This Podcast Is... Uncalled For - Matthew Adams

Episode Date: March 6, 2026

Today our guest is Matthew Adams, who is a progressive Democratic candidate for California General Assembly (their state House) District 9, which covers a big part of California's Central Valley south of Sacramento.  We talk about our experiences with running for office as progressive Democrats, and the issues we have in common. Matthew's website: https://sites.google.com/view/adams4assembly/home Matthew is a candidate for the 2026 election cycle.

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Hi, everybody. Welcome to this podcast on call for. I have a special guest with me today. If you could introduce yourself, please. Sure, happy to be here. My name is Matthew Adams, and I'm a Democratic candidate for Assembly in District 9 in California, which is the Central Valley, so that covers Lodi, Galt, and Mantica as the major areas. Yeah, I saw your websites and saw the map south of Sacramento area, right?

That's right, that's right. All right. So this is legislative seats. I guess. It is, yeah. It's the lower house of the legislature. So like most states, there's two houses as the upper, which is the Senate and the lower, which is the assembly.

So it's very similar to the Congress, which on the federal level, of course, has the upper house as the Senate, lower house as the house, just like that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that sounds about rights. So I believe you're the first active candidates to be on the podcast for any off. Well, aside for myself, I ran for office a couple of times myself. I was going to say, you're a former candidate yourself.

Yeah. In my case, a couple of times trying to run for Ovalon Park City Council. So Ovalon Park, a major suburb of Kansas City in Kansas. And ran for the state Senate Districts 21, which is my part of Ovalon Park and all of the city of Lonexia, which is right next door. Yeah, that's awesome. Love talking to fellow candidates. We have a unique insight into, I think, the process. Yeah.

Yeah. So I also gather from your websites, you found the Bernie Sanders camp a little bit? I would say so. I would say I'm more progressive. It's an uphill climb. This district is a pretty Republican area. I'm going against a Republican incumbent who has been in office for 10 years. and the area that I am hoping to represent is pretty much in line with that for the Assembly

district. It's carved out basically all of the major democratic population areas have been removed. The best we've got is a couple of purple areas, I would say, like Mantica's pretty purple, maybe leaning blue, but everything else is either leaning red or red in the area. So, you know, I've got my personal political beliefs, and I put them all out in the website there. I'm for Medicare for all and, you know, housing for all and all of those things that I really do genuinely believe. It'll be tough to have, you know, some compromising conversations with people to kind of get them to meet them wherever we can on those issues. But I think when you talk to voters of any political bent, they want authenticity.

And that is what I believe. And that's what I would do if I were representing this area and I'm assembly. So I'm probably more progressive than the average. voter here, but I think there's a lot of other things we can connect on that hopefully, you know, we'll get into what those issues are. Yeah. So, so my part of the state is, I live pretty much in the bluest part of the state now. It's been trending blue this past decade. However, it's more of a centrist blue like, uh, I see. Yeah. Like Biden or yeah. Yeah, Mike Biden or Hillary or something like that. Although I will say,

Biden did, he says he was a moderate and everything, but a lot of the things he did could be seen as progressive. That's true. That's true. It's always tough to see, like, who is a real moderate versus who's more progressive based on how they message themselves versus what they do. So good point, good point. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So my Senate race, that was back in 2016, so almost 10 years ago now. probably 10 years ago when this releases. I actually got primaries from the centrist wing of the party and wound up losing big time. And that's created a bit of a rift between me and the party establishments here. I can imagine. Yeah.

Oh, it gets better. The guy that tries to knock off for city council back in 21. was the same guy who pried me here. Oh, man. So also in 16, it was a Republican incumbent by the name of Greg Smith

who his big thing was his teenage daughter was kidnapped and murdered. So he runs A on her on that murder. I don't care if he's offended by it's That's my observation

And B uses his platform To loosen Gun restrictions Here in Kansas So now everywhere it is They call it a constitutional carry Where you can carry pretty much anywhere

Concealed without a permit And that's some scary stuff It is It is He gets prime marriage by a more centrist Republican. She winds up winning the whole race. And then two years later, she switches parties and is now a, she's now at the incumbent state senator and a Democrat.

