Sharon McMahon Did Not Plan to Be America’s Government Teacher

In September 2020, Sharon McMahon, a public-school teacher turned yarn entrepreneur and portrait photographer from Duluth, Minn., was nursing her husband through a recent kidney transplant, looking after her four school-age children, watching the election campaign with mounting dismay and, as she puts it, “just riding out COVID like everybody else was.” Weary of people bloviating online about stuff they didn’t understand, she posted a short video explaining the Electoral College using an enamel bucket, a wooden box, a mug, a fake branch, and her mildly zany personality. “Let me know,” she said, “if you want me to make more videos like this.”  

People did. Four years later, McMahon, 47, who now bills herself as America’s Government Teacher, has parlayed her ability to convey basic civics lessons in a nonpartisan manner into a mini-media empire with a podcast Here’s Where It Gets Interesting, an Instagram account SharonSaysSo with 1.1 million followers, a book club with a waiting list to join, a newsletter The Preamble, and a new book The Small and Mighty, which is a series of vignettes of non-famous people who affected history. She interviewed both Kamala Harris (in March, before she became the nominee) and Tim Walz (in August, after he became Harris’ VP pick). When people complained that she hadn’t interviewed Republican nominees, her loyal fans, who call themselves the Governerds, chimed in that she had requested interviews but hadn’t heard back—and many of them tagged vice presidential nominee J.D. Vance in their replies. 

McMahon’s content offers no inside information or breaking news. She says nothing any mildly motivated voter couldn’t find on Wikipedia, or in a government textbook. But there’s something reassuring and refreshing about her midwestern earnestness, her crisp grasp of the subject matter, and the fact that it’s not easy to tell who she’d vote for. “I decided, rather than arguing with people who were confidently wrong on the internet, that I would just start making some very short explainer nonpartisan videos,” she says. “Not telling you who to vote for, not telling you why this candidate was better than that candidate, but helping you obtain the information you needed to be able to make an educated decision for yourself.” One popular recent post compared the economic plans from the Trump and Harris teams; another is a blow-by-blow dismantling of the saying that “the U.S. is a republic, not a democracy.”  

The Small and Mighty tells the stories of key but unsung players in pivotal moments of American history, such as Gouverneur Morris, Alexander Hamilton’s best friend who wrote the preamble to the U.S. Constitution; Septima Clark, a Black teacher who helped found Citizenship Schools, which were instrumental in enabling Black people to vote, and whose students included Rosa Parks; and Julius Rosenwald, a part owner of Sears, Roebuck and Co., whose money built thousands of schools for Black students. Each chapter makes the case that many people have made an impact using whatever resources they had on hand. It’s hard not to imagine that’s the category McMahon would love to be in.

In a media landscape that is turning away from institutions and toward more relatable, personal sources of information, McMahon is a small bright spot. She’s not interested in Joe Rogan-sized audiences or Mr. Beast-style spectacles. She’s not in it to stir stuff up, like Elon Musk seems to be. She’s quite happy to just be the locus where common sense lives. And she likes the mainstream media. It was local radio interviews that first introduced her to wider audiences. “I don't have that kind of contempt for the legacy media institutions in the way some Americans do,” she says. “I think they perform an incredibly important service that if legacy media went away, we would all be much worse off.”

But she’s found a niche in the current media ecosystem and worked it. Karen Kane, a legal assistant who lives near Seattle, discovered McMahon during the chaos after the 2020 election. “I think Instagram just decided to feed me some Sharon, because I had probably been overusing the words ‘misinformation’ or ‘disinformation,’” she says. “I could tell pretty quickly that she's accurate and factual and unbiased.” McMahon, for example, can write an admiring tribute to President Jimmy Carter one month and speak at the George W. Bush Presidential Center the next. 

Kane appreciated how efficiently McMahon distilled the cascades of information on the internet into something comprehensible. She’s now an avid follower, a subscriber to McMahon’s Substack, and a member of her book club, which has read such books as Bryan Stevenson’s Just Mercy and Tara Westover’s Educated. Though she had been a political-science major at university, Kane, 55, says she had checked out of political news for several years. McMahon got her reengaged. She now watches Rachel Maddow and has three Kamala Harris T-shirts. 

