From Pokémon to Public Policy: Aaron Stephens’ Political Journey

Aaron Stephens’ career in public policy was destined from the beginning.

Remembered in East Lansing for helping guide the city through the COVID-19 pandemic as a 24-year-old mayor, Stephens showed political prowess at an even younger age. 

His mother recently shared a story with him about Stephens being 5 or 6 years old and fighting against the corrupt Pokémon card trading at his elementary school. 

Students would trade cards on the bus or during lunch, when there was no adult supervision. The bigger kids would take advantage of others, Stephens said, trading “legendary whatever-the-heck” cards for not very good cards. 

“I saw that and I knew that was wrong,” Stephens said. “Apparently, I asked the principal if there could be, basically a regulatory agency in our elementary school. I did this in crayon, by the way, but like a regulatory agency on making sure the trades were not being taken advantage of. I was basically trying to create the SEC but for Pokémon cards.”

Not getting the answer he wanted from his principal, Stephens sat in her office for the full school day, protesting this Pokémon injustice, until his mom picked him up at the end of the day. 

Stephens’ influence for change has come a long way since his Pokémon protest. He stepped down from his post as mayor in 2021 to pursue a masters degree in public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School for Public Policy, a degree he has since earned. 

Stephens “loved every minute” of his time at Harvard.

“It was just a bunch of political policy nerds that all wanted to help the world,” Stephens said. “You’d walk into a room and be like, ‘You know what would be great? If we solved the tax code today,’ and then you’d have like an eight-hour discussion about every little minute detail. It was like heaven for policy nerds.”

Stephens found many mentors and gained the respect of some of the country’s most notable political figures while at Harvard, including former NAACP President Cornell Brooks and former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick.

Stephens assisted Patrick in teaching a class on running for office for a semester. The class had 100 students and four course assistants. 

“He’s extremely diligent,” Patrick said when asked about Stephens’ defining qualities. “He’s a great listener, which is something I value and respect. And he has a real servant leadership spirit. I love that, because the course was about how important it is that people who were interested in running for office put doing the job above just having the job. And he understood that.”

The class was structured around a lot of small group work with exercises, simulations and guest speakers. Patrick said Stephens brought a good perspective to this class, having served in public life.

“He really paid close attention to the students,” Patrick said. “He was very sensitive to their feedback and to their needs and whether they were getting the points and who needed a little extra guidance.”

Stephens hopes one day to teach a similar course at Michigan State University. 

“I love the degree I got here at Michigan State, but I feel like sometimes the practical skills of being in politics are sometimes lost in the more theoretical classes,” Stephens said. “It was really fun to help teach a very hands on, this is why you run, these are the things you have to consider when you’re doing it and this is how to do it.” 

From advocate to Council member to policy wonk: Aaron Stephens’ political evolution. 

Growing up, Stephens was constantly surrounded by political debate. His father is a republican and his mother a democrat, so as a child, he frequently was asked to be the “tie-breaker” in their political debates. 

“In order to break these debates, I had to know a bunch of stuff about politics,” Stephens said. 

In high school, Stephens continued this research on politics and got involved with the suicide and drug crisis at his Oakland high school. He saw classmates overdosing in his school and no action being taken by the district. 

“I started doing a decent amount of research and a lot of it came from the suicide stuff and the drug ODs,” Stephens said. “Because it was really screwed up and the school district was just doing nothing about it, and I couldn’t understand why.” 

Stephens continued his fight for public policy at Michigan State, where he got involved with the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign and fell in love with the grassroots side of politics. 

“I was just like, ‘Okay, there’s a community of people who are down to do this work and they’re down to not get paid for it,’ even though they should get paid, but they were down to do that and it just felt like a movement,” Stephens said. “I think I was hooked from that moment on.” 

Stephens was elected to serve on the East Lansing City Council as a student in 2017, aiming to bridge the gap between campus and the city. The next year, he graduated from Michigan State with a degree in political science and government. 

“I think the first thing that I voted on and the first amendment I made was the amount of free parking that students got on the streets,” Stephens said. “Obviously, from a student perspective, I knew that people were worried about getting a ticket, which means they would drive drunk, like, that’s how it is….This was an issue and people were doing things that were unsafe just to avoid a $35 ticket, so we should just maybe consider how important a $35 ticket is.”

Stephens utilized his student perspective in order to help the East Lansing community understand each other and grow. 

Shanna Draheim, who served on council with Stephens, applauds the work he did as a student.

“Aaron was, I think, our youngest ever elected representative, and that brought a perspective on a lot of issues for students and young adults that we hadn’t had yet,” Draheim said. “And I think that changes a lot of our thinking about how we think about downtown and how we think about housing.” 

During the July 14, 2020 council meeting, Mayor Ruth Beier and Councilmember Mark Meadows both resigned, catapulting 24-year-old Mayor Pro Tem Stephens to the top of the city’s elected ranks. 

In the midst of an unprecedented global pandemic and calls for significant police reform, Stephens had to navigate this new role. 

“I basically immediately quit my job,” Stephens said. “And, unlike many people that end up in these positions of power, I did not have a retirement account and/or a very large savings to fall back on. So I did what I could for a little while, but it was full-time work, being mayor at that time was very much full-time, it was working nearly 9 a.m. to 9 p.m.” 

Being paid only about $10,000 annually for his work as mayor, Stephens needed to find a way to pay rent. He became mayor by day and stock boy by night.

“I needed to figure out how to pay for life things, like rent, groceries, other things,” Stephens said. “So I, kind of secretly, got a job stocking shelves overnight at the South Lansing Meijer. I never told anybody there who I was or anything else, but that’s how I paid rent when I was mayor.”

Draheim reflected on the impact Stephens had on the city of East Lansing, saying that his “energy and passion” were some of his defining qualities as a leader.

“He just would talk to people about an issue, get very passionate, want to find the right solution, and was pretty tireless when he was committed to doing something,” Draheim said.

Reflecting on his time as mayor, Stephens said he learned that “you can always talk with people.”

“During COVID, I had to work with fraternities,” Stephens said. “I would be going from a funeral of a mother of three to talking to a fraternity about how they really wanted to have a party, and that’s a difficult mental game to play. However, it’s important to understand that everybody’s perspective is valuable to them, rational to them, and if you treat it like that, you can probably get a decent amount of stuff done. I try to carry that out in everything I do.”

Stephens is grateful for his time as mayor. Through sleepless nights and long hours, he always believed the work he was doing was important and he was in the right place.

“I don’t know whether it was fate or divine intervention, but I was there and I needed to do the best job that I could possibly do,” Stephens said. 

Now back in East Lansing, Stephens has no plans to slow down in his advocacy and progressive policy work. He currently works at the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, specifically working on banning members of Congress from trading and holding stock and antitrust issues. 

He and his fiancé returned to East Lansing because it’s home.

“The main things I would say brought us back is obviously family being here, we want to start our life here and we want to be around our loved ones,” Stephens said. 

A lot of his national advocacy bleeds into state policy, so Stephens plans on getting involved at the local level as well, reaching out to nonprofit organizations and trying to help where he will be the most beneficial.

“The local stuff is just always going to be so much more real and so much more impactful,” Stephens said. “So I’m going to be as involved as I can, as involved as the city will let me. Unfortunately, you’re not getting rid of me too soon.”