Former GOP operative Tim Miller recounts his own political reckoning—and offers pearls of hope in the face of despair—as the 2025-26 Jack Kemp '57 Distinguished Lecturer
Best-selling author, political commentator, and Bulwark writer-at-large Tim Miller addressed party dynamics, the future of the conservative movement, and antidotes to doomscrolling as the 2025-26 Jack Kemp ’57 Distinguished Lecturer at 鶹Ƶ on October 21.
In her introductory remarks, Kathryn Leonard, interim dean of the College and vice president for academic affairs, quoted Kemp—the nine-term U.S. congressman, Housing and Urban Development secretary, and 1996 GOP vice presidential candidate: “The American idea is that the Declaration of Independence applies to every individual. Everyone should have the same opportunity to rise as high as their talents and efforts can carry them. And while people move ahead, we should endeavor to leave no one behind.” That ideal, Leonard said, “fits squarely with our mission here at 鶹Ƶ.”
Speaking in Thorne Hall with Professor Caroline Heldman, chair of the Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies Program at Oxy, Miller traced his political evolution back to what he called “the moral, uplifting, patriotic, Bob Dole-ish version of American politics. I bought into the free markets and free people—America as a shining city on a hill.”
Entering politics professionally in the 1990s, Miller campaigned for mostly mainstream, moderate Republican candidates. “I really got attracted to the game of it,” he said. “I worked with a lot of people who could have just as easily changed teams who kind of stumbled into politics. There was very little political disagreement—that was the era I grew up in.”
Over time, however, Miller began to feel that he had become “a cog in something that I didn’t feel good about.” While working for Sen. John McCain during his 2008 presidential bid, he said he felt “very uncomfortable” with then-Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as McCain’s running mate “with somebody that old at the top of the ticket.”
After coming out during the 2008 campaign (which he recounts in his 2022 memoir Why We Did It: A Travelogue From the Republican Road to Hell), Miller stepped away from politics briefly before returning as national press secretary on former Utah governor Jon Huntsman's 2012 presidential campaign. He went on to work for the Republican National Committee during the 2012 general election and served as a communications director for Jeb Bush during his brief 2016 presidential run.
Despite his avowed dislike for President Trump, Miller continued to identify as a Republican until 2020, when he and others were trying to build a base of support for a more populist party in the post-Trump era. But his efforts to recruit a candidate such as Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois (the 2023-24 Kemp Lecturer) or Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan to primary against the incumbent Trump came up empty. “Obviously the party was uninterested in it,” he said.
One of the central failures of the pro-democracy, anti-Trump coalition, Miller argued, “is that we stopped even trying to persuade the other side.” Writing off large segments of the electorate as irredeemable may feel morally satisfying, but it is “bad politics,” he said. “Whatever you think about that as a moral or ethical question, that’s not how you win political races. The whole point of politics is trying to persuade people.”
That belief shaped Miller’s critique of Democratic strategy more broadly: Whereas Democrats once held Senate seats in states such as North Dakota, South Dakota, and Arkansas, he said, now they do not even seriously contest them. “If you ever want to have enough Democratic senators to be able to pass actual legislation and change things, you have to win in those places.”
As the discussion turned to political exhaustion—“I’d like to say it’s just my students who are doomscrolling and they’re way maybe into despair, but I think it might be all of us,” Heldman said—Miller advocated for engaging with politics at the local level, such as school board and city council. “Stuff that is happening close to you matters,” he said. “You can start to not feel despair if you are engaging on an issue that matters where you can actually feel the change.
“If you have the time and the inclination, go out and volunteer and talk to people in the communities,” added Miller, who moved to New Orleans in 2023. “I just think that engaging with actual people in a community, whether in political setting or a volunteer setting, is useful.”
Launched in 2013, the Kemp Lecture Series strives to engage the Occidental community in dialogue on important issues of public policy such as the political economy, economic growth in the context of a market system, communitarian values, and bipartisan relations. The series is made possible by the Jack Kemp ’57 Scholars Endowment.
