READING,MI – Michael Johnson, a self-employed truck driver originally from Detroit, now lives with his two cats in this little Hillsdale County town of just over a thousand people, almost the same population it has had since 1900.
He is 66, a U.S. Army veteran long since divorced, and his kids long since grown and moved away. He earned an associate’s degree from Lawrence Tech in his 40s, but follows politics closely and is keenly worried about the future of his country.
So he is thinking seriously about running for Congress — as an independent. “The time is slipping by us to avoid a ‘coming fury,’” he said, by which he means civil war. “I strongly feel I have abilities to bring many toward the middle instead of being so polarized.”
He may have a point. Polls have consistently shown people are tired of gridlock and the major parties’ unwillingness and seeming inability to work together.
Johnson is probably more like the average voter in terms of his outlook, lifestyle and economic status than most members of Congress. So, if he runs, what would be his chances to win?
An educated guess would be … zero.
That sounds cynical, and we are always cautioned to “never say never.” Indeed, the unexpected can happen. Independents have been elected to Congress; Frazier Reams was elected to Congress as an independent from Toledo in 1950, and served two terms.
But he was well-known, well-connected, and had money and media support. Johnson has none of those things, and said he intends to run a “bare bones” campaign.
That’s nice in theory, but that means he faces a monumental task getting known outside Reading; the new district stretches along Michigan’s entire southern border, from Monroe to Berrien counties.
The district is solidly Republican, and has been represented by Republican Tim Walberg since 2010. In 2016, Democrat Gretchen Driskell spent $2.4 million in an attempt to beat him, and didn’t come close. The newly drawn district is even more heavily GOP; all else being equal, experts say it would vote 64 percent Republican.
“I’m not afraid,” said Johnson, who said he had been investigating how to get on the ballot as an independent. Doing that isn’t all that easy; potential candidates have 180 days to collect 3,000 valid signatures from registered voters in the district.
Since some are always invalid, that means he needs at least 4,000, to have a cushion, and they need to be filed with an affidavit establishing his identity, by 4 p.m., July 16.
Getting that many signatures may not be as easy as it sounds, unless he is willing to pay professional canvassers a few thousand dollars to do so. The process is a lot easier if he should choose to run as a write-in candidate. All he would need to do them is download a Declaration of Intent from the Secretary of State’s election bureau website and file it with the department by Oct. 23.
But if he does that, nobody will see his name.
If by now you are thinking that the deck is hopelessly stacked against independent candidates, that’s because it is. Jack Kevorkian, the former doctor who became nationally famous for assisted suicides, ran for Congress as an independent in 2008.
He no longer had to work, had time to campaign and had one of the best-known names anywhere — but when the votes were counted, he got only 2.6 percent, losing to Gary Peters 183,311 to 8,937.
Michael Johnson does have one advantage over Kevorkian; he doesn’t have the stigma of being regarded as a murderer by a large segment of the population. But he is also completely unknown.
Johnson does have some qualms. He is estranged from much of his family, who are Republicans, because he believes the party has largely gone off the deep end and has mostly voted for Democrats in recent years – but is dissatisfied with them as well.
“My son, who was involved in Georgia Republican politics for 10 years, said I should be prepared for ‘the machine’ to hurt me in a big way, and better think long and hard about it all,” he said.
It seems more likely that the “machine” wouldn’t bother to take much notice of him, and Johnson still is leaning towards running on a platform of conciliation and common sense. His neighbors have been encouraging. One, who is a fervent Trump supporter, said “if you are going to run, this would be the time to do it, as long as you can answer any question and debate the issues.”
The potential candidate knows he has some catching up to do in that regard. But if he pulled off a miracle and somehow won, he would face another problem. Not only would he be a freshman without seniority, the other 434 members of Congress would be Democrats or Republicans.
There would be pressure on him to caucus with one party or another, or be left entirely out in the cold when it came to getting committee seats. Vermont’s Bernie Sanders was elected to both the House and Senate as an independent, but caucuses with the Democrats.
Michael Johnson, however, wants to bring both sides together, not join one. “Extremism in defense of stupidity is not virtuous,” he said.
Hard to argue with that.