For some, McMahon offers a beacon in the new media environment of noise and unclear motives. “We’re looking for people we can trust—not even people with whom we agree on everything, but people we believe are telling us the truth,” says Shauna Niequist, 48, author of the New York Times bestseller Present Over Perfect and, like this reporter, a onetime guest on McMahon’s podcast. “I believe McMahon is telling us the truth and it’s like water in the desert.” 

It’s all quite a lot of responsibility for a person who less than five years ago told a local magazine her dream was to launch a photography course and eventually a career speaking at photography conferences. But McMahon comes from a family experienced at taking on daunting challenges. Her biological father left her mother—and two daughters under 3—for another woman while the family was stationed in Germany. (Asked if she is in touch with her biological dad, McMahon says they are Facebook friends.) Her mother, Julie, after making her way back to the States, agreed to marry her second husband before she even met him, although they had exchanged many letters, and had another daughter. For four years she homeschooled McMahon and her sisters. And in 2020, she offered to donate one of her kidneys to a stranger, in order to set off a donation chain that provided McMahon’s husband Chris with another stranger’s kidney.

While McMahon is a newbie to media, she’s no patsy. She pretty quickly realized she’d need some help getting the word out and hired a PR company before she started her podcast to help her get guests as she launched. She leaned into her teacher background and Minnesota roots to score the Walz interview, which was only four questions—all softballs—but done on the fly as Walz rushed between events. She managed to get Harris to talk about Israel and why pro-life voters might consider voting for her, and found her prepared and serious. Trolls on McMahon’s social media find they are no match for a woman who cut her teeth on ninth graders; she knows how to judiciously ignore some and publicly scold others without shaming them. 

Her fans tend to be moderates, both politically and in temperament. McMahon says the people who recognize her are usually women, about 35-ish and very polite. “Most of them are like, ‘I'm so sorry. I don't want to bother you. I can see you're having dinner. I just want to say, keep up the good work,’” she says. Online they’re a little more opinionated. “They care a lot about the world and about making the world a better place,” says McMahon, “and they really dislike the direction the things are headed, in terms of the amount of rancor and vitriol.”

Judging by the comments on her social media, a lot of McMahon’s fans are active Christians, as is McMahon. And a good deal of them hold conservative views. But they’re not entirely comfortable with either political party. “Many of the women in my life who were raised in conservative Christian homes were told over the years by their pastors and their parents that the Republican Party most closely aligned with Christian values,” says Niequist, who lives in New York City. “In recent years, they’ve observed that’s no longer true, if it ever was, and that has caused such profound disillusionment. Those women are now looking beyond their pastors or their parents for wisdom about politics, and they’re looking to her.”

It’s not that McMahon does not have strong opinions. She has released bromides that call for more gun control, less gerrymandering, more than two political parties, and a strengthening of voting rights. Her book opens with a brisk dismissal of the idea that the Civil War was about states’ rights, or anything other than slavery. She doesn’t think either campaign is doing a very good job of presenting an inspiring vision of where they’re going to most of the moderates who listen to her. “People here in the middle are not responding to Make America Great Again,” she says. “Nor are they particularly aligned with We're Not Going Back because they know that it’s a dig at Make America Great Again.” 

And she’s not afraid to mobilize the Governerds to solve a problem. She regularly requests money for various causes and has so far raised more than $10 million. Her biggest donations make clear her priorities: she has directed $2 million to teachers who apply for grants to buy school supplies; $2 million to Undue Medical Debt, which the organization says led to more than $300 million in erased debt; and a million to chef José Andrés’ World Central Kitchen.

McMahon professes to be as surprised as anyone to find herself as popular as she is. “I didn't have any grand designs. There was no master plan. There was no business plan. There was no ‘Here's what I'm going to do in five years,’” she says. (After more than a decade teaching, she can’t seem to shake the habit of repeating the same idea in different words.) “I never thought to myself, this is going to grow into something enormous. I just thought, maybe this will help the, you know, 150 people that I'm friends with on Facebook.”

But she has thought about her legacy, especially the one online. “I am operating under the assumption that someday people will be able to access your private correspondence, that someday you will be able to go to Facebook and file a historic records request,” she says. “I want to be the kind of person that my descendants one day, when they Google my name, read information about me, watch interviews that I have done, listen to my podcast, and hear my voice, will be proud of who I am.”