Lancaster Online, October 21, 2018: Meet Jess King: A progressive Mennonite running to represent Lancaster County in Congress
There’s a chill in the air at the Stewartstown Fall Festival as Jess King stands near a children’s bounce-house and hands out the vibrant blue campaign yard signs that have seemingly spread like wildfire across Lancaster and York counties.
Two miles from the Maryland border in southern York County, this is some of the most overwhelmingly Republican territory of the solidly red 11th Congressional District.
Her message is focused intensely on her beliefs that the Republican-passed tax cuts are a form of failed trickle-down economics, that the country inevitably needs to move toward a national health care system and that Washington politicians are bought and paid for by wealthy corporations.
In facing Smucker on Nov. 6, King is a first-time candidate looking to unseat a conservative incumbent in an area known to re-elect its Republican congressmen for decades on end. King’s priorities echo many of the policies made popular by U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent and self-proclaimed Democratic Socialist, during his run for president in 2016.
Sanders hit on all these topics when he gave King a coveted endorsement and campaign rally with 2,000 of their supporters in Lancaster’s Musser Park last May.
As a congresswoman — and the first woman ever to represent Lancaster in Washington, D.C. — King says she’d like to sit on the Subcommittee on Regulatory Reform, Commercial and Antitrust Law within the Judiciary Committee. She says she’d also have her sights on the Small Business Committee as well as the Education and Workforce Committee — the latter being one of three committees that Smucker sits on as a freshman member of Congress.
Many of her fellow Democratic candidates this year are running primarily as a check against Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress. Their campaign speeches are anchored with harsh criticisms of the president’s political agenda and personal behavior, from his threats to the Justice Department to his treatment of women.
But King rarely talks about the controversial commander in chief. His name didn’t come up once in her Oct. 8 debate with Smucker, something she calls “amazing” in an interview.
Smucker has lately taken aim at King’s more progressive tendencies.
“She’s not a Blue Dog Democrat. She’s not even a centrist Democrat,” he says in an interview. “She is part of the Democrat-Socialist part of the Democrat Party. It’s a very different candidate. She makes Christina Hartman look like a conservative.”
King, for her part, has not claimed to be running as a Democratic-Socialist, as Sanders has done.
She’s also getting no support from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which offered financial and organizing backing to Hartman when the district had a much smaller GOP edge.