Yeah, it's an interesting, interesting play out there. Yeah. And I tell you what, I was so impressed with. the way she handled that whole primary thing compared to the kid who was a primary me as like you know what if i wind up going down the primary i want to supports uh this uh candidates and then find that that's the swiss parties a couple years later i feel vindicated by that personally. Sure, sure.

Mm-hmm. Yeah. So do you see the same dynamic happening in your district? The same dynamic being just... Yeah, the centrist versus the progressives. Well, I mean, as I said, it's a pretty conservative district. So there's often not a lot of inter-party conflict on the Democratic side, just because there haven't been that many Democratic candidates that have been running in the

area. So not particularly. And on the Republican side, unfortunately as well, there hasn't been a lot of competition either. So it's kind of just been whoever is the incumbent obviously remains entrenched and they run for office and then they kind of just hold onto the seat as long as they have it, as long as they like to have it. And then whoever takes their place after they retire, move on to higher office or Lewis and the General is usually very similar. So unfortunately, no, there hasn't been a lot of competition on the party level in my area. Sure. Sure.

Yeah, that's interesting. You say that because outside of California, we think of California as this big blue behemath of a state, but really you still see the urban, rural divide. Yeah, definitely. This district is, I mean, a key example of that. As I said, I mean, the way that this assembly district is carved out. It's basically all rural areas. It's geographically quite large. It extends from like the east and south

part of Sacramento County and then the main part of San Joaquin County and then a little bit into Stanislaus County, which is going to be nothing to anybody not in California. But again, there's a map on my campaign website. At Adams for Assembly, you can take a look and kind of visualize the area. But it's quite massive. The geographic area. But the people that live in there, it's basically the same. any other assembly district, which are usually confined to just one county. It's a lot of very small rural towns. I've been making a list of all the areas and all the cities that I would reach out to and have to tour if I'm going out to campaign.

And I'm putting the population next to them so I can see how much of community I'm going to be talking to here. And the number that is like in the low thousands is most of these cities. So it's a pretty rural district, which makes it a pretty conservative Republican district. Right. Despite the fact that most of California, obviously most of our population is... Los Angeles, San Francisco, Sacramento, all these larger cities, San Diego, although San Diego said something, but mostly, you know, urban, mostly liberal, and that those carry the states. If you look at the statewide, you know, presidential results, governor statewide results, they're all pretty conservative,

are pretty democratic and it's, you know, you'd think that's the end of the story. But if you look at it, you know, it's like 60-40 most of the time for these things, 60% Democrat, 40% Republican. Those Republicans have to live somewhere. And they live in a lot of the rural areas. Yeah. So, so yeah, locally we have, I'd say our blue areas are the Kansas City area, you know, where I am, both Wyndotte and Johnson County. Then right next door would be Douglas County. that's Lawrence University of Kansas is there then Topeka Shawnee County next door to that's that's the state capital a lot of people say well what about

uh Wichita well Wichita well Wichita is a it may be a blue around there but that is a very red area around Wichita. In fact, I would say most of our state's problems come out of Wichita. As soon like you get further away from the college I suppose or right right. Yeah. Right. Right. Also, Wichita, that's the Koch brothers are based on. Oh, is it? Yeah. So yeah. But other than those cities, the rest of the state is very rural.

Sure. Like that drive like half hour west or half hour south here. I'm in a rural area. So. And then we're right next door to Missouri, of course. Kansas City being the basically saddling Kansas and Missouri. Right. I'm, we're going to talk about gerrymandering in just seconds,

but I'm of the opinion that pretty much the entire Kansas City metro area should be its own state at this point, because both Topeka and Jefferson City are screwing with our area. Yeah, and I imagine it's distinct enough culturally and politically that it could probably carry. Yeah. And then Missouri, we think of as a red state now, but historically it's always been one of those purple states that could go either way. Yeah.

