With elections a priority for the chair of the Michigan Democratic Party and its LGBT & Allies Caucus, Mark LaChey is setting his sights not only on 2019, but to 2020 and beyond. He said that he's looking to put diverse candidates front and center in the coming years.
"My focus is going to be on recruiting LGBTQ and especially women and persons of color; to emphasize the 'L' and the 'T' and the 'Q' and POC candidates," LaChey said. "Especially for the legislature to run in the state house in 2020. With the draconian term limits, we have the real prospect of going back to zero in the not-too-distant future with respect to representation in the state House. We always need to be refreshing our candidate pool, and, additionally, not only finding those people but generating support in terms of money and expertise to mentoring to help those people get elected."
Setting his sights to a national scale, he said that an LGBTQ Michigander running for Congress is in sight.
"The entire state House is up for re-election in 2020. I look within the four corners of Michigan primarily, but if we had a gay person who wanted to run for Congress, I think there's some opportunities there," he said. "I think there are some districts that are more purple than they were, two, four, six, years ago. I think that would be phenomenal to add an LGBT member of Congress in Michigan. I think it's past due, just like it was past due for us to have a statewide elected LGBT person before Dana Nessel."
