People are really struggling and Washington seems to have forgotten families like mine,” Ben McAdams said of his new run for U.S. House.
Former Congressman Ben McAdams officially announced Thursday his run to return to the U.S. House of Representatives, saying he is more concerned about the direction of the nation than any time in his life and he “couldn’t sit by and do nothing.”
“People are really struggling and Washington seems to have forgotten families like mine,” McAdams said in an interview with The Salt Lake Tribune. “They’ve forgotten what real life is like.”
McAdams said he grew up in West Bountiful, raised by his mother, along with his five siblings.
“We lived paycheck to paycheck. I remember as a kid some months the power was shut off because we couldn’t pay the bills. We struggled to put food on the table,” he said. Chronic health issues in the family left them with medical debt, and it was an experience he says shaped his perspective.
Now, he says, President Donald Trump is trying to deny food assistance to low-income families and trying to strip away Affordable Care Act subsidies that make health care affordable, “I just look at this and think, if there’s something I can do about it, I need to get off the sidelines.”
McAdams served one term in Congress, from 2018 to 2020. In 2019, despite serving in a Republican-leaning House district that had voted for Trump, he voted to impeach the then-president.
“When I voted to impeach Donald Trump, I knew when I took that vote that it would probably cost me my reelection,” he said. “But it was the right thing to do, and I don’t regret casting that vote.”
“The stakes are only higher this time around,” McAdams told The Tribune. “Now we see political enemies are being prosecuted by the Department of Justice. The National Guard is being sent in to patrol the streets of our cities. More than 170 American citizens were falsely detained by [Immigrations and Customs Enforcement], not to mention the thousands of hard-working, law-abiding immigrants who are ripped from their families without an ounce of due process.”
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) Former U.S. Rep. Ben McAdams speaks during the U.S. Global Leadership Coalition discussion at Grand America Hotel in Salt Lake City on Tuesday, April 4, 2023.
McAdams said that Trump has, “in the blink of an eye … taken the Constitution and trampled all over it. And what concerns me is that Republicans in Congress are really his accomplices. And you know, to be honest, too many Democrats just aren’t doing anything to stop it.”
One challenge for McAdams will be rebuilding trust among some in his own party.
In 2022, McAdams and Salt Lake County Mayor Jenny Wilson led an effort to convince Democratic delegates not to nominate a candidate for U.S. Senate and instead throw their support behind independent candidate Evan McMullin in a challenge to Sen. Mike Lee.
The party bought into the strategy and, despite holding Lee to the lowest percentage of the vote total than any Republican since Orrin Hatch was first elected in 1976, McMullin still lost by 10 points.
McAdams said McMullin “was simply a better candidate to face Mike Lee and to oust him from office,” and the Democratic delegates agreed. McAdams recognizes that some in the party would have preferred a more traditional approach, “but for me, this was about electing somebody who could make a difference.”
McAdams becomes the second Democrat to join the race since 3rd District Judge Dianna Gibson rejected new congressional boundaries proposed by Republican lawmakers and instead chose a map submitted by the plaintiffs in a years-long lawsuit challenging the state’s U.S. House districts.
State Sen. Kathleen Riebe, D-Cottonwood Heights, announced her candidacy Wednesday morning. Both Riebe and McAdams were planning to run regardless of which district Gibson chose. However, McAdams had sent an invitation to a campaign kick-off event to his supporters last week.
The new map creates a compact district in the northern portion of Salt Lake County that heavily favors Democrats. But it is the only one of the four districts where Democrats have much hope of winning, meaning Riebe, McAdams and likely others will be competing in what could become a very crowded field.
The district includes areas McAdams knows well. He was twice elected as Salt Lake County mayor and before held a state Senate seat that included a chunk of Salt Lake City and surrounding areas.
McAdams said he welcomes the challenge and will be reminding voters of his accomplishments — pointing to his support for expanding Medicaid to provide health coverage to low-income Utahns, reforming homeless services and pushing for LGBTQ+ rights during his days as an advisor to former Salt Lake City Mayor Ralph Becker.
“People know that I stand up and I fight, but they also know that I win,” he said. “A tweet isn’t going to bring down the cost of groceries and a tweet is not going to make housing more affordable.”
McAdams said he wants to roll back Trump’s tariffs, which he calls “a sales tax on food that’s hurting American families.” He said he would not vote for a budget that doesn’t include support for families trying to pay for health care.
And he said most of his work since leaving Congress has been on affordable housing, working with cities and counties around the country to find ways to incentivize infill construction on unused government property.
Source: Utah News