It's Not About Me
This campaign is about WE THE PEOPLE. I've simply decided to offer a choice of a presidential candidate who more closely represents the regular, everyday, working individual. The people of the U.S. will of course want to know about who I am as a person before casting a ballot. So here is a brief history of my life. Hopefully it will shed some light on how my experiences have shaped my current view of the world, but mostly it's just the story of a normal, working class guy. Again, this is not about me, but we can't really separate the campaign from the candidate, so here we go.
Early Years
I was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1985, but my family moved to the small town of New Richmond, Wisconsin when I was three years old. My mother stayed at home, and my father commuted to St. Paul, Minnesota working as a secretary in the legal department of a large corporation. I grew up with four sisters, and being a single-income family with five children meant we never had a lot of money. I attended public school and always did well academically, consistently getting A's in my classes. In middle school three of my closest friends and I started a band which we continued all through high school. When I was fifteen I got my first job as a housekeeper at a small hotel in town where my mom had recently started working as a front desk clerk. After a couple years of that, I did a brief stint in telesales. By the time I graduated high school in 2003 I was back at the hotel as a front desk clerk and worked there through the summer until leaving for college in the fall.
College
Having taken several Advanced Placement courses in high school, I already had 36 college credits when I started at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. I started a program for physics majors, but decided by the end of two semesters that I didn't actually want to be a physicist spending the rest of my life in the world of academia. Since music had always been my true interest, I dropped out of university and opted to attend the Madison Media Institute where I earned an Associate's Degree in audio engineering in 2006. While attending college I worked one job in telesales before finding a better job in telephone captioning.
After That
I didn't get a job in my field immediately out of college, but still had the telephone job to pay rent and bills, including the ones for my freshly acquired student loan debt. In this time I started another band with friends I had made in my college years. I eventually lost the telephone job and found out how unemployment insurance works. After about six months with no luck finding a job, I landed a customer service position for a local company that sold and maintained uninterrupted power supplies. This was the best paying job I've ever had, though I only made about $16 an hour by the time I quit two and half years later when I decided to relocate.
Move Back Home
When two of my band members decided to move to Minneapolis, I figured I could too, but it was really to be closer to my father who had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in the last year. After seven years living in Madison, I moved back in with my parents in New Richmond, who were happy to have me around to help since my dad had now lost the use of his legs. By the end of that year I found a place in Minneapolis and got work as a temp at a warehouse in a suburb. Though the work wasn't consistently full-time, I stayed on there for about two years. After that I found another job for a company that contracted customer services for other large corporations. After serving as an internet chat agent for one client, and then a telephone agent for another, I was promoted to a real time analyst for the call floor. The company eventually lost a client and downsized, and I was laid off.
Up to the Present
So after another period of unemployment I found a job in my actual trade. In 2016 I started working for an independent talk radio network as an audio engineer and happily work there to this day making just under $30,000 a year.
And that's about it. Not too much detail here, but this should at least give you an idea of how I'm a man of modest means and understand the working-class struggle first hand.