Jeromie Whalen is an educator who has spent the past 11 years teaching technology, media, and communications at Northampton High School. But this year, the Belchertown native and current South Hadley resident has taken a leave of absence to pursue a different kind of ambitious task: running for Congress against incumbent U.S. Rep. Richard Neal, a Springfield Democrat who has represented the region in Washington D.C. for 36 years.
Whalen, 38, is the latest in a procession of left-leaning candidates to challenge Neal in recent years. They have criticized him for his opposition to progressive policies like Medicare for All and for his acceptance of massive amounts of campaign cash from corporations — money he has used to fend off those electoral challenges. A more conservative Democrat who began his political career as a city councilor and mayor of Springfield, Neal has risen up his party’s ranks to become the top Democrat on the influential House Ways and Means Committee.
The Shoestring’s investigations editor Dusty Christensen spoke with Whalen last month about his decision to challenge Neal, his political beliefs, and why he thinks he should represent Massachusetts’ 1st Congressional District — a region representing 83 municipalities and around a third of the state’s entire landmass.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity:
Dusty Christensen: How do you identify politically?
Whalen: I identify politically as a dude from western Mass. We have gotten to an age that political labels and rhetoric really win the day in a way that I’m not down for. If you were to look at my platform, you would see that I am very progressive in that sense. But I am much more interested in making a populist movement and bringing in a lot of people that, the minute that they hear that progressive label, they start to tune out. I don’t want them to do that. I want to sit down with them, and I want to have those conversations, and sometimes they’re tough conversations. But I think that is the solution to the problems that we have right now, fundamentally rethinking the systems that we have at hand that are so broken that we need to tear them down and start over.
So what are those? I think that we can all agree that our health care system is absolutely broken. We have astronomical drug prices. We have insanely high bills that you have to pay. And you start thinking more about the bill that is going to come after you get out than your actual health. And so what that means is that thinking about universal health care — and getting profits out of the health care system — is imperative to a functioning society.
I also think that we are in desperate need of an overhaul of taxes and the tax code. It’s disgusting that billionaires are skating by while working- and middle-class people who are working their asses off are in a position where they can’t afford rent or they can’t afford utilities, or they can’t afford groceries … They should be getting the benefits that they need because they are the lifeblood of these corporations, and they are the reason why billionaires are able to thrive. So billionaires should be paying their fair share of taxes.
Christensen: To circle back to a couple of those policies you mentioned. Universal health care: obviously, the big bill that has been put forward every year in Congress — first by U.S. Rep. John Conyers, D-Michigan, in 2003 — is the Medicare for All Act. Is that the kind of thing you’re talking about? Do you support that bill?
Whalen: Yes, absolutely. Some people float around a couple of different versions of these systems. They float around a public option, they float around some middle ground in between this. I don’t think that there should be a company profiting ever on your health, period. I look at an example that I just saw recently in South Hadley, where I live. The insurance rates have gone up something like 18% in this year alone. You look at why and it’s GLP-1 [diabetes and weight-loss] drugs. Those drugs are averaging something over in the ballpark of $1,200 a month. You go to another country, those same drugs are going to be $200 to $300. So we’re getting screwed really badly when it comes to thinking about who is actually profiting off of our health and who can afford to be healthy in this country.
Christensen: I did want to ask about a couple more policies at the center of debate in the Democratic Party right now. One of those is the issue of Israel’s U.S.-backed war on Palestine and the party’s support for arming Israel. There was a lot of tension at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago last year, for example, over the party refusing to open a speaking slot for a Palestinian-American. That was despite protests from “uncommitted” delegates who were pushing for the Democrats to do more to end Israel’s bombardment of Gaza, which Palestinians have called a genocide for nearly two years — a term many others have now begun using, too.
