Collins is a socialist running for election as a representative of the Essential Workers Party in WA-10. It includes the city of Olympia and the surrounding area. It’s partisan index is D+5 and is 76% White, and 6% Asian, 5% Black with 11% Hispanic. This is an open seat, the incumbent Democrat Denny Heck is retiring, which predictably has led to a huge field of candidates, including 6 Democrats. More on Beth Doglio later who has been endorsed by Bernie and Pramila Jayapal later. Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant and Our Revolution endorsed Collins. Collins has raised $250,000 as opposed to around $600,000 by Doglio, and two other Democratic candidates, Strickland and Reeves.

Issues

https://www.joshua2020.com/

Actually not seeing anything in the platform about M4A but I’m sure he supports it.

THE GREEN NEW DEAL

The climate crisis is the greatest engineering challenge in human history. We must transition our economy to emit zero carbon & actively sequester it in the next decade; this means becoming carbon-neutral by 2025. To do this, we will create millions of good-paying, union jobs overhauling transportation systems, rapidly replacing internal combustion vehicles with zero-carbon alternatives, rebuilding our energy grid, redesigning cities, and finding new ways to produce food.

We must pursue a bold, ecosocialist Green New Deal in the same way we deployed the Marshall Plan or competed in the Space Race: with grave urgency and unwavering focus. The only way to avert the global climate crisis is to lead the world toward a future worth building, and to do that we must lead by example. We have a tremendous amount of work to do to save our planet, and it’s time to start.

THE ROOTS OF RACISM

The working class is more diverse than America at large and every branch of our government. Racism has been embedded in the fabric of American society since before our nation was founded. The wealthy and powerful, nearly all of them white men, have maintained their positions of power by dividing us up using race, religion, and nationality. Our country remains segregated in education, policing, housing, healthcare, infrastructure, and environmental safety, despite decades of attempts to close the gap.

This is because racism is a system. Racism is enforced not just socially, but economically as well. The gap in quality of all these essential, basic social needs for communities of color has been reinforced and justified by a system that values profit over progress and money over human lives. Capitalism is the Atlantic slave trade. Capitalism is an entire continent stolen from Indigenous peoples. Anyone who is serious about addressing racism must both advocate for the end of our inhumane economic system, and for direct public investment in our nation’s historically marginalized communities.

FEDERAL RENT CONTROL

Over ⅓ of American households rent their homes. The 2008 crash devastated American workers in permanent ways;. Millennial home ownership rates are dismal, and housing insecurity/homelessness are on the rise. On any given night in the United States, there are more than half a million people sleeping on the streets, over 20,000 of them in Washington State alone. This is a crisis that will not be solved by providing tax breaks for developers. We tried that, and real estate investors made billions in profits while the crisis worsened. When their economic gambling led to a crash, they got bailed out, while we ended up in foreclosure or had our homes sold out from beneath us. The leading cause of homelessness today? Medical bankruptcy.
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We need federal rent control, with zero exceptions, and 15 million new units of social housing, and we need to start now. Every winter that homelessness is allowed to continue in the US, people freeze to death in our streets. Real wages are flat for the working class, while rents in major cities climb at increasing rates. We cannot allow the people of our country to live paycheck-to-paycheck, one medical emergency from homelessness. That means wages need to be higher, but it also means that we must recognize a simple truth: basic human needs are human rights, and that includes a safe, warm home.

https://themighty.com/2020/07/joshua-collins-openly-autistic-candidate/

Inspired by Democratic candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s 2018 Congressional victory in New York, 26-year-old autistic truck driver, Joshua Collins, knew he had to run for political office. Thus, Collins embarked upon a bold challenge to unseat Rep. Denny Heck (D-Wash.) in Washington state’s 10th Congressional District, feeling the incumbent was woefully inadequate on issues like climate change.

When Heck announced his retirement in 2019 (along with a campaign for another office), it culminated in a free-for-all for the open seat in the House, with 19 candidates from multiple political parties running. The 10th Congressional District comprises portions of three counties southwest of Seattle. In Washington state, the top two finishers in the Aug. 4 primary, regardless of party, advance to the 2020 general election.

Collins was originally running in the election as a Democrat but is now the pioneer of the left-leaning coalition Essential Workers’ Party. If he wins the election, Collins would be the first known openly autistic Congressmember in United States’ history. The Mighty spoke with Collins about being autistic, the election and his perspective on the future of the country.

https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/21/21067086/joshua-collins-joshua4congress-tiktok-discord-campaigning-bernie-sanders-aoc

Joshua Collins looks like just about every other young person on TikTok. His nails are painted black, his videos are set to trending songs, and he’s not afraid to dunk on fascists online. But where many young people use the app for clout or entertainment, Collins’ TikTok has become the centerpiece for a new kind of political campaign — one he hopes will carry him all the way to Congress.

Collins is a 26-year-old socialist truck driver running to represent Washington state’s 10th district in Congress, which covers parts of Olympia, Spanaway, and Puyallup. Collins launched his campaign in April after watching Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s (D-NY) triumphant 2018 primary and deciding anything was possible. He had just turned 25, even younger than AOC and skirting the edge of the minimum age for House members to be sworn in.

“In 2018, that was huge. It changed everything. We went from ‘we should do this’ to ‘we can do this’,” Collins told The Verge. “There’s no way to describe how big an impact that had on the grassroots activist communities.”

For most of 2019, the odds were stacked heavily against Collins. The solid-blue seat had been held for three terms by Denny Heck, a Democrat who took the 2018 election by nearly 30 points. But in December, Heck announced his retirement and threw the race wide open. Collins still faces steep competition from more conventional candidates — particularly former state Rep. Kristine Reeves and former Tacoma mayor Marilyn Strickland — but his odds are now better than anyone expected.

Collins also has one crucial advantage over Reeves and Strickland: he’s kind of famous online. Before he formally launched his campaign last spring, Collins had around 40,000 followers on Instagram. His Twitter following was much smaller, but after a few well-timed retweets from Ocasio-Cortez, thousands of people started flocking to his account. Last October, he joined TikTok and launched his official campaign account @joshua4congress. As of publication, the account has over 26,000 followers. That presence on Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok hassled to a “big boost in our donations and volunteer signups,” Collins says.

As his TikTok following grew, Collins began urging followers to support him more directly by joining his Discord server. A messaging app similar to Slack, Discord has become Collins’ main hub for volunteers, allowing him to coordinate campaign drives with almost no overhead costs. Around 1,300 people have joined the server, often to share memes, news, election polls, and conduct opposition research. Volunteers across the country are able to phone and text bank and make social media posts to support his campaign by signing up for his Discord. The Discord membership is a fraction of his TikTok following, but potentially far more powerful. Collins calls the Discord server “a campaign office, but online” and a “remote organizing ‘space’” for volunteers to talk shop and inspire other young members of the resurgent left to run for political office themselves.

“Our Discord has literally doubled in size since I started using it, and my timely TikTok video about my incumbent opponent dropping out was part of a massive two-day fundraising haul,” Collins told The Verge. “If it isn’t translating for other people, they probably aren’t using it right.”