When running for the U.S. House of Representatives in the Massachusetts Seventh Congressional District last year, Rayla Campbell says, she saw a problem.
The 38-year-old conservative Republican from Randolph and mother of three attended events across the state as well as in New Hampshire to support various candidates, including then-President Donald Trump.
“Going around the state doing a bunch of different rallies, I saw how many things that are wrong here and we have no representation,” Campbell told NewBostonPost in a telephone interview when asked about her decision to run for lieutenant governor in 2022. “… It’s making sure we have the correct checks and balances in place. I see that none of the politicians we have in office right now have that in mind.”
Campbell still feels ill-used from her unsuccessful campaign for Congress last year. Campbell challenged U.S. Representative Ayanna Pressley (D-Dorchester) in 2020, but wasn’t able to get enough signatures during the coronavirus emergency to make the Republican primary ballot. The ordinary number is 2,000; the state Supreme Judicial Court cut it in half, to 1,000, in light of the coronavirus emergency. Campbell fell short of both numbers.
She continued with a write-in campaign in the primary, getting 1,202 certified write-in votes. That was about 800 votes fewer than she needed to make the ordinary threshold for getting onto the general election ballot as the Republican nominee. But it was about 200 votes more than the court-reduced threshold for signatures to make the primary ballot. The Secretary of the Commonwealth denied her a spot on the general election ballot, citing the 2,000-vote threshold. Campbell appealed in court, but lost. However, the Massachusetts Republican Party has challenged the results and demanded a recount from the city of Boston this week, arguing that hundreds of write-in ballots went uncounted, as was the case in a March 2020 state committee race in the city.
After the election, she initially set out to run for Congress a second time in 2022, But Campbell announced in March that she would run for lieutenant governor of Massachusetts instead.
Campbell said she’s using the experience she got campaigning last year and that she’s all in.
“Absolutely. I’ve been going to more towns than I was last year,” she said. “It’s important for people to know that there is somebody out there fighting. And having that base that I built last year and just hearing from the voices of everybody from throughout the state and seeing the similarities of the problems in our communities, it’s been a major boost for me. I’ve been thanking God so much for this opportunity to come out here and meet so many people. It’s been an amazing experience.”
In her run for lieutenant governor, Campbell said that her top priority is education — especially opposition to critical race theory.
Critical race theory, as EducationWeek defines it, says that “race is a social construct, and that racism is not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice, but also something embedded in legal systems and policies.”
“Critical race theory is not a part of our curriculum,” Campbell said of her agenda. “We also need to have a complete overhaul of what the schools are doing and where the money is going and these teachers’ unions. Why are these teachers making so much money to sit at home and remote teach your kids? They’re not even teaching them or training them, they’re indoctrinating them. They’re not able to learn in these environments.”
Campbell also said she opposes the push for a statewide sex-ed mandate that requires that public schools that teach sex education include material that critics say is degrading and not age-appropriate.
She takes issue with material from Planned Parenthood forming a sex education curriculum approved by the state’s elementary and secondary education agency. She also questions gender-identity sex education.
“Why is that even being brought into our schools?” she said. “There’s only two sexes: male and female. If you want to identify as anything other than that, that’s fine. Do that in the privacy of your own home. It doesn’t belong in our public schools where our tax dollars pay for this — and Planned Parenthood needs to stay away from anything that has to do with our schools. Aren’t they trying to kill babies? So why should they have anything to do with our schools when they want to exterminate a race and we know that?”
Campbell said she opposes mandating the coronavirus vaccine for students.
“We as parents should have a say over what our children are learning and being exposed to and also what goes into their bodies, not the government,” she said.
Campbell is pro-life. She said that in 2022, Republicans in the Commonwealth need to run on supporting the ballot initiative that party chairman Jim Lyons and many members of the MassGOP are working on to guarantee medical care to babies born alive following an attempted abortion.
“Can you think of a child being born alive being denied medical care?” she said. “And we’re talking about a child that has survived an abortion attempt. I have three beautiful children. Once a child is conceived, that is a gift from God. We really need to be protecting our children, even inside the womb, they don’t have their voices, so they need people on the outside to advocate for those voices so I am 100 percent with Jim Lyons in trying to repeal the ROE Act and this bill they are trying to push through — and them letting your teen-ager have an abortion without your knowledge.”
The ROE Act, which the Democrat-dominated state legislature enacted in December 2020 over Governor Charlie Baker’s veto, removed a previous requirement that babies born alive after an attempted abortion get potentially life-saving medical treatment. It also eliminated a requirement that 16-year-old and 17-year-old girls get permission from a parent or from a judge in order to get an abortion.
Among other issues, Campbell said she wants to drug addicts into long-term care facilities.
She also said she supports the police. She said police budgets should be increased. She also said that Massachusetts has the best police officers and police practices in the country.
As she runs, Campbell said it will also be a priority of hers to help get other Republicans elected — candidates that she feels as though are more in line with herself and conservative party chairman Lyons rather than the incumbent governor, Baker, a fiscally moderate and socially liberal Republican.
Campbell said other than state Representative Marc Lombardo (R-Billerica), who she said is “amazing,” that she is not a fan of any members of the Massachusetts Legislature. Lombardo was the one GOP member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives who did not sign onto a letter in June calling on Lyons to either condemn state committeewoman Debbie Martell (of Ludlow) or resign after she said she was “sickened” that a homosexual Republican Congressional candidate had adopted children with his same-sex partner.
She also said that Democrats in the state shouldn’t be running unopposed — and she has been encouraging people to run against them.
“I’m like what are you afraid of?” she said. “If you’re afraid of loss, you’re never going to achieve anything in life. You’ve got to understand that you’re going [to have] wins and losses and that’s the whole battle. You’ve got to keep fighting and going on. We need people who understand that and that know they have the grassroots behind them. Don’t worry about the current people because we don’t even use them now. They don’t care about us. We’ve built a strong grassroots movement across the state because we see our freedoms and liberties are in jeopardy and if we don’t do anything, we’ll lose everything.”
Campbell said that the state needs fewer career politicians and that supporting her is one way to help address that problem.
“This is not a career that you spend your life in,” she said of politics. “You’re supposed to come in and do God’s work and help the people. But for these people, it’s all about money and multi-million dollar houses.”
“I am literally that everyday person. I have three small children and just one income because my husband is disabled — he has a rare bone disease and I have to work my butt off to make sure we have food on the table while homeschooling and running a campaign.”
More information on Campbell’s campaign is available on her web site (RaylaForMA.com) as well as her Facebook page “Rayla Campbell for Massachusetts.” She also hosts The Rayla Campbell Show on WSMN in Nashua, New Hampshire (which reaches northern Massachusetts) from 9 a.m. to 11 a.m. on Thursday mornings, which she also streams on her Facebook page.
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