I’m Rob Tracinski, and I’m running for Congress in Virginia’s Fifth District.
To be specific, I’m running for the Democratic Party’s nomination for Congress in the primaries that begin—well, they begin today, June 18. Primary Day is August 4, but the early voting begins now, and you can go usually to your local county registrar’s office to vote. Or if you’re in one of the three independent cities in the district, Charlottesville, Lynchburg, and Danville, you can go to your registrar’s office there.
I was just there for early voting in Louisa County, and me and my wife and son were among the very first people to cast our ballots, so I’m pretty confident that as of this morning, I’ve taken an early lead in Louisa.
Since it’s the first day, I wanted to offer you a short guide to all the candidates.
Obviously, these are my rivals, this is not a neutral guide. I think you should pick me. But I will try to give you as honest a guide as I can, give you an idea of what’s going on and how I’m different from the other candidates—because if I weren’t offering something different, I wouldn’t be running.
The first observation I want to make is that we have two Republican candidates in their primary, and three Democrats in our primary, and between us the names are McGuire, Lucero, Perriello, Krzyzanowski, and Tracinski. What do you notice about that? We’re in a wave of anti-immigrant hysteria these days, but who do we have running for Congress? An Irishman, two Eye-talians, and a couple of Polocks. A hundred years ago, at the height of the last big anti-immigration hysteria, these were the immigrant groups we were supposed to be afraid of, and now we’re as American as anybody else, and we’re the ones running for Congress, and nobody bats an eye. There’s a lesson there.
Alright, so let’s start with my two fellow Democrats.
One of them is Dr. K, Suzanne Krzyzanowki, a physician in Lynchburg. She goes by Dr. K because—well, because that’s what people with long Polish last names kind of have to do. Trust me on this.
Dr. K is running on health care. She’s running on the idea that our health care system is in crisis, and it’s heading for a worse crisis, and she wants to address that.
Now, I like Dr. K. I’ve gotten to know her because all of us candidates are always showing up at the same events together. And what I respect most is that, like me, she’s not running just because she wants to be in office. She’s running because she has a cause, and it’s something she’s passionate and knowledgeable about, where this is coming out of her own experience.
The big difference between me and Dr. K is that I think there is a bigger and more important crisis we have to address first—a constitutional crisis in which we’re losing our democracy. And I think that has to take precedence over health care or anything else, because I don’t think we can solve those other things unless we solve the constitutional crisis first. More on that in a minute.
Then there is Tom Perriello, who’s from Ivy, Virginia, sort of in the heart of prosperous Western Albemarle County, just outside Charlottesville. And the most important thing about Tom is that he has served in Congress before, for one term about sixteen years ago. He was elected in this district by a very narrow margin in 2008, during a very good year for Democrats, and then got voted out in 2010. And since then, he mounted a campaign for governor a few years ago, and now he’s back running again.
Tom’s biggest strength is that he has lots of experience in politics—and I guess that’s kind of his biggest weakness, too.
On the one hand, in between serving in Congress and running for governor, he’s done a lot of diplomatic work, and he came out of a background in international humanitarian groups, and when you get him talking on those issues, he talks with a lot of first-hand knowledge and sincerity.
On the other hand, I’m not sure how much his two years in Congress, as part of a Democratic majority when Obama was president—I’m not sure how much that’s going to help him in the very different situation we’re in right now. And my concern is that it could hold him back, the way it’s been holding back a lot of the Democratic Party leadership.
The job right now isn’t carefully nudging through well-meaning legislation and crafting compromises, you know, across the aisle. The job right now is to fight a desperate political battle between Congress and the president to preserve the very existence and relevance of Congress. This is not normal politics, this is constitutional crisis politics. It’s not, I don’t know, 1996. It’s more like 1776.
So the difference between me and Tom is actually the whole reason I’m still in the race. I would not have stayed—given Tom Perriello’s advantage in experience and money-raising, which comes from running several different campaigns over the years. Given all that, I would not have stayed if Tom had come out and talked about those big constitutional issues.
