Can a Socialist Truck Driver Become the Youngest Member of Congress?

In the first 48 hours after Democratic congressman Denny Heck announced his retirement, his then-sole opponent Joshua Collins, a 26-year-old truck driver, raked in $26,000 in campaign donations for the Washington state primary race. Collins owes a lot of that surge to his large social media presence: More than 61,000 people follow his campaign on Twitter and another 27,000 follow the video-sharing platform TikTok, on which Collins alternates between criticizing Trump's foreign policy and posting lighter stuff like calling for Vermont senator Bernie Sanders to name Danny DeVito as his running mate.

In December of last year, the 67-year-old Heck made the surprising announcement that he was retiring rather than seeking reelection in 2020. While Congress has seen a wave of Republican representatives choosing not to run for reelection this year, Heck is a Democrat in a solidly blue district, which included the state capital Olympia, and a member of the Intelligence Committee, which ran impeachment inquiry hearings. The reason Heck gave for leaving was, as he wrote, "simply too many hyperbolic adjectives and too few nouns. Civility is out. Compromise is out. All or nothing is in."

Heck and Collins are a sharp contrast. The retiring congressman is a staunchly centrist Democrat who did not support programs like Medicare for All or the Green New Deal. Collins, on the other hand, is a professional truck driver running on an openly socialist platform calling to nationalize pharmaceutical production and abolish the CIA ("Our military can gather intelligence. The Central Intelligence Agency is an unaccountable institution with a long history of uninterrupted brutality that often undermines U.S. and U.N. security interests.").

Collins's victory is hardly assured though. With Heck out of the way, other candidates have jumped in, making the primary election a seven-way race with more orthodox opponents like state representative Kristine Reeves and former Tacoma mayor Marilyn Strickland. And despite being in a solidly blue district, winning the primary wouldn't be the end of the line: Washington has what's known as a "jungle primary," where the two candidates with the most votes advance to the general election.

If he can pull off a win, Collins would be the youngest member of Congress, just barely over the age limit of 25 years. And he would be the first representative from Generation Z, the politically active and younger-than-millennials age group that is leading large-scale climate strikes and gun-control demonstrations. But less than 40,000 of his district's 400,000 registered voters are under 25. (Heck won 166,000 votes compared to his opponent's 103,000 in 2018.) Collins is going to need a lot more than just the TikTok cohort to win. Collins spoke to GQ about why he got into the race, and how he hopes to translate online organizing into a real-world victory in 2020.

GQ: When did you first get interested in politics?

Joshua Collins: I lived in Kansas when I was a child, in Missouri for a while, Las Vegas in high school, California for a very short time, and then Washington during the 2016 election. I grew up poor. My mom became a nurse in her 30s. She never finished middle school but she got her GED later and went to nursing school. My dad's not a part of the picture. She has six kids and three step kids, so we're a big family. In high school, I was an activist—I helped organize 1,100 students to occupy the Nevada state legislature. We were attempting to prevent them from funneling education funds to private prisons. And I learned then that some politicians can’t be pushed on some things. They'll just give you nice words and then go with their donors anyway.

And when did you start identifying as a socialist?

In the last couple years. When Bernie Sanders ran and I realized I completely agree with him, I started calling myself a democratic socialist. And the more I learned about, you know, worker ownership and the dynamic of our society and what is necessary for us to really combat climate change, the more I started believing that we need to change the ownership paradigm in America. Right now, everything is owned and controlled by a small number of wealthy people. And I don't think we're going to deal with the climate crisis in a way that is humane and fair to working class people while the wealthy still own and control everything.

Trump and other Republicans pretty regularly refer to any response to climate change as "job-killing regulations," and a move to renewable energy would result in a loss of jobs in industries like coal and fossil fuel. How do you convince people to fight climate change when they think their liveliood is on the line?

