ASBL 60, William Marks, Recent Candidate in Texas, District 25, March 16, 2026
ASBL 60, William Marks, Recent Candidate in Texas, District 25, March 16, 2026
The American Small Business League (www.ASBL.com) spoke with William Marks, who ran for Congress as a Democrat in Texas, District 25, in the recent primary. (Dion Sims won.) William is a decorated combat veteran and award-winning navy communicator with 22 years in the military before working for six years at Meta. His website is www.WilliamMarks.com.
What are your takeaways, lessons from your recent campaign?
As a candidate for the House, you can be competitive in three ways. First, have two hundred thousand dollars to spend on day-one. You can hire a team. Build infrastructure. Set up your technology stack. And attract more money. “It takes money to get money.”
The second way to be competitive on day-one is to already be famous. A celebrity. An athlete. An astronaut. Already have name recognition.
The third way can be called the organic way, which is to have lived in the same area for decades and built up a large network. It helps if you’re maybe a small business owner or a teacher, something like that, where you interact with the public quite a bit.
“I started out with none of those things,” William said. “But the Republican incumbent (Roger Williams) had not had a challenger since 2020. And I felt that the people at least deserve a choice. So, I decided to run.” To run a lean campaign. Use social media for all the free marketing possible. Do it full-time. William is a good public speaker. He did over 200 personal events over seven or eight months. He walked 380 miles.
After 3 or 4 months of campaigning, Republicans in Texas redrew the district to try to win more seats. Now William was unknown in much of the new district. He had been campaigning in its old lines to people who now couldn’t vote for him.
“But when people met me and heard my positions, they got on the team. They were very enthusiastic.” Primaries are less about your positions, more about name recognition. William ran against someone who had ninety years of family name recognition, Dion Sims.
“I’m confident the Democratic party will flip the House.”
The American Small Business League called the office of Republican incumbent Roger Williams recently about our www.DontCheatWomen.com goals (see below). He’s the chairman of the House Small Business Committee. Basically, we were told, that sounds DEI. We’re Republicans. So, we’re not going to do anything about that. William said, “Roger Williams is no friend of small business.” He inherited a car dealership that makes him a millionaire many times over.
“There are many local races that need good candidates. You don’t have to have a lot of money. You just have to work hard and put your mind to it.” School boards. Your city council. The zoning regulations need to be friendly to small businesses. If a business permit takes too long. That’s your city council. “I urge everyone to look into those local races.”
“I believe that the system is not set up for the working class to win elections and I think that needs to change. And the only way to do that at this point is election finance reform. Twenty years ago, we had a good start with the McCain-Feingold Act, which put us on the right track toward campaign finance reform.”
“But now a billionaire can give 200, 300 million dollars to get someone elected. That’s now what our Founding Fathers had envisioned.” The Supreme Court ruling in the case called Citizens United basically lets corporations and unions give as much as they want, supposedly protecting their free speech as expressed by their campaign donations.
We must reverse Citizen United as a way for “the working class to take back our election system” and take those billions of dollars out of the electoral process and make it a public investment and put regulations on a lot of the dark money, the Super PAC money that is now in elections.
Another observation is that it’s hard for veterans to be competitive in elections because they typically move around a lot in the service. William moved 18 times in 22 years in the Navy. “You can’t put down roots. You can’t get organically known in a community without spending long, quality time in one place. Veterans must work extra-hard to get known.”
We discussed the Iran war. Veterans in Congress would be more reluctant than non-veterans, Williams believes, to go to war. War is basically a failure of diplomacy.
Tariffs were also discussed. Congress, William says, has abdicated its responsibility there, as it has with war, handing over its Constitutional prerogative to the president.
What about the rich who pull the strings of both parties, who might be orchestrating the war to collapse the world’s economies, to the point even of famine, to justify digital, programmable currency, which would be digital slavery?
William replied, Democrats are not as bad as Republicans. And he recommended the regulation of campaign donations, of stock trading and other investments by members of Congress, and that we prevent members of Congress from becoming lobbyists for giant corporations.
We discussed the need to overcome lifelong, deeply embedded powerlessness. “The tone of the country is set by the people who do not vote. Any election that didn’t go your way, chances are it’s not because people voted for the other guy. It’s because of the people who didn’t vote.”
The rich and powerful, who are prospering while we struggle, want us to be demoralized, to feel powerless, to stay home on Election Day. “No one’s coming to save us. We must do that ourselves. By loving our neighbor, being involved in our community, and being an educated and informed voter. That’s how we fight our way through this.”
And we discussed the importance of small businesses. Here are the ASBL’s www.DontCheatWomen.com goals:
We want Congress to raise from 5% to 15% the federal contract dollars that must go to women-owned small businesses.
Define a small business as 100 or less employees.
Make the Small Business Administration prove that small business contracts go to small businesses.
Why?
98% of all businesses in America have less than 100 employees. But the general definition is up to 500 employees. They are supposed to get 23% of all federal contract dollars. And the SBA claims to surpass that goal every year. However, we have found (and so have many Congressional investigations and SBA Inspector General reports) that big businesses actually get almost all “small business” contracts, and they create no jobs to perform that work because they’re already big, but small businesses would create around 2 million jobs (on top of the jobs America typically creates), and that would boom the economy for everyone.
Secondly, women-owned small businesses get less than 5% of federal contract dollars, and those owned by men get over 95%, even though women own over 40% of all businesses in America and they sell what the government buys. The U.S. government is the largest purchaser of goods and services in the world. Such discrimination is probably a violation of civil rights law.
But it’s worse than that. It lets men be richer than women, which lets men dominate in politics.
Men donate more to campaigns and have more influence with the winners. And men run for and win more offices.
Men hold roughly 75% of all seats in the House, the Senate, State legislatures, president’s cabinets, almost that many governorships, and 90% of committee chair and party leadership positions. Everything that empowers women economically, like steering a fair share of federal contracts their way, helps them run for office and become political equals. We need the wisdom of the whole human race in the councils of government.
Go to www.DontCheatWomen.com and see how to contact your Representative, your Senators, and the White House.
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