3 Feisty Candidates Who Proudly Defend the Working and Middle Class

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http://www.alternet.org/election-2014/3-feisty-candidates-who-proudly-defend-working-and-middle-class


Maine Democrat Shenna Bellows is running for the U.S. Senate.

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Daylin Leach

In politics, campaigns romanticize candidates. But there’s little to romanticize about growing up poor. In Daylin Leach’s case, his dad left when he was a toddler and never paid child support. “I lived with my mother in small apartments” in north Philadelphia, Leach said, until his mother had to quit her job to take care of her ailing mother. “We had no income. We were on welfare. I was put into a series of foster homes. Then we [he and his mom] reconciled.”

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Troy Jackson

Maine’s Senate Democratic Leader, Troy Jackson, would never make that mistake. He’s a logger from a small town near the Canadian border who got involved in politics in 1998 when he and 14 other men blocked border crossings to try to stop Canadian loggers from working for American landowners—who could pay them less because of the currency exchange rate and fact that the Canadians have national health care.

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Shenna Bellows

Jackson is not the only Mainer running on a working-class platform. In the Senate race, Shenna Bellows is facing the 18-year Republican incumbent, Susan Collins. Bellows is best-known as the former executive director of the American Civil Liberties Association of Maine who helped lead the successful same-sex marriage campaign in 2012. But her campaign has been marked by decisions that set her apart from other Democrats, such as rejecting donations from oil and gas interests because of climate change, or from banks that led to the 2008 recession—because, she says, those industries hurt Mainers.

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