Chesterton Tribune

 

 

Democrat Ryan Farrar to run for Visclosky's open seat

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Democrat Ryan Farrar is scheduled to make an official announcement on Friday, Dec. 20, that he will run for the open 1st District seat in the U.S. House of Representatives.

The long-time incumbent, U.S. Rep. Pete Visclosky, D-1st, is not running for re-election.

Farrar is a lifelong resident of the region whose grandfathers both brought their families to the Gary area after serving in Europe during World War II to seek work in the burgeoning steel industry. Farrar’s father also worked for three decades for U.S. Steel, which Farrar credits with ingraining within him the values, principles, and importance of labor unions.

“We love to talk about raising the minimum wage, and we should,” Farrar said. “But strengthening union rights is the true key to middle-class prosperity. For starters, I intend to fight for a federal ban on ‘right-to-work’ laws, which are effectively state sanctioned union busting.”

Farrar ran for State Senate in 2018, in the heavily Republican 6th District, which includes the southern half of Lake County. “I’m very proud of what we were able to do in that campaign,” Farrar said. “We met every goal, other than winning. No Democrat in the history of the district had ever received as high a percentage of the vote, and most of our nearly 19,000 votes came from Lake County. Those results encouraged me to think bigger, and when Visclosky announced his retirement it felt like fate; as it has always been my dream to replace Pete in Congress when he retires.”

Farrar plan to campaign largely on one issue: campaign finance reform. “How can our Congress ever enact meaningful reform to issues like climate change, healthcare, or legalizing cannabis when our representatives are receiving large sums of money from fossil fuels, insurance companies, big pharma, and for-profit prisons?” he said. “Ultimately representatives represent whoever is funding them; and most receive much more in campaign donations than they earn in salary for their work in Washington. Who are they really working for? You do the math.”

 

Posted 12/18/2019

 
 
 
 

 

 

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