Maryland Activist Mckayla Wilkes is Running to Unseat the Second-Most-Powerful Democrat in the House

Interview by Kelly Wilkins

This interview was originally published by our partner Media For Us.

We spoke with activist, student, and single mother of two, Mckayla Wilkes, who was previously jailed simply because she couldn’t pay her traffic debt and now wages a congressional challenge in Maryland’s 5th district against incumbent Steny Hoyer, who Wilkes says “has signed every single crime bill that’s ever been written.” Wilkes, inspired by Bernie Sanders’ campaign, is running a grassroots-funded challenge to unseat Hoyer, saying the incumbent is “completely out of touch” and “takes massive amounts from the various corporations that profit off of the pain of people in our community”. Hoyer is currently serving his 20th term and is the second-most-powerful Democrat in the House. Wilkes is endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America and Brand New Congress, among other grassroots political organizations.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Media For Us: Can you first tell us about your background and why you've decided to run for office?

Mckayla Wilkes: My background is I'm a mom, an activist, and a political science major. I attend community college, but I decided to run for Congress because regular people deserve to be represented by regular people. And a lot of progressives say that, but it’s a true statement. 

I'm someone who has been directly impacted because of the policy decisions of my representative, who’s been in office for a very long time. The struggles that we were going through seemed normal, because that’s just how our life was everyday. But I finally decided that enough was enough, especially when I was incarcerated because I was in traffic debt, and almost died while I was pregnant with my daughter because my health insurance company decided that they weren’t going to cover the medicine that I needed, even though they knew that I had a life-threatening illness. 

And so going through all of these things, seeing how we have a system that is stacked up against regular people, that we don’t have a political system that puts people first and that’s why we have all the problems that we have as regular working-class people, I finally stood up and decided that somebody needs to step in and work to enact some kind of transformative change. It’s not like I began to run for Congress because I wanted to, but I really felt like I had to for my survival and the people in our community’s survival as well.

MFU: Your opponent, incumbent Steny Hoyer, is in his 20th term as Maryland’s representative for the 5th congressional district. Can you say why you believe the district needs new representation and how you and your opponent differ?

MW: Steny Hoyer and I differ significantly. The biggest thing that sets us apart is my campaign is grassroots-funded. I don’t take money from corporate interests because that is not where I want my loyalty to lie. Steny Hoyer takes massive amounts from the various corporations that profit off of the pain of people in our community: the fossil fuel industry, the pharmaceutical industry, the insurance industry, developers, and the list goes on. And those are the people who he’s essentially beholden to. 

This is someone who’s signed every single crime bill that’s ever been written. When we speak about the war on drugs, which he fails to address and that disproportionately affects black and brown people, he doubled-down last year and called marijuana a gateway drug that he was concerned about legalizing on the federal level. 

This is someone who didn't decide until he was posed with a primary challenge last year that we should raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour, when the minimum wage hasn’t been raised in ten years. He was there for those ten years. 

Our policies are bold and put people first. We believe in things like universal healthcare, and Medicare for All, because healthcare is a human right. Steny Hoyer takes massive amounts of money from the very industries that profit off of the private health insurance industry. We need to enact criminal justice reform because we don’t have an actual criminal justice system -- we have a criminal legal system that’s focused on incarceration instead of actually helping people and focusing on rehabilitation and restorative justice. Steny Hoyer takes massive amounts of money from the private prison industry as well. We believe that we should have a homes guarantee. Steny Hoyer is in his twentieth term and if you go to his website he has no mention of a housing platform whatsoever. 

And he’s just someone who is completely out of touch, and I don’t understand how he’s gotten away with it for so long. He’s just someone who skates by. And I’m not that type of person. I am a results and action type of person. That’s another thing that sets me and Steny Hoyer significantly apart from each other.

MFU: You’ve said you “have faced the abuses of the criminal justice system firsthand, and will work to end the exploitative rot which is the prison-industrial complex.” Can you say more about this experience and how it informs your politics?

