FREMONT, Ohio — As November’s midterm elections approach, Democratic Rep. Marcy Kaptur spoke exclusively with Spectrum News about her race against Republican J.R. Majewski in Ohio’s 9th District.
The full, uncut conversation from Aug. 22 can be viewed above or the full transcript can be viewed below.
A full report on the race in the 9th Congressional District can be viewed by clicking here.
Taylor Popielarz: So first off, you’ve obviously been in this business for a long time. This cycle, what is your pitch to voters about why you deserve to be reelected?
Rep. Marcy Kaptur: Well, first of all, results. What we’ve been able to do and what is on the teed up—in terms of projects that we want to complete. What’s happened is that the district has changed so dramatically that many of our projects that are underway, I have to keep tucked under this arm at the same time as I try to pick up the new parts of the district. And what’s also on the line is seniority, quite frankly. In the Congress, you don’t succeed in your early years. You have to really prove yourself and you have to rise in committees. I’ve now done that. And for instance, in Toledo we’re currently building a federal courthouse—the only one being built in the entire Great Lakes. The other one is so old, the judges had their feet in water in the basement of the current federal courthouse. It took us so long, because it’s not easy to pass things in the Congress of the United States for this part of the country, if you haven’t noticed. Even Amtrak, for example, on the east coast, they get $16 billion out of the box. We don’t get a penny. We have to fight for everything, work with the private sector, try to get it accomplished. So, from our part of the country, it’s much harder and I think I’m a proven leader in terms of bringing our tax dollars back.
Taylor Popielarz: Especially since the shape of your district has changed so much, do you feel like you’ve been able to gauge, if I said to you right now, what’s the top priority facing this district? What is it?
Rep. Marcy Kaptur: I would have to say continued economic recovery and workforce development. Today I just learned that one of the businesses here in Sandusky County is laying off people until the first of the year. Pretty well-known company, by the way. And so, we still struggle, both with the jobs and with the job training that goes into preparing people of the jobs that exist in the 21st Century, and those that are to come, the ones that we’re working on. For example, we want to do a hydrogen hub. But to become a leader in the country to do that, you need very high-level engineering, and you need training all the way down to the high school and junior high school level. So, in order to meet the market, you have to have the workforce prepared. And there have been issues on that, actually, that we’re working very hard to remediate. In terms of mechanics, we have an airplane mechanic program out at the Toledo Express Airport—now renamed the Kranz Airport, Eugene Kranz Airport. But there aren’t enough mechanics, they’re being snapped up all over the country. And in the automotive arena, where we are undergoing a revolution, we’re a million mechanics short in the country. So we’re trying to bring in funds to help the local school systems meet the new market, and we’re coming up short. We have to try harder. Our educational systems are having trouble with finding teachers. And so, I would say an immediate need is really for individuals to volunteer if they’re retired teachers or they worked as coaches or they worked in libraries, to volunteer at our local schools, so they can start on time and be fully staffed in order to help the children who many of whom, by the way, fell behind during the pandemic. So, I would have to say, economic recovery from the pandemic and making sure that our youth are prepared for the jobs that are being created today.
Taylor Popielarz: Especially for the new constituents in the newly drawn 9th District. You touched on this a bit before when you talked about experience, but what’s your pitch to them about why you’re right to keep this job and why J.R. Majewski is wrong for this job?
Rep. Marcy Kaptur: Well, first of all, I serve on all the right committees. I’m a senior member of the appropriations committee. This doesn’t happen. There aren’t people from the Great Lakes who get gavels on these subcommittees of appropriations. That is one of the most powerful committees in the Congress. I serve on the defense committee, I’m now number three on that subcommittee, and I’m the only one on the veterans committee from our state, and on the agriculture committee. We had a major hearing this morning here in Sandusky County on the new farm bill. And I used to be the top member in my party on the agriculture appropriations committee, so I know the issues, I know the rules of the game, so to speak, for agriculture. So, it’ll be easy for me. You don’t have to train anybody; you don’t have to have someone—and by the way, this district has eight counties and parts of others in it. And so, it takes a while to get to know people and to get to know their institutions and to understand how to try to help the major challenges we face. There isn’t an audience I go into that doesn’t talk about the Great Lakes and Lake Erie, and the rivers that flow into it. They know what a challenge this is—the farmers talked about it this morning, trying to find ways to deal with the changing environment. So, I think agriculture has a big role to play, a big role, in terms of new opportunity because of what’s happening in other parts of our country, sadly, and we’re going to have to displace that production elsewhere. We should repurpose our region to receive more of that as it shuts down in the West.
