn’t work.

We overturned an abortion ban, and now every Missourian has a constitutional right to reproductive healthcare, but it is still nearly impossible to access care.

So, here is my solution: run a candidate on every ballot to contest the Republicans who do not follow the will of voters. We can’t keep letting races go uncontested. We can’t keep spending millions to get our rights on the ballot only to have Republican lawmakers silence our voices by refusing to follow our directives.

Missouri Republican lawmakers do not respect Missouri voters. The only way to undo the damage is to kick them out of office. Get them out.

The only way to get them out is to win races across the state.

The only way to win races is to contest every race on every ballot.

In the meantime, I’ll keep microdosing travel — driving backroads to talk to the people who remind me why I fight in the first place.

People want to be heard.

They want decency and a government that respects their vote.

The lines on a gerrymandered map are meant to divide us, but democracy still runs deep in red states.

We just have to keep showing up in every county and on every ballot and in every conversation until Missouri, and every red state like it, remembers who really holds the power.

Power to the people.

~Jess

P.S. I work with Blue Missouri to fund Missouri down-ballot candidates. You can join us to fight back against gerrymandering by providing financial support to Democrats running in the reddest and toughest districts in the state.

Here is the link.