Evelyn Reynolds

Here is a simple moral proposition. No one in America, or anywhere in the world, should die or suffer unnecessarily because they cannot afford a prescription drug which, in many cases, costs a few cents or a few dollars to manufacture.As Chairman of the US Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee (Help) I’m going to do everything I can to develop a new approach to the development and manufacturing of prescription drugs that responds to medical need, rather than short-term shareholder profit. Given the power and greed of the pharmaceutical industry this is not an easy task, but it’s one that must be pursued.The tragic reality is that, today, millions of people around the world are suffering, and dying, from preventable diseases because they can’t afford the outrageous prices charged by pharmaceutical companies. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), one third of humanity lacks access to essential medicines. For a staggering number of people around the world, this leads to what the WHO calls “a cascade of preventable misery and suffering.”There are a number of reasons why this tragic reality continues to happen.First, too often drug companies abuse patent monopolies to charge outrageous prices or otherwise keep lifesaving drugs out of reach for people around the world. For example, the Boston-based drug company Vertex is neither selling a transformative new treatment for cystic fibrosis in the developing world, nor allowing other local companies to produce it. Put simply, the company is not only refusing to bring a life-raft to people drowning with cystic fibrosis in poor countries, it is also blocking others from deploying their own life-rafts to people who need them to stay alive.Second, far too often, the medicines that are desperately needed by millions of people in poor countries are not being produced by the pharmaceutical industry because the drug companies cannot make sufficient profits by doing so. In the US and other developed countries people often pay exorbitant prices for life-saving medicines. Poor people in developing countries can’t. They don’t have the money. The result: they die. Because the business model of the pharmaceutical industry values dollars gained over lives saved, there are not enough companies looking for transformative treatments, especially for diseases that afflict poor people.Consider the case of tuberculosis (TB) – a disease that killed more than 1.3 million people in 2022, and is on the rise as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic. The TB vaccine still used today is more than a hundred years old, and only protects young children, even though adolescents and adults account for the majority of TB transmission. The testing of a promising new publicly-funded TB vaccine that could potentially save millions of lives was delayed after its corporate owner, GSK, decided to focus on more profitable vaccines.The scientist who brought GSK the idea of the TB vaccine decades ago now acknowledges that Big Pharma cannot deliver for developing countries. “You get a big company to take it forward? Bullshit,” he told ProPublica. “That model is gone. It’s failed. It’s dead. We have to create a new one.”Clearly, we must do better. The life of a millionaire in New York City is not worth more than the life of a person living in extreme poverty in South Sudan.Fundamentally, we need to transform how we pay for the development of new prescription drugs. This starts with funding open-source research, so lifesaving information is shared, and scientists around the world can work together to research and manufacture their own breakthroughs. Patents should not stand in the way of public health.If we can provide $886bn to the Pentagon for military spending, we can provide scientists with the money they need to develop cutting-edge cures that are accessible to everyone.People should not die because of their income or where they were born. We know what it will take to save lives. Now we must have the courage to stand up to the pharmaceutical industry. Let’s do it.
Bernie Sanders is a US Senator, and chairman of the health education labor and pensions committee. He represents the state of Vermont, and is the longest-serving independent in the history of Congress More

Former US ambassador to Thailand Morton Abramowitz (left) and former US first lady Rosalynn Carter, a baby in her arms, speak to the child’s mother at the Sa Kaeo refugee camp, Prachinburi Province (later Sa Kaeo), Thailand, on 9 November, 1979.

