Powering the Democrats

How Veterans Are Powering the Democrats’ 2018 Hopes

From Staten Island to San Diego suburbs, millennials with military résumés are making GOP districts competitive.

By MICHAEL KRUSE

“Ma’am,” said the soldier in suit slacks and a collar-popped pea coat, “my name is Max Rose, and I’m running for Congress as a Democrat.”

The woman behind the glass front door in the semi-suburban neighborhood on Staten Island in this state’s Republican-leaning 11th Congressional District looked him over. She asked what he was “all about.”

“Sure, sure—here’s a little information,” he said, showing her his “walk card.” On one side was a picture of Rose smiling while sitting at a table wearing a tie. “A Healthcare Expert with Solutions,” it said. “An Economic Champion.” On the other, though, was an image of him in his military fatigues, a long, black M4 carbine assault rifle hanging off his shoulder. This side had different language: “Combat Infantry Captain in the U.S. Army,” “the courage to lead.” This was the side Rose presented to her first.

The door opened a little.

“I’m the first post-9/11 combat veteran to run for office in New York City history,” Rose said.

The door opened a little more.

“I’m a Staten Islander,” he continued. “I deployed to Afghanistan about five years ago. I was an infantry platoon leader.” He said he was a Purple Heart recipient. Bronze Star, too. “And now we’re fighting this fight,” Rose said.

The door opened all the way.

Rose, a 5-foot-6 power pack with an upbeat, shoulders-back gait, is near the forefront of a surge of a certain sort of candidate in the 2018 election cycle. Veterans who are Democrats are vying for Congress in numbers not seen in decades. With Honor, a “cross-partisan” organization that aims to “help elect principled next-generation veterans in order to solve our biggest problems and fix a Congress that is dysfunctional,” counts approximately 300 veterans who have run for Congress during this cycle—roughly half of whom chose to serve after, and in many cases because of, September 11, 2001. Although specific numbers are hard to come by, the spike is stark—“a substantial increase,” With Honor co-founder and CEO Rye Barcott told me, “from any prior cycle” in modern memory. While the perception might exist that most veterans lean Republican, some 51 percent of the veterans who are or have been 2018 candidates, based on With Honor’s tally, are actually Democrats. And some are proving to be competitive in places once considered safe GOP districts. Witness Conor Lamb’s win in western Pennsylvania earlier this month. Polling suggests former Army Ranger Jason Crow could do the same in Colorado’s 6th District in the suburbs of Denver. Backed by members of Congress like Representative Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) and organizations like VoteVets and New Politics, this roster of aspirants is a key to Democrats reclaiming control of the House of Representatives in November’s midterms, party strategists believe.

It is not a coincidence that this wave of veterans is hitting at a moment when a five-time draft-deferring president occupies the White House and toxic partisanship has ground Capitol Hill to a virtual halt. The candidates are presenting themselves both as a moral rebuke to what they see as Donald Trump’s self-promoting divisiveness and also as a practical solution to the failure of the nation’s highest legislative body to get anything done. In short, the reputation of the national institution with by far the highest approval rating, the military, is being offered as an antidote to the woes of a schismatic president and a Congress whose approval ratings have never been worse.

“They’re all people who served the country without worrying about who’s a Democrat and who’s a Republican—let’s just get the damn thing done,” longtime national Democratic strategist Joe Trippi said in an interview. “In this Washington, in this divisive, chaotic cycle, you have these people who’ve proven they can rise above party and actually accomplish a mission.”

And out on the campaign trail, many of them have versions of Max Rose’s experience with opening doors, I heard in conversations with a dozen of these kinds of candidates.

Mikie Sherrill, a former Navy pilot and federal prosecutor running in New Jersey’s Republican-leaning but open 11th District, sees it when she stops in at diners. It usually happens with older men. “I’ll go up and say, ‘Hi, my name’s Mikie Sherrill and I’m running for Congress,‘” she told me, and she’ll gauge mostly disinterest. “And I’ll say, ‘Yeah, you know, I was a Navy helicopter pilot and a federal prosecutor,’ and then I kind of start to walk away—and they go, ‘Wait a minute, wait a minute …’”

In California’s 50th District, made up mostly of San Diego suburbs and held by embattled GOP Representative Duncan Hunter, Josh Butner gets it when he introduces himself as a former Navy SEAL—who’s a Democrat. “That usually gets the conversation started,” he said. “They say something to the effect of, ‘Yeah, we need more Democrats like you.’ We need more people willing to put the country ahead of political parties. We need more folks willing to work with the other side.’”