The largest donors to Richard Neal’s campaign committee in this previous election cycle were individuals, and the political action committee, representing the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, and he has previously supported legislation that would have punished supporters of peacefully boycotting Israel over its treatment of Palestinians. I’m curious to know how your policies would be different on this issue as compared to Richard Neal and others in the Democratic Party who have regularly voted to arm Israel?
Whalen: This is how the old-school establishment operates, how Richie Neal operates. He won’t say a damn thing until public opinion sways into the favor and he has to make a stand. That’s not leadership. I was listening to NPR and just heard about the recent strike on [a Gazan] hospital. Killed a bunch of journalists. Killed a bunch of health care professionals. What’s going on right now is a genocide, clear and simple. Anybody that has access to the information at hand and can read the horror stories that are coming out of Gaza, it’s an absolute travesty. But you will never hear Richie Neal say that because he takes tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars, from pro-Israel government PACs. [Fact check: Neal has received $130,400 from pro-Israel PACs since 1990, according to the money-in-politics watchdog group OpenSecrets. However, he has also received hundreds of thousands of dollars from weapons manufacturers that have profited from Israel’s war in Gaza, including $217,500 from RTX Corporation.] And that ensures that he won’t take a hard stand on making sure that women and children are safe. This is not a radical idea. To think that this has become a politicized thing — “I can’t stand up to end the genocide that’s going on because people are lining my pockets with money” — that shows what the leadership on his side is. And that’s exactly the opposite of what I stand for.
Christensen: I want to talk about corporate money. According to The Shoestring’s analysis of campaign finance records, Richard Neal has accepted more corporate PAC money than all but two other members of the U.S. House since 2010. You have said you’re not taking corporate PAC money. What policies in particular do you think that your opponent supports because of that corporate financing of his campaigns? How would your policies be different because you are not taking that corporate cash?
Whalen: I think that Citizens United is one of the worst Supreme Court decisions ever. Everybody that’s taking the money is the problem, and so this is not Democrat or Republican, this is just corruption in general. Richie being in bed with all of these corporations, it speaks volumes as to why he wants to be quiet on Medicare for All or not be out in the front fighting for that. It just takes a simple internet search — “Richard Neal Open Secrets” or “Richard Neal campaign contributions” — to see that he takes hundreds of thousands of dollars from not only the health care lobbyists, but big banks, big pharma, the people that want to make sure that the shareholders are taken care of rather than his constituents. Those donations equal access to him and advocacy on those corporations’ behalf.
Christensen: I’ve covered campaigns against Richard Neal in the past. And what he’s said is that these campaign donors are actually buying into the policies that he already supports and not influencing him. And his backers would say that he’s managed to build quite a lot of power in Washington, D.C., and then is able to use that power to benefit western Mass, whether it’s bringing federal funding here or helping other projects along. How would you respond to those who think it’s a good thing to have such an influential lawmaker representing this area?
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Whalen: It’s all bullshit. The idea that he has deep institutional knowledge, where was that knowledge and where did it get us when we got two Trump administrations? That power that he wields, what power does he have when Springfield alone loses $47 million in public school education that’s getting hijacked?
When I think about the power, you have to ask yourself, who does he wield that power for? It’s not the constituents, I’ll tell you that right now. It’s the corporate lobbyists and billionaire class. And then you layer on the other corruption that goes on with his own son. His own son takes $50,000 plus in campaign money and then goes and lobbies before the Ways and Means Committee.
It’s not two paths that we have. His path is just a downhill slope and it’s leading us straight into the gutter. And so we’ve got to rethink what we think a career politician stands for because I am exactly the opposite. I’m not a career politician. I lean into that because I want to serve people as a public servant, like I have for over a decade in the classroom.
Christensen: Let’s move on to the Trump administration. How do you think that Democrats have done, specifically in Congress, in pushing back against some of the Trump administration’s actions, from the mass deportation of immigrants nationwide to the sending of the National Guard to occupy the streets of Washington, D.C.? Do you see the Democratic Party as adequately fighting back against his agenda? And if not, what would you do differently?