Because of Kansas City, because of St. Louis, there too. A lot of people point to Columbia, right just north of Jefferson City, right in the middle of the states. That's a college town, too. You know, University of Missouri there, too. but it has its own version of Wichita called Springfield and yeah

that gets me now into the whole thing of gerrymandering so you may have seen in the news lately that Missouri decided which currently is a Republican majority in both their house and Senate they decided to

do a midterm gerrymander of the state basically cut and it affects Kansas City especially because it's cutting it's pretty in a in a very weird sense between three House districts and I'm talking U.S. House here. Yeah. Right. Which would pretty much wipe out a Democratic seat. Yeah, that's a long term. on that trend yeah held a long time by uh kansas states former mayor ammanuel cleaver

who by the way spoke in my college graduation how cool is that yeah um where over in kansas uh they gerrymandered um our states as well so they have lawrence which has absolutely no business uh being in the first congressional congressional congressional districts in the first congressional district so that's playing it with the rest of western kansas once talking about big then you have uh kansas city kansas and wyndy county being splits along uh interstate 70 so north of 70 is now the second's districts with uh tepica and mostly the eastern part of the states

and then the southern half of Wynod south of 70 staying in the third district which includes all of Johnson County and they tacked on a few rural counties as well and the entire idea was

to get to Shrease Davids voted out of office our current congresswoman and turns that that has not worked. But if it was up to them, they would try to pull that again and everything,

just to just to create another Republican seats. Yeah, and we're seeing that across the country, right? Yeah. And you're seeing the reverse of it in your states, right? And particularly in response to Texas was the first to really, to really kick this off. Yeah. Yeah, California is doing as something to respond to these Republican states, doing the very thing that you're just describing,

redrawing the districts mid-decade. Normally, these districts are not drawn again until after the census every 10 years. Republicans have been directed by Donald Trump and his administration that they want to shore up their seat gain in the House coming up on 2026. So they're saying, let's redraw the maps now. Let's make it.

So there's more likely to be a Republican or more Republicans coming from your state into the U.S. Congress than we would normally expect, given the district. California and our governor, Gavin Newsom, has seen this and responded by asking the state legislature, which just recently passed. Proposition 50, what it would go on to become. The Redistricting Response Act would be balancing out the losses of Democratic seats in these states like Missouri or. Texas and all sorts of states across the union that would California now be able to put in those if this were to pass after the California voters take vote on it in November, redraw districts so we'd have five more Democratic seats in theory coming out of California. This is different, of course, than what's happening in all of those other Republican states

because it is being presented to the voters. They are getting a chance to weigh in on do we actually want to do this. And we are framing it as a response to something that is happening elsewhere, whereas the Republicans are kind of just doing it to do it because they are worried about losing seats in the House in 2026. And I think they rightfully should be. I think they should be. Yeah, good save. Incredibly unpopular during this administration over the last couple of years. And historically, what we see at the midterm for every presidential term, a party that is in control will lose seats in the house.

oftentimes they lose control of the house that they have it. And that's just the typical presidency. As we know, the Donald Trump presidency is far from typical and historically unpopular and continuing to get more unpopular as the days go by. So this is a fear that they have that is real that they're trying to shore up. And we just want to reflect reality, you know, that if you're unpopular, you lose seats. And that's fair. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, that's a great point. you know Clinton I maintain Clinton was probably one of the better presidents we've had in my

in my lifetime along with Obama and Biden but Clinton in particular the country was in a much different states than and then 94 comes along

if Republicans taking over the House and Newt Gingrich becoming the speaker and his contract on America

and next thing to know, Clinton is impeached for bullshit reasons. And of course, about that same time, that's when we had the media apparatus that we see now starts to take place. Rush Limbaugh was huge at the time, and he made his bones. uh demonizing democrats and uh certainly demonizing a clinton and then uh i think it was 96 was when uh fox news became a thing and i think it all went downhill from there in terms of uh discourse and the parties have just been drifting further and further parts ever since to the point that we're at now where we have the other we have at the other sides uh you heard about the shooting in Utah.

