Brenden Kelley

Brenden Kelley (Democratic Party) ran for election to the U.S. House to represent Ohio's 14th Congressional District. He did not appear on the ballot for the Democratic primary on May 3, 2022.

Who are you? Tell us about yourself.

I’m an advocate, a brother, a son, and a former Cleveland Indians batboy. I was born and raised in Northeast Ohio and I followed in my parents footsteps by becoming an attorney. As a lawyer, I fight for people & small businesses that powerful corporations have decided didn’t matter. My clients deserve their day in court and I fight to make sure those who treated them negligently are held accountable.

Please list below 3 key messages of your campaign. What are the main points you want voters to remember about your goals for your time in office?

I’m running for Congress because our representatives in Washington—and the massive corporations that paid to put them there—have forgotten people like you and me. And it is literally killing us. Since the pandemic began, 28 million Americans got sick, 600,000 people died, and 78 million lost their jobs. At the same time, America’s billionaires made more than $1.6 TRILLION. When a handful of people can accumulate so much wealth in the face of so much tragedy, something has gone wrong in this country.David Joyce and his colleagues in Congress have created a system that punishes victims and rewards the villains. Fortune 500 companies and their billionaire owners regularly pay no taxes, while you and I pay our fair share. Members of Congress have enriched their corporate supporters for years by opposing increases to the minimum wage. This has held down wages for our lowest-paid workers and kept wages stagnant for the middle class, even as the cost of living has gone up year after year. Washington delivered billions in corporate bailouts and tax cuts to companies like GM while allowing them to ship American jobs elsewhere, as they did in Lordstown.We have to fight to win back our country. We deserve a representative who listens to their constituents and goes to bat for them every day. We need a representative in Washington who recognizes our assets, understands what we need, and advocates to bring home the maximum resources to improve our region.

What areas of public policy are you personally passionate about?

I’ve experienced first-hand what happens when massive corporations and the mega-wealthy reduce your family to a number on a spreadsheet.

My brother Chris was in a rollover car accident when he was 18 and suffered a traumatic brain injury leaving him a quadriplegic. The insurance companies fought against paying for my brother’s care, and our out-of-pocket bills grew to more than $20,000 a month. After my father passed away, the insurance company cut off our coverage altogether.

As you might expect, our treatment by the insurance companies helped make health care policy a passion of mine. No family should be forced to go through what mine did. Fortunately, the Affordable Care Act prevented insurance companies from doing what they did to my brother and made insurance coverage affordable for millions of families. My opponent, Dave Joyce, however, voted more than 30 times to repeal the ACA without having any plan to replace it.

I’m running for Congress because I believe we must use the levers of government to ensure everyone can build their own American dream, not just David Joyce’s corporate overseers.

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