Tracy Lovvorn worries about the country. The 48-year-old from Grafton says she particularly doesn’t like the direction she sees the Democratic Party moving in, which is why she is giving a congressional run another go.
Lovvorn, who owns Evolution Physical Therapy in Grafton, ran against U.S. Representative Jim McGovern (D-Worcester) in Massachusetts’s Second Congressional District in 2018, a race McGovern won 67.8 percent to 32.8 percent.
Lovvorn told New Boston Post in a telephone interview last week that her initial desire to run for office came from an interaction with a patient in 2015 during the presidential primaries. The man and his wife defected from Soviet Russia in 1979.
“He said, ‘What I’m seeing on TV and what they’re doing, they’re working to turn this country into what I left.’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He asked if I knew of Saul Alinsky and George Soros. He gave me some information. I went home and googled it. I got just as upset as he was, and I wanted to do something about it,” she said.
“I knew the history of Jim McGovern and what he’s been working towards, his relationship with Cuba and Castro, and how he supported rebels in Nicaragua against U.S. interests,” she added. “I want to do everything I can to keep America a republic.”
McGovern, a supporter of normalizing diplomatic relations with Cuba, met with the country’s then-dictator Fidel Castro in 2002. During the 1980s he worked for U.S. Representative Joe Moakley (D-South Boston), who opposed aid to the U.S.-backed Contras in Nicaragua, the group brought down the Marxist Sandinista dictatorship in Nicaragua, as National Review points out.
Lovvorn sees McGovern not only as an ineffective representative for the district but as someone who is off-putting to many people who are lifelong Democrats.
“I’m offering a chance, and we need to take it,” she said. “We’re on a very slippery slope to socialism. We are seriously fighting against a Marxist takeover. We need to do something about this, support each other better in our party, and reach out to Democrats. One thing I really do try to focus on doing is get our message to Democrats, true real JFK Democrats who ask what they can do for this country and love this country as much as we do. Their party has been hijacked and we need to offer them a home. We can’t be calling anyone names. We can’t win without their support as well.”
Lovvorn said she is pro-life. She also said she wants to protect the constitution, support opportunity zones, attract jobs to the district that pay more than minimum wage, rationalize the immigration system while securing the border, and enact term limits. Her campaign platform says that she wants to rein in government-issued student loans to reduce debt, crack down on pharmaceutical companies to combat the opioid epidemic, and invest in infrastructure.
“I want to do everything I can to bring opportunities and federal resources here that haven’t been here since the mills left,” she said. “We want to incentivize businesses to come.”
She noted that in 2018, USA Today ranked Worcester in its top-20 cities hit hardest by extreme poverty and said that 20 percent of households in the city earned less than $15,000 a year; for Hispanics, that number was 30 percent in 2015, according to GoLocalWorcester. And she noted that Worcester ranked fifth in the highest percentage of homeless students in America, as the Worcester Telegram & Gazette reported in 2019.
“That was before so many of our businesses closed,” she said. “Now it will be even worse. We have 10 colleges and universities in Worcester. They come out with so much potential, but there’s not a lot of local jobs for them to stay. They have to move out of the area and go work in Cambridge.”
She also noted that part of immigration reform has to do with what the country does with students on foreign visas once they graduate.
“We have a lot of students here on student visas, the science industry and health care,” she said. “We have a lot of H1B visas and 40 percent of illegal immigration is visa overstays. We have a lot of great people who want to stay here and the system is too cumbersome and expensive to figure out. It takes too much time and money. I don’t want to make it easy, but I want to make it fair and attainable.”
Lovvorn said she opposes legal abortion.
“I’m also anti-killing babies after they’re born,” she said. “Back in the day when Bill Clinton said that abortion should be safe, legal, and rare, that was kind of bad for everyone because it was still legal and people who were pro-choice didn’t like that he said rare. I would at least expect us to get back to something that’s a firm resemblance of rare. Now they want to kill babies after they’re born. That’s insanity.”
On term limits, she said McGovern is a prime example of why they should exist.
