Barr Versus Bergman

Inside the 1st Congressional District race

Another election, another challenger for U.S. Rep. Jack Bergman. Will this one garner the votes to pull off an upset?

Bergman is seeking his fifth term representing Michigan’s 1st Congressional District, which includes the entire Upper Peninsula and 20 counties in the northern Lower Peninsula. It’s roughly half of Michigan’s land area and forms the second largest congressional district east of the Mississippi River.

Bergman, a Republican, faces Democrat Callie Barr on Nov. 5. Bergman easily defeated his last four Democratic opponents in the heavily rural district, but Barr believes she has the right background and appeal to unseat the incumbent. Northern Express connected with each candidate to find out why they feel they deserve voter support.

Callie Barr

Barr, 38, was born and raised in Traverse City, moving to Cheboygan in high school. She married Matt, her high school sweetheart, and he enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. He served two tours in Iraq and suffered combat injuries, she says, including post-traumatic stress and traumatic brain injury.

Barr obtained a degree from Central Michigan University in secondary education and taught in various schools as the family moved around, and it was around this time that she got involved in advocating for military families through Blue Star Families and the Rosalynn Carter Institute for Caregivers.

Barr eventually went to the University of Michigan for a law degree when she got serious about advocating for military and veterans’ rights.

“We just didn’t have a voice in a lot of the policies that were being implemented and impacting us, and I knew I really needed more tools in the toolbox to be taken seriously and not just patted on the head,” she says.

Barr worked as an attorney for several years before deciding to run for Congress. Problems with housing, healthcare, her husband’s struggles, and other issues made her feel like she was “screaming into the wind,” and she had a strong urge to run for office and force change.

“I know what it feels like to be ignored, to feel second class or underestimated,” she says. “The people in our district have needs, and we need representation. I meet great people around this district, putting their heads down and trying to do good things for their community, and they need a conduit. They need a voice.”

She is critical of Bergman, who she calls “very absent” and willing to engage in harmful partisan politics, including efforts to discredit the 2020 U.S. presidential election.

“I feel strongly that extremism leaves communities like ours behind,” she says. “When you deny an election, when you tell people they can’t trust each other, you are undermining a very basic understanding of what it means to be an American.”

Barr says she’s telling everyone who will listen that she wants to be a dogged advocate for every resident of the district, regardless of their beliefs.

“I want to bring an absolute commitment to our people here, an absolute commitment to country over any political party, and I mean that,” she says. “And that means you’re not always going to be in line with your party.”

Housing, childcare, infrastructure, and more are on her list of issues that need immediate attention.

“Housing is a huge issue across the entire district, and to me, it’s important to find ways to have flexible capital for builders, because their margins aren’t great, so that they can enter the market…and build units that make sense for their communities.”

She also wants to protect Social Security.

“Some people will say, oh, that’s an alarmist thing, but it’s not really alarmist when you have someone saying all the time that you want to privatize it,” she says. “We have an older voting population, and they’re scared.”

Line 5 (an oil pipeline owned by the Canadian company Enbridge that passes under the Straits of Mackinac) continues to be a major talking point within the district as some are concerned about its potential to pollute the lakes. Barr sees both sides of this issue.

“We’re in a period of energy transition, and we have goals for clean energy. And that’s great, but in a district like ours, we have to be very responsible because we need reliable and sufficient energy to make sure that in an area where it gets 30 below, people aren’t freezing to death,” she says. “So we don’t want an aging pipeline threatening our water, but there’s a tunnel, