Ortega Challenges Big Pharma Democrat for California Congressional Seat
Interview by Joaquin Romero
We spoke with Mike Ortega, candidate for US Congress in California’s 46th district. Ortega is a longtime organizer, with his roots in the anti-war movement of the 2000s and the Young Socialists. His recent work has focused on mentoring students through the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers. In his present run for congress, Ortega faces off against Democrat Lou Correa in a district which covers a large portion of Orange County, including Santa Ana, Anaheim, and the city of Orange. His campaign has notably been endorsed by Orange County DSA, as well as former presidential candidate Marianne Williamson.
Here, Ortega speaks on his long, storied history in socialist organizing, his view of incumbent Lou Correa, and his vision of how a congressional seat can be used to the benefit of a larger left-wing movement.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
Rift: What is your background, and what pushed you to run for political office this year?
Mike Ortega: That’s a big question, we’re gonna need to break that down into little bite sized chunks.
Rift: Sure. Well, where do you come from?
MO: So I was born in Chicago. I was the youngest of eight brothers and sisters, and this was between my two parents. My mother had her first daughter when she was fourteen. My father had his first son when he was seventeen. They both came into their marriage already having had kids, and I’m the youngest.
My dad was a migrant worker, so wherever there was work, he moved us. I have a brother that was born in East Los Angeles, my other sisters were born in Chicago, and I was raised for most of my childhood in Newark, New Jersey. It’s the biggest city in New Jersey, very working class, one of the few cities that’s majority Black and Latino. I grew up in a city where Black History Month was an event – think Dia de Los Muertos here – that’s like Black History Month there. I played Malcolm X in the school play, like in second grade, it was a whole thing. I thought it was normal that a lot of your teachers are black, the city council is black, the mayor is black. I thought it was super normal.
I wound up being initiated into a gang when I was about 13 years old. My older brother was deep into the life.
I grew up in a really heavily gang and crime-ridden kind of neighborhood. The north side of Newark is mostly Puerto Rican, Dominican. The street gangs when I was growing up were the Latin Kings, Los Ñeta, the 666 Demons, Los Trinitarios. There was a posse that I wound up having problems with the 2nd Ave crew. I wound up being initiated into a gang when I was about 13 years old. My older brother was deep into the life. He tried to school me on the ways of the streets. Gang life is different in those parts. I was part of this neighborhood clique, this neighborhood posse that was small potatoes, comparatively. But man, it was a crazy life. I wound up getting involved in this three gang war, all because I wound up getting jumped. I had a knife on me, I wound up stabbing a couple of guys, turns out those guys are the head of the 2nd Ave crew. They put out a hit on me. This is when I just turned 13 years old, so I’m going back and forth from home to school, taking different routes because I’m worried these guys are gonna find me.
Now, during this time I was like a stellar student. I was the top of my class with standardized test scores. I was really talented when it came to academics, but to survive in the neighborhood I had to play this tough-guy role. But it really wasn’t me. I’m kind of a softy on the inside, but I needed to portray this tough guy on the outside because of who my brother was, because he had a reputation, who he expected me to be, and what ‘manhood’ was, what being ‘macho’ was. And so, it’s strange now, as an adult, to look back at this time. It’s very much that you’re in this mental state of constant fear and paranoia, and in spite of that, I was able to get into the top school in the city, one of the top schools in the state, which was this science magnet school in Newark. I was one of two students from my school to get in. But by the time I got there, I had already been in juvenile hall twice, and so I showed up to this school with a knife in my boot, dressed really thugged out, not sure if there were enemies that were going to be at the school. It’s sort of like PTSD. I was in a mental state that was very traumatized.
I was fortunate that the school I went to was a bunch of nerds, like me, man! So I didn’t need to be that guy anymore. And so a part of me was really liberated from that, and I got the opportunity to move out of that neighborhood. I wound up living with a sister, because there were just too many problems - a best friend of mine had gotten killed in a shooting from those same guys we had those problems with. So I wound up, by the time I was fourteen, changing my look. I started dressing very preppy, I went from having a bald, shaved head to growing my hair out. I looked like a totally different person. I wound up getting into drama and robotics.
Around fifteen, sixteen, I go to this program at Princeton University that’s for creating leaders amongst Black and Latino kids.