Photograph: Diana Walker/Getty Images More

The Washington chattering class, often unsure what to make of outsiders, dubbed Rosalynn Carter the “steel magnolia” when she arrived as first lady.A devout Baptist and mother of four, she was diminutive and outwardly shy, with a soft smile and softer Southern accent. That was the “magnolia”. She also was a force behind Jimmy Carter’s rise from peanut farmer to winner of the 1976 presidential election. That was the “steel”.Yet that obvious, even trite moniker almost certainly undersold her role and impact across the Carters’ early life, their one White House term and their four decades afterward as global humanitarians advocating peace, democracy and the eradication of disease.Through more than 77 years of marriage, until her death Sunday at the age of 96, Rosalynn Carter was business and political partner, best friend and closest confidant to the 39th president. A Georgia Democrat like her husband, she became in her own right a leading advocate for people with mental health conditions and family caregivers in American life, and she joined the former president as co-founder of The Carter Center, where they set a new standard for what first couples can accomplish after yielding power.“She was always eager to help his agenda, but she knew what she wanted to accomplish,” said Kathy Cade, a White House adviser to the first lady and later a Carter Center board member.A passion for politicsRosalynn Carter talked often of her passion for politics. “I love campaigning,” she told the Associated Press (AP) in 2021. She acknowledged how devastated she was when voters delivered a landslide rebuke in 1980.Cade said a larger purpose, though, undergirded the thrills and disappointments: “She really wanted to use the influence she had to help people.”Jimmy Carter biographer Jonathan Alter argues that only Eleanor Roosevelt and Hillary Clinton rival Rosalynn Carter’s influence as first lady. The Carters’ work beyond the White House, he says, sets her apart as having achieved “one of the great political partnerships in American history”.Cade recalled her old boss as “pragmatic” and “astute”, knowing when to lobby congressional brokers without her husband’s prompting and when to hit the campaign trail alone. She did that for long stretches in 1980 when the president remained at the White House trying to free US hostages in Iran, something he managed only after losing to Ronald Reagan.“I was in all the states,” Rosalynn Carter told the AP. “I campaigned solid every day the last time we ran.”She flouted stereotypes of first ladies as hostesses and fashion mavens: she bought dresses off the rack and established an East Wing office with her own staff and initiatives – a push that culminated in the Mental Health Systems Act of 1980 to steer more federal money to treating mental health, though Reagan reversed course. At The Carter Center, she launched a fellowship for journalists to pursue better coverage of mental health issues.She attended cabinet meetings and testified before Congress. Even when fulfilling traditional responsibilities, she expanded the first lady’s role, helping to establish the regular music productions still broadcast as public television’s In Performance at the White House. She presided over the inaugural Kennedy Center Honors, prestigious annual awards that still recognize seminal contributions to US culture. She hosted White House dinners but danced only with her husband.Her approach befuddled some Washington observers.“There was still a women’s page in the newspaper,” Cade recalled. “The reporters who were on the national scene didn’t think it was their job to cover what she was doing. She belonged on the women’s page. And the women’s page folks had difficulty understanding what she was doing, because she wasn’t doing the more traditional first lady things.”Grandson Jason Carter, now Carter Center board chairman, described her “determination that never stopped”. She was “physically small” but “the strongest, most remarkably tough woman that you would ever hope to see”.Including as Jimmy Carter’s political enforcer.She “defended my grandfather in a lot of contexts, including against Democrats and others”, confronting, in person or via telephone, people she thought had damaged his cause, Jason Carter said.Yet she nearly always connected politics to policy and those policy outcomes to people’s lives – connections forged from her earliest years in the Depression-era deep south.Rural Depression lifeEleanor Rosalynn Smith was born 18 August 1927, in Plains, delivered by nurse Lillian Carter, a neighbor. “Miss Lillian” brought her son, Jimmy, then almost 3, back to the Smith home a few days later to meet the baby.Not long after, James Earl Carter Sr moved his family to a farm outside Plains. But the Carter and Smith children attended the same all-white schools in town. Years later, Rosalynn and Jimmy would quietly support integration – and call for it more vocally at Plains Baptist Church. But growing up, they accepted Jim Crow segregation as the order of the day, she wrote in a memoir.Rosalynn and Jimmy each endured challenges of rural Depression life. But while the Carters were considerable landholders, the Smiths were poor, and Rosalynn’s father died in 1940, leaving her to help raise her siblings. She recalled this period as inspiration for her emphasis on caregivers, a way of classifying people that Alter, the biographer, said was not used widely in discussions of US society and the economy until Rosalynn Carter used her platform.