So what keeps me in the race is that if Democrats are not going to put the fundamental threat to our political system front-and-center in the primaries, then we’re not going to put it front-and-center in the general election, and then why would we be confident Democrats are going to address that issue once they’re in office. And so we’re not really going to be ready for this moment.
That leads me to why I’m running. I’m running because, as a writer, I was tracking Donald Trump’s attempt to centralize all power in himself, taking it away from the courts, from independent agencies, trying to dominate and control the press and the legal profession, and suppressing the free market, making it so every business has to suck up to him if they don’t want to get tariffs slapped on them. I literally wrote the book on it.
I saw that pattern and realized it’s not just happening because Donald Trump wants to be dictator, it’s happening because Congress is letting him do it, and we need people in Congress who will push back and restore the Constitution.
But what really pushed me over the edge is that just after I finished that book, Trump tried to abuse his control over the FCC to get Jimmy Kimmel taken off the air. And I looked to the Democratic leadership thinking, surely, they’re going to come down on this with fire and brimstone. And there was Chuck Schumer saying, “We’re focused like a laser on affordability.” And sure, we should be concerned about affordability. But maybe we could spare a little of that laser focus for the First Amendment, or the Fourth Amendment, or the part of the Constitution that says only Congress can declare war. And you can see how that would make affordability a lot easier, because gas wouldn’t have spiked up to $4.50 a gallon.
So I thought to myself, I could spend another three years on the sidelines shouting that Democrats ought to do this, and Democrats ought to say that, or I could decide that I am a Democrat, and I can offer to do and say these things, and not just sit on the sidelines.
In short, I’m here because I couldn’t watch our democracy go down without a fight.
Speaking of that, let me spare a few words for the Republican primaries. I’ve gone hammer-and-tongs against our incumbent, John McGuire, because he is exactly the kind of rubber-stamp guy in Congress who makes Trump’s power grab possible. And we all know that he got the job because he got Trump’s endorsement and Bob Good didn’t, so we know he’s never going to stand up to Trump.
Up against him in the Republican primary is Melanie Lucero. And she’s criticizing McGuire for some good reasons. The fact that he doesn’t show up in the district and actually face his constituents in town halls. And she’s criticizing him for not doing enough on veterans’ issues. And I’m taking a bunch of notes on this for the general election.
But then she says she’s actually more in favor of backing Donald Trump, she’s even more of a true MAGA than McGuire is. So that’s not really an alternative, is it? And right now, today, after the disastrous war Trump started with Iran and a peace deal that is just an American surrender on every issue—now is possibly the worst time to announce that you don’t think anyone ever needs to ask any questions or offer any resistance to what Trump is doing.
So that’s my final pitch, not just to Democrats but to Independents and even to Republicans, people who have not traditionally voted in the Democratic primary. Remember, Virginia is an open primary state. You don’t have to be a registered Democrat. You decide when you show up at the registrar’s office or when you show up at the polls what primary you want to vote in.
There’s no alternative offered in the Republican primary. So if you’re starting to think that maybe Donald Trump is kind of making a mess of things, if you think it would be a good idea if we had a functioning Congress that isn’t just his personal rubber stamp, if you’re looking for a reasonable alternative, someone who is really just trying to restore the normal constitutional order—then you should hop over into the Democratic primary and vote for me. Look, I never thought, before ten years ago, I never though I would run as a Democrat, so it’s not so crazy to think that maybe you could vote for a Democrat, if only just this once. Think about it.
And if you didn’t need so much convincing to think that Trump is going off the rails—vote for the one person in this race who is most focused on fixing our constitutional system so we won’t have a president—any president—go off the rails like this again in the future.
Turn out to vote for me, in early voting or on August 4. Vote to restore the Constitution.
Support my campaign so we can bring this fight to the US Congress!
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