This year’s New York’s 21st Congressional District Democratic race has seen more candidates than any other in recent history. Each candidate still running for office has a part of his or her previous life pushing them forward, whether it be childhood experiences, former jobs or political activism.

Voting is from noon to 9 p.m. Tuesday.

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Farming philosophy

Katie Wilson describes herself as the average North Country citizen, someone who grew up on family farmland, has had to choose between buying groceries and paying her electric bill, and is resourceful ideologically.

She described her father as being “land rich, cash poor” during her childhood, owning a country inn frequented by wealthy guests who stayed and dined at their home.

“The constant flow of people from all walks of life opened my eyes to how different peoples perspectives are, how varied peoples perceptions of the same experience can even be,” Wilson said.

For her entire life, Wilson said she has lived in the lower and middle classes, and has experienced the effects of politicians not paying attention to these members of society. While living in Colorado around a decade ago, her fiance at the time lost his carpentry job when his company’s contract building second and third homes was pulled in the midst of the 2008 U.S. economic crisis. At the same time, she was having a child.

“Having a child at the time of Obama and the economic decline of our country made me really aware of what kind of world I was bringing my children into, and what kind of opportunities they would have based on global politics and national politics,” Wilson said.

Wilson says her lack of political experience is precisely why she believes she is the best candidate for the job. Her real-world experience struggling to make ends meet, learning the dangers of a dysfunctional economy and studying economic philosophy as a layperson, she said, has allowed her to create a political worldview that avoids the worst parts of both Democratic and Republican policies.

Wilson said she tried to avoid partisan politics. She prefers to find the best path to benefit people like her, economically. This stems from her belief that wealthy politicians, funded by wealthy businesspeople, will not create a successful system for the working class. This is what she said separates her from Republican incumbent Elise Stefanik.

“She doesn’t know what it’s like to punch a time clock. She doesn’t have any idea what it’s like to live through a winter up here,” Wilson said, “what it’s like to make hard choices for necessities … like groceries and heat.”

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Prioritizing purchases

It is common knowledge that Emily Martz comes to the race from a position at the Adirondack North Country Association, where she organized efforts to improve the economy of the North Country.

But before Martz worked at ANCA, she was in life insurance sales, where she worked with customers to budget money for what they had decided was an essential purchase.

“That 12 years, including life insurance, taught me what it means to a family to have and build financial security,” Martz said. “It really showed me firsthand the conversation of what they value, and needing to take people from where they are to where they want to go. And knowing they’re going to have to make sacrifices.”

Martz said she applied this idea of budgeting for the important things to the government, saying the U.S. must find a way to fund things like welfare, education and unions. Of course, there is a price for funding these services, but just like the families purchasing life insurance had to make some sacrifices, Martz says the taxpayers will have to make their own.

Those sacrifices, Martz said, should be paid by the coal companies the government has been subsidizing as the industry is pushed out of the energy market by green energy.

She believes this money would be better spent on welfare programs.

“A conversation about welfare is a conversation about families, it’s a conversation about children, it’s a conversation about creating more economic opportunity for people,” Martz said. “I have no problem with helping someone who needs it.”

Martz also said the money spent keeping oil companies afloat could be used to strengthen trade unions and their apprenticeship programs, educating a new generation in the many trades and services needed in today’s marketplace. She also said with green energy establishing itself, skilled workers will be needed to operate, design and invent the energy systems of tomorrow.

Martz wants to sit on the House Appropriations Committee, which plays a role in deciding where funds go.

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Congressional charity

For the majority of her life, Tedra Cobb has been helping people. From a young age her parents taught by example, welcoming nine adopted siblings into their family, teaching in public schools and starting a foster care agency for homeless youth while Cobb was in middle school.

After graduating, she followed in her family tradition of public service and assistance, working at a correctional facility as a Spanish-speaking counselor for medical situations where she translated a lot of conversations about HIV/AIDS testing. She said what she saw and learned there prompted her to take her next job working in HIV/AIDS education with a nonprofit group in St. Lawrence, Lewis and Jefferson counties.

Through these jobs and her time running a health agency, sitting on the North Country Children’s Clinic Board and being a legislator in St. Lawrence County, Cobb learned the ins and outs of charity, government and public service work, and has fused the three together in her campaign approach.

Though she has several areas she wants to tackle — health care, the economy and education — she often looks to others for what exactly to target and for new areas that need improvement. Cobb is essentially taking the nonprofit model of learning about a problem and setting up a system to solve the problem, and applying it to the government.

“Local government isn’t always good at seeing the distance, thinking strategically,” Cobb said.

Cobb has a strong structure of human helpers, as evidenced by her roughly 900 vocal supporters who write dozens of letters to the editor, tirelessly knock on doors around the district and wear their pins everywhere they go. She wants to mobilize people the same way in Washington, gathering solutions instead of votes.

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Campaigning from experience

Patrick Nelson had already knocked on thousands of voters’ doors before he decided to kick off the Democratic race a year-and-a-half ago.

The 28-year-old had already been involved in Aaron Woolf and Mike Derrick’s North Country congressional campaigns in 2014 and 2016, respectively, working as an intern and even on their senior staff.

Nelson said he has tremendous respect for both men but, while working on their campaigns, saw them following advice from political consultants that he thought was poor and led to them losing to Stefanik.

“What I noticed after a while was a real disconnect between how the consultant class, and the Washington, D.C., types would take a look at the 21st Congressional District and what it actually looks like when you’re on the ground talking to the folks,” Nelson said. “The [Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee] doesn’t know how to win elections.”

He said consultants see a Republican majority in the district and make assumptions about who they are and how they vote. They tell their candidate clients to play it safe, not appear too “left” and avoid talking about policies specifically. Nelson remembers his call script for the Woolf campaign telling him not to talk about specific policies, but values.

In reality, Nelson said NY-21 voters do not fit into the typical party-line votes other districts might.

“The consultant class thinks that if you say a bunch of things that sound nice and never say anything specific that you won’t alienate anybody and you might be able to win by just being inoffensive,” Nelson said. “People are sick and tired of the talking points. They can smell it a mile away; that’s why they don’t like politicians, because there’s a ‘sound’ to it.”

He believes people would rather hear a straight answer that they don’t agree with than someone trying to say a bunch of things polls say they want to hear.

While working as a delegate on Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign, Nelson said he learned that many North Country Republicans do not support tax cuts for the wealthy and talked with many Republicans, independents and conservatives who want Medicare for all.

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Seeing solutions

After six years of identifying problems on cable news shows on CNBC and MSNBC, Dylan Ratigan wants to focus on solutions. He said his time reporting for Bloomberg, interviewing and debating the rich and powerful on “Fast Money” and “The Dylan Ratigan Show,” and researching his book “Greedy Bastards” largely informed his current platform of fixing the political system.

“I learned, explicitly, how apparently broken our politics are, and how politics are being made to the detriment of the American people to benefit an increasing small group of people who control both parties, full stop,” Ratigan said.

While these years of television journalism were good for learning about the political and economic systems, Ratigan eventually left cable news in 2012 because he realized it was not a place for solutions.

“Cable news in general continues to be reactive to the most provocative thing available and is counter-productive to finding solutions more often than now, because it holds people in that dark place,” Ratigan said.

To improve the world and be happy with his life, he said he started identifying solutions, first taking the form of his veteran-employing, solar-powered, hydroponic farming module company Helical Holdings.

Ratigan said Congress has the same problem cable news does: focusing on problems to the point of being counter-productive. He said looking at a problem is only useful until a solution is found, and he wants to bring an energy to Congress.