“There are only four kinds of people in this world,” she said. “Those who have been caregivers; those who are currently caregivers; those who will be caregivers, and those who will need caregivers.”As she grew up, Rosalynn became close to one of Jimmy’s sisters. Ruth Carter later engineered a date between her brother and Rosalynn during one of his trips home from the US Naval Academy during the second world war. Jimmy, newly commissioned as a Navy lieutenant, and Rosalynn were married 7 July 1946 at Plains Methodist Church, her home church before she joined his Baptist faith.Already an appointed school board member, Jimmy decided to run for state Senate in 1962, without consulting Rosalynn. She embraced the decision because she shared his goals.Four years later, Jimmy ran for governor, giving Rosalynn the first chance to campaign by herself. He lost. But they spent the ensuing four years preparing for another bid, traveling the state together and separately, with a network of friends and supporters. It would become the model for the “Peanut Brigade” they used to blanket Iowa and other key states in the 1976 Democratic primary season.The center of Carter’s circleThose campaigns for governor solidified mental health as Rosalynn’s signature issue.By the time they got to the White House, Rosalynn had distinguished herself as the center of Carter’s inner circle, even if those beyond the West Wing did not appreciate her role.Carter sent her on diplomatic missions. She took Spanish lessons to aid her Latin America voyages. She decided herself to travel in 1979 to Cambodian refugee camps. Spurred by a Friday briefing, she was on a plane the next week, having put together an international delegation to address the crisis.“She wasn’t just going to have pictures made … she watched people die,” Cade said.She traveled to US state capitals and urged lawmakers to adopt vaccine requirements for schoolchildren, winning over converts to policies that largely remain intact today, recent fights over Covid-19 vaccine mandates notwithstanding.Rosalynn wanted her husband to delay the treaty ceding control of the Panama Canal, pushing it to a second term. She met regularly, without the president, with pollster Pat Caddell. They discussed a re-election path she knew was perilous on the heels of inflation, rising interest rates, oil shortages and the Iran hostage situation.Distraught upon their return to Plains in 1981, she dived back into the farming business. But the void would not begin to close until the former president conceived The Carter Center. In their Atlanta outpost, she found an enduring platform from which to travel the world, pushing to eradicate Guinea worm disease and other maladies in developing countries, monitoring elections, elevating discussion of women’s and girls’ rights and continuing her mental health advocacy. All while living in the same Georgia village she once wanted to leave forever.“My grandparents, you know, have a microwave from 1982 … They’ve got a rack next to their sink where they dry Ziploc bags, reuse them,” Jason Carter said recently, explaining their “simple” and “frugal” style in the same home where the Carters lived when Jimmy was first elected as a state senator.There, the former first lady welcomed foreign dignitaries, Joe Biden and Jill Biden, aspiring politicians seeking advice and, as her health declined, a new generation of Carter Center leadership. She liked to serve pimento cheese sandwiches, fruit and, depending on the guest list, a few glasses of wine. And she came with an agenda.“Mrs Carter would always be the first one at the door, and she would insist on walking me to the door at the end,” Paige Alexander, CEO of The Carter Center, said of her sessions in Plains. “That final walk … so she could get her last points in was, I think, quite indicative of the relationship that they had and how she managed it from the governor’s mansion all the way through.” More

