By Daniel.
Joshua Collins is a truck driver, a democratic socialist, a small business owner and he’s running for congress – at 26 years old.
Collins is challenging incumbent representative Dennis Heck in the Democratic primary. Heck, an Evergreen grad, has represented Washington’s 10th congressional district since the state legislature carved out the district in 2012.
Collins says Heck has failed to represent and communicate with his district, which centers on Olympia. “I’ve been in his office over the Green New Deal, trying to get him to take the fossil fuel pledge, trying to get him to stop taking money from fossil fuel companies, and to support a radical, bold plan to actually deal with climate change on the scale that’s necessary. And he won’t even meet with someone.” said Collins.
So Collins decided to run himself.
Coming of Age in the Recession
In his words, Collins grew up “in the poorest city in the poorest county in Kansas.” At 14 he moved to Las Vegas to live with his mom, who had just established herself as a nurse. “We had one good year,” said Collins, before the housing market crashed.
“My mom was married, and they were fighting about money all the time all of a sudden. Just out of nowhere. I never had seen them fighting about that,” said Collins. “I feel like a lot of people kind of watch this stuff happened. They lost the house.”
Collins said his mom “was hard on herself” for being unable to help Collins with college. Collins got his first job at 15, and planned on joining the Air Force before complications from a car accident disqualified him and left him with a $20,000 emergency room bill.
“I tried to pay my own way through school and spent two years going part time while working full time 60-70 hours a week,” said Collins. “It ruined my way to pay for school. Every penny I needed was to get by. That was a big burden on my finances that made it so I was denied financing for a car, denied housing.”
Then Collin’s grandmother became ill while he was working at a glass factory in Vegas. He got time off approved to see her, and began the three-day drive to Virginia where she lived. “When we got halfway, I got a call from them saying I was going to be laid off if I didn’t get back to work within a couple of days,” said Collins. “Shortly after I’d already turned around they said I was still being let go. So not only did I not see my dying grandmother, I was now out of a job.”
Having spent the last of his money on gas to get halfway to Virginia and back, Collins decided to go to trucking school.
The Radicalization of Collins
Collins has been an owner-operator for the past year, meaning he owns his own truck and has some leeway to choose which shipping contracts to fulfill.
“I believe that workers should have more freedom and more say in how their workplaces run. And there’s no one in this country who kind of understands that more than someone who’s an owner-operator truck driver,” said Collins. “All the money, the wealth that I generate with my labor goes to me.” Collins says socialism means that workers control the workplace, not the government.
Although his experience running his small trucking business has informed his politics, this is not his first foray into the political arena. In high school Collins volunteered for a state senator in Nevada and worked with other students to push back on a bill that moved money from the education fund to private prisons.
“We got 1100 students to occupy the legislature, so I guess it could be considered part of the occupy movement,” said Collins. “Ultimately, we were unsuccessful, and that this was when I realized that a lot of politicians, they’re unmovable, because their donors are against what the people want.”
Collins regularly criticizes his opponent for accepting campaign contributions from the fossil fuel and finance industries. Political contribution tracker OpenSecret says Heck received more than a hundred thousand dollars each from the securities, insurance and real estate industries in the 2018 election cycle. Heck did not respond to a request for comment.
Collins has raised almost $12,000 on CrowdPac from 360 donors, with an average campaign contribution of $33 dollars. He says he was inspired by the small-donation campaigns of Bernie Sanders and New York’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
A Policy Wonk
Collins campaign may run on small donations, but he’s a man with big ideas.
He wants a $20 minimum wage by 2028 and a two-year 100% tax break for households making under 80k a year balanced against taxes on the rich “at least as high as FDR.”
In his view, school funding should be disentangled from property taxes and teachers paid substantially more. Fossil fuels should be owned and managed by the government. The federal Housing and Urban Development department should be re-empowered to build new public housing to combat homelessness. He wants Medicare for All, free college education for people of all ages, and for all medical and student loan debt to be erased.
Collins wishes Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez were more vocal about foreign policy. Collins himself wants the defense industry to be nationalized, the US to pull out of overseas bases, and for the CIA to be investigated, prosecuted and abolished. “The CIA is an unaccountable, unelected group of spies with a very dangerous agenda, who have overthrown governments and have likely assassinated politicians and political figures in our own country,” said Collins.
For the trucking industry, he wants to ease the process of automation by empowering the government to offer interest-free financing for truckers to purchase their own clean-energy trucks. “It would create the largest worker owned industry the world has ever seen.”
He compares this transition to the ongoing yellow vest movement in France, which was sparked by a fuel tax increase and the French government’s plans to move away from diesel engines. “We saw in France when they just tried to impose carbon taxes to get diesel trucks to try to transition. What that did was it screw over a lot of truck drivers, even just regular employee truck drivers,” said Collins. He wants a worker-first Green New Deal.
“My philosophy with policies is never ask for what you want. Always ask for more,” said Collins. “You always aim for more than what people think is possible. And we don’t know what is until we do it.”
Internet Prescience, IRL Presence
Like many DSA members, Joshua Collins is extremely online.
Collins cites interactions on twitter with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as directly inspiring his decision to run. “In November, I started using it to follow Alexandria, Casa Cortez – I already followed her on Instagram. “I tweeted out or twice. And both times, she retweeted me. And this took my followers from 34 – mostly spam accounts – to like 800. And from then I decided to use that for the campaign,” said Collins, whose twitter account is @Joshua4Congress. “I got that up to 8500 by just expressing my opinions and saying things that I feel like everyone kind of already agrees with. Leftist things that should be obvious.”
Collins tweets exclusively from an android smartphone that he nervously fiddled with during an interview at downtown Olympia’s Batdorf & Bronson. He’s posted 2,000 more times than his opponent, despite joining the platform two years later. Heck posts from a number of different twitter clients, which may indicate that his social media accounts are managed by his staff.
Collins has done “ask me anything” interviews on reddit under the username SocialistHiker. He’s a regular poster to the ChapoTrapHouse reddit, a subreddit for fans of the leftist Chapo Trap House podcast.
“With our generation there isn’t really isn’t that much of a divide between online stuff and real life,” said Collins. “For older folks, they don’t really expect it to be the same. And I think that also gives me the advantage over my opponent, who won’t expect how much support I have in real life. Because he feels like probably like most my support just online people show up.”
Collins is recruiting volunteers and hopes to knock on every door in the district. Interested people can sign up on joshua2020.com.
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