Democrat Josh Hicks: ‘People like me don’t often have a voice in the halls of power’
Central Kentucky’s 6th Congressional District had a nationally watched race in 2018 that cost $22 million in political spending, brought President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden in to stump for the candidates and ultimately awarded a fourth term to U.S. Rep. Andy Barr, R-Lexington.
But for all that spectacle, roughly half of the district’s 578,997 registered voters didn’t cast a ballot.
Those are the people Josh Hicks wants to reach.
Hicks, this year’s Democratic nominee challenging Barr in the 6th District, says many poor and working-class Kentuckians don’t care about national politics because they don’t see anyone in Washington caring about them.
If the Democratic Party is too liberal for their taste on certain social issues, Hicks says, the Republican Party seems devoted to helping the rich get richer at the expense of everyone else.
“Folks around here have been left behind for a long time,” Hicks said in a recent interview. “And they’ve heard a lot of empty promises again and again.”
Hicks, 42, a tall, husky man, is the underdog. In Barr, he faces an incumbent with $2.1 million on hand as of June 30, more than twice as much campaign cash as him.
Also, the 6th District is an increasingly conservative place outside of Lexington and Frankfort. It backed Trump, the Republican president, by a 15-point margin over Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton in 2016.
To avoid getting dismissed as a liberal, Hicks is quick to share his rustic biography with voters.
He was raised on a Fleming County farm, picking tobacco; played football at Georgetown College; served in the U.S. Marine Corps, twice deploying with the 24th Marine Expeditionary Unit; patrolled Maysville for five years as a police officer; and earned a law degree at the University of Kentucky in Lexington, where today he practices law at a small firm he co-owns.
Hicks wasn’t even a registered Democrat until 2016. He quit the GOP, he said, because it no longer had a unifying message other than “support for the wealthy donor class and Wall Street.”
On the campaign trail, Hicks describes Barr as a country club Republican with a trust fund, a cloistered career politician.
For instance, Hicks said, Barr might not have voted so many times to repeal the Affordable Care Act if he personally knew more Kentuckians who struggled to find health insurance before the law passed, particularly people with preexisting medical conditions who now are guaranteed equal access to coverage.
And Kentucky’s decision to expand Medicaid, made possible by the Affordable Care Act, has been a godsend for hundreds of thousands of the working poor whose jobs don’t provide insurance coverage, Hicks said.
“Frankly, I come from a much different place than Congressman Andy Barr comes from. People like me don’t often have a voice in the halls of power,” Hicks said.
“The corporations, the very wealthy, the billionaires, the special interests — they have gotten everything they could have ever wanted, and it’s still not enough. They’re still seeking more,” Hicks said. “Unless we have someone who tries to fight back against that, regular folks in Kentucky don’t have a chance.”
The lone Democrat in Kentucky’s congressional delegation, U.S. Rep. John Yarmuth of Louisville, said Hicks can connect with people from all walks of life because of his own personal history.
“Josh Hicks is the absolutely perfect candidate for that district,” Yarmuth said.
“There’s not one person in that district he can’t talk to comfortably,” Yarmuth said. “He can go out in Fleming County where he grew up and talk to rural citizens and he can go around Lexington and talk to bankers and the academic community and the legal community. He’s just comfortable with everyone. I don’t think I can say that about myself in my district.”
The election is Nov. 3, although mail-in absentee balloting already has begun. Aside from Barr and Hicks, the Libertarian Party’s Frank Harris also is a candidate. Harris won just 0.7 percent of the vote when he ran in 2018 against Barr and Democrat Amy McGrath.
Split from GOP
Although Hicks lives with his wife and two children in suburban Lexington, he likes to greet campaign visitors at his parents’ farm near Ewing, a tiny community in Fleming County. While he was growing up here, his father worked at a construction company; his mother had a job in the local Honda shop.
“I came from nothing, essentially,” Hicks said. “I lived with my wife, and the first two years of our marriage, we were at poverty level, had just enough money to get by. I’ve gone from there to being a successful attorney in Lexington.”
People who struggle to pay their bills appreciate that government can provide important services that would make life a little easier, like education, job training, health care, addiction treatment and high-speed Internet access, Hicks said. But that only happens if their elected leaders support them, he said.
Barr and other congressional Republicans seem chiefly interested in assisting their top campaign donors with tax breaks and business deregulation, which is what turned him off the GOP despite his conservative upbringing, he said.
