Lower is full establishment. Norton, the Afghanistan Combat Veteran filed before all of this. Tom Norton approached numerous well known West Michigan Republicans to run against Amash but all declined. He put the burden of the campaign on his own shoulders. Time for Michigan citizens to align behind Norton and take out the “Liberal-terian” Amash.
Please go to his Facebook page and “like & share” as well as Twitter @fornorton and follow his campaign. A Freeper is guiding the campaign. DONATE!
The last time GOP primary voters in MI-03 rejected an “establishment Republican” with a conservative voting record over several years in the state legislature in favor of a “Tea Party outsider” who was “not a career politician” and was “not beholden to anybody” was in 2010, when they nominated ... Justin Amash, the Palestinian Paulistinian, beholden to Ron Paul and Hamas (and not necessarily in that order). So I recommend that we judge each candidate AS AN INDIVIDUAL and not reject or support anyone based solely on his bio.
Maybe Norton would make a great candidate, or maybe he wouldn’t—I know bery little about him apart from what he put on his website. He sounds like a good family man, and in addition to his military service he has some experience in government (in his town council). His town lies a mile within MI-03, which certainly is better than living a mile outside the district. Less helpful is the fact that he lost state representative primary elections in 2010 and 2014.
As for Lower, he’s originally from Ionia County (and served as a county commissioner there), which is wholly within MI-03. It is correct that he currently lives a few miles outside MI-03 (in SW Montcalm County), but it is more correct to say that he was a carpetbagger when he ran in the Montcalm and Gratiot 70th State House District in 2016 (which is when he moved from Ionia County across the county line to Montcalm County) than it would be to call him a carpetbagger for running for Congress from Ionia County today.
I have no reason to believe that Lower is not a true conservative, much less that he’s running because he wants to run interference for the execrable Amash, but I do question whether a candidate from Ionia County (and whose current state house constituents are all outside MI-03) would be our strongest candidate in the general election in a fornerly solidly GOP district that has trended leftward as Grand Rapids moves left. Of course, Norton is from the boondocks in far northern Kent County and wouldn’t necessarily have strength in Grand Rapids or its suburbs, which is where the lion’s share of votes are located. It’s likely that neither Norton nor Lower is the ideal candidate to defeat Amash in the primary and the Democrat in the general.
The primary election won’t be until August 2020, which is over a year away, and the filing deadline is around 11 months away. It would be foolish to annoint the first candidate to express interest in running against Amash as the nominee, and to reject anyone else who later exoresses interest, without analyzing the pros and cons of each candidate. While I agree that it would be best to have a single candidate running against Amash, it is imperative that such candidate be a conservative who can beat Amash in the primary and beat the Democrat in the general, and, frankly, we don’t know right now who the best candidate will be.
What can Michigan FReepers tell us about state senator Peter MacGregor? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_MacGregor He sounds like someone with the local appeal in Kent County that would be invaluable in the prinary and general. If MacGregor turns out to be the optimal choice, wouldn’t it make sense for him to run against Amash, Nelson to run for MacGregor’s state senate seat (which would open up once MacGregor is elected) and Lower to stay in the state house? And if MacGregor isn’t the right guy, we should be looking for the right candidate and not settling for a two-time loser in state house GOP primaries just because he was the first guy to throw his hat in the ring.