DAY FIFTY-SEVEN - BEN McADAMS

Oct 25

Day Fifty-seven | Ben McAdams | UT-04
798 Sawbuck Patriots | $8736 pledged today | $538,505 donated overall

Team:

Whan you are done making today's contribution, you can have fun with this interactive electoral college map from the creative and smart folks at 538. But DO NOT CLICK THAT LINK before you make your donation, OK? We have an understanding about our mutual priorities, yes? Thanks.

THE SITUATION: Utah. (Waitaminnit, Alex – you told me WINNABLE races only. There are winnable D seats in Utah?) There is one; thanks for asking.

Utah’s fourth (yes, the fightin’ fourth) has had three representatives in the eight years it’s been in existence (Utah expanded after the 2010 census, and won a fourth seat in Congress) – with Ds and Rs representing the district for two terms each. The district is in Salt Lake City and Salt Lake County, and pieces of other nearby counties. It’s conservative, sure – but it’s not zanily so. Trump wound up with under forty percent of the vote in ’16, with Clinton and a third-party independent taking over sixty percent of the vote. However, it is indeed the most Republican-leaning district in the COUNTRY to be currently represented by a Democrat.

THE OPPOSITION: Burgess Owens played ten seasons in the NFL for the New York Jets and the Oakland Raiders. Owens had a successful football career. As a college athlete, he helped desegregate the game – he was the third Black athlete to play at the University of Miami, and was named a First-Team All-American defensive back. In the pros, he was a reliable and sturdy player, and won a NFL championship in 1980 with the Raiders.

His post-football career was somewhat less storied. He and his brother ran a business that eventually failed; Owens declared bankruptcy as a result. By his own admission, he wasn’t doing so great after that, working as a security guard and cleaning chimneys in Brooklyn, and then selling software in Philadelphia. But in 2012, he moved to Utah and turned his life around. He founded and ran a group called Second Chance 4 Youth, which helps younger people who have had interactions with the criminal justice system.

In recent years, he’s been a frequent commentator on Fox News, frequently talking about his conversion from liberal views to conservative ones. He’s been critical of football players kneeling, has said that the Democratic party is run by Marxists and socialists who hate the country, has appeared on a QAnon-supporting YouTube show (Owens: "I didn't know it was that kind of a show!"), and so on… Oh, and he was a speaker at the gloriously authentic and inclusive and not-at-all-staged-by-Leni-Riefenstahl-and-Roger-Ailes'-ghost 2020 Republican National Convention. (THE BESSSSSST … IS YEAAAAAAAAAT … TO COMMMMMMMMMMMME!) And he’s written (with at least twelve plagarized passages) two books: “Liberalism or How to Turn Good Men into Whiners, Weenies and Wimps” and “Why I Stand: From Freedom to the Killing Fields of Socialism.”

Super.

OUR CANDIDATE: Two-term Salt Lake County Mayor Ben McAdams, who also served in the Utah State Senate, has represented this district for the past two years. He graduated from the University of Utah, and has a JD with honors from Columbia Law, where, in his spare time, he served on the Columbia Human Rights Law Review. He worked in a couple law firms before taking a job as advisor to the Mayor of Salt Lake City.

As a Mayor himself, he worked on thorny homelessness issues, proposed targeted taxes to support Zoos, Arts and Parks (yes, he called it the ZAP Tax!), and helped unincorporated areas better chart their own destinies. In the Utah Senate, he wrote a bill banning housing and employment discrimination against LGBTQ+ Utahns; it failed on a party-line vote.

He ran for and won his seat in Congress in 2018 over Mia Love, the two-term Utah Congresswoman, in the most expensive House campaign in Utah history. The election wasn’t finally decided until November 20. Despite being the only D in the Utah congressional delegation, he’s got the highest approval rating of his states’ representatives. He understands the C-19 pandemic on quite a personal level; in March, McAdams announced that he had tested positive for the coronavirus – one of sixteen members of the House who were so diagnosed. (He recovered fully.)

And while he votes with the Blue Dog Democrats (the moderate D caucus in Congress) and hasn’t been a fan of Speaker Pelosi continuing as Speaker, he’s head-and-shoulders superior on mainstream D issues to his opponent. This is another couldn’t-be-tighter race; McAdams is leading, but only by a razor’s edge. However, THE MATH SAYS HE CAN WIN.

Sawbuck Patriots, it's go time: click HERE to send $10 (or more!) to support Ben's campaign. Our collective effort will invest $8736 today. (And NOW you can go play with the cool map from 538.)

Thank you!

- Alex / www.sawbuckpatriots.com

Alex Clemens

DAY FIFTY-SEVEN - BEN McADAMS

Sawbuck Patriots, it's go time: click HERE to send $10 (or more!) to support Ben's campaign. Our collective effort will invest $8736 today. (And NOW you can go play with the cool map from 538.)

DAY FIFTY-EIGHT - ABIGAIL SPANBERGER

DAY FIFTY-SIX - TJ COX

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