Around fifteen, sixteen, I go to this program at Princeton University that’s for creating leaders amongst Black and Latino kids. I told my story in the admissions process. One of my teachers recommended that I apply to the program. I got in, and it was fully funded. That program really opened my mind. We were assigned to read Plato, Socrates, James Baldwin. We studied African-American history, philosophy, logic, and the idea was to put you through freshman year of college in a summer.
What that did for me was it opened my mind to look at the conditions I had grown up in, and look at it in a different way. Like, the tragedy of this nightmare that I had to live through as a teenager, the funerals I had to attend by the time I was fourteen, this wasn’t just regular neighborhood stuff. This is a part of the fabric of this country. And this country, in order for it to exist, it keeps us under these conditions of not having enough money to get by, so we use whatever means we have – stealing, drug-dealing – and within that underground economy you don’t have any legal resources. So the rules of where we had to grow up were very much that you had to take care of yourself through the means of violence on a regular basis.
I wind up coming across Che Guevara, and I’m telling you, Che Guevara changed my life. This was around when George Bush was elected president, 9/11 was about to happen. I had gone through this self-education of revolutionary politics, and witnessed White America freak out, want to blame a brown country for it, not really show any evidence for what they’re talking about, and then want to invade. So I immediately joined the anti-war movement, I think it was my sophomore year of high school. I was part of the marches in New York City, in DC. I was taking buses and my mom was seeing me on the news, protesting. She was like “what the hell are you doing in DC”. But I felt like it was my duty to participate in fighting against what I saw as White Supremacy.
By nineteen years old, I ran for State Assembly as a candidate for the Socialist Workers Party.
I would come across different groups that were in the leftist/socialist world. There was only one in the city I grew up in, and that was the Socialist Workers Party, people refer to it as a Trotskyist group. I wind up joining and being a full member by the time I’m sixteen, seventeen years old. By nineteen years old, I ran for State Assembly as a candidate for the Socialist Workers Party. You can pull up my record, you can see that I lost horrifically, like fourth place. The guy I lost to, Donald Paine, died the week before the election. So I like joking around, so I tell people, “when I was nineteen I lost to a dead guy in my first election”.
But that exposure really opened up the world for me in terms of seeing labor organizing, and the history of the revolutionary movement. And so I received my political education through that movement.
I did really well in high school. I went to this magnet school. It was falling apart. In the winters, the heat would never work, so we’d wear coats when we were in class. The locker room, which was on the first floor, would flood every time it rained, so our books would get ruined. They put all the smart Black and Hispanic kids into this building filled with asbestos, like it’s absolutely criminal what they did to us. Today they have a nice school, but when we were there the city kept delaying the plans. They didn’t want to fund this, they didn’t want to fund that. So my first political action as a teenager that I led was a series of walkouts within the school, and then eventually it became city-wide, protesting conditions in the inner-city schools. I almost got expelled, I got on the hit-list of the mayor, the mayor tried to have me expelled from high school. I was getting stopped by the police and frisked like on a weekly basis. And that’s where I got the experience like; when you fight, it hits the fan real fast, and the people in charge start coming after you.
And so that resolved more my attitude about the Democratic party, because the city I grew up in was run by Democrats. Not that I was saying Republicans were any better, but I was a third-row, screw-both-parties teenager. So the first time I voted when I was 18, I voted Socialist and Green Party down the line, and I wouldn’t vote for a Democrat until Barack Obama. I wouldn’t register as a Democrat until Bernie Sanders would run in 2016.
I got accepted to George Washington University for political science when I was 18, but I dropped out of school after two weeks. I got into revolutionary politics full time. I got a job as a garment cutter at a tutu factory. For the next few years I would be a garment cutter and work in garment manufacturing. I was a member of UNITE HERE! Around then the immigrant rights protests began happening, I believe it was the Sensenbrenner bill back in 2005-2006 that would have made it a felony to be undocumented and to provide any material aid to an undocumented person – if you’re renting a room, if you’re a church, if you’re a priest. It was very draconian. And the response by the immigrants in the United States was inspiring. Chicago had one of the biggest protests in history, with something like 250,000 people protesting in the streets, and then that was followed up by Los Angeles’ first protest which had like 500,000 people. I was part of the New York protest, which I think was 250,000-ish in Liberty Square park.
The party I was a member of asked me to go to Los Angeles because I was one of the few Spanish speaking socialists in my age group. So I moved out here and joined the March 25th coalition representing the Young Socialists.
