After her unsuccessful bids for the U.S. House and Senate, Morgan Harper joins a campaign to split apart live entertainment behemoth Ticketmaster.

In October, the American Economic Liberties Project launched “Break Up Ticketmaster.” As the nonprofit’s director of policy and advocacy, Morgan Harper is helping lead the campaign. On the first day of the effort, about 5,000 people sent online letters to the U.S. Department of Justice in support of the idea.

Less than a month later, the campaign received an unexpected boost when Taylor Swift launched her much-anticipated Eras Tour, her first since 2018. When presale access for the tour began, it became immediately clear that Ticketmaster’s system was not equipped to handle the demand. People dealt with a virtual queue that left them waiting online for hours, a laggy site rife with glitches, and, of course, high ticket prices and fees. On Nov. 17, two days after presale access began, Ticketmaster canceled the public ticket sale for the Eras Tour.

On Twitter, Ticketmaster cited the “extraordinarily high demands on ticketing systems and insufficient remaining ticket inventory” as the cause of the public on-sale cancellation. The criticism was, ahem, swift, and came from all corners. The loudest rebuke came from the songstress herself. “It’s truly amazing that 2.4 million people got tickets, but it really pisses me off that a lot of them feel like they went through several bear attacks to get them,” Swift said in a note on Instagram. For the American Economic Liberties Project, the timing was fortuitous. The number of letters submitted to DOJ increased by thousands each day following the Swift fiasco. “It took the whole campaign to another level,” Harper says. At press time, more than 51,000 letters had been sent.

This wasn’t the first time Ticketmaster landed on the organization’s radar. In January 2021, the group released a report that examined antitrust policy and enforcement during the Obama administration. Harper says the report identified Live Nation Entertainment (the parent company of Live Nation and Ticketmaster) as “an example of failed antitrust enforcement.” Ticketmaster and Live Nation merged in 2010, giving the new mega company enormous influence over both ticket sales and live events promotions. And even 16 years before the merger, grunge rockers Pearl Jam filed a complaint with the Justice Department, claiming that Ticketmaster was a monopoly.

“We as an organization know Live Nation Ticketmaster to be a monopoly, or operating with monopolylike power. And now we have people who probably don’t even know what antitrust means who are saying, ‘Hey, I hate this company. I hate this monopoly,’ ” says Harper, a lawyer and a former Consumer Financial Protection Bureau official. “That is a huge opportunity to join those things: clear policy goal and prescription with general public awareness and motivation to do something about it.” (Ticketmaster did not respond to requests for comment for this story.)

Founded in 2020, the American Economic Liberties Project advocates for the enforcement of existing antitrust laws and the creation of policy that challenges the dominance of monopolies. Harper joined the organization as a consultant in the summer of 2020. She became a full-time staffer that October, six months after losing to U.S. Rep. Joyce Beatty in the Democratic primary for Ohio’s third congressional district.

The role is a good fit for Harper, who ran two political campaigns—she also unsuccessfully sought the 2022 Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate in Ohio—around progressive issues like universal health care and tuition-free college, and without the assistance of corporate PACs. She says monopolization of the economy is the most pressing issue for the country.

“A lot of the things that we end up focusing energy on, I would consider to be downstream effects of this root cause issue, which is limited financial resources going to a smaller number of people,” she says. “You’re pushing out small businesses and medium-sized businesses from being able to start, innovate, grow. Then, workers are in a worse off position to negotiate for wages and make sure that [they’re] capturing a certain portion of that economic pie.”

In January, there was a Congressional hearing about Ticketmaster and Live Nation to explore whether the merger of the companies stifled competition and harmed consumers. There’s bipartisan support for breaking up the company, something Harper says is essential if it is to succeed. The Justice Department is currently investigating the company.

“We’re kind of in wait-and-see mode to see when and if the Department of Justice files a lawsuit,” Harper says. “That would potentially be the first move to break up Live Nation Ticketmaster, which would be huge, because we haven’t seen the breakup of a monopoly in decades. And this certainly feels like one that is ripe for that kind of intervention.”

Harper is in a bit of a wait-and-see mode herself. She hasn’t ruled out running for office again, but at the moment, she is enjoying being a “somewhat calmer, private citizen.” In 2020, she founded Columbus Stand Up!, which focuses on community support and grassroots organization. In its early days, the nonprofit provided PPE, delivered food to families and offered rides to vaccine appointments. Columbus Stand Up! is currently collaborating with the Ohio Sierra Club to organize around utility price hikes.

“More than anything, I love that moment where it feels like folks believe that they have power. That’s what all of this is about to me,” Harper says. “It’s not about Morgan Harper getting elected. It’s about my hope that I can inspire people to embrace and flex their own power. And that’s the power that we have when we come together to really push for the future we want.