The solution to that is the same as the solution for automation. We're seeing hundreds of thousands, possibly even millions of jobs being automated in the next few years. And we're also going to see a lot of jobs go away because there are industries we don't necessarily need, and we probably shouldn't have any more. What I've found has been popular is a federal jobs guarantee, long-term unemployment benefits, and guaranteeing a safe and secure retirement for workers who are displaced because of automation or because of a shift in the way our economy works.

How exactly would a federal jobs guarantee work?

So, we all know that there's a lot of work that needs to be done on our infrastructure. You know, we have giant problems with our water systems, our energy system, our roads and bridges, we need to be expanding our railroad system—and those all require workers to do the work. We can guarantee any worker who wants a job can get one, and it will be decent paying government job that will allow them to provide for their family.

As a truck driver, you’re in a profession that's on the front line of being automated out of existence.

Yeah, we’re already looking at our jobs disappearing. Any day now they're going to start putting thousands of self-driving cars on the road, and that will ruin thousands of lives if we don't get sane policies in place. So I think it's important that we do these policies and we trust it from the workers perspective and make sure that no matter why someone's job disappeared, or why they lose their job, they are taken care of, their family is taken care of, and that they are not going to just be an afterthought in this massive economy.

How did you get started as a truck driver by the way?

I was going to go into the military to pay for school, and I got in a car accident that rendered me incapable of passing the physical requirements to join the Air Force. So I was working to pay my own way through school and I was taking college classes, when my grandmother was about to die. I worked at a factory and when I went to visit my dying grandmother, they had approved the time off but they still laid me off while I was gone. I'd spent everything I had on driving across the country to see her. So I had no choice but to drop my courses and become a truck driver—they bussed out to Los Angeles and taught me how to drive a truck. I had my license in three weeks and spent five years on the road.

What's the experience been like?

You do get to see the country. I've been working since I was 15 and never was able to really travel. But the problems of the industry are just endless. Truck drivers are expected to work a typical 60- to 70-hour week, and you're not really allowed time at home. The standard in the industry is one to three days off per month, and the other days gone and working. So it makes it very hard to maintain friendships and makes it so you don't really get to see your family a lot. The pay is okay—it's above average, but it's also incredibly expensive to live on the road. You get overcharged for everything. A gallon of water can cost five bucks. If you're ever needing a shower, you have to pay for those and they can cost you know, $15 for a shower.

What finally made you decide to run?

I was watching the 2018 election, and I was following the efforts for Medicare for All. As a person who has had unstable health care a lot of my life and I currently don't have insurance, I really care about that issue. I saw Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez run as a democratic socialist, and I started watching our DSA in Olympia and watched that organization grow from just a couple people to, you know, a couple hundred. And AOC also kind of helped me a little bit. She retweeted me a couple times and it helped me build my initial support for this run—when I first tweeted at her I had 34 followers. And she retweeted me twice within, like, a week and it got me to 1,200 followers and I used that to build more following and eventually to recruit volunteers and raise money and stuff. It’s kind of amazing how much a couple of retweets can do for someone.

You've been really prolific on TikTok and Twitter.

We're using social media to raise money, to get press, and to recruit volunteers most importantly. We've gotten people involved in this campaign who have never voted before, who have never attended any meetings, a lot of young people who are just high school and college students. I think that is probably our biggest advantage, that we have to bring new people in the system who are in this to save the planet from climate change and who are really not used to the typical way of doing things. When I asked volunteers to show up and help me knock doors for another candidate, we had dozens of people show up. And I realized, if they're willing to do this much just for someone who I've endorsed, they're going to do just as much if not more for our campaign.

What's one thing you want people to know about this campaign?

One of my biggest messages is that this isn't just an election, we're not just fighting an establishment. We're fighting an empire. The fossil fuel industry and other industries are willing to push for the overthrow of governments just to get their way. And so I don't think we should take it lightly how hard they are going to fight me. I know that Amazon [based in nearby Seattle] will likely back whoever is the establishment candidate in this race. So we're expecting a very tough race.

The people who see first-hand every day how health insurance companies fail their patients want to get rid of them entirely.

Originally Appeared on GQ