Taylor Popielarz: You’ve campaigned heavily on the fact that your opponent, J.R. Majewski, was at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Obviously, you were inside the building.
Rep. Marcy Kaptur: Yes, he was outside the building with all those rioters.
Taylor Popielarz: You’ve labeled him in many ads, campaign emails as an extremist. Why do you feel it’s important to drill down on that fact?
Rep. Marcy Kaptur: I feel it’s important because someone like that doesn’t play by the rules. And when you come and you desecrate the Capitol of the United States, which frankly members of my family fought for, and shed blood for, other families died for, and someone like that with others who come in, and whatever their opinion, they don’t present themselves reasonably. They riot. They harm 144 of our police officers, some still hospitalized, by the way. What kind of person is that that would do that? I call that an extremist. And I don’t care what the ads might say about that individual. I know what they did. I was there. So, I think that it is a complete abomination. It’s a complete undermining of our Constitution. And I do view it as an insurrection.
Taylor Popielarz: So obviously, we’ve been talking about how the shape of your district has changed. And you could say it’s been gerrymandered to favor a Democrat for many years, just by the shape of it. You’ve won all 20 of your elections by double digits. What do you say to constituents who say, this time, it’s good that you’re facing actual competition in a general election?
Rep. Marcy Kaptur: Well, let’s say I faced competition before. I had to oust someone who outspent me three to one in my very first election. I had to oust individuals in my own party who represented two-thirds of the population in the region when I did not. I think I know how to campaign, and most importantly, I know how to serve the people, once elected. And I think we’ve touched enough lives. I think people have seen the results of our work. They know that what America makes and grows, makes and grows America. And they know that that is my motto.
Taylor Popielarz: Next year would be year number 40 for you in Congress, and I believe you would surpass the total for longest serving woman in either chamber. Right now you hold that in the House. A lot of voters that I’ve spoken with across Ohio say they do value term limits, they dislike the idea of a career politician. Why should they keep you in office?
Rep. Marcy Kaptur: Well, first of all, because they kept changing the district on us all the time and I couldn’t fix what was wrong in all the places I was asked to represent. And it’s just like raising a family. You don’t fix what’s wrong in just a couple of years. It takes, frankly, a lifetime of commitment when you have serious issues. If all we needed was a pothole fixed, that’s not a big deal. But when you’re talking about cleaning up Lake Erie, addressing the serious challenges of the western basin of Lake Erie. When you’re talking about trying to unsnarl the rail traffic in our region, it’s an enormous, enormous challenge, infrastructure challenge. Trying to get us more closely connected with Canada. When you’re talking about taking people who have lost their work, and we’re trained in one field, and then have to retrain, and you don’t have the schools to do it. And you have to bring dollars and help those schools recover. When you have health systems, where people can’t get care, because they live too far away from a hospital or a clinic. These are not simple problems. You can’t just solve them like that. You have to be diligent. You have to keep trying year after year after year, and finally, you succeed. So, people I think have to understand, you know if it was the same district—but it isn’t—for the last 10 years, two-thirds of my home community of Toledo was removed from the district. That means now I have to go back for the last 10 years for everything that wasn’t done there. I have to pick up the broken pieces. And if they would have left that in the district in the first place, I would have had more done. We have lots of examples. I mentioned the only federal courthouse being built in the entire Great Lakes is being built in Toledo now. If you think about that as a current project, that took us almost two decades, over two decades. If you look at the Veterans Glass City Skyway in Toledo, that’s over the largest river that flows into the Great Lakes, that took us about 16 years. So, I usually say to audiences, I’m the author of the bill that authorized the World War Two Memorial in Washington, D.C. Something the public wanted, the public wanted it. And it took us from 1987 to 2004. Because of the slow wheels of Washington. So if all they want is a piece of saran wrap, OK, fine. Change your brand. But if you really want to see something done, pull the lever for me.