The party I was a member of asked me to go to Los Angeles because I was one of the few Spanish speaking socialists in my age group, so I moved out here and joined the March 25th coalition representing the Young Socialists. And I helped organize some of those May Day protests, such as the big 1 million person march that happened in Los Angeles where the ports got shut down, and follow-up protests that happened in Hollywood. I was getting permits for them, I was helping distribute the materials, I was bringing my coworkers.
When I moved to LA, the industrial job that I got as an organizer was at Farmer John’s. So if you’ve ever had the Dodger Dog (hotdog), I worked in that factory for…too long.
I was a butcher. I learned how to de-bone. It was primarily Mexican, with a couple of Black coworkers. For these political actions, I would bring colleagues from work. It was a reeducation for me, working with Mexican-Americans, working with Salvadoran-Americans, and recent immigrants. To do something as bold as walking out of work and risk getting fired, to protest the political action of the government that you’re not even a citizen of. Those experiences were super inspiring.
When I wound up changing industries, to medical, that’s what brought me to Orange County. I came down to Orange County, established myself, and then the Bernie Sanders 2016 campaign happened, and I’m there like ‘are you kidding me? There’s a socialist running for president on the Democratic ticket? And he’s saying that he’s a socialist in public? I would have been crucified!’ I mean, I used to have people chasing me off their lawn with a bat when I’d be doing door-to-door.
So Bernie inspired me to jump back in. It was very tacit at first. But then I thought, hey, what is it that I can bring to the table, to the progressive movement, to the left wing? Seeing what representation we had in the district I lived in, and seeing he was a right-wing Democrat, like a Blue Dog, I was like ‘nobody’s stepping up to this guy?’ Literally no one. I was like, okay, this might be my contribution to actually really jump-starting a broad Democratic Socialist coalition.
Rift: Let me pause you right there. What’s interesting to me about your run is the fact that it’s going on in Orange County, which traditionally, and I know that the demographics have been changing over the last few years – is a very conservative area. You have conservative Republicans and conservative Democrats like the current representative. So it’s very interesting to me that you are trying to run as a socialist in this area. How is that going? And what is the response on the ground among the people that you’re talking to?
MO: This was one of the appeals when I looked at the district I lived in and joined the Orange County Democratic Socialists a while back. The first thing that impressed me was that the Orange County DSA has over 500 members today. Now they’re paper members, that means people don’t always show up. But like, you have 50-100 people who are signed up, who show up to events and like, when I was organizing back in the day, there were 100 socialists in the country.
Bernie Sanders won this district that I’m running in decisively. He won Orange County too, but he won this district by nearly 50%, and he was publicly a Democratic Socialist.
And so that reflected to me that there was a massive psychological shift that’s happened here. Looking at the numbers, Bernie Sanders won this district that I’m running in decisively. He won Orange County too, but he won this district by nearly 50%, and he was publicly a Democratic Socialist. I was Looking at the campaign stuff, like alright, how many votes would you need to be able to win, what would you need to win a primary, and the votes are there for a democratic socialist. If the Bernie Sanders crowd comes out to support this run, we win in the primary. And that’s really where the core of our strategy came from. It was like, hey, there was a lot of on-the-ground-work that was done here, but at the core of it, the message of Bernie Sanders rang so true here that there were Republicans in this district that voted for him.
In my experience on the ground here, I’ll be frank with you, it’s middle class White people that get nervous with the socialist label. Most of the immigrant community here don’t care, but when you talk about policy – do you believe that healthcare is a right, and it should be universal – let me tell you, my brother, I’ve met Republicans who have stopped and signed my petition to get on the ballot. They’re like, ‘look, I hate Lou Correa, and I hate Democrats, but the pharmaceutical industry is absolutely evil and needs to be put into check’. And we think the record of the incumbent is really enough for us to give him a run for his money, because he’s got the classic right-wing Democrat record. The guy endorsed Republicans for county sheriff, for different city council seats. He’s not ashamed that he takes money from Big Pharma.
This is a 30 point blue district. There’s no risk of a Republican winning this district. So we can go in hard and fast against this type of moderate Democrat, and so it gives us the leeway to be able to hammer at the policies that we see from the conservative wing of the Democratic party. It’s the perfect target. We have the right politics, and we think as long as we get that message out, that the politics will defeat him.
Rift: So what’s really interesting about you is that with that background you just described, it’s gotta be more than a decade of direct organizing experience you have. How does that inform the campaign now? Do you feel confident that the strategies that you've learned through that time on the ground are going to be able to push you through the primary?
