Mark Barrett

mbarrett@citizen-times.com

ASHEVILLE – Matt Coffay hopes the same energy that has enabled Democrats to run strong races in usually Republican U.S. House districts this year will boost him in North Carolina's conservative 11th U.S. House District.

Coffay (pronounced Cough-A) is an unabashed progressive and the first Democrat to declare his candidacy in the 2018 election for the seat now held by U.S. Rep. Mark Meadows, R-Buncombe. The 30-year-old is head of the local chapter of Our Revolution, an organization formed to push roughly the same platform Sen. Bernie Sanders advocated during his presidential bid.

Meadows easily won his third term representing the 11th district last November with 64 percent of the vote. He is expected to run again next year but has made no formal announcement.

The Republican candidate in a Kansas congressional district where Republicans usually cruise to victory won a special election earlier this month by only 6.2 percentage points and Jon Ossoff, 30, a little-known Democrat, got 48 percent of the vote in last week's special election for a Georgia congressional district in the Atlanta suburbs, putting him in a June runoff.

President Donald Trump appointed Republicans who had held those seats to positions in his administration. Democrats are also hopeful that their candidate to fill a third U.S. House seat vacated by a Trump appointment, in Montana, will benefit from a backlash against Trump in a contest to be decided in May.

"All three of these guys are doing what we intend to do in Western North Carolina," said Coffay, who said he will build a grass-roots campaign that will also bring in unaffiliated and Republican voters. "I am not running as a Democrat. I am running as someone who wants to represent working class people."

Coffay grew up outside Blue Ridge, Georgia, in a county that shares part of its northern border with Cherokee County, North Carolina, and graduated from UNCA. He was a farmer in Alexander until last year, when he took a job with the nonprofit National Young Farmers Coalition. He now lives in Asheville.

He announced his candidacy at a "Medicare for All" town hall meeting held Sunday in Waynesville by about 20 WNC progressive and Democratic groups. He thinks the United States should extend health insurance coverage similar to Medicare to the entire population.

"Just about anybody with Medicare that you ask is going to say they have good coverage," he said.

He said Meadows is pushing changes to the Affordable Care Act that would erase many of the beneficial features of the law.

Meadows' push for allowing states to ease rules on what insurance purchased through the ACA must cover will mean, "People that can afford plans won't be getting plans that cover the things they need," Coffay said.

Meadows also wants to put some people with pre-existing medical conditions in government-subsidized high-risk insurance pools, a step Coffay also opposed.

"The plans in those pools are supposed to be subsidized, but frequently they're not subsidized enough and what you end up with is these really expensive plans," he said.

Coffay said he supports investing more in infrastructure in the region, with an emphasis on better internet connections, and having public universities stop charging tuition.

"An education workforce is what we want as a country," he said. "We can't send kids out of college with the equivalent of a mortgage" in student loan debt.