VOTE FOR THE SALT OF THE EARTH (Or When the Cabal Doesn’t Like You It’s ‘Cause You Want Money For the Poor People They Hate)

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May be an image of text that says 'She lived in her car with with her kids, ran for office three times, got COVID during the campaign- and still won.'

American Memories 

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April 25 at 5:30 AM 
She was sitting outside a payday loan office, doing math that kept coming up wrong, when two questions rose up from somewhere deep inside her:
Who speaks up for people like me? Why do I keep having to live like this?
Her name was Cori Bush. She was a preschool teacher in St. Louis, earning $9 an hour. After a decade of showing up every single day, she had worked her way to assistant director — and was still making minimum wage. When she became pregnant with her second child and fell ill, the numbers finally stopped working. She and her family couldn’t make rent.
They were evicted.
For months, Cori Bush and her young children lived out of their car.
Most people would have folded. She didn’t. She went back to school, earned her nursing degree, became an ordained minister, and built a church from the ground up — piece by piece, the way you build anything when nobody is coming to help you.
Then one summer, something happened in a city just miles from her home that she could not look away from. A teenager named Michael Brown was shot and killed by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri. The community erupted in grief. People poured into the streets. And Cori Bush drove straight toward it.
She and her colleagues set up a tent. They did grief counseling. They handed out food, diapers, and financial assistance to families who had nowhere else to turn. She stood in the streets with her neighbors. She got pepper-sprayed by police while doing it.
She didn’t leave.
“Ferguson was just regular people,” she later said, “who made change that affected the entire world.”
Standing in those streets, something crystallized for her. If she wanted to truly fight for people like her — people doing impossible math outside loan offices, people sleeping in cars, people showing up every day for a system that wasn’t built with them in mind — she needed to be inside the room where decisions were made.
She ran for U.S. Senate in 2016. She lost.
She ran for Congress in 2018. She lost again.
She ran for the same seat in 2020, this time battling COVID-19 so severe it sent her to the hospital twice during the campaign itself.
She won.
Cori Bush became the first African American woman ever elected to represent Missouri in the United States Congress — a former minimum-wage worker, an evicted mother, a protest nurse, a pastor who had decided, after all the years and all the losses, that enough was enough.
In Congress, she fought for a $15 minimum wage — because she had earned $9. She pushed for tuition-free college — because she had carried student loan debt for years. She called for universal healthcare — because she’d had to give up her own health insurance just to run for office. When the eviction moratorium was about to expire and millions of families faced losing their homes, she slept on the steps of the United States Capitol.
Because she knew what losing your home felt like.
“I would be a regular person representing regular people,” she had promised.
She kept that promise.
In 2024, millions of dollars were spent in a campaign to unseat her — one of the most heavily funded primary challenges in congressional history. She lost her seat.
In October 2025, she announced she was running again.
“St. Louis deserves leadership that doesn’t wait for permission, doesn’t answer to wealthy donors, and doesn’t hide when things get tough.”
Some people are broken by hardship. Cori Bush was forged by it — and she has spent every ounce of that strength on the people still living inside it.

PRIMARY ELECTION: AUGUST 4, 2026

 

CONTACT: INFO@CORIBUSH.ORG

 

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Oct
3
2025

press release

Cori Bush Announces Campaign for U.S. Congress in MO-01

ST. LOUIS, MO — Today, Cori Bush formally announced her campaign to represent Missouri’s First Congressional District, pledging to fight for St. Louis families squeezed by rising costs, broken systems, government abandonment, and anti-democratic attacks from Trump and his billionaire allies.

 

WATCH LAUNCH VIDEO

 

This announcement comes as Washington is mired in crisis, with a government shutdown slashing food assistance, housing support, paychecks, and essential services families rely on to survive. Once again, regular people are paying the price for government dysfunction. The question before us isn’t whether Washington is broken – because it is. The question is whether we send leaders who will take on that broken, failing system and fight to change it. St. Louis deserves a leader who will rise to the moment, call out the chaos, and fight to protect our communities. That’s who Cori Bush is because that’s who Cori Bush has always been.

“Right now, we are in the fight of our lives. It isn’t politics as usual, and we can’t afford to operate as such. This is about survival for our families, and the moment is now,” said Cori Bush. “I’m running because Missouri’s First deserves leadership that’s built different. A leader who doesn’t just navigate a broken system, but works to build a better one. A leader who shows up when it’s hardest, who fights for all people, who unifies us with courage, resilience, and love. A leader rooted in the community, lifting the voices too often dismissed, and proving what’s possible when you fight for everyone. That’s who I’ve always been — ten toes down for this district”

Bush brings a proven record of delivering for St. Louis into this campaign, which includes:

“For me, it has never been about a title. It has always been about my community — because St. Louis built me, brick by brick,” Cori Bush said. “Trump’s billionaire backers and the politicians in their pockets aren’t waiting to rig the rules, and we can’t wait to resist. We must protect our communities, expand opportunity, and deliver results for the people. St. Louis is built for this fight, and so am I.”

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