MO: So the primary, we honestly think it’s ours to lose. It’s our mistake to lose this primary. Because of the 30 point difference and the turnouts that we’ve seen, we have a win number calculated, but really the win number is much smaller. We just have to beat the Republican, because California has a top-two primary.
We just have to beat the Republican, because California has a top-two primary.
So if it turns into a Mike Ortega versus Lou Correa race going into November, it is a moderate versus progressive Democrat in a safe-blue district. On the national field of progressives, a lot of that is going to get cleared because not every progressive is going to win. Some are gonna win their primaries and then their races are set. But we’re gonna be one of the few races where you still have, going into November, moderate and progressive. And we think that is really going to give us an inflection point with fundraising and publicity, in terms of gathering the national attention we’ll need.
In our field work that we’ve done, the only people that are die-hard in favor of the incumbent are people that have worked for him, or are somehow affiliated or have been endorsed by his campaign. I have not met regular, middle-eastern, Latino, Asian people that are like ‘oh man, Lou Correa has really done a fantastic job for this district’. Everyone I’ve met is like ‘I don’t even know what this guy does’. And the ones that do know what he does know that it’s not good, but they vote for him because he’s the only Latino name on the ballot with a ‘D’ next to it.
Rift: So then, looking ahead. Say everything goes well in the election, primary, general. Let’s say that you make it into office. What then are your priorities? You’ve mentioned healthcare. You’ve mentioned prescription drug prices. What are your biggest priorities if elected?
MO: I want to talk to you about two realms of the office. Realm one is legislation and what are we voting for and what impact you can actually have on people’s lives. The second realm is what the office does for the progressive movement, for the workers’ movement, for the socialist movement. I think those are two different things.
Legislatively, it’s very clear. We support universal healthcare beyond Medicare for All, and we will support the expansion of Medicare at any chance we get. We also think that we need to put a system in place to negotiate drug prices in the United States. And I would say a single-payer system, even if that’s divorced from having actual universal healthcare, I think at the bare minimum, there should be a single-payer system so that the government is at least negotiating the prices of pharmaceutical drugs. If we could pass legislation that would actually make insulin affordable, that would actually make other lifesaving chemotherapy affordable, that would offset the cost of Medicare, that would offset cost for families, that would help reduce the cost of insurance in the country.
For immigration we support the abolition of ICE. I will demand the abolition of ICE. We don’t need immigration and customs enforcement, it serves no other purpose than separating families and terrorizing immigrant communities. The other functions it serves, there used to be other law enforcement agencies for them. For drug trafficking you literally have a DEA. For human trafficking you literally have an FBI with a human trafficking division. So what else is ICE doing but corralling up undocumented workers? That’s what it’s doing, and they have no oversight. Their jails don’t follow any of the protocols of any of the other holding systems, and so immigrants are being treated in subhuman conditions in these places. And so we’re in favor of shutting down all of those facilities, releasing the undocumented that are in their possession, and we will demand a pathway to citizenship that doesn’t require relocation.
Now third, our big push as well is a Green New Deal, and prosecuting polluters. The companies and government officials that have been responsible for poisoning water supplies in Native and communities of color should be federally prosecuted, and there should be legislation to prosecute them. With the Green New Deal there needs to be a massive investment in infrastructure and alternative sources of energy that just isn’t there. Combating climate change, we’re talking about the scale of production and human will needed that it took to get us on the moon. That’s how big the problem is.
With the gridlock that exists in DC, it’s going to be very difficult until we begin removing centrist Democrats like Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema and other Joe Manchin Democrats like Lou Correa.
With the gridlock that exists in DC, it’s going to be very difficult until we begin removing centrist Democrats like Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema and other Joe Manchin Democrats like Lou Correa. If we don’t get them out of office and actually get fighters in there, we’re never going to see that gridlock open up. And that’s where the second part of my answer comes from, which is how are we building the movement?
One of the things I love about Ilhan, AOC, Rashida, what they’ve done in their communities is that they’ve built a movement where now there’s an expectation of what that person and that office is going to fight for and stand for. We need to establish those precedents all across the country.
In addition to that, locally, what is the function of the office? The office should serve as a platform to advocate for the issues and the struggles of the working poor, that the middle class is struggling through within that district, including the activist groups that march and protest. The office should serve as the platform to amplify those messages.
