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A recap of Scott Zimmerman's Rumble interview with Donna Brandenburg and Lewis Herms

When two long-shot gubernatorial candidates — one from Michigan, one from California — compare notes on running for office, the stories start to rhyme in an uncomfortable way. 

That's the premise of this episode of Scott Zimmerman's Rumble show, which brought together Donna Brandenburg, who ran for governor of Michigan, and Lewis Herms, an independent documentarian who ran for governor of California, to talk about what actually happens when an outsider campaign starts gaining traction.

Zimmerman frames the two guests as having more in common than their ballot lines suggest: both left comfortable lives to challenge entrenched state political machines, and both, in his words, got "crushed by the machine" in the process — just through different mechanisms.

Ballot access and legal fights

Brandenburg described being removed from the ballot twice in a single election cycle, which she says was done improperly. She also referenced a recent fraud conviction tied to the 2022 election secured through the state attorney general's office, plus a default judgment in a related civil case. 

Her framing throughout was that primary structures and ballot administration favor an entrenched "uniparty" over outsider candidates before a single vote is counted.

Media blackout and the "Wikipedia problem"

Herms' account centered less on courts and more on visibility. He described reaching out to press outlets for coverage and being told, in effect, that he needed a Wikipedia page before he'd be treated as a legitimate candidate — and then described a cycle where independent editors would verify his page's citations, only for the page to be reverted or the editor's account banned shortly after.

He also said he was excluded from broadcast coverage of debates he actually participated in, and described a Facebook-hosted straw poll where his numbers were climbing before his standing was deleted from the poll outright — something he says was later confirmed, in his account, by a platform employee acknowledging the removal in a chat log.

Law enforcement and the "brown shirts" problem

A meatier chunk of the conversation turned to sheriffs and state police. Both guests argued that law enforcement in their states had, in places, become an extension of political protection rather than a check on it — recounting a story about a state police response to a citizen-filed complaint against Michigan Governor Gretchen Whitmer, and a tense in-person encounter Brandenburg had with a sheriff during her campaign. 

The two guests distinguished this from a blanket "defund the police" position, framing their view instead as conditional support: back the officers doing their jobs constitutionally, and hold accountable the ones who aren't.

The bigger picture

Underneath the individual anecdotes, the conversation returns repeatedly to a shared worldview: that state-level institutions — media, ballot administration, tech platforms, and in some cases law enforcement — function as a coordinated "machine" that quietly filters out candidates who threaten the status quo, regardless of party label. 

Both guests describe this as harder to prove than it sounds, precisely because, in their telling, it isn't applied consistently from one candidate to the next.

The episode closes with both guests thanking Zimmerman for the platform, a rundown of upcoming interviews on his channel, and shout-outs to viewer donations that keep the show running.