Whalen: So I think that you can look at Massachusetts as an example of how you can actually fight back. My friend Mahmoud Khalil — and when I say friend, I volunteered with him in 2018, we were standing shoulder to shoulder in the classroom teaching Syrian refugees — when he got abducted, Ayanna Pressley went down to go see him. Elizabeth Warren and Jim McGovern and Ed Markey, they all went. You know who didn’t go? Richard Neal. And so with anything, there’s people that will fight and people that are not bought and sold by corporations. And then there’s people without backbones.
Christensen: Climate change is obviously a huge deal for constituents in any district. In our district, we’ve seen wildfire smoke impact air quality. We’ve seen the climate whiplash between massive floods and periods of drought. How would you, if elected, seek to address the climate crisis? And how would that differ from what’s being done now?
Whalen: Green New Deal. Three words. That’s not just saving the planet, although we shouldn’t need an incentive to make our planet a better place. But if one does want to look at what incentives can be combined with the Green New Deal, it’s economic development. We can create jobs that are focused on cleaner alternatives to fossil fuel. We can prioritize the creation of systems that are going to bring down our utility bills. The thing that I hear so often around here is that my utility bill jumped an astronomical amount just from one month to another. The way that we fix that, the way that we fix our economy, is also the way that we can fix the planet. And if we could combine those two, that is just a winning combination.
Christensen: Any other policies that separate you from either your opponent in this race or the Democratic Party as a whole?
Whalen: I think my union support and being an actual member of a union with boots on the ground fighting for fair contracts, looking out for other unions within the district. You know, Richie can say that he’s pro-union, and he gets the endorsements and all of that. But at the end of the day, who’s out there on the picket lines? It’s me. Who’s out there with the people that are fighting this good fight? It’s me. Who is not taking money from giant corporations that want to dismantle unions? It’s me.
Christensen: Over the years, I have covered several other campaigns against Richard Neal. There was Tahirah Amatul-Wadud, the civil rights lawyer who ran against him in 2018 as a political outsider and lost by around 40 percentage points. Alex Morse, the then-mayor of Holyoke, ran against Neal in 2020 on a platform supporting some of these same things you support — Medicare for All, the Green New Deal. He raised a lot of individual donations and received financial support from national progressive organizations, but ended up losing by 20 percentage points. And last year, Neal defeated independent candidate Nadia Milleron with around 64% of the vote. Richard Neal has defeated everybody who has run against him in the Democratic primary and in the general election. Why do you feel that your campaign is going to succeed when many others before you have not?
Whalen: What I think that I bring here as an advantage is being an outsider to the utmost extent. I’m running a campaign that is entirely different from my predecessors’. I am not held back by thinking that I need to act a certain way or do a certain thing, and I’m sure as hell not held back by corporate sponsorship in any way like Richie is. I’m not saying that is true for Alex or Tahirah, but I think that I offer a different perspective.
People are really energized, it’s turning people’s heads and they’re saying, “Hey, that guy’s relatable. I see that guy at the gas station filling up. I see that guy in the grocery store right next to me.” I want to be the same exact person that I have been.
I’ve been called a no name candidate, and I actually embrace that because having no name means that I can stand for every person. I can stand for every teacher, I can stand for every nurse, I can stand for every tradesperson, I can stand for every union worker or single mother.
By working hard, by putting every effort I have into it, I think that people are understanding that we can do this together. We just have to have the audacity to go in a new direction after decades of the same thing. And people get that.
Dusty Christensen is The Shoestring's investigations editor. Based in western Massachusetts, his award-winning investigative reporting has appeared in newspapers and on radio stations across the region. He has reported for outlets including The Nation magazine, NPR, Haaretz, New England Public Media, The Boston Globe, The Appeal, In These Times, and PBS. He teaches journalism to future muckrakers at both the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Smith College. Send story tips to: dchristensen@theshoestring.org.
