On Tuesday, Democratic U.S. House candidate Matt Schultz sat down with Alaska Beacon reporter James Brooks to introduce himself and talk about why he’s running for office. Here’s a transcript, lightly edited, of that conversation.
James Brooks: I wanted to ask why, and why you? I know you’ve been unhappy with the way things have been for a while, but what pushed you over the edge and just made you decide to run?
Matt Schultz: Well, interestingly, those are two somewhat distinct questions. Why me? I believe that every person has a responsibility to use the many gifts and opportunities we have as a way to be of service to the world. And so my whole life, I’ve been doing my best to be of service, and that’s been part of my personal life and also my ministry and everything that I’ve been doing. So why me is because I think every person should be of service, and if the opportunity presents itself, we have a duty to serve as many people as possible.
Now, as far as what pushed me over the edge for this particular decision, there’s been an increasing amount of concern, particularly amongst members of my family and working-class Alaskans, that approach me at various events I’m at to say things are just too difficult now, the policies that our current legislators have put in place have made life unaffordable, just on the basics like food and rent and on the larger but just as important things such as health care. And so, when the budget was recently passed and it really just put the hammer on people who are working hard to get by, I felt it was my time to raise my hands. Each time someone approached me and said, ‘Why doesn’t somebody do something?’ I felt like they were telling me it’s time to do this.
Brooks: So this has been in the works for a few months, a few weeks, or when did you make the go-ahead decision?
Schultz: A few months. It’s a long process of decision-making that includes talking, not only to trusted family members and mentors, but also people who are very politically savvy and professional in this world and seeking for and receiving the blessing of other people that I work with.
Brooks: I imagine it’ll take some sacrifice from your everyday life. What do you have to change in order to be able to run as a pastor?
Schultz: Well, I don’t think I’m ever going to watch television again. (coughs) Excuse me, I got a frog in my throat there. Maybe I’m mourning the loss of “Severance” there.
But yeah, definitely. A lot of my free time, which previously had been much more flexible and relaxed, I’ve decided to no longer have that, but you raise a good point that I am still running as a pastor, and so there are certain things I’m not going to sacrifice. I am really willing to sacrifice rest, and I’m willing to sacrifice free time, and I’m willing to sacrifice comfort, but I’m not willing to sacrifice my values and ethics. So I’m campaigning as someone who is a pastor and will behave as such. I’m going to be kind and I’m going to build bridges. I’m going to cooperate and try my best to build something better.
Brooks: And were there people that you found especially helpful when you were organizing, getting ready to run. Whose advice did you rely on?
Schultz: That’s a good question. I don’t know that I feel comfortable naming names, per se. You know, I don’t have other people’s permission to do that, but I will say, throughout my whole life, my wife has been a huge guide for me, and she and I discern our personal lives, our spiritual lives and our public lives side by side. We’ve always been a team. So that would be the biggest one.
In addition to that, due to my work throughout different social advocacy things that I’ve been doing throughout the community, I’ve gotten to know a lot of different elected officials and people who have run for many offices and won a lot of offices, also people who are highly influential in the nonprofit sector and in the unions. Just by nature of the work that I do, I become friends with a lot of them, and I ran this by just about all of them. I ranked up an awful lot of phone time and got a lot of feedback.
Brooks: I know you mainly through your writing in the Anchorage Daily News, which you’ve done since 1999, but I understand you moved to Alaska in 1997. Can you give me a little bit of your biography? How you ended up here?
Schultz: I’d be happy to, but I want to clarify a word I just used. I used the word feedback, and I want to make sure you know that for me, feedback means conversation, I wasn’t saying, like pushback. I got a lot of encouragement primarily, and that was a wonderful thing, along with constructive help with how I can improve. Just to be clear with my words.
Schultz: So, some of my background. Yes, we moved up here in 1997. We left about four years after that to go to graduate school and to work in a couple of other spots. We came back in 2013 because, like so many people, we discovered that you just can’t leave Alaska. The moment we left, we said, we have to get back there. Somehow. We have to find a way back.
Unfortunately, at that time, there was no educational opportunity for us in our chosen career, and we hear so many families saying the same thing, that they just wish there were a way for their kids to graduate high school and stay here and build a life and not have to leave for college or for trade school or for opportunities to build a career and build a family here, but like them, we had no options, so we had to find another place.
We’re really grateful that we found a way back here. It worked out wonderfully. And we said, as soon as we got here, we’re never leaving again, we are all in.
Brooks: I was reading Iris’ article, and she had said you were raised in rural New York. Were you born in New York and came here; were you born and raised there?
Schultz: Yeah, I was born and raised in a place that had more cows than it had people, and spent every day playing with my friends on the farms. And there was a GE plant nearby, which most of my school members and their parents were involved with, and when that hit hard times, so many of us got laid off.
They were hard-working, some of the kindest people you will ever meet in your life. It was a great place. I found it was a giant world that I wanted to go explore, the great land. So I found my own path, but it was a good place to be.
Brooks: What made you join the ministry?
Schultz: Wow, a lot of things. At the simplest level, I’ve just always felt the call. And I know that’s pretty vague, but honestly, it’s true. I’ve always felt that the spiritual life was important. I have always appreciated how the calling is based on caring for other people, being of service to individuals and communities and the world.