Rosalynn Carter, wife of the 39th president Jimmy Carter, has died at the couple’s Georgia home aged 96.Carter, who became one of the nation’s leading mental health advocates during and after her husband’s time in the White House, was diagnosed with dementia in May.On Friday, her family announced she had entered hospice care at home, joining her 99-year-old husband in end-of-life treatment in the Plains one-story residence they shared since before Jimmy Carter was elected a Georgia state senator in 1962.The former president has been in hospice care there since February after declining further medical intervention for his own health issues.“Rosalynn was my equal partner in everything I ever accomplished,” Jimmy Carter said in a statement released Sunday afternoon by the Carter Center.“She gave me wise guidance and encouragement when I needed it. As long as Rosalynn was in the world, I always knew somebody loved and supported me.”The statement said Mrs Carter “died peacefully, with family by her side” at 2.10pm ET. An online tribute book is open at www.rosalynncartertribute.org.Chip Carter, the couple’s middle son, said: “Besides being a loving mother and extraordinary first lady, my mother was a great humanitarian in her own right. Her life of service and compassion was an example for all Americans.“She will be sorely missed not only by our family but by the many people who have better mental health care and access to resources for caregiving today.”The former first lady was born Eleanor Rosalynn Smith in August 1927, in Plains, a small rural town of fewer than 600 people where her husband was also born and raised.She was a fiercely loyal ally throughout his political career, both in the White House and during his years as a respected international diplomat after his single term in office ended in 1981. But she also forged her own identity for her mental health advocacy and as a social justice activist.She founded the Rosalynn Carter Institute for Caregivers in 1987, and remained active in the organization into her later years.The Carter Center, a human rights non-profit founded by the couple, paid tribute to her work in its statement earlier this year announcing her dementia diagnosis.“Mrs Carter has been the nation’s leading mental health advocate for much of her life. We recognize, as she did more than half a century ago, that stigma is often a barrier that keeps individuals and their families from seeking and getting much-needed support,” it said.“We hope sharing our family’s news will increase important conversations at kitchen tables and in doctor’s offices around the country.”Rosalynn Carter and her husband were also supporters of Habitat for Humanity, raising awareness and funds for the Carter Work Project named for them, and frequently tackling projects themselves as “some of our best hands-on construction volunteers”.One of the couple’s final public appearances was at the Plains Peanut Festival in September, days before Jimmy Carter’s 99th birthday, when they rode the parade together in the back of an SUV.Their families were already known to each other when they met while Jimmy Carter was at the US naval academy in Maryland during the second world war. They married in 1946, and helped run the Carter family’s peanut farm together until his political career took off.She wore the same gown to Carter’s 1977 presidential inauguration as she had when he was elected Georgia governor in 1970.The couple, who celebrated their 75th wedding anniversary in 2021, had four children, Jack, Chip, James and Amy. Their sons were adults by the time Carter was elected president, but Amy, aged nine, was the subject of massive media attention and became one of the most famous child residents of the White House. More

Donald Trump’s rhetoric on immigration, his plans for a second presidency if he wins next year’s election, and his description of political enemies as “vermin” reflect the language of 1930s Germany and the Nazis’ rise to power there, a senior Democrat warned on Sunday.JB Pritzker, the Illinois governor of Jewish descent who helped drive the construction of the state’s Holocaust Museum and Education Center in Chicago, added his voice to a wave of condemnation over the former president’s remarks.Joe Biden last week also likened Trump’s comments to the era when Nazi Germany orchestrated the murders of 6 million Jews during the Holocaust, saying “it isn’t even the first time” he had done so.Trump had deliberately chosen to use words “that are unfortunately reminiscent of the past”, Pritzker said during an appearance on MSNBC’s Inside with Jen Psaki.“The rhetoric that’s being used by Trump, by some of the Maga (Make America great again) extremists, is rhetoric that was used in the 1930s in Germany [and] I am very concerned about the direction of the country if we see policies like what Donald Trump is espousing come to light,” he said.