The Democrats Finally Have The Candidate To Beat Fred Upton-- Meet Jon Hoadley

MI-06, the southwest corner of the state, flush up against Lake Michigan in the west and Indiana in the south, has been an elusive target for Democrats. Obama beat McCain by 8 points; Romney edged Obama by a little over a point; and then along came Hillary... and Trump won 51.3% to 42.9%. She was the wrong candidate for the district, even with Trump as the opponent. There are 6 counties in this R+4 swing district-- and in the 2016 it was Bernie country. The well known narrative about primary day is that Bernie beat Hillary in every county. Kalamazoo is the bluest (and most populous) county and Bernie took it 20,146 too 12,593. Cass in the reddest (and smallest) county and Bernie took it more narrowly-- 1,683 to 1,657. But the lesser known narrative is that on that primary day, Bernie also beat Trump. Trump had 30,518 votes. Bernie had 37,191 votes. People in MI-06 knew what they wanted. It wasn't Trump and it wasn't Hillary.

Like Bernie, state Rep. Jon Hoadley puts ordinary working families first. He's an "us, not me" kind of candidate-- with a record in the legislature to prove it. His own legislative district, HD 60, is entirely within the 6th congressional district. In 2018, with the GOP boasting that they would beat him, he annihilated their candidate 26,772 (76.6%) to 8.181 (23.4%).

For the past month, Hoadley has been traveling to every corner of the district, meeting the people who live there, listening to what they are looking for from Washington and sharing his ideas about what he wants from Washington for MI-06. He's 35 and the ideas he talks about infuriates the Republicans in Washington. On his first day on the stump, he told voters in Portage that "We have people that are worried about living paycheck to paycheck right now. We saw that with the government shutdown. We know that to solve the problem about access to clean drinking water in our district is going to take significant support from both the state and federal government." The Republican response was basically the same as what they say about every single Democrat running in every single district: "He's a socialist and a protégé of Ilhan Omar." When Republicans in DC hear Hoadley talking about expanding Medicare to include dental, vision, prescription drugs, etc and to offer it to all Americans, they tell voters he wants to take away their health insurance. That's what he's up against. I asked him to share a guest post as an introduction to DWT readers and Blue America supporters. Please read it below. And if you like it, please consider contributing to his campaign by clicking on the Blue America thermometer on above.


Let's Get Serious: Reagan Era Economics Was The Biggest Scam Ever Pulled
by Jon Hoadley



There's been a story told over the past 30 years that goes something like this: if the people at the top do even better, the rest of us will be a little better off, too. The characters change, but the story remains the same: if the people with the best healthcare have even more, life saving medicine may one day be available to everyone else. If we lower taxes on billionaires and millionaires, one day we'd see our wages go up. If we keep telling our schools to fight amongst themselves, universities to do more with less, and career and technical education to make do without basic equipment, one day all of our kids would learn more.

That day isn't coming.

When we think of the massive challenges that America faces in the 21st century: healthcare and taking care of our loved ones, income inequality and economic security for our families, education and student debt, and tackling the pending global disaster that is climate change, I'm reminded that so many of these were caused by decisions made by the politicians of the past that didn't prepare us for the needs of the future. So many of those decisions were made during a period in which Ronald Reagan and conservative Republicans sold Americans a bill of goods: That low taxes and small government were the only solution.

This wasn't just an assault on taxes, this was an assault on community- the belief that we were all in this together. Some politicians, as well as some millionaires and billionaires, saw an opportunity to create a reboot of an old sitcom-- unchecked corporate power where the people at the top get to write the new rules and the old rules somehow don't apply. According to supply-side economists, many of the lessons learned after the last economic crash started to have asterisks, exceptions. Savings and Loans associations weren't exactly banks, so they received an asterisk. Housing prices couldn't possibly go down, asterisk. The tech industry and start-up culture don't really have overtime hours, asterisk.

Politicians capitalized on the crisis or crises of the moment to tell America a too-easy tale of self-reliance. Those tales degraded the underlying truth that in community we are always standing on the shoulders of those who came before us. Speaking of bootstraps and freeloaders, politicians sold an idea that people take advantage of everyone else by accepting food assistance, or medical care, or social security or unemployment. Politicians then use those falsehoods to justify cutting the social safety net-- and cutting taxes for the wealthiest Americans. The story, which never lined up with reality, produced electoral wins, more cuts, a cycle of disinvestment in our shared priorities, and avoidance of our greatest challenges that continues to today.

The reality is the economy isn't set up to let most families get ahead anymore. This failure shows up not just as the millions of families in poverty, but the millions more families who are barely making it. Low taxes left 40% of families unable to afford a $400 emergency. Small government left 78% of Americans unable to make ends meet if they missed two paychecks. It also let some of America's largest banks get a bailout and the rest of us with the bill. It is the failure caused by the take-care-of-the-people-at-the-top-first economic thinking that creates these problems, not the failure of the people working day in and day out to make ends meet.

The idea that families feel personally responsible for not being able to afford childcare despite two parents working multiple jobs and a side hustle, the idea that students must mortgage their future to earn a chance to work a job that barely pays the bills, the idea that an employer and an insurance company should have more say than a doctor in deciding if someone has access to life-saving medicine-- these are the last episodes of that doomed-to-fail reboot.

But those fictional tales and tired reboots don't have to be told tomorrow.

The bill has come due for choices made 10, 20, and 30 years ago. We need to put people and community back in the center of our debate. That means having enough love for our country to invest in the roads, rails, bridges, and broadband that benefits all of us and being honest that no one could afford these items alone. That means having enough faith in our country that educating the next generation of students will unleash decades of talent and leadership that will keep America strong and benefit all of us, even if we don't have our own children or didn't receive the same support when we were in school. That means having enough clarity in our future to say President Trump's tax scam handcuffed our ability to tackle the major challenges our country faces all while saddling our children with a growing federal deficit and debt to foreign powers for years to come. That means having enough wisdom to disregard the false conflict between unions and protecting our environment, knowing that a renewable economy will create hundreds of billions of dollars in new construction and manufacturing jobs with secure paychecks for honest people doing an honest day's work.

Putting people and community back in the center of our decisions means standing up to the wealthy few and political talking heads who have for far too long told the rest of us we have earned nothing at all. We can stop talking in sound bites about health care, and education and reducing things to the same old press releases if we choose. The experiment of the 1980s didn't work. It's time politicians of the past stop spinning fiction. Our future reality, together, can make a much better story.