Taylor Popielarz: If you do keep winning this election, maybe more, do you have a self-imposed cutoff for when you would say I would hang it up?
Rep. Marcy Kaptur: I think that God has the answer on that. I don’t have the answer.
Taylor Popielarz: OK. And then lastly, for you, I saw your new TV ad out. And it says pretty straightforward, “Marcy Kaptur, she doesn’t work for Joe Biden, she works for you.” And it mentions the president a couple times, it mentions you working with Republicans, it criticizes Biden and some of his policies. It’s a clear indication you’re trying to distance yourself from him right now. You’ve also, though, in the times I’ve interviewed you on the Hill throughout the last 18 months, you’ve praised Biden. You’ve called him transformative. At a 2020 campaign stop, you said, “It will be my honor to not just vote for Joe Biden, but to work for him.”
Rep. Marcy Kaptur: Yes.
Taylor Popielarz: So why now are you trying to distance yourself from your support for him?
Rep. Marcy Kaptur: I’m not—I’m trying to say that every vote is different. There’s no black and white in Congress. We have to find the big middle, right? We have to find areas where you can agree. What he’s done on infrastructure, he will go down in history for the infrastructure bill. The public doesn’t even fully understand what’s in that bill and what it could mean to our area if our governors, mayors, city council people, county commissioners, draw down the dollars that are there with wisdom and vision, vision toward the future. OK, I support him on that. I support him on the $35 a month diabetes insulin provision that we were able to get in this last bill that we passed, so that people don’t have to pay, starting in 2025, any more than $35 a month for their insulin. I support him on saying to senior citizens, hey, once you pay $2,000 for your prescription drugs, guess what, you won’t have to pay the rest, Medicare will pick up the rest. I support him on that. What I didn’t support him on, for example, was something that he allowed to happen – import foreign frames for solar panels using a type of substrate that we don’t make in America. It came from China. I am virulently opposed to that. And I will speak my piece. And I will say it loudly and I won’t stop and I didn’t. And we were able to get some language adjustments that were put in the bill, finally, to try to soften the blow to the finest solar companies in America, which exists right here in northern Ohio, Toledo Solar, First Solar. We built them from the ground up. If people think that First Solar was just built because you were in office for two years, forget it. It took decades to help to do the research, the development, the private investment, the genius of the private sector moving forward and never giving up. And we now have other new technologies, like hydrogen, coming forward, that will produce even more jobs down the road. This doesn’t happen overnight; people have to be realistic about when you’re trying to transform the country. What it takes, what it takes to do it. We had the Interior Department build the Ottawa Wildlife Refuge Visitor Venter. This year alone, in May—and that didn’t happen overnight. That took us years and decades to transform the coast. We, just in May—$40 million, came into the local economy because birders came in from all over the world and spent a boatload in our area. That’s a new shot in the arm to Lake Erie shores and islands, to all those involved in the tourist industry. We just had the Army Corps of Engineers in here. We were looking at the various harbors that we have to dredge and the opportunities to create more space because it’s so crowded now that the boats can’t get out. We got a $17 billion boating industry, $6 billion fishing industry. If you look at what it takes in order to sustain those, it doesn’t happen overnight. And you don’t really understand what’s needed until you have time to study it.
Taylor Popielarz: Last quick follow up, just as we’re talking about the president. I spoke to one of your constituents at this listening session you just had for the ag committee. He told me he’s a fan of you. He knows you take your work seriously. But he dislikes, in his words, that you vote with President Biden 100% of the time. And I checked FiveThirtyEight’s analysis of lawmaker votes and they say it is 100% of the time. And he said no lawmaker, no matter their party, should be a yes on every single thing for any particular leader. So, what do you say as folks see your TV ads being a little critical of Biden, but then they look up your voting record, what do you say to them about kind of your loyalty to your party and the president, but also being willing to buck them if need be?