Here in New York’s 11th, Rose is running in the most concentrated pocket of Trump Country in a very blue city. All of Staten Island and a slice of southern Brooklyn, it’s the only congressional district in the president’s hometown that voted for him. On Staten Island, voting rolls show five Democrats for every three Republicans, but its elected officials (state and local) are split in favor of the GOP. Whiter and more socially conservative than the rest of the city, Staten Island is home to firefighters, police officers, teachers and people who take the ferry to Manhattan. Five miles from the heart of the city, the people here have a chip-on-the-shoulder attitude, according to Kevin Elkins, a lifelong Staten Islander and Rose’s campaign manager, boiling down to: “Screw the system, because they screwed us.” In that way, it resembles the country as a whole—and explains why 56.9 percent of Staten Island voters picked Trump.

Rose, 31, has a handful of opponents in the Democratic primary in June, but he’s the well-funded favorite. Come November, he would face Dan Donovan, the current Republican representative, or GOP challenger Michael Grimm, the former representative who is coming off seven months in prison for tax evasion but who retains local support—if not Washington’s blessing. With endorsements from the Working Families Party, the Women’s Equality Party and NARAL Pro-Choice America, plus Moulton, retired Air Force colonel and California Representative Ted Lieu and House Minority Whip Steny Hoyer, Rose is on the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee’s “Red to Blue” list of Democrats considered to have a chance at flipping a red district. Even so, Roll Call still labels the 11th as “likely Republican.” So does University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato. And the Cook Political Report calls it a Republican “lean.”


***

Rose was born and raised in Brooklyn, the son of a medical laboratory executive and a professor of social work. He went to Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, where he wrestled briefly and was a history major with a favorite professor who specialized in the psychology of political leaders. After Wesleyan, he went to the London School of Economics, where he earned a master’s degree in philosophy and public policy. And after LSE … he enlisted in the Army. Why? I asked him this over a late steak dinner at a Staten Island tavern called Jody’s Club Forest. We were drinking Bud Light poured out of a plastic pitcher into half-pint juice glasses. He answered my question by asking another. “If not me,” he said, “who?” In April 2013, the Stryker he was riding in got blown up by an IED. The first words he says in his first campaign video: “I don’t remember the bomb going off …”

There used to be far more Max Roses in Congress. In the 1970s, according to Jeremy Teigen, a political scientist at Ramapo College in New Jersey and the author of Why Veterans Run, approximately three-quarters of the members of Congress were veterans—led by the “Greatest Generation” of World War II. But the number of veterans in Congress has been going down basically ever since. The percentage of veterans in Congress is now 19—near a historic low. This downward trend has been evident as well in other prominent political arenas. The 2012 presidential election, for instance, was the first since World War II in which neither major party nominee was a veteran. The 2016 presidential election was the second.

Whether it’s causation or correlation, many of the candidates I talked to for this story pointed to the reality that the extent of the partisanship in Washington has gotten worse as veterans on the Hill have disappeared.

Available data suggest that being a veteran in fact doesn’t help win elections. “If you think about it,” Teigen told me, “if that were true, we’d have 535 veterans on Capitol Hill. Parties would nominate no one else.” A comprehensive study of congressional races from 2000 to 2014 showed a military background has no “systematic, measurable effect,” Teigen notes in his book. Furthermore, he writes, “Democratic veterans actually do a little worse than comparable nonveteran Democrats”—a function, perhaps, of Democratic veterans seeming to run more in longer-shot districts.

But this year’s candidates say this time’s different, because so much else is so different, too.

