The election for Kentucky’s 1st Congressional District pits Republican Congressman James Comer against Democrat John “Drew” Williams, a construction worker from Marshall County.
The race comes as Comer is reportedly eyeing a run for governor next year. While he has not officially announced his candidacy for the state’s highest office, Comer has previously said he plans to announce a gubernatorial campaign in December.
Both candidates were invited to participate in WKMS’s Voter Guide. Comer did not respond to invitations to participate. Williams’ responses are listed below.
John “Drew” Williams
Editor’s note: Williams participated in an interview with WKMS. His answers have been transcribed and edited for length and clarity. You can also listen to an extended cut of his interview below.
Q: What should voters know about you, and why are you running for office?
A: I am a 20-year construction worker on Kentucky Lake and Lake Barkley. I build boat docks for a living. I've been doing that since I was 14. I'm 34 now … I am a history major from Murray State University. My wife's a public school teacher. She got her degrees from Murray State University. Her master's [degree is] in Greek and Latin from Notre Dame, and she's working on her educational doctorate. And we're both lifelong community servants, and so we've been working on revitalizing my hometown fair in Marshall County for the last seven years.
At this time of political division, where we have such low faith in government and elected officials, I think that people who have [an] ear to the ground and understand the issues with affordability, with access to government, with trust in government, should be the people who we're putting forward. Career politicians are kind of out of vogue right now; they're not really in phase. So, I think that having somebody that has worked really hard on building up a community, but also you know is not [an] established member of the political sphere, is important.
Q: What would your priorities be, if elected?
A: So my priorities right now – and obviously that changes as our community's needs change – but the big things to focus on obviously [are] the affordability crisis and making sure that… America is working for working families … working to make sure that we have a base-level floor for our society. We're the richest country in the world; that should be a kind of a no-brainer. But it seems like right now we're fighting tooth and nail just to, you know, keep dollars in our pockets.
The second one is making sure that we have a strong moratorium on data centers, that we work on strict and effective regulations and that when we implement AI, it has strong ethics and is a worker-centric model and a human-centric model, and … [that] we're not using it to displace people. I've been watching the book-cutting kind of measures that have been going on, and that breaks my heart as somebody who had like the most Accelerated Reader points in my school's history in Marshall County. I can't imagine that that's an ethical practice.
And then, third, is government corruption … both parties have a terrible track record. They have a terrible approval rating. Individuals in office or running for office have good ratings, but that's not attached to the party structures or to politics in general, and so … it's individual stock trading bans. It's politicians not becoming lobbyists when they leave office, it's banning dark money, super PACs, ending Citizens United, making sure that we are standing up for the emoluments clause and for making sure that politicians and elected officials are not getting kickbacks for contracts, for actions with foreign countries and making sure that Congress's only special interest and your representative's only special interest is the people, and so that's kind of my focus.
Q: What do you see as the signature issue for Congress and in this district that you would address in this next term?
A: So I think it's the individual stock trading ban on politicians. I also think it counts for their immediate families because we can see specific individuals who don't trade individual stocks themselves, but their family members do. That's pretty much the same thing. Same thing with if you're an appointed official. So if you go through Congress to get your job after the president is elected and they pick a new cabinet, those people should also be barred from trading individual stocks because they have such a heavy hand on the system. Secondly, I think we should be banning Citizens United. Again, campaign finance reform is going to be super huge. Third is, for me, I think we should go back to the 1913 $3,000 for federal income tax, but scaled with inflation, which would be about $100,000 next year.
And then finally, the way that we do economic safety net services like SNAP, Medicaid, housing, childcare, transportation assistances – they don't speak with each other very well. And so a lot of times when you have somebody who's working or getting off those systems and they benefit from them, they'll earn $500 this week, and they'll lose $700 worth of overall services. And so there's no incentivization project there for us to engage like upward mobility.
In the district, because we're so rural, I think that a specific conversation about rural infrastructure, main streets and court square revitalization is really important for rebuilding our village because a lot of bigger cities have both the population density, the economic development and the community structures to have a village. Now, some of them might, again, be in underserved communities, and they need help specifically too. And so I think that this would culminate there.
Q: How would you improve the quality of life for residents in this district?
A: The things that I've noticed is that obviously we're a large farming community. Farmers are public servants, in my opinion. I think that what they do and the risks they take are so drastic in comparison to other jobs. You know, a single bad [crop] year can, for any number of reasons – drought, floods, fires, trade wars and tariffs – can ruin someone, and it's really on them a lot of the times and their insurance and their spaces. Whereas I think that, if you're doing the right thing as a farmer and your community is supported by your actions and whatnot, you really shouldn't be worried about going out of business from no fault of your own.
Because we've so heavily stocked ourselves in global commodity crops, we don't have the domestic crop and we don't have the local crop. That obviously, you know you goes back 150 years. A lot of farmers were feeding their town, and so they were invested members of their communities because of that … whereas now, again, we're shipping a lot of it to China. We're shipping a lot of it to other countries, and which is good for exports, is good for [the gross domestic product]. There's no problem with that, and we should be advocating for that.
But to create a better system at the federal level that promotes and incentivizes and secures you having a small crop that can be utilized for local … produce and markets, and having a domestic crop that we're utilizing to help get to bigger markets, but here in the United States changes a lot of the conversation.
The quality of life conversation in rural communities is really difficult because so many people, depending on what town you're in, are lacking a different level of service. And so having more traveling clinics, more availability, more paramedicine by your ambulatory and EMS people. Working on like keep community-based services and making sure that communities aren't falling through the cracks because they're lacking a treatment or recovery center, they're lacking a senior center, they're lacking you know senior care services or childcare services that really help promote and promulgate a community structure that I think we're really lacking. We really subscribed out of the village, and so if we can figure out a way as a community, first off, to help take care of each other.
Q: What do you think needs to change in Congress, and why should people vote you into office to do that?
A: Two percent of Congress is considered blue-collar workers, and less than that made under $60,000 a year before they got there. I think that the number of people that are there and are having the conversations on our behalf don't really understand what we're going through. If we're going to make an economy that works for working people and it works for the vast majority of Americans and [to help] rebuild the middle class, what we have to do is get people out of office who are tied to corporate PACs, that have huge stock portfolios, right?
My opponent's currently got about $500,000 in corporate PACs and $285,000 in individual stocks – lot of that's in mega corporations and big spaces that aren't actually invested here in western Kentucky or southcentral Kentucky.
And then, you know, hopefully, working on some independent redistricting so we can get better results on that. I actually have Fulton and Frankfort in my district, but I don't have Bowling Green, so it's a really weird map, and it's hard to represent people adequately.
So I think that those kinds of shifts, as well as, again, mandating town halls, mandating debate structures, mandating [that] we have these roundtables and interview conversations would help educate people as well as make sure their voices are heard.