Of course. Last week, yeah. Yeah, that shooting happens. They find the kid is far right wing, which, being an ex-Morman, myself, I'm not surprised, because the LDS church is a very right-wing church. Right, right. Yeah. Even compared to most other churches, which are fairly conservative as well.

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. absolutely and then you hear the aforementioned mr trump trying to blame progressives and the and the left in general on that murder like we're not the ones uh fomenting all this violent rhetoric that you know that's something you need to look in the mirror for yeah and i mean if you want to talk about you know the presidencies over the last couple of decades what president would have seen the violent act that took place on that day, the shooting that we all saw versus the school shooting and all the shootings that have been taking place and immediately say this needs to be blamed on somebody

and this needs to be an excuse to turn the dial up to make things more heated, make things more violent in our rhetoric and our actions. What president would do that other than Donald Trump, right? Because that's the way that he's raised his base. way that he's become politically popular and politically as influential as he has is running off the backs of these violent incidents and trying to incite violent incidents. I mean, I'm not going to say that, you know, he wants this violence to happen. He probably, you know, who's to say, but he likes the rhetoric. This is the kind of stuff that is red meat to his base. No other president,

even Republicans, would view what happened this last week and say, this is great. This is something that I would love to talk about. Because for most average people, let alone presidents, it's a tragedy, right? I mean, these sort of things are something that should bring us together and say, we need to cool things down. Let's come together. Let's take this opportunity to look at why this happened and how we can fix it. I mean, you may have seen the viral clip of Trump was on Fox News the next day or two after. And they asked, what would you like to do?

Like, how can we heal this country? We got a lot of people going back and forth on the Democratic side and the Republican side. And he says, frankly, I couldn't care less. You know, he does, he's not interested in using anything to unite the country because he's never actually wanted to unite the country. And it's, it's dangerous. And we're increasingly seeing it after moments like this. Yes, we are. That's right.

So hopefully Democrats can reclaim the House this election cycle, but they're making it difficult for us. No question about. And that Missouri plan I talked about, that is going to. people have already filed lawsuits against it so hopefully it doesn't pass and we still have two out of eight seats in Missouri remain Democratic but we will we shall see yeah and that is the other part of this that people don't talk about as much is it is often illegal to do a lot of the things that are being out here to drag the districts in a certain way or the other I mean who knows how the Supreme Court is going to rule on anything these days but in the past the Supreme

court has ruled against gerrymandering. A lot of the circuit courts have ruled against gerrymandering. And they've been unfortunately wobbly on that in recent years. But there's a reason that this kind of stuff is not usually allowed and not usually done because drawing lines explicitly based on partisanship is not any way to better the representation of the people that are going to get, right? I mean, geographically, the lines could just, I mean, everybody says, Like, let's just draw them like easy squares, you know, like, any weird shapes, let's just do all those, do those, uh, no more.

Whether it's that easy or not, it's certainly more fair than saying, we're going to draw people from, you know, Western Kansas all the way to connect to the other side, just so we can have these representations that we want. It's power be getting power and people, you know, using their corruption to get things through, which is far from only happening in redistricting efforts, but certainly happening in redistricting efforts. Right, right. Yeah, I believe you guys have an independent redistricting commission. We do not. That's part of the issue.

I think if there is one reform I would do nationwide, it would be to introduce redistricting commissions, completely nonpartisan just based. purely on the geography of what's going to work for everyone in a state, you know, as compact and as square, if you will, as possible. Yeah. And I mean, it's got its problems that we have our independent redistricting commission in California every 10 years. It's certainly not creating perfect districts, but it's better to have people that have no skin in the game drawing these things than people who are basically deciding what their job and where they're going to be instead. So the districting that we have gotten in California since that passed in the 2010s has been a lot better. We've seen a lot more fair, competitive elections up and down the state.