“He’s been in for 23 years and look at the poverty level and homeless kids,” she said. “Immigration has been an issue since Ronald Reagan. He complains about it all the time, but what has he done about it?”
“They’re not hard to make happen, we just have to do it,” Lovvorn said, referring to the problems she thinks need fixing. “McGovern has been in there for ages, and I know he hates Donald Trump, but Trump has only been in for three-and-a-half years, so what’s he done for the rest of the time? He’s been there with Democrats and House majorities. He just has excuses.”
Several media outlets have described Lovvorn as a QAnon supporter. Last month, USA Today described QAnon as a conspiracy that “is based on unfounded claims that there is a ‘deep state’ apparatus run by political elites, business leaders and Hollywood celebrities who are also pedophiles and actively working against President Donald Trump.” The FBI has designated QAnon as a domestic terror threat, although U.S. Department of Homeland Security acting secretary Chad Wolf said it is not a “significant” threat during an appearance on CNN last month.
So what does Lovvorn actually think of QAnon?
“I’ve said the whole time that I’m very aware of QAnon,” Lovvorn said. “It’s information and I don’t know a lot of the details, but ever since Jeffrey Epstein didn’t kill himself that a lot of the QAnon information has been validated. Not everything, but some of it. Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, three years ago that was conspiracy. The [pedophile] island, Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew, that was all conspiracy. The fact is that I appreciate at least it brings attention to something horrific. If you don’t believe that sex trafficking and child pornography is a problem, then you’re wrong.”
“Anything that can bring attention to that isn’t bad,” she added.
As far as sexual deviancy, Lovvorn said former U.S. Representative Gerry Studds (D-Provincetown) was a prime example. While in Congress, he acknowledged engaging in sex acts with a 17-year-old male page.
“Jim McGovern’s wife was an intern for him,” Lovvorn said. “Jim McGovern was the one who invited Bill Clinton to Worcester after the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Jim McGovern supports Cuba and has spoken highly of Fidel’s education and health care, and now it comes out that Epstein was in Cuba and Cuba is a pedophile island. I wouldn’t mind pointing fingers that way. If he can’t speak out against it, does that mean he’s for it?”
Lovvorn called Cuba a pedophile island because Epstein allegedly visited it at the invitation of Fidel Castro.
McGovern did invite Bill Clinton to Worcester in 1998. Clinton visited the city in late August of that year, days after admitting to a grand jury that he had misled the public and a previous trial court concerning his relationship with Lewinsky. McGovern wanted Clinton’s help campaigning for what he saw as a tough re-election bid, according to MassLive.
As for McGovern’s thoughts on Cuba, he reiterated his stance in a press release when Fidel Castro died in 2016.
“In my meetings with President Castro and other Cuban leaders, I expressed strong disagreements on human rights and pushed for needed reforms, but also recognized their efforts to expand education and healthcare for the Cuban people,” McGovern said at the time. Today, we offer condolences to the family of Fidel Castro and our thoughts and prayers are with the Cuban people.”
Four hours after this story was published, a spokesperson for McGovern’s office sent New Boston Post a statement via email from the representative.
“QAnon isn’t just nuts – it exploits exploited children. Raising awareness about the dangers of child abuse and sex trafficking is a good thing,” McGovern wrote. “That’s not what QAnon does. They don’t care about children. They hijacked these horiffic issues and use them to spread crazy sci-fi conspiracy theories that encourage people to commit acts of domestic terrorism. So much so that Donald Trump’s own FBI has labeled QAnon as a domestic terrorist threat. There are lots of fantastic anti-trafficking groups out there doing great work. Many of them must now waste precious time and resources combatting conspiracy theories rather than actually helping those in need. If people think retweeting bots and sharing memes is the best way to help exploited children, they are part of the problem and not the solution. Any reasonable Republican should denounce QAnon – not amplify its voice.”
When speaking about QAnon, Lovvorn concluded by saying this: “If it were something that just some normal soccer moms were talking about in the corner, nobody would pay attention, but the fact that it’s kind of weird and when you look into it, the more science fiction it sounds, it gets people talking about it. And anything that raises awareness for these problems, I think is a good thing.”