“I finally decided they were never going to come back and do what needed to be done in communities like this,” Hicks said, gesturing at the surrounding countryside.
He gave an example: In 2017, he said, the Republican-controlled Congress passed a $2.2 trillion tax cut package that heavily favored corporations — only the individuals’ tax cuts came with an expiration date — while draining revenue from scores of important federal programs.
Among other things, the bill diverted $750 million from the Prevention and Public Health Fund at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, leaving the country less prepared to face COVID-19, he said.
Trump proved to be equally disappointing as a leader, Hicks said.
“His comments on veterans recently highlight what I feel is missing from our government as a whole, which is a true dedication to public service,” he said.
“To hear that he said the Marines at Belleau Wood were ‘suckers,’ that was hard for me. I served in the Marine Corps,” he said. “To hear something like that just proves my theory that we don’t have enough public servants in Washington, D.C., even at the highest levels.”
Police and racism
Hicks says his views of the world are evolving as his experiences grow.
When he was a Maysville police officer two decades ago, he said, he didn’t understand critics who accused the police of systemic racism. As far as he could tell, he and his colleagues treated everyone with the same level of respect.
But more recently, as he watched video of Black Americans being abused by police and listened to shocking personal accounts, he realized that he was only viewing the world from his own perspective, he said.
“I didn’t see it,” he said.
“Even when I was a police officer, I didn’t recognize that I might have some of those internal biases that we’re now seeing all over the country,” he said. “But even if I didn’t see it 15 years ago, it’s there in front of us today. Part of growing is recognizing that you may have been wrong, you may have been mistaken, that you could do better, that you can move forward.”
While local and state governments must take the lead in reforming their own police departments, Congress can play a role by demilitarizing the police, Hicks said. Over the past 20 years, the federal government has awarded huge sums in homeland security grants that police departments use to equip themselves with military-style gear.
It’s time for helmeted police officers to stop rumbling down the streets in armored convoys, Hicks said.
“You’re told ‘Police your community like you’re a part of it,’ and then you’re given tools like you’re going into a war zone,” he said. “Those two things can affect the morale, can affect the culture in your department.”
Selective debt outrage
Hicks breaks with some of the Democratic Party’s positions in the U.S. House of Representatives, such as the Green New Deal, a sweeping package of proposals intended to mitigate climate change. The plan would excessively penalize coal, he said, which remains “a cultural touchstone” in Kentucky.
However, Hicks said, he wants Kentucky to play a large role in developing renewable energy, such as solar and wind, and to use its agricultural resources for reforesting and regenerative farming, to help lower the global temperature.
“Climate change is real. And it’s a crisis,” Hicks said. “If part of what we’re seeing now adds to someone’s personal growth in recognizing climate change, then I’m grateful for that part of it. Because when you have 112-mph straight-line winds in Iowa that kill people, when you have the wildfires that we’re seeing in California, when you have these hurricanes on the Gulf coast, it has to become real to you.”
Republicans try to undermine government, treating it like an enemy, Hicks said, but government is supposed to be how communities band together to collectively tackle their problems.
For example, he said, Kentucky schools were closed this year by the COVID-19 pandemic, forcing their students online. But many parts of the state don’t have fast, reliable Internet connections. Even after it’s completed, the 3,000-mile Kentucky Wired project will need more money for the “last mile” connecting individual homes.
“We need to make sure we put that in the next infrastructure bill. This is something that has to happen,” he said.
“Our counties won’t be able to afford that on their own. They were struggling before the coronavirus, and they’re certainly going to be struggling now, especially since our senior senator has decided that they don’t deserve any relief from the federal government. I guess they don’t rate as highly as a cruise line.”
Asked if he worries about the federal debt, which is expected to reach $20.3 trillion by the end of this fiscal year, Hicks gets visibly agitated. There is too much debt, he said, but Congress only seems concerned about it when some of its poorer constituents need help from Washington.
“What I find funny about questions like this is, nobody ever talks about the national debt when it’s time for a tax cut, when it’s time for a bailout, when it’s time for subsidies to corporations. Then, nobody ever has the first problem with it. They cannot get that money out the door fast enough,” Hicks said.
“It’s only when we’re talking about, hey, rural Kentucky is suffering because of the opioid epidemic, we need to address that. Then it’s ‘Oh man, wait, that sounds like it’s going to cost a whole lot of money!’”
This story was originally published October 6, 2020 at 9:18 AM.
