The dude running for Congress: An interview with Tommy Sowers, Democratic candidate for Missouri’s 8th district

Though Sowers said he first thought about running for Congress while deployed in Iraq, he’s running a race “focused specifically on southeast Missouri” and those people are focused on the economy, he said. His district is the 10th-poorest in the country, but Sowers described it as a scenic, small-town area where there’s no commute to work and property taxes are low. Still some counties have even seen their population halved in the last 30 years, he said, as many of those who grow up there inevitably leave for jobs elsewhere.

His district of 70,000 veterans is “where the armed forces come from” and is still very in tune with what’s going on overseas. “I’m getting a lot more questions on Afghanistan in terms of, what’s our mission there. Because people see a lot of money and a lot of blood and their family members going back over and over and over again and they want to know that there is an end stage. They want to know that this just isn’t an open ended commitment.”

“Is it in our strategic interest? Are we funding this the correct way? Do we really want to train and fund 400,000 Afghan army and police and fund a force that is not financially sustainable for the long-term? These are questions Congress needs to be asking,” he said.

The Iraq War veteran — who was there for the country’s first Democratic election — wouldn’t say, even when pressed, whether the United States should’ve fought the war in the first place: “As a military guy, you don’t have positions. I mean you’re apolitical.”

The candidate, who has a full-time campaign staff of five plus other consultants, said he’s “all in” for winning the race. “I took a 100 percent pay cut to do this. I left the military after 11 years to do this. I was 8 and half years away from a full pension and retirement.”

“We’ve gone from me to a pretty rapidly growing organization with $400,000 in revenue and a number of employees and advisors,” he said of the campaign. “We’ve scaled up pretty quick.”

Though he called the connections to newly installed Massachusetts Sen. Scott Brown “coincidental,” Sowers’s Dodge Ram 1500 is an integral part of the campaign, he said.

“So you know, in a climate where a guy in a truck seems do well against entrenched power, I’m a guy in a truck that’s wrapped like a NASCAR truck with a dog, working my tail off for every vote.”