On Monday, Lonny Koons was picking up candles in Massachusetts to deliver them to Wal-Mart stores. It’s the kind of work, he said, that many politicians don’t understand.
“Everyone in Congress comes from that elite background, and they don’t feel the pain that we feel,” Koons said, sitting behind the wheel of his truck. “But if you’re going to claim to represent the people, you have to understand where they come from.”
That, in a nutshell, is the basis of Koons’ long-shot bid to unseat U.S. Rep. Elise Stefanik in the upcoming Republican primary to represent New York’s North Country. He’s running as the working-class candidate trying to topple an army of political consultants, lobbyists and out-of-touch politicians.
The address for this campaign website is bluecollarpolitics.net. His logo depicts a hammer and a pick, the tools used by miners. In campaign videos posted to Facebook, he talks to voters from behind the massive wheel of his moving truck, with the orange slash of his seat beat across his chest.
“Lonny here,” he says in one recent video, with a few strokes of his goatee. “I’m on my way to work to do that thing that I do where I drive all over the place and drop stuff at stores to be bought by you guys.”
There’s has been a lot of talk in political circles about how the GOP is becoming the party of, as Florida Sen. Marco Rubio puts it, “a multiethnic, multiracial, working-class coalition.” That vision of the party is backed by polling showing that college-educated voters are increasingly behind Democrats, while voters without college degrees are increasingly on the side of Republicans.
Stefanik herself has echoed blue-collar themes with attacks on “liberal elites” and claims that Republicans “stand up for the working and middle-class Americans that big-government Democrats have abandoned.”
A problem, though, is that most prominent Republicans are themselves quite, you know, elite. While Ted Cruz rails against the establishment, the senator from Texas is a Princeton and Harvard educated lawyer married to a Goldman Sachs executive. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis talks like a populist but went to Yale and Harvard Law School.
Stefanik, meanwhile, graduated from the Albany Academy for Girls and Harvard, worked in the George W. Bush administration, then moved to her parents vacation home to run in the 21st congressional district. Stefanik, 37, and her husband now own a home in the town of Saratoga.
Koons said he doesn’t begrudge anybody’s success. But those backgrounds, he said, put politicians out of touch with ordinary Americans.
“Ms. Stefanik as a Republican is a great Republican, but she doesn’t represent the middle of our district,” he said. “We’re the ones scraping by and living paycheck to paycheck, and she wasn’t brought up that way.”
Koons, 43, grew up in Michigan and dropped out of college to join the Army, where his 20 years of service included tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. After he left the military in 2017, Koons and his wife bought a home in the rural Lewis County town of Croghan. (It’s home to the International Maple Museum!)
His political positions are eclectic. Though he doesn’t actually believe every American has the right to own a nuclear weapon — a Newsweek headline claiming otherwise misrepresented his words, Koons says — he is a strong supporter of the Second Amendment, a requirement, of course, for any North Country Republican.
Yet Koons is also pro-choice “up to the point that medical professionals have deemed that the unborn child could survive outside the womb.” And he supports universal health care, noting that’s what he received in the Army.
While Koons does have a campaign manager — unpaid, at least for now — he proudly noted that he wrote every word on his website. Those positions represent his own thoughts. No party operatives!
If it needs it, Koons can find inspiration in the success Ed Durr, a fellow truck driver who earlier this month shocked the New Jersey political world by defeating the longest-serving Senate president in the state’s history.
“My election showed nobody’s untouchable,” the man dubbed Ed the Trucker subsequently said.
Of course, there’s a difference between beating a state senator and defeating a woman who, as GOP conference chair, is the number three Republican in the House. Stefanik will have millions of campaign dollars at her disposal and the backing of a party that sees her as important to its future.
But Koons said voters seem receptive to his candidacy, once he explains his perspective. And beginning in January, he’s embarking on a 1,600-mile walking tour that, as planned, will take him to every town in the sprawling district.
Wait, a walking tour of the North Country in January? Won’t it be a touch chilly?
“I’m up for the challenge,” Koons said.
[email protected] ■ 518-454-5442 ■ @chris_churchill
