MARQUETTE — Late last week, 1st district Congressional candidate Wayne Stiles, D-Michigan, joined candidate Justin Michal, R-Michigan, in visiting Marquette Senior High School to present to two AP Political Science classes.

“We did two different classes,” said Stiles. “We talked a little bit, introduced ourselves, and then we started going right into what it’s like running a grassroots campaign, because that’s what both of us are doing. And the struggles that we face and things that happen inside the party.”

Stiles is a former industrial designer in the Traverse City Area, who now rents out several properties there.

“Then we answered several questions that (the students) had for us about what they think is going on in the world,” said Stiles. “The two classes were different; the first class got dark kind of fast, just with what’s happening in our political climate. One of the first questions was just: ‘why are you running for office?”

For Stiles, the moment he decided to run was in November of 2024, when Donald Trump was reelected.

“I realized at that point that I can’t complain anymore on social media or whatever, I have to get out there and do something,” said Stiles. “I personally feel that the current president is an existential threat to our democracy, to our Constitutional Republic.”

“(Trump) promised to lower grocery prices, promised to make things more affordable, promised lower gas prices … I don’t think he cares about American people at all … I don’t think our congressman Jack Bergman does either.”

Stiles is running a campaign on enacting specific strategies and listening to constituent concerns.

“Usually the number one thing in people’s minds is economy,” said Stiles. “How are we going to afford groceries? How are we going to afford insurance? How do we deal with our housing shortage?”

“I come from new product development design,” said Stiles. “I was a graduate of the University of Michigan. Part of that system is having a client come to you with a problem, and then you look at it from every different angle and you come up with a solution.”

“I’m running for Congress to flip this congressional seat blue, and get a guardrail back up on our democracy, and then start solving some of these problems that we have,” said Stiles. “Without taking any corporate PAC money. Then I will be able to actually represent the people of Michigan’s first district. That’s kind of, in a nutshell, what we talked about with the high school students.”

Stiles says that one of the biggest ways he plans to advocate for Northern Michigan and the Upper Peninsula in D.C. is through healthcare reform.

“In Traverse City, and I know this is happening up here as well, the local hospital system has bought up all the smaller, independent hospitals,” said Stiles. “And then they’ve consolidated them, and then they started reducing services … They’ve left this vacuum in our small, rural towns, where there’s no services at all.

“Yes, I want universal health care, or whatever name you want to put on it, but in our district, we’re +13, almost +20 red. People don’t want to swallow eliminating healthcare as it is and coming up with a brand new system. What I think we should do is take a baby step where we reinstitute the public option, but maybe call it public option plus. And the plus in my mind would be that the federal government comes in and opens facilities in these rural communities where already business doesn’t want to be.”

Stiles suggests that doctors be given student loan abatements to start practices in rural areas.

“We all tell our children to get good grades and go to college, and then we are not creating opportunities for them to move back to our towns,” said Stiles. “It’s a big problem all across our whole district. They can’t make the kind of money that they can make moving out of the district or out of state.

“With plans like that, where we help (doctors in rural areas) eliminate their student loan debt, maybe we help them as first-time home buyers, then they will come, and they’re going to move into one of these abandoned storefronts in our small towns. But they need to remodel it, so then you have to bring skilled laborers in to do that work. And when the skilled laborers come with their families, then you need to bring in more teachers to the school district.

“It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy where we start by using some federal dollars in the healthcare system, but it turns into revitalizing our small towns and rural towns across our district.”

Plans like this one, which Stiles describes as “practical” and “common-sense,” are winning people over.

Stiles first got connected with Marquette Senior High School through Michals, who after a candidate forum back in March was going bowling with some high school students who were interested in politics.

“(Michals) introduced me as his ‘socialist friend Wayne,’ and later one asked me what it was like to be a socialist,” said Stiles. “I just laughed, because he was dead serious. So I talked to them. And these guys were really Republican. But now I just saw them, all four of those young men today, again (in their political science classes). One of them, I could tell, who asked me a lot of questions that night, today I could tell that I’d reached him in some meaningful ways.”

For Stiles, being a political outsider is a positive thing.

“Originally, when Congress was set up, it wasn’t for people to make a career out of,” said Stiles. “You didn’t need to be a professional politician. And you didn’t need to be a lawyer or a multimillionaire to run for Congress. Which is really becoming the case now, even if you look at both Democrats and Republicans, so many of them are lawyers to start out with. And they have a lot of money and a lot of influence, and it pushes regular people like myself and the other grassroots candidates right out of the race.

“Something is wrong with the system. I felt compelled to get out there and make a change instead of thinking that’s somebody else’s job.”

More information about Stiles’ campaign can be found at wayne-stiles.com.

Annie Lippert can be reached at 906-228-2500, ext. 550. Her email address is alippert@miningjournal.net.