As the residents of Texas’ 17th Congressional District face the challenges brought about by COVID-19, the man hoping to represent them is no different.
Democratic Congressional candidate Rick Kennedy has seen his life, and campaign for Tuesday’s runoff election, look a little different than being on the trail for March’s primary. Taking his campaign into the virtual realm amid the pandemic, Kennedy has been practicing the social distancing guidelines as his potential voters.
“It’s affected my life certainly like it’s affected everyone’s life…the only time I left the house was to go to H.E.B.,” Kennedy said.
Kennedy will be facing David Jaramillo in the Democratic runoff, with the victor taking on either Pete Sessions or Renee Swann in November’s general election.
To maintain his ability to reach out to the TX-17 population, the candidate has been running virtual town hall meetings to provide an opportunity for the public to call in, as well as “virtual door-knocking” sessions, where residents can sign up for a 10-minute discussion with Kennedy via ZOOM.
Kennedy has made a career in software engineering and project management, making him familiar with the necessary virtual steps. The campaign experience, while different, has been effective thus far.
“We tried to provide as much availability to voters as we possibly can,” he said.
Many aspects of life have been different since Kennedy received 47.9 percent of the district-wide vote on the March 3 primary. One of his two opponents, William Foster III has dropped out, leaving Kennedy contending with former United States Marine Corps veteran Jaramillo. Jaramillo took 35 percent of the district vote in March.
Dealing with the COVID-19 crisis has been at the top of government to-do lists, with Kennedy sensing a failure from his potential constituents to maintain a strong course against the virus.
“Many of our political leaders treated it as a political problem and not a public health problem,” he said.
To Kennedy, the “most critical failure” of the governmental response to the virus is an absence of a comprehensive system of testing, tracing, and isolating patients.
“We still have an extremely scattered and piecemeal, patchwork ability to test and trace and isolate, and as we’ve seen as we started reopening [the economy], we’re starting to see case counts spike in all of the states that reopened earliest. The sad thing is, this was predictable. Not only was it predictable, it was predicted.”
Texas has hit regular all-time highs in new virus cases, with the estimated number as of Thursday at 104,467 statewide active cases, per the Texas Department of State Health Services Dashboard.
Further complicating matters for Kennedy is the response of those that may be understating the virus’ impact on Texas and the nation.
“The rhetoric coming out of the [Trump] administration, many of the Republicans, tells me that not only do we want to pretend like this pandemic is over and we’re just going to ignore it, we’re going to pretend like it never happened in the first place, and I think that’s a grave disservice to the lives of Texans and the American people.”
Kennedy’s platform, based on principled compromise and cost-benefit analysis, has attempted to sway the discussion away from politically-charged talk surrounding the virus.
“I’m not so naive as to say you can keep politics completely out of the response to this, but at best, politics should’ve been a subtext to the response, not a dominating factor.”
The candidate has promised to take his message of compromise directly to the people if elected, as Kennedy will be providing in-person town halls in most areas. The first town hall, he says, will be in the county that voted against him the most.
“Those are the folks that doubt me the most, the most skeptical about me, those are the folks I need to open an immediate dialogue with…I am going to open up lines of communication with them. They may leave that meeting as skeptical and as distrustful of me as when they walk in, but we will have had the meeting and the lines of communication will be open,” he said.
For more information about Kennedy’s campaign, visit rickkennedyforcongress.com. For information on polling times and locations in Freestone County, visit co.freestone.tx.us.