Colin Allred Attacks Julie Johnson’s Palantir Trades in Dallas Runoff

Colin Allred has a answer ready for the voters who ask him the same question at every town hall. They want to know why politicians in Washington are getting rich while the rest of us pay the bills. They want to know about the stock trades. The trades. The ones that happen while laws are being written.

Allred says he tells them the truth. He admits they are right. We need to be better.

He is saying this while running for a House seat in Dallas. He is challenging Rep. Julie Johnson in a runoff. The fight is bitter. It is also a preview of what is coming next. Democrats are sharpening their anti-corruption case against Donald Trump. They are using the same anger voters feel about their own representatives.

Trump promised to drain the swamp. Now his family is profiting from it. The White House is back. The money is flowing. Democrats want to take the upper hand on an issue that voters actually care about.

Allred is attacking Johnson for trading in Palantir. It is a data analytics firm. It has ties to the Trump administration. Johnson says her trades were handled by a financial manager. She says Allred is only out for himself. She points to his financial disclosures. His wealth nearly doubled during his time in Congress. Allred says his assets were in a blind trust. The money came from his wife’s income as a law partner.

The numbers get small when you look closer. Johnson says the sum total she made on that Palantir trade was only $90. She accuses Allred of making it seem like hundreds or thousands. It is a classic political squabble. But it is bigger than Dallas.

It is a debate about money in politics. It is a debate about who gets to define corruption.

Daniel Lobo-Lewis knows this well. He is a political consultant in Washington. He says the difficulty is that no party has the mantle on anti-corruption right now. Voters outside the beltway see both parties as corrupt. They see all politicians as bought by donors. They see them as self-interested.

Lobo-Lewis and Nico Agosto founded the Political Integrity Project last year. They track stock trading. They track corporate donations. They ask candidates to sign an integrity pledge. The pledge means no stock trading. No corporate donations. No lobbying after they leave office.

So far, about 90 challengers and seven sitting lawmakers have taken the pledge. All of them are Democrats.

This is not just about Allred and Johnson. It is about the broader Democratic Party. Long a refrain of strident progressives and good-government reformers, accusations of self-dealing have become a mainstay of Democratic primaries. The criticism of lawmakers’ personal wealth is intensifying. The party wants to sharpen its anti-corruption message against Trump. They want to develop a platform for overhauling Washington if they take power in the midterms.

The short version is this: Democrats are using the stock trading feud to prove they are different. They are trying to harness populist anger. They are trying to show that the swamp is still there, even if the president changed.

Read that again. The swamp is still there. The family is just different.

Allred is one of several candidates trying to use this anger. He is betting that voters will forgive his own wealth if he attacks Johnson’s trades hard enough. Johnson is betting that voters will see through the attacks if she focuses on his blind trust and his wife’s income.

It is a tight race. It is a messy race. It is a race that will tell us a lot about how Democrats plan to fight Trump in the general election. If they can’t agree on what constitutes corruption, how can they expect to win over the voters who see both parties as the same?

The Political Integrity Project is watching. The voters are watching. The stock market is watching.

Make no mistake. This is not just about $90. It is about trust. And trust is the one thing Washington is short on.