U.S. Representative Jake Auchincloss (D-Newton) isn’t running for re-election unopposed.
A libertarian-minded Republican from Newton, Emily Burns, announced that she will challenge him in the Fourth Congressional District in a video posted to YouTube on Tuesday, October 12. She is the second Republican to join the race; former Attleboro city councilor and U.S. Air Force veteran Julie Hall is also running. Hall was the Republican nominee in 2020.
Burns spoke to NewBostonPost by telephone about her run on Thursday afternoon. She said the coronavirus pandemic is the major reason why she’s running.
She thinks the government is taking too much freedom away from people and doesn’t see the incumbent doing anything to stop it.
“It’s just because I feel like we’re at a crossroad in this state and we need to talk about where we’re going from here. We need to decide if we want to cede our daily liberties to the government or make those decisions for ourselves. I look at the last year-and-a-half, and these guys don’t make good decisions for us — and then they blame us, and then we start all over again. We’re in this perpetual pandemic that I call a pandemic of the un-elected. I can’t really figure out any other way to have those conversations because we continue to get shut down. We need to start talking about what we’re doing and I feel like people don’t feel like it’s acceptable to even have these discussions, but public policy should always be up for debate and discussion.”
“I feel like I don’t have a choice,” she added, referring to the current situation. “The policies have been so bad and there are so few people who will stand up and say so, especially among people who are more moderate and well-heeled.”
Burns said she doesn’t have anything against Auchincloss, saying he seems like a “perfectly nice guy,” but she doesn’t agree with his political approach. She said that he’s not doing anything to stand up to the erosion of freedoms caused by the government response to the coronavirus pandemic.
“He’s kind of a go-along-get-along guy, he seems to be more focused on fund raising than he is on the issues of this district,” she said.
Burns said that she thinks at this moment, her approach is what the district needs as well as what the Republican Party needs.
“I feel like that fits really well within the Republican Party: small government, individual responsibility,” she said. “That’s why I’m running as a Republican.”
Outside of pandemic politics, Burns said that supporting school choice, combating big tech censorship, and de-fanging bureaucracy are some of the issues that are most important to her. Her campaign web site notes that she thinks firearms are a state’s rights issue and that she supports legal immigration, but opposes allowing illegal immigrants to pay in-state tuition at public colleges.
On social issues, she does not identify as conservative.
“People need to be able to make their own decisions to the greatest extent possible and we should keep the government out of it,” she said. “People tend to make better decisions than government.”
She supports legal abortion and would seek alternatives incarceration in the War on Drugs.
To win this kind of a race, Burns knows that she would need support from people who don’t ordinarily vote Republican. She said she plans to reach out to Democrats and unernolleds to try to earn their support while being respectful of their disagreements.
“Most of my friends are people who have never voted Republican, and I plan on going and talking to them and talking to people of all stripes,” she said. “That’s what we’re gonna need: to build a coalition of the pissed off. Otherwise, we’re all gonna get steamrolled.”
The 42-year-old was the founder of an education company called Learnivore that shut down during the coronavirus pandemic. It was a network of private instructors in a variety of topics including yoga, music, math, and foreign languages, among other things.
More information on Burns’s campaign is available on her web site: www.emilyburns.vote .
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