Obviously, again, there's always room for improvement. But compared to where a lot of the other states and the union are, it's a much better system. I agree. Oh, yeah. Yeah. All right. And, of course, we got to bring a religion into the conversation to. because I am very much, again, being in Kansas, I witnessed myself just how terrible it could be to try to be a theocrat running estates.

We, for crying out of that, we had Sam Brown back as our governor. That alone should scare anyone. And yes, he was as terrible as he has talked about. He very nearly destroyed to the states with basically trying to introduce Reaganomics at a state level. And wound up close to bankrupting the state that before he mercifully got out of there. That's one thing I will credit Trump for is he got that guy out of, of office, they reversed his tax cuts.

And so, so yeah, tax cuts don't necessarily translate to everyone's going benefits because this is a cautionary tale, but no, they won't. It just make things worse. It's true. It's true. I mean, people love the idea of a tax cut because, you know, what they'll think.

think is I'm going to end up paying less money at the end of the year because I'm not paying all that money to taxes. I think economically, what we have seen, studies have shown, people's pocketbooks have shown, you do end up paying more if less is covered by the government, right? Because things still need to be paid for. And it's usually a lot better and more efficient if the government can handle a lot of the social services. You know, if people are on the hook for their own social services, healthcare, buying food, road repair, cities have to take those funds from somewhere. Taxpayers have to still have to

pay into those funds either out of their own pockets because they'll have their own troubles that would have been covered by a collective bank, or not bank, a collective fund that the government would have collected. That money still has to be paid by somebody. And if we're not paying into it

for the government's purposes, then it's coming out of your own pocketbook. And then people are like, well, why am I losing more money? And that's why. So these tax cuts, I agree, are incredibly helpful.

And they are also misleadingly proposed, I think. Yeah. When Republicans talk about taxes, they're always talking about income tax cuts, which are the more progressive taxes. So we cut taxes on the wealthy, they'll put more money.

That's the thing. That's thinking, right? well, you still have, like you said, you still have to pay for stuff. So if you're kind of income taxes, what else is there? You got property taxes and sales taxes, both of which are very regressive and you're more likely to pay if you are poor. Yeah, and that's a good a good shout out that often these are misleading and who the tax cuts are actually for. When they say they're cutting taxes, most of the time they're not talking about the average American. You probably are actually, you might get a smaller portion of a tax cut.

You might have a slightly lower rate than you did last year. But the largest decrease in tax cuts are always going to be for the wealthy because they're the ones that are going to be the ones in the people's ear and saying, we need all this money so we can do X, Y, and Z. And whether the people in power actually believe that that money is going to trickle down or go to all these other communities like the wealthy say it is, or whether they're just wealthy themselves and are benefiting from it themselves or both. ultimately the average taxpayer is really not going to get the benefit of these tax cuts anyway. Yeah. In part because the wealthy people, they're just going to pocket that money that they're not going to read. That's something I give Clinton a lot of credit for was when he did his tax plan, he said, all you wealthy guys who own businesses, make sure you're paying.

your employees give them raises and stuff. So, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, what the wealthy do with that money is most of the times they'll either keep it for themselves, right? Or they will donate it back into the same politicians to ensure that they can get more of those favorable policies for them in the first place.

And I mean, to connect that back to my own race here, the guy that I'm running against, his name is Heath Flora, he's the Republican minority leader in the assembly. And he is a very prolific fundraiser. that I'm going up against. He has over a million dollars in his campaign account right now, and he could easily get a million more if he felt threatened, I'm sure. All of the races that he has run in the last couple of years in my district have gone basically unchallenged.

