Why I'm Running
Why I'm Running
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Interview with co-founder of Good Conflict
Something is broken, and you feel it
right here at home.
You feel it when a full day of work still does not stretch far enough. When property taxes keep climbing but classrooms are stretched thin. When young people leave because they cannot afford to stay, and seniors on fixed incomes watch costs rise without end.
This is not about left versus right. It is about people who work for a living versus a system that keeps tilting toward the very top.
While families in Wayne County and Webster balance groceries, heating bills, and gas just to get to work, a small group at the top keeps rewriting the rules to benefit themselves. They keep us arguing with each other so we stop asking why the deck is stacked against us. They use outrage to divide neighbors who actually want the same things: good schools, affordable healthcare, safe communities, and a fair shot for our kids. As long as we are pointing fingers at each other, no one is holding the powerful accountable.
Interview with co-founder of Good ConflictThat divide is intentional. And it is working.
But upstate New York has never backed down from a fight — and neither have I. As an elected union president, my job was not rhetoric. It was results. I negotiated to protect wages, healthcare, and retirement security. I defended workers facing unfair discipline. I fought for safer workplaces and fair schedules so families could plan their lives with dignity.
That experience taught me something simple: when working people are not at the table, working people lose.
We are underdogs, and we know it. But this district was built by farmers, tradespeople, small business owners, and families who show up for each other. When we stand together as neighbors — not as labels — we are stronger than any political machine. And that unity is exactly what scares them.
I am running to bring practical judgment and accountability back to this district. Not to divide neighbors or chase headlines, but to make sure the people who keep this community running are never again treated as an afterthought.
In upstate New York, this has happened before...
In the early 1800s, farmers, laborers, and canal workers were told the economy was not their concern. Decisions were made by powerful interests in Albany and New York City. Profits flowed one way. Risk flowed the other.
But something changed when working people pushed back.
Local farmers, merchants, and laborers pushed for public investment instead of private control.
The result was the Erie Canal, which ran directly through Wayne County towns like Palmyra and Lyons. It broke monopolies, lowered costs, and gave working people access to markets they had never had before.
Later, the Finger Lakes became a center of reform movements that asked the same basic question in different ways. Who gets a voice? Who sets the rules? Who benefits from the system? From labor organizing to the push for broader civic participation, change here never came from the top handing it down. It came from neighbors insisting on fairness.
When corporations grew so powerful they bent the rules in their favor, a New Yorker named Theodore Roosevelt took them on in the NYS Assembly. He believed concentrated power was a threat to democracy, whether it sat in government or in boardrooms. He used public authority to restore balance.
That is the upstate I know.
Not chaos. Not political division.
Every major step forward here came when ordinary people refused to accept a system that only worked for the few and insisted it work for the many.
That moment always looks uncomfortable to those at the top.
And it always feels overdue to everyone else.
But that instinct is still right. And it is still necessary to Uplift Upstate!