DAY FORTY-TWO - JON HOADLEY

Oct 10

Day Forty-two | Jon Hoadley | MI-06
782 Sawbuck Patriots | $8426 pledged today | $392,182 donated overall

Team:

THE SITUATION: MI-06. Kalamazoo. (Say it with me - out loud - Kalamazoo! OK. Your day is ALREADY better than it was just seconds ago, because mouths LOVE saying that word.) The fighting sixth has got some of those pivot counties in it - those counties that voted for Obama twice, but then Trump. It's a little bit +R, but not wildly so - and less +R than it has been in recent years.

Kalamazoo.

THE COMPETITION: Fred Upton. Big Fred has been in Congress since 1987. (Do the math - you'll need all your fingers and toes, and some more fingers/toes of a trusted friend to count that high.) Upton is in his seventeenth term, and on his NINTH President. He’s an experienced hand in Congress, and he tends to stay out of the headlines.

But one can find his voting record. (I looked.) He voted against the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and has voted for its repeal like 60+ times, as some of those Rs tend to do. But that's not all: he’s been so great on environmental issues that back in 2011, the LA Times wrote that Upton represented “one of the biggest threats TO Planet Earth ON Planet Earth.”

(Narrator voice: "Sick burn, LA Times. Sick burn.")

To his credit, he’s voted in a marginally acceptable way on gun laws. To his detriment, he’s voted with Orange Julius about 85% of the time. And he wrote the Video Game Decency Act, which was so well-crafted that it was never even considered for a vote, because he couldn't get his own party to put it forward.

Leadership, ladies and gentlemen. That's leadership.

OUR CANDIDATE: Jon Hoadley is a Michigan state representative from Kalamazoo. (Which, again, is indisputably one of the most fun American city names to say. And I invite you to say it out loud, again.) He's a solid Dem, one of the nation's key Red-to-Blue flip targets, and according to a guy I know who knows him personally, he's a really great, earnest, solid legislator.

And also, of note, Jon Hoadley is gay. And while this doesn’t matter, and shouldn’t be an issue, it is an issue, because of some bullshit. Coordinated attacks are being run in Michigan against Hoadley, falsely calling him, amongst other things, a pedophile, which is bullshit. And let me be explicit about the quantitative level of bullshit here - the LGBTQ Victory Fund, which has endorsed 310 out candidates for office this year, has said THIS race is THE MOST homophobic race IN THE NATION. (You've gotta be running a pretty damn homophobic race to win THAT particular award in the USA in 2020, no doubt.)

I’m not gonna get into the details, because I’ve already said “bullshit” a bunch of times, and I don’t want to make your coffee curdle with the absurd, insulting details of the negative campaign against Hoadley's integrity. (Which, for the record, are utter bullshit.) Jon Hoadley’s platform focuses on the environment, access to healthcare, civil rights, racial equity, and inclusion, and Upton and the QAnon conspiracy and Pence and the foolishly terrified people who are still frightened of The Gays and Their Agenda can perhaps take their utter bullshit back to a past century where that was relevant, thankyouverymuch.

(I apologize. Sorry. I'm perhaps a bit exercised with all the stupid homophobia. Namaste, and I'll go and do my breathing exercises now.)

Jon Hoadley has been running an uphill battle since he announced. Upton has been raising a lot of money from a lot of special interests for a long time, and he knows where the big dollars are. He’s led in the polls for most of the campaign, as well. A month ago, when I was considering folks for inclusion in Sawbuck Patriots, I looked at MI-06 and discounted Hoadley’s chances of pulling this off.

However, I was wrong to have done so. And to those folks who kept tugging my sleeve about his campaign - you were right. Jon's campaign is overperforming. He’s fundraised like a champ. His polling numbers have consistently increased, day by day, and Hoadley is now within the polling margin of error, or better, depending what you look at. He can take this race over the finish line in first place.

Jon's not accepting corporate PAC money (and indeed, several corporate PACs are indeed working on those coordinated attacks mentioned above), Biden is on track to beat Trump in this district, the horrifying Whitmer domestic terrorism kidnapping story is motivating reasonable Michigan Republicans to do what's right, and overall, THE MATH SAYS JON CAN WIN.

Sawbuck Patriots, it's go time: click HERE
to send $10 (or more!) to Jon's campaign. Our collective effort will invest $8426 today.

Thank you!

- Alex / www.sawbuckpatriots.com

Alex Clemens

DAY FORTY-TWO - JON HOADLEY

Sawbuck Patriots, it's go time: click HERE to send $10 (or more!) to Jon's campaign. Our collective effort will invest $8426 today.

DAY FORTY-THREE - DR. BARBARA BOLLIER

DAY FORTY-ONE - ALYSE GALVIN

Join us - click HERE

Sawbuck Patriots, it's go time: click HERE
to send $10 (or more!) to Jon's campaign. Our collective effort will invest $8426 today.