“In Germany in the 1930s people that they didn’t want to have power, people that they wanted to separate and segregate, they began calling them immigrants, even people who had been in Germany for generations. This is a way to begin to segregate people and then eventually … dehumanize and kill people.“I don’t know where it’s going with Donald Trump. What I can tell you is that the things that he talks about are frightening to those of us who know the history of Europe in the 1930s and 40s. And I’m deeply concerned about his predilection for revenge and what that will mean for groups of people that didn’t support him in the 2024 election if he gets elected.”Highlighting Trump’s extremism has become a key part of messaging from the Joe Biden White House and Democratic party as the runaway leader in the race for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination moves further ahead of his challengers.“Employing words like ‘vermin’ to describe anyone who makes use of their basic right to criticize the government echoes dictators like [Adolf] Hitler and [Benito] Mussolini,” White House spokesperson Andrew Bates said during a press briefing last week.“Using terms like that about dissent would be unrecognizable to our founders, but horrifyingly recognisable to American veterans who put on their country’s uniform in the 1940s” and defeated the Axis Powers which included forces from Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy during the second world war.Pritzker expanded on the theme Sunday in his interview with Psaki, Biden’s former White House press secretary.“I repeat it wherever I go, that Donald Trump is dangerous for our democracy. He’s dangerous for specific minority groups in the US. And I think that for those of us who have a platform to call it out it is a requirement,” he said.“I’m deeply concerned about the rise of hate. I worry about it on our college campuses. We’ve seen protests, and I think it’s everybody’s right to express themselves. What I don’t want is protests and counter-protests encountering each other and that turning into violence.”skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionThe governor also had words of comfort for Democrats concerned at recent polls placing Trump ahead of Biden in several key swing states.“I don’t think yet people have really put these two next to each other and evaluated what the philosophies and agendas are,” he said.“People don’t really focus until, let’s face it, after the conventions. It’s just in those final couple of months, July all the way through November, that this needs to be brought home to people.“When that happens, that crystallization will occur in people’s minds and people will see that the democracy that they believe in, the country that they owe their allegiance to, that the best thing for America is to put aside the authoritarian Donald Trump.”Trump was in Texas near the border with Mexico on Sunday to promote an escalation of hard-line immigration police that he adopted while in office.Those policies alarmed civil rights activists and drew court challenges. More

Ron DeSantis defended Elon Musk as “a guy that believes in America” on Sunday as the Florida governor refused to condemn X’s billionaire owner for an antisemitic post that caused numerous key advertisers to desert the social media platform.In an interview Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union, the Republican Florida governor claimed he had not seen the message on the platform that was formerly known as Twitter. The message – in which Musk said an X user who accused Jewish people of hating white people was speaking “the actual truth” – was denounced by the White House on Friday as “abhorrent”.Instead, DeSantis dedicated his remarks on CNN to exalting Musk as a banner carrier for free speech. And he dismissed other prominent right wingers who have expressed antisemitic positions as “fringe voices”.“Elon has had a target on his back ever since he purchased Twitter, because I think he’s taking it into a direction that a lot of people who are used to controlling the narrative don’t like,” said DeSantis, whose campaign for the Republican 2024 nomination continues to crater. “I was a big supporter of him purchasing Twitter.”When State of the Union host Jake Tapper brought Musk’s widely condemned “actual truth” message to the screen, DeSantis said he had “no idea what the context is” and said he would not “pass judgment on the fly”, although he said he stood against antisemitism “across the board”.“I know Elon Musk,” DeSantis said. “I’ve never seen him do anything. I think he’s a guy that believes in America, I’ve never seen him indulge in any of that. So it’s surprising if that’s true.”Critics have previously accused the governor of being slow to condemn rallies by neo-Nazis in his state, some carrying flags with the words: “This is DeSantis country.” He has attempted to portray the criticism as a “smear campaign” by political opponents while a campaign aide posted a “reprehensible” tweet suggesting DeSantis’s Nazi supporters were actually Democratic party staffers.After Sunday’s CNN interview, senior Democrats were skeptical of DeSantis’s insistence he hadn’t seen Musk’s message. The message drew headlines globally and prompted disgusted major companies – including Apple, Disney, IBM and Warner Brothers – to suspend advertising on X.