It's been basically him against either a writing candidate or a third-party candidate. And yet, every election, he continues to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars and spent hundreds of thousands of dollars. These are not real campaigns. So the money that is being spent on these campaigns is not for campaign purposes. The wealthy are just taking this money, putting it into their favorite candidate. He's spending it on personal trips. He's spending it on, you know, absorbent food and, you know, going, he went to the Kentucky

Derby. And, you know, he's living it up because he's passing or preventing things from going into law that the Republican donors would prefer him to be in place for that to do. And he's benefiting from it. And we continue to have this system that rewards people who get paid or, you know, pay into this system. And it's awful, you know. I mean, Citizens United, the dark money influence in our politics over the last decade plus has really, really corrupted politics on every single level and every single state. And we haven't really reckoned with that in a real way.

The longer this continues to go on, the more people will get away with things. and the more evil we will frankly see in our political system because, I mean, it's cliche to say money is the root of all evil, but I think that money often exists to a lot of evil things are happening in politics because of the money unfettered money that is coming in that just is leading to these horrific corruption instances. Yeah. Again, I'm in Kansas. We have to we have the Coke brothers. And yeah, they're Americans for prosperity. they're like the call themselves

and so yeah I've seen firsthand exactly what we're talking about yeah let's we gotta get money at politics yeah and simple and that's why I'm glad to be a Bernie

Democrats and I'm glad to have a Bernie Democrats to talk to today so yeah I mean this is the that's the main reason I got into this race is because we need to get the money out of politics I mean the fact that a guy like this can run completely unchecked and have all this money

flowing in and out and is publicly reported too. Like it's, it's not a secret. People just either can't afford to care, the average voter, right? They've got a lot of other things going on. And I completely understand that money in politics is not something that is in your face every day that you'll see on the news for one reason or another. It doesn't get covered as much, right?

It's a lot easier to focus on the things you do see every day, you know, and think that's a higher priority. But at the end of the day, the government touches every aspect of your life. And the people in government are the people that you would want to protect you from these harmful influences and to better that lives that you have and the things you do see every day. If they're not looking out for you, if they're looking out for the people that are paying into their own pocketbook, it does have a real impact on every single thing that affects your life, whether you are aware of it or not. And it's really sad that that's not covered is one of the biggest issues in the nation because it absolutely is. Absolutely. Absolutely. And we are very close to running at time. So close in thoughts. Oh, well, thank you for having me. I appreciate talking about, you know, anything related to

politics and my campaign. It is great to get an insight into the other states here. But for anyone listening that wants to check out my campaigns, Adams4 Assembly, that's the number for AdamsforAssembly.com. I'm running again in California's Assembly District 9 and race in 2026 and you know hopefully I can have a lot more conversations and get the word out this is a great opportunity I appreciate it all right so it's a 26 race okay so so oh yeah we'll be you'll also be running by the time this releases oh yeah all right yeah yeah I did the same thing so yeah yeah run file a year in advance and all that all right well best of luck to your campaign and Thanks for taking some time out of your very busy schedule to come on and talk with me.

And for the rest of you at home, thank you for listening, and we will talk again soon. Thank you. This podcast is Uncalled for. It is hosted, produced, and edited by myself, Mike Cherniewski. Our opening music is the this podcast is Uncalled for. The theme is created at suno.com. S-U-N-O-com. Our outro music for this episode is Homeless California by Montplasia.

It's a license at Creative Commons. Zero, 1.0, universal license. So it's under the public domain. And you can find this at free musicarchive.org. And once again, thank you to Matthew for taking time of what's going to be a very busy schedule. I have him. I wish him all the best. If you live in his district, please consider giving him your vote.

Thank you. Please support the podcast and purchase our exclusive uncalled-for merchandise, T-shirts, sweatshirts, mugs, stickers, and so much more. Go to www.com.cafacepress.com slash uncalled for pod. Thank you so much for listening. We will see you next time. Do we have like an outline of what we're going to get into, kind of just we'll just let let the conversation flows