MW: I would say one of the main things that needs to be reformed is the cash bail system, because the majority of people who are incarcerated are there because they simply can’t afford to get out. We should have a fair system that is equitable, and in which our freedom doesn’t depend on whether we can pay or not. 

We need a more holistic approach to the way we approach criminal justice reform. We should not be incarcerating people because they possess drugs. The possession of all drugs should be decriminalized. If you are on your fifth charge for possession of cocaine, clearly jail time is not working. People need help. 

We need to stop criminalizing people for having mental health issues, and get people the help that they actually need. 

We speak about what should be done on the outside, but we also need to discuss how people are treated while they are in prison. When I was pregnant and incarcerated for traffic debt, I was put in a cell 23 hours a day. I got one hour out to go shower, or whatever, because my pregnancy was seen as a medical issue. 

They’re putting people in solitary confinement because they have medical issues. I can’t tell you how many people I've spoken to who’ve experienced this, and I've seen it first hand. When an inmate says that they are sick, or they don't feel well, they’ll say that it's called medical watch, but they’re putting them in solitary confinement. 

When I was a kid going through the things that I was going through, being incarcerated after the death of my aunt, having to process the grief of losing her...back then I was actually diagnosed as clinically depressed, but going through all of this I didn’t know that that was the case because every time something happened, I was thrown into the juvenile detention facility. Had they offered me some type of therapy, or someone to talk to, maybe we could have fixed the problems sooner if someone would have even cared to go that deep enough. 

And what was so horrible about it was that my probation officer, the judge, everyone knew what I was suffering from. They knew that I was suffering from grief, that I was going through a loss, and their solution to that was, ‘We know what you’re going through. We understand. But you just need to stop.’ And there was no regard to anything that I was going through, the state of my mental health. No one wanted to get me help. 

But for every one day of school that I would miss, I would get ten days in a juvenile detention facility. I noticed at a very young age that our criminal justice system doesn’t care about people. It doesn’t care what your circumstances are. It’s just solely based on locking you up. I was 15 and 16 years old in juvenile detention for skipping school.

MFU: How does your team feel about its momentum? And what is it like to campaign during the COVID-19 crisis?

MW: It’s definitely different, campaigning now. As far as our momentum, we feel great about our momentum. Our district is really amped up and ready for change. And we were fortunate enough to start campaigning early on, so we’ve just continued to grow. 

Our campaign actually started out like it is now, having to do everything remote, virtually, because before we didn’t have money to have things in person. And in the very beginning, everyone who was volunteering at the time was studying abroad, so they were halfway across the world, and I was the only one over here. 

It’s kind of like we’ve reverted back to how we were doing things before we could raise enough money to get a venue, before everyone was even in the same state or continent or country. And so it’s definitely been a transition, but it hasn’t been a hard one.

MFU: You’ve said Bernie’s campaign was the reason you became politically active. Can you say how his campaign transformed your perspective?

MW: Bernie Sanders was the first politician that I had ever seen talk about the issues that were important to me. I was not involved in politics at all, but when he ran for president I just happened to come across him and I was hearing the issues that he was focused on, like healthcare, the criminal justice system, housing. He was just speaking about issues that I had never heard a politician fight for. 

You always hear politicians on TV when they have the presidential debates, you hear the candidates’ proposals of what they would like to do, but it’s just a whole bunch of numbers and hoopla. With Bernie Sanders, it was actual substance. He wants to make sure we all have healthcare. He wants to make sure that we have a fair criminal justice system. He acknowledges the racial and class disparities that we have. 

And so he really made me see that there are people out there that actually care about the community, and he also made me see that we can run on these issues and we can shift the narrative of the public.

MFU: Do you have words of encouragement or advice for people considering launching a grassroots campaign for congress or another political office?

MW: My best word of advice is don’t ever think that you have to wait your turn, because the way that my life was, I never would have thought that I would be posing a challenge to the second-most-powerful democrat in the House, but here we are. We can do it. And it doesn’t matter whether someone thinks that you’re good enough to do it. You're always good enough to do it, and people with lived experiences should definitely surge to run for office because our voices are the ones that count. And, you know, you just gotta do it because somebody’s gotta give us a seat at the table.