Trump is the president, and this new generation of service members has emerged from the battlefield with deep reservations about the direction the country is heading. They might be frustrated by the (ongoing) outcomes of the conflicts of Iraq and Afghanistan, but they are not embarrassed by their service. On the contrary, they believe, it’s what distinguishes them, and what has prepared them for this moment. From the victories of Tammy Duckworth and Tulsi Gabbard in 2012 to Seth Moulton’s surprising triumph on the North Shore of Massachusetts in 2014 to his handpicked current class of endorsees—“Seth Moulton’s kind of a North Star for a lot of these guys,” said Anson Kaye, a prominent media strategist who’s working for Rose—these young veterans are hammering home their message of service above self, country above party, concluding their résumés and experiences hold special appeal for voters who have grown exasperated with scorched-earth, hyperpartisan politicking. Rose isn’t the only candidate who’s used his or her time in the service as a campaign pillar and as a cornerstone in a video pitch. Amy McGrath, a retired F-18 pilot in the Marines and a Democratic candidate in Kentucky’s 6th District, created buzz with hers last summer. Butner released one just a couple of weeks back. “Out here,” he says at the start, “there’s no time for bickering or special-interest politics. Working together is a matter of life and death.” Says Moulton in one of his own on behalf of his Serve America PAC: “For a new politics, we need to elect new leaders.”

“What we’re hearing from a lot of the candidates who are veterans who are running for office this year is that they are answering the call to continue to serve their communities in a different way because of concerns that they have—some of which include the president’s actions and all the dysfunction that they see in our nation’s capital,” said Ben Ray Lujan, the New Mexico congressman and DCCC chair.

Talking to them, I heard some altruism. I also heard no small amount of irritation.

“I am so angry at what the politicians are doing to our country up there,” said Dan McCready, 34, who’s running in North Carolina’s 9th District, held by a Republican since 1963. “The lack of courage, the lack of American values up there …”

“Our current political system—and certainly Donald Trump and what he’s doing—doesn’t really represent the country that we fought for,” Crow told me from Colorado.

Dan Feehan was in college at Georgetown on September 11. He could see the smoke coming from the Pentagon. “Because of that, I made the decision to serve,” he explained. “That certainly drove the urgency of that moment.” Now he’s running in Minnesota’s 1st, in the southern part of the state—in a bid to replace Democrat Tim Walz, who’s running for governor. “The feeling of uncertainty, the feeling of what’s going to happen next—there’s a similarity there.”

“By the very nature of what we were taught to do in the military, which is to solve problems, act quickly, build teams, engage in chaotic environments, sort out problems, understand what you can fix—I mean, that’s what we do,” said Joseph Kopser, an Army veteran running in the 21st district in Texas, which stretches from Austin to San Antonio and has been in Republican hands since 1979. “No kidding it takes veterans to step forward.”

Based on research done by the Lugar Center and by West Point scholar and New America fellow Isaiah Wilson III, there is evidence that veterans in Congress actually do act in a more bipartisan way. Barcott and fellow Marine Jake Wood wrote last fall in Time that “lawmakers who have served in the military often have a special sense of duty and an uncommon ability to reach across party lines and get things done.” Retired U.S. Senators Richard Lugar and Tom Daschle, a Republican from Indiana and a Democrat from South Dakota, respectively, expressed similar sentiments in U.S. News & World Report: “We have come to believe that one solution to the partisan crisis in national security policy is to elect to Congress more veterans committed to bipartisanship.”

McCready agrees. “I led a platoon of 65 Marines in Iraq during the surge of 2007 and 2008,” the North Carolina candidate told me. “And I had folks in my platoon from all over the country. We never cared where you came from. We never cared about who your parents were or the color of your skin. The last thing we cared about, actually, was whether you were a Republican or a Democrat. Because we all wore the same color of uniform. And that’s really what the military teaches you. It’s that we’re all on the same team, you don’t leave a person behind, and we all have a job to do that’s bigger than ourselves. That’s what’s missing right now in Washington.”

Rose, for his part, in the two days we spent together on Staten Island and in Brooklyn, was a nonpartisan turret-turner with his frank talk.

The Republican Party as a whole, he said, “has wholly abandoned the middle class and the working class,” with “this fallacy, this laughingstock, of trickle-down economics, which they have bought into yet again.”