“The guy’s running for president, and Elon Musk [posted] that on Wednesday. It’s Sunday. So this is four days later, and he has not had the chance to read what Musk wrote? That is very hard for me to believe,” Democratic US House member Jamie Raskin of Maryland told Tapper.“You showed it to him, and he still refused to condemn it. If you’re serious about condemning and confronting antisemitism, and racism, and these bigotries, which are the gateway to destruction of liberal democracy, you’ve got to be explicit and open and full throated about it when you’ve got [the opportunity] to denounce antisemitism and racism across the board.”DeSantis has vocally supported Israel since its war with Hamas began in October. On Sunday, he urged greater US support for the Israeli’s military’s onslaught against Hamas in Gaza.“We need to let Israel win this war,” DeSantis said. “We should support them publicly and privately to actually finish the job, because if you just do some glancing blows, Hamas is going to reconstitute itself and we’re going to end up in the same cycle going forward.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Israel’s in a situation where they suffered the biggest attack on Jews since the Holocaust. You have an organization, Hamas, that wants to wipe Israel totally off the map. This is not just some minor dispute. This is an existential threat to the survival of the world’s only Jewish state [and] they have to do whatever they can to protect their people.”DeSantis pointed to his ban of a pro-Palestinian student group from Florida’s university campuses, a policy challenged in court this week on free speech grounds, as an example of standing up to terrorists.“We have Jewish students fleeing for their lives because you have angry mobs,” he said. “I have constituents in Florida whose kids don’t even want to go to campus … because of such a hostile environment.”Tapper, in a thinly disguised dig at DeSantis’s well publicized previous attacks on minority students on grounds of race and gender, replied: “Absolutely Jewish students, just like Muslim students, Black students, gay students, or all students, should feel safe on campuses.” More

Upon January’s arrival, Republicans will control every elected statewide office in once-bipartisan Louisiana after the GOP swept runoff races Saturday for attorney general, secretary of state and treasurer.The Republican success, in a state that has had a centrist Democrat in the governor’s office for the past eight years, means that political conservatives have secured all of Louisiana’s statewide offices for the first time since 2015. Republicans secured the governor’s mansion in October and also hold a two-third supermajority in the state house as well as the senate.Liz Murrill was elected as attorney general, Nancy Landry as secretary of state and John Fleming as treasurer. Murrill and Landry are the first women in Louisiana to be elected attorney general and secretary of state.Saturday’s election completes the shaping of Louisiana’s next executive branch. Most incumbents didn’t seek re-election and opened the door for new leadership in some of the most powerful positions.Louisiana’s gubernatorial election was decided on 14 October when Jeff Landry, a Republican backed by former president Donald Trump, won a multi-primary party outright and avoided a runoff.The outgoing governor, John Bel Edwards, the only Democratic governor in the US’s Deep South, was unable to run for re-election due to term limits.Also in October, lieutenant governor Billy Nungesser and commissioner of agriculture Mike Strain were Republican incumbents who won re-election. And Republican Tim Temple was newly elected as insurance commissioner.Despite a low voter turnout, Saturday’s election caught Trump’s eye. The former president and favorite to clinch the Republicans’ 2024 White House nomination endorsed the GOP’s candidates in each of the three statewide races, which featured little meaningful resistance from Louisiana’s Democratic party.The three Republicans “are outstanding in every way and have my complete and total endorsement”, Trump said in a statement issued by the Louisiana Republican party.Murrill will replace her boss Jeff Landry when he becomes governor in January. Murrill’s opponent in the attorney general race was Lindsey Cheek, a New Orleans-based Democratic trial attorney.The attorney general represents the state in a variety of legal disputes. However, Landry often made statewide and national headlines in the role, including his support for legislation banning gender-affirming medical care for transgender youths and a near-total abortion ban with no exceptions for cases of rape and incest.Murrill has joined Landry in championing conservative causes, including a lawsuit against the Joe Biden White House for the Covid-19 vaccine mandate for federal contractors.On the campaign trail, Murrill pledged to fight overreach by the federal government, defending Louisiana’s abortion ban and pushing a tough-on-crime rhetoric that is antithetical to progressive criminal justice reforms.