The Hands That Built It
What I've seen Clint Twedt-Ball build in Cedar Rapids, and why it matters for Iowa's 2nd District
Let me begin with something that rarely happens in political endorsements: genuine admiration for the person I’m not endorsing.
Lindsay James is a gifted legislator. She has served Dubuque with conviction and moral clarity, and her record in the Iowa House, fighting to lower prescription drug costs, protecting mobile home residents, expanding access to affordable housing, speaks to a seriousness of purpose that Iowa desperately needs. I have known Lindsay for years. I respect her deeply. Iowa would be fortunate to have her in Congress.
This endorsement of Clint Twedt-Ball is not a verdict against Lindsay James. It is a testament to what I have witnessed, up close and over many years, in Cedar Rapids.
I grew up on the southeast side of town. I served as a Linn County Supervisor. I have spent my adult life in the currents of Iowa’s civic and political life. And in all of that time, I have never seen anyone do the work the way Clint Twedt-Ball does it.
I mean that literally.
There is a phrase I keep returning to when I think about Clint: he thinks with his hands. It is a quality you almost never find in politics, this capacity to hold an idea and a hammer at the same time, to theorize about poverty while sitting on the floor of someone’s kitchen. Clint does not study problems from a comfortable distance. He moves into them.
Saul Alinsky once drew a distinction between the organizer who describes the neighborhood and the one who has been in the room where the problem lives. Clint has been in the room. For nearly twenty years, he has been in every room: the flooded living rooms of the Time Check neighborhood after the Cedar River swallowed whole blocks in 2008. The kitchens where families had no food. The vacant lots that everyone else saw as blight but Clint saw as possibility.
When the flood hit, it was one of the worst natural disasters in Iowa’s history. Entire neighborhoods were gutted. And while the federal response moved at its predictable pace, Clint and his brother Courtney, who had founded Matthew 25 just two years earlier, organized thousands of volunteers, launched the Block by Block program, raised more than seven million dollars, and helped recover twenty-four blocks of homes. They did not wait for permission. They showed up with tools and trust. When the derecho tore through Cedar Rapids twelve years later, they did it again, helping rehabilitate nearly three hundred more homes.
And then they kept building. Not just houses, but infrastructure for dignity: Iowa’s first urban farm, a corner store in a food desert, a cafe where anyone can eat regardless of ability to pay, a tool library that trusts people to build for themselves. Under Clint’s leadership, Matthew 25 grew from two staff members to more than forty. It became one of the most consequential nonprofit organizations in the state. And Clint did it from inside the neighborhoods he served, not from above them.
In my time as a county supervisor, I learned something about the distance between policy and people. Most good Democratic politicians can intellectualize a problem. They can read the white paper, cite the data, articulate why housing insecurity or food deserts matter. And that is important. But there is a difference between understanding a crisis and having sat in someone’s living room while they lived through one. Clint has done both, and that combination is vanishingly rare.
What sets him further apart is that he does not simply serve. He interrogates. As much as Clint deploys theology, he thinks critically about power, race, and privilege. He has wrestled honestly with what it means to be a white man leading work that serves predominantly marginalized communities. His faith is not decorative. It is a lens through which he examines the world with rigor and humility.
There are parallels in this race to the Iowa Democratic Senate primary, where two candidates of extraordinary quality are asking voters for the nomination. We are lucky, in both contests, to be faced with genuine choices rather than grudging compromises. When both options are strong, you do not need to diminish one to choose the other.
And so here is my case.
If you are looking for a candidate who has walked among the marginalized and built a life around practicing inclusion rather than theorizing about it, Clint Twedt-Ball is that person. If you want a representative who has converted righteous anger into power and opportunity, who has taken the raw material of injustice and built something that feeds people, houses people, and gives them the tools to rebuild their own lives, he is that person.
Clint did not come to this race because he needed a title. He came because the room where the problem lives has gotten bigger, and the people in it deserve someone who has spent a lifetime walking through the door.
I am proud to endorse him.