Rose, though, chastised his own party as well—for abandoning the working class, too, and for taking for granted other segments of its traditional coalition.

“The African-American population is a great example,” he told me at Jody’s. “You raise money, you raise money, you raise money—and then you show up about 30 days prior to an election and you say, ‘Well, let’s talk about turning out the vote.’ There’s zero trust. There’s zero relationships. If anyone’s sick and tired of it, it’s many, many leaders in that community.”

Still, he said, “you’ve got to choose a side in this game, and I’m a proud Democrat. But I want Democrats to be Democrats again.” Which means? “It means that if you’re telling me you think government has a role for this country, then say it. … Be bold about it. If you think that the working class has been gypped, then say it. And tell me how you’re going to fix it.”

He ticked off his list: Massive public works initiatives like the interstate projects of the past. Twenty-first-century smart grids. A widespread national effort to address the opioid scourge—a pressing issue in Staten Island, as in so many places around the country—a la the response to the HIV and AIDS epidemic of the 1980s. Something akin to the Apollo project in the tech and health care spaces.

“And that active role for government is not just tax cuts for rich people and corporations,” Rose said. “It’s not just cutting Social Security and Medicaid and figuring out ways we can restrict legal immigration. There’s far more of a role for government. And that’s why I’m a Democrat.”

***

The night before, Rose had been at a fundraiser in Manhattan, late. He was on the ferry as the clock approached 1 a.m. I met him in the lobby of his Staten Island apartment building at 6:15. Then, in a near-zero-visibility mixture of icy rain and fat flakes of snow, we crossed the Verrazano Bridge to Brooklyn to a subway station, where he shook scores of hands and at one point helped a woman with a toddler in a stroller descend a set of stairs, and then we went to a breakfast back on Staten Island for an organization for people with disabilities, where he worked the room, from table to table. Later, he laced up his sand-tan combat boots to do a round of door-knocking in a nor’easter.

“I’m the guy that showed up in the snow. I can’t be all bad,” he said through another glass door, showing his card.

“Thank you for your service,” this woman said.

“We gotta change politics!” Rose told her. “It’s a mess in D.C.”

And now, finally, it was warm, in a house for an evening fundraiser. “Tired yet?” I asked him. He gave me a look, New York for c’mon. On tables were finger sandwiches and mixed nuts and shrimp, Heinekens and Perrier and pinot noir. On the wall was a picture of the hosts with Bill Clinton. On the shelves were books by James Carville (Had Enough?) and Ta-Nehisi Coates (We Were Eight Years in Power). A woman rang a little bell. It was time for Rose to talk. He still had on his combat boots.

“I’ve been a politician for 176 days,” Rose said.

People laughed.

“But I’ve been a soldier for eight years,” he continued. And the mood was serious again. “I led a combat outpost in Afghanistan. And when I tell people that, they imagine Fort Knox or something. It was just some sandbags, 30 U.S. soldiers, about 60 Afghan National Army soldiers, and a mission. And those soldiers came from everywhere—all across the country, gay, straight, Hispanic, African-American, white. Dreamers. Citizens. None of that mattered, though, because we had a mission to accomplish. And when my vehicle hit an IED in Afghanistan, they got to work. They called the nine-line medevac. They pulled 360-degree security. They got me out of there. I’ll owe them for the rest of my life. You know, a fascinating thing happened to me when I was medevacced to Kandahar Air Force Base. A two-star general comes up to my hospital bed, he looks down at me, and he says, ‘Son, five years ago, you’d be dead.’ And then he walks away.”

More laughter.

“You can laugh at that,” Rose said with a smile. “I was pretty shocked—that’s how generals comfort you. But you know what? He was right. For too long, Strykers had been called Kevlar coffins. … And after far too many soldiers died, Congress finally got their act together. They put the right people in a room, they gave them resources, they put partisanship aside, and they said, ‘Solve the damn problem!’ That used to be the story of this country. I am only alive today because that’s what Congress is actually capable of.”

He let that thought sit for a bit.

“So,” Rose said, “I think that we need to go back to that.”