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionFleming’s victory, meanwhile, vaulted a close Trump ally into the state treasurer’s office. Fleming is a conservative former congressman who co-founded the US House Freedom Caucus.After his time in Congress, Fleming served as a member of the Trump administration. He faced Dustin Granger, a Democratic financial adviser based in Lake Charles, in Saturday’s runoff.Nancy Landry, who is not related to Jeff Landry, beat Gwen Collins-Greenup – a Democrat from Louisiana’s capital of Baton Rouge – in the race for secretary of state. Nancy Landry is a former state House member from Lafayette and has worked in the secretary of state’s office for four years.She will handle replacing Louisiana’s outdated voting machines, which don’t produce the paper ballots critical to ensuring accurate election results.The lengthy and ongoing replacement process was thrust into the national spotlight after allegations of bid-rigging and when conspiracy theorists who support Trump’s lies that fraudsters robbed him of re-election in 2020 inserted themselves into the public dialogue.Though Landry is Louisiana’s first woman elected to secretary of state, the first woman to hold the position was Alice Lee Grosjean. Grosjean was appointed in 1930 by then-governor Huey P Long after the secretary of state at the time, James Bailey, died suddenly of pneumonia.
The Associated Press contributed reporting More

To launch his campaign for US Senate, Zach Shrewsbury chose the site of one of America’s most famous hangings.Charles Town, West Virginia, was where state authorities executed the abolitionist John Brown after he led an attack on a federal armory a few miles down the road in Harpers Ferry, a pivotal moment in the lead-up to the civil war. One hundred and sixty four years later, Shrewsbury – who decided against attempting to get a permit for the event at the site of the insurrection, which is now a national park – stood on the courthouse grounds where Brown’s hanging took place to announce that he would be the only “real Democrat” running to represent West Virginia in the Senate next year.“We need leaders that are cut from the working-class cloth. We need representation that will go toe to toe with corporate parasites and their bought politicians. We need a leader who will not waver in the face of these powers that keep the boot on our neck,” Shrewsbury said to applause from the small group of supporters gathered behind him.“So, as John Brown said, ‘These men are all talk. What we need is action.’ I’m taking action right now to stand up to these bought bureaucrats.”The remarks were a swipe at Joe Manchin, the Democratic senator who for the past 13 years had managed to represent what has become one of the most Republican states in the nation. In recent years he has used his power as a swing vote in Congress to stop several of Joe Biden’s legislative priorities – attracting the ire of progressives and prompting Shrewsbury to mount a primary challenge.A few weeks after Shrewsbury began campaigning, he was showing a friend around an abandoned mining town when his phone rang with news: Manchin had decided not to seek re-election, leaving Shrewsbury as the only Democrat in the race.By all indications, Shrewsbury, a 32-year-old Marine Corps veteran and community organizer, faces a difficult, if not impossible, road to victory. West Virginia gave Donald Trump his second-biggest margin of support of any state in the nation three years ago, and Manchin is the last Democrat holding a statewide office. Political analysts do not expect voters to elect the Democratic candidate – whoever that turns out to be – and predict Manchin will be replaced by either Governor Jim Justice or Congressman Alex Mooney, the two leading Republicans in the Senate race.Shrewsbury’s message to them is: not so fast.