How it feels to be the Youngest Congressional Candidate in the United?States.

This past Saturday I gave a speech to a capacity crowd in Centre County. After the speech, a man approached me and said, "You're twenty-four, but you're older than me and I'm seventy-five." Before this point, I hadn't thought much about my age. But it's true, I'm young, in fact, I'm the youngest person in the country running for Congress. Shouldn't I be raising hell and making the mistakes common to a man in his twenties? If you stick around to hear my story, you'll quickly realize why I'd prefer to knock doors.

Prominent politicians like Nancy Pelosi, Mitt Romney, Hillary Clinton, and George W. Bush grew up in a culture of political involvement. To my knowledge, growing up with a politically active family is the most common route to a political career. However, that is not my story.

I grew up in central Pennsylvania, a twelfth-generation Womer to do so. My father is a construction worker, who has not voted since George W. Bush was President. Politics was not part of my upbringing in any manner. However, I did attend State College Area School District. A school system largely populated with the children of intellectuals from nearby Penn State University. As I have learned, the children of, and intellectuals themselves, are generally very politically involved. So my first real exposure to politics was through the regurgitated stylings of my much more affluent peers. As I heard their inherited liberal views, I reflexively rejected them. After all, this privileged bunch were the ones who made it clear my whole life that I was not one of them.

While I would continue to get a rise out of them by dissenting, I never formed my own political identity. In fact, I lazily dismissed politics as the toiling of the immaterial. I believed that change would need to be in spite of government, not as an instrument of it.

I began to form my political identity as I started working. During my high school years, I discovered that I could cheat the attendance system, and skip class without consequences. I used this newfound freedom to do freelance construction work off of Craigslist. After the many times I had seen my father struggle financially, I figured it'd be better to ease the burden than to waste my time in school.

After high school, I began working construction under my father and delivering pizzas at Domino's at night. As I met my father's coworkers, and saw they lived lives of struggle as well, I began to see my political identity shape around the plight of the working man. I decided to attend college accepting a football scholarship. I majored in secondary education because I thought the coursework would be easy, and I could serve people as a teacher. As I studied education, my belief that government was useless began to dissipate. I learned that the discrimination in education, and the disparities that persisted are a direct reflection of the ability of our government to be used as an instrument of injustice. Additionally, I learned the remedy for such injustice must also fall under the instrument of government.

This awakening stirred a desire to study why the region I grew up in was subjugated. As I furthered my education, I shifted my focus to psychology and political science. I wanted to understand people, and I wanted to understand our government. In this course, I found that there were specific acts of Congress that led to the diminished fortunes of regions like mine. I learned that NAFTA and China's addition to the WTO sent manufacturing jobs out of our region, I learned that the social safety net programs promised to the poor of Appalachia were cut in 1996, and I learned that our political system had been seized upon by corporate influence.

As I thought about politics, I realized that our system was broken, but very few were aware of who to blame. I realized further, that despite definitive evidence of how harmful past legislation was, most political discussions in my time focused on nonsense. The leading stories on cable news were about whether Donald Trump had relations with a porn star, or about if John Fetterman was dressed appropriately for the Senate. Politics had devolved into "pro-this" and "anti-that".

Once I understood that there was nary a discussion of substance, I set out to change it. I started writing and publishing articles about politics as I saw it. Free from generalizations and aspersions, focusing on data and substance. I still had yet to find where I fit into politics. Was I a Republican or a Democrat? My white working-class peers certainly gravitated toward the Republican party. While the Democratic Party seemed to pervade an air of snobbery, especially when you have someone like Hillary Clinton saying she'd, "put coal out of business". A statement which strikes a particular chord with me, whose family toiled in the mines, and the absence of such work destroyed the community I live in. Both parties rhetorically supported the working class, but who was telling the truth? I began to dig in.

What I found through extensive research was quite simple. Since Theodore Roosevelt walked out of the Republican convention in 1912, the Republican Party was at its core the party of the rich. Conversely, the Democratic Party for nearly the entire 20th century was an advocate for the working class. This distinction is unmistakable and definitive. It didn't matter if the topic was trade, worker's rights, environmental, educational, etc. The Democrats served the people, and the Republicans served the elites. What I believe confused this distinction in my day was the Presidency of Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton rose to prominence as a "third-way" Democrat. Which the country would eventually learn was a repackaged version of the socially liberal, economically conservative Rockefeller Republicans. President Clinton, over the loud dissent of his own Congressional coalition, would go on to sign NAFTA and cuts to welfare into law despite his own party voting resoundingly against them. This change, along with the Republican Party shifting towards social conservatism at the same time under Newt Gingrich saw a peculiar politik arise. The socially liberal upper crust existing in our nation's suburbs would become the base of the Democratic party, with the Democrats eschewing its former working-class base out of the party. While the Republican Party would become an alliance of the socially conservative working class and the financially motivated ultra-rich.

It was under this cloud that I saw my fit. I am a Democrat, but I reject the third-way, and I reject neoliberal economics. I am a Democrat in the classic sense, supported by my community, supported by labor, and I am hell-bent on reviving that part of the Democratic Party. This is because as a consequence of the aforementioned realignment, regions like mine, and its parallels in West Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana have seen an utter destruction of our way of life. In the modern era, folks like me must do the nearly impossible to overcome our circumstances. We must avoid the depression and suicidal ideation that clouds our communities. We must reject the opioids that are given out like candy to ease our woes. And finally, the most troubling, we must leave our region to find success.

I'm not interested in any of those outcomes. I was well-positioned to be the exception to these outcomes too, as a law student on a full ride at Penn State, I could have been one of the privileged few to find financial success in a region largely devoid of it. However, I am also not interested in finding financial success, just to watch my fellow man suffer from my ivory tower. It is under these circumstances that I, as a twenty-four-year-old man felt it necessary to run for Congress.

The path thus far hasn't been easy, but it has been rewarding. I know as a Democratic candidate in a Congressional District that overwhelmingly supported President Trump, that the race isn't going to be easy. It is also uneasy walking into a room full of fellow Democrats and saying, "The party has left me behind." But I do it, and I will continue to do it because before I go to bed at night, and when I rise in the morning, I have to look in the mirror and answer to my younger self. A child who suffered immensely, and deserved more from his government. I have to dwell on the fact that right now, there are thousands of children who are growing up in the circumstances I did, feeling like they have no one advocating for them.