A fun little factoid about me is that my dad was a Catholic priest and my mom was a Catholic nun, and they got married and excommunicated in the same moment.
So that’s kind of funny. So I sort of inherited the family business, in a way, but I chose a different path slightly.
Brooks: Yeah, and you mentioned your wife. Do you have any kids?
Schultz: We do. We have three kids, and two of them are grown and out of the house, and the third is in high school.
Brooks: In high school there in Anchorage or elsewhere?
Schultz: Yeah, in Anchorage.
Brooks: And then, if you were elected to Congress, you’d be — I’m thinking of Gabriel Warnock of Georgia — Is he the only other pastor? Do you know? If not, that’s OK.
Schultz: No, there are three or four others, and they are in both parties and more than one denomination. And over the course of the history of Congress, there have been dozens and dozens. So there’s quite a bit of precedent for this, and to my knowledge, there have never been real major issues with it, or even minor issues. It’s got a long history behind it of being fine.
So I wish you know, in some ways, it’d be cool to say I’m the first but it’s actually something that’s been done a lot, and it works out just fine.
Brooks: And how does that affect the policies you would pursue as an elected official? I imagine the values that you hold now would be values you carry forward, so that’s why I ask.
Schultz: Thank you for asking. I love the question, and I think that I’m really lucky that the values I have and hold dear seem to be the values that most Alaskan voters are looking for, and that’s a lot of courage to stand up for what’s right.
That’s honesty, that’s the not just the willingness, but the drive to be constructive in Congress, to go there and work with people who might disagree with us, but still work together to build a community that serves all Alaskans, and in the broader sense, at the federal level, that also serves all Americans.
I’ll be focusing on Alaska needs, of course. And in order to do that, they want to send people to Congress who have a spirit of service and cooperation. So we can work in a bipartisan way and get the values in there that are common to Democrats and Republicans and independents and undeclared voters. There are so many foundational values that we all share, and we should be building on those.
Brooks: What do you think is the biggest issue right now? The biggest problem is that you would like to fix or address?
Schultz: Well, you asked me for one, but I’m going to give you two. I would say the affordability of life, just the cost of living, and the way the economy is not currently structured to serve people who are working hard for a living.
The economy right now and the government also are geared toward helping millionaires. Personally, I don’t bump into a lot of millionaires, and I’m not a millionaire myself, so I want to address the way that the system is rigged to hurt working-class people only in the attempt to help millionaires. We need to change that system for sure.
The other one, it goes right along with it. It’s really — they’re really two sides of the same coin — but the cost and the accessibility of health care have just become out of reach for too many people. Not only are people getting booted off their care at the moment, but it’s something along the lines of more than 40,000 Alaskans might lose their care, and then also the premiums are about to skyrocket, and some are already starting to feel that increase.
It shouldn’t be this way. People shouldn’t avoid going for necessary treatment just because they’re afraid they’re going to lose their house because they can’t pay the rent now that they bought their medicine.
So those things do certainly go hand in hand, but they’re both so major and important that I like to speak about each of them. And I think once we’ve done those, once we have really chopped away at that, we’ll start to see people able to build a life again and to have time to thrive and be healthy and spend time with their loved ones without all the anxiety that the current policies have dropped on them.
Brooks: And I saw a short video that Andrew Gray had posted online. He had said it was from your first official campaign event, and it got me thinking. What are your plans for a campaign? How do you intend to get out and about, because it’s not easy to do here in Alaska.
So what do you see yourself doing here in this first month, for example?
Schultz: Yeah, it’s not easy, but it’s awesome. You know, like most of the things that we do up here when we try to travel around and enjoy Alaska, it takes some effort, but it’s always worth it. So I do intend to get to just as many places as I can. I’m going to be traveling to Fairbanks really soon to go visit lots of friends and good folks up there.
We’re going to try to get out to rural Alaska as often as possible. I think a big part of the work of being a pastor is very similar to a big part of the work of trying to get elected and serving the people as representative. And that is, you show up, you meet with people, you talk with people, you learn the joy of knowing these people. And most of all, you listen.
I don’t know how it’s possible to be a representative that doesn’t show up for things like town halls and to listen to the people’s concerns, so I will definitely be doing that as much as possible.
Brooks: Is there anything I haven’t asked you in in our short time here, that that you wish I had, or something that you think I should know?
Schultz: Boy, that’s a great question. I wish I could give you like a 25-minute speech, but I don’t want to lump that on you.
Brooks: I’d take it if you did.
Schultz: No, I know my (campaign manager) is listening in and she’s probably wanting me to not do that, but I will say that I feel that so many Alaskans have approached me — it’s got to be in the hundreds have approached me — to say that they are sick and tired of politics that are geared towards serving the wealthy, and they’re sick and tired of politics that are geared toward attacking the other party instead of learning how to work with the other party to build a better future together.
It’s as if we’re the passengers in the back seat of a car, and in the front are two people we don’t know and we don’t trust, and they’re punching each other instead of taking us where we’re supposed to go.
And I think it’s time for us to make a change there.
Let some serious people and some compassionate people in there to build a future for working-class Alaskans.