Jim Keady is a warrior for New Jersey's Fighting Fourth district.

My husband and I moved to New Jersey in the late summer of 2005, in the middle of one of the worst disasters to hit the United States. But Katrina wasn’t a natural disaster - it was man-made. People brought about the conditions in which thousands of American citizens were left behind to die in the city of New Orleans.

We were in New Jersey because we had some hard times of our own. We’d had to pick up and move from the Washington DC metro area due to a downturn in our personal circumstances, and we had come to the Jersey Shore because to both of us, it had always been a second home, a place of refuge. Both of us hardcore music fans, we’d met in one of the bars along the Shore. And now we’d returned to try to figure some things out and make another go of it.

But it wasn’t easy. The economy was bad, jobs were scarce, and affordable housing next to impossible. We struggled for years, but we didn’t give up. I went back to school and got two Masters degrees, my husband worked two jobs, but we still couldn’t catch a break. I couldn’t find a full-time job in my field, so my days were spent hopping from part-time job to part-time job, driving the back roads of Monmouth County and gulping down a sandwich and a soda or two as I headed to my next gig. It would be years before I knew the luxury of having my own office, of paid sick days and vacation time.

For many Monmouth County residents, this is a luxury they may never know. Indeed, in the one of the wealthiest counties in the United States, this is life for more than a few of us. The men and women who get up when most of us are sound asleep to man the fishing boats, make coffee, empty bedpans and change sheets, flip burgers and empty trashcans, mop floors and mow lawns. They are the invisible ones; they wait for the bus in the cold and in the rain, they ride their bikes in the dim morning light as cars whiz by them, as bankers and lawyers and Wall Street types pass by on the way to the trains and ferries that carry them to jobs that enable them to overlook the desperation that’s right there in front of them.

Jim Keady sees that desperation. He knows it because he’s been out there in it. Having grown up in the Jersey Shore town of Belmar, Jim went elsewhere to get an education and a job, and in the process transformed himself from star athlete and school teacher (he has a Masters in Theology) to social justice warrior. Fired from a job coaching soccer at St. John’s University for refusing to don the required Nike apparel, Jim later sued for wrongful termination. He then boldly took on the sporting equipment conglomerate: moving to Indonesia to work in a Nike factory, he spent a month attempting to live on Nike’s sweatshop wages and returned to embark upon a lifelong battle to expose the multi-million dollar corporation’s deplorable environmental practices and working conditions.

Keady returned to New Jersey to become an activist, speaking out and writing and traveling the country to advocate for the faceless, desperate workers he encountered in Indonesia, people forced to work in Nike sweatshops in order to survive. In 2001, he formed Educating for Justice, a nonprofit that educates and organizes citizens to promote global peace and justice. In 2005, he was elected to the city council in Asbury Park, where he pushed for affordable housing and a redevelopment plan that addressed the mismanagement and decay of the troubled seaside resort. And he took over the family business: he owns and manages an Irish tavern that caters to beachgoers and locals, swapping stories and above all, paying attention.

Jim Keady had gone elsewhere to get an education and a job, but he never really left the Jersey Shore. This part of the Garden State is heavy on the Irish, and this time of year is a whirlwind of St. Patrick’s Day parades and after parties, drink specials and bagpipes and kilts and corned beef and cabbage. And this is still a part of Jim, but it’s just one part of the charismatic ex-soccer player. Now a candidate for congress from New Jersey’s 4th district, he divides his time between the bar, his nine-year-old daughter, and long days of meet-and-greets and fundraisers, candidate forums and public appearances. It’s an exhausting uphill battle; despite his broad and vocal popular support in the district, the arcane policies and procedures of New Jersey’s local politics have already put Keady at a distinct disadvantage, as the results of a recent Democratic convention in Monmouth County, one of three counties represented in NJ-04, have placed him second on the primary ballot below the party-endorsed candidate.This convention (and two others like it) occurs months before the June 5 Democratic primary, months before the actual voters - most of whom have no idea any of this has transpired - choose one person from among the primary candidates to oppose veteran Republican Christopher H. Smith in November. Some voters don’t even realize Smith represents them, as a recent redrawing of the electoral map has gerrymandered them out of longtime Democratic congressman Frank Pallone’s district.

Keady faces long odds; he’s running a grassroots campaign that’s rejected PAC money in favor of small-dollar donations while his opponent holds high ticket fundraisers featuring Wall Street power brokers and middle-of-the road, party-sanctioned DC players who attract supporters with large bank accounts. He’s running a campaign that cuts against the way things are done here in the Garden State, against the insider process that’s enabled weak and corrupt representation to flourish on both the local and national level for decades.

But Jim Keady is a fighter, and he’s not giving up. He goes through 16-hour days with seemingly boundless energy, with a warm smile and a firm handshake and piercing blue eyes that look straight into yours when he talks to you. Jim loves to talk, and he can spin a tale like a proper Irishman. But he’ll listen, too, as dozens of hardworking New Jerseyans tell him their stories. He grew up on these streets, and he has personal relationships with many of his supporters. Jim connects to voters of all ages, and they respond to him. They seem to know intuitively that Keady will stand up and fight for what he believes not out of self-interest, but because that’s who he is. Because, as with his ongoing battle with Nike, Keady sees injustice not as a problem to be solved but as a challenge to be overcome.

New Jerseys’s “Fighting Fourth” is now on the national radar, as the DCCC recently added the sprawling district that bisects the center of state to its target list of “flippables.” The party’s already embraced Keady’s opponent, sending newly sworn-in governor Phil Murphy from Trenton and (Sen.) Bob Menendez and Frank Pallone from Washington to show up at campaign events. After years of national invisibility, the June 5 fourth district primary will, in 2018, yield a victor who will receive DCCC financing and support.

But many of people of New Jersey’s fourth district have known Jim Keady for years; they know the single dad who shows up at his daughter’s school events, the community activist who was there cleaning debris from their yards in the aftermath of Superstorm Sandy and facing down former Gov. Chris Christie over missing recovery money. The DCCC doesn’t know this, doesn’t know Jim. They see an opportunity, and they think they have found a middle of the road moderate who will draw Dems and traditional Republicans to vote out the once firmly-entrenched Chris Smith in November.

But after the recent debacle in Texas and a potential Blue Wave on the horizon, perhaps the DCCC will be re-thinking this strategy soon. There’s a war going on out there for the soul of the Democratic Party - a war between centrists who chose the 2016 presidential candidate and the bold progressives like Jim Keady. And when the dust settles, the people of the fourth know one thing: Jim Keady will be there.

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