Rep. Marcy Kaptur: Well, I guess what I’d say is that I virulently opposed Joe Biden on the major issue that passed the Congress in the 1990s called NAFTA. He and I virulently disagree on what that bill did, what that trade bill did to this part of the country. And one of the reasons—you have to have a longer time horizon, you can’t look at the last two years when he’s been president. Look at our votes in the Congress when he was in the Senate, when I was in the House. I don’t—whatever website that is, I would say that they have a very short lens. Very, very constricted lens. Because he and I had many arguments about that and the supporters in the Senate for NAFTA that emptied out this part of the country and didn’t touch Delaware. Although he does say that they lost the General Motors facility, that that actually did shut down in Delaware. So, there are votes, and then there are votes. And, you know, if you’re voting on something like should the Post Office retirees’ pensions and health benefits be secure? Yes, he and I would agree on that. If you say for the people who worked in the trucking industry, the mining industry, the building trades, should their pensions be secure? Yes, he and I will agree on that. When it comes to economics, he and I have had some massive disagreements. So, who’s ever got that board rating, whatever it is, I haven’t seen that. But it surely doesn’t look at our voting records together. Now on foreign policy, I agree with him on a whole lot of things. I never thought we should have gone to war in Iraq. And I don’t know—I assume he voted for that. I don’t know, I’d have to go back and look. But on the really big ones, there are some times that we have had disagreement. On other things like infrastructure, we needed it for practically three quarters of a century and we finally got a president that did it. So, I walk with him on that one.
Taylor Popielarz: And that FiveThirtyEight—that was just talking while he was in office as president, so that didn’t go as far as in Congress.
Rep. Marcy Kaptur: To me, two years is nothing.
Taylor Popielarz: Yep.
Rep. Marcy Kaptur: Two years is nothing as a president, although he’s done a lot. But he’s made some mistakes, and we have let him know about that. And we’ve kept our foot to the pedal in terms of getting him out here, so that he can understand better, because Washington really doesn’t understand our region. They don’t because they are financially oriented on the East Coast, they’re tech oriented on the West Coast. They really do not understand agricultural and industrial America. They don’t.
Taylor Popielarz: And just to that, you don’t feel like you’re part of Washington? Having spent so many years in Congress?
Rep. Marcy Kaptur: I fight against it every day. One example, urban agriculture, I have led that fight. On ethanol, that came out of this part of the country, no other part of the country, and they didn’t want to do it. Now it’s one of the most important sources of income for our farmers. And it’s part of the transition into renewable energy for this country. We can’t ignore any energy sector. And right now, if you were to say to me, you know, Marcy, what’s the most important thing people have to lose if you wouldn’t be there? I’d say my chairmanship of a committee that brings real dollars and connectivity from our region to some of the most powerful interests in this country. That includes our major research labs, companies that can bring opportunity here, the kind of high science as well as engineering that are going to make the difference to modernize this part of the country, and development of relationships that don’t happen overnight. Whether it’s education, whether it’s parks, whatever the topic is, that you begin to understand the tissue of the entire country and you can bring that to bear in your region. That takes time. It’s an investment in the future. And so, when you elect someone to the Congress, it isn’t like some other job that really—it doesn’t take that long to master the subjects, but it does. If you want an intelligent group of people, and a well-informed group of people in the House and the Senate, you have to work on it, you have to work at it. And we’ve come through some very tough times in this part of the country. And one thing I think the public would have to say, I never gave up. I never ran for another office. I never aggrandized for myself. I never went to work as a lobbyist. I never went through that revolving door. I stayed dedicated because I knew what this area needed.
Taylor Popielarz: Alright, we covered a lot. Thanks so much.
Rep. Marcy Kaptur: Thank you.