“People were really sold on the fact that Joe Manchin could be the only Democrat that could win in West Virginia, and I very much disagree,” Shrewsbury told the Guardian a week after the senator made his announcement.Also a former governor, Manchin is considered the most conservative Democrat in the Senate, and when the party took the majority by a single vote in the chamber in 2021, Manchin stopped the Biden administration from passing policies that would have made permanent a program to reduce child poverty, and more forcefully fight climate change.Sitting in a conference room at the Fayette county Democratic party’s headquarters in Oak Hill, where visitors pass a lobby displaying an American flag, a pride flag, and a stack of Narcan, the opioid-overdose reversal medication, Shrewsbury outlined his plans to run a campaign distinctly to the left of Manchin’s policies – and one he believes can win.“People want someone who’s genuine. They don’t want a politician. They want someone who actually looks like them. I mean, hell, you can’t get much more West Virginia than this,” said Shrewsbury, fond of wearing flannel shirts and hunting caps.Among his priorities are creating universal healthcare and childcare programs, and reducing the role of incarceration in fighting the opioid epidemic ravaging West Virginia.“Everyone here just is thankful for the scraps or crumbs that we get from whoever we elect. And that’s who we keep electing – whoever can keep the little crumbs coming along. I’m trying to say there is a better way,” Shrewsbury said.He also doesn’t shy away from identifying as a socialist, arguing the term may be less politically damaging than it appears – West Virginia Democrats voted for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 presidential primary, and the independent senator, he argues, is popular even with the state’s Republicans.“If caring about working-class people, caring about people having bodily autonomy, water rights, workers’ rights, makes you a socialist, then call me whatever you want. Doesn’t bother me,” Shrewsbury said.Raised on a farm by a Republican family in rural Monroe county, Shrewsbury dropped out of college after a semester and joined the marines. In the years that followed, he guarded the perimeter at the US base in Guantánamo Bay, and was deployed to Japan, Malaysia and South Korea before eventually moving to Seattle and then returning to West Virginia, where he realized how bereft his home state was of the prosperity he saw elsewhere in the country and overseas.“Why can’t my home be as economically profitable as the rest?” Shrewsbury recalls thinking. “It woke me up in the Marine Corps a little bit, and once I got back home, I really just kind of put the nail in the coffin there for what I was gonna be for work. I want to help people.”He turned to community organizing, seeing it as a way to help a state with the fourth-highest poverty rate in the nation, which is struggling to transition from the declining coal and logging industries that have historically undergirded its economy.“I know Zach’s a long shot. It’s like David against three Goliaths,” said Pam Garrison, a fellow community organizer. “Zach is able to be hardline when he needs to be. I’ve seen him being forceful and steadfast in his principles and what things are. And then I’ve seen the compassionate and empathy side of Zach too, And that’s what makes a good politician.”Since 2020, Shrewsbury has helped towns dig out from flooding, door-knocked in the narrow Appalachian valleys – known as hollers – to find out what residents were looking for from the state legislature, and talked to mayors and city councils about the opportunities presented by the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which incentivizes consumer usage of renewable energy, including home solar panels.Though Manchin played a key role in authoring the IRA, he also nixed the expanded child tax credit, which has been credited with cutting the child poverty rate by half in 2021, the sole year it was in effect. Shrewsbury was outraged by reports that later emerged of the senator privately expressing worries that people would use the program’s money to buy drugs, and jumped into the race.Despite the state’s conservative leanings, Sam Workman, the director of the Institute for Policy Research and Public Affairs at West Virginia University, believed Manchin may have had a path to victory had he decided to run. But he said the same cannot be said for Shrewsbury or any other Democrat.“It’s kind of a fall-on-your-sword moment,” Workman said. “Politics is like sports: you should never say never, but I do not see the Democrats winning the Senate seat, no matter who runs.”Shrewsbury may be alone in the Democratic primary at the moment, but he expects other candidates to enter. Since launching his campaign, he has not heard from the state Democratic party, nor the national party’s senate campaign arm.“I’m not exactly what the party wants, because I speak my mind. You know, I’m not going to toe the party line,” he said. “I wish the party would get back in more touch with the workers. But like I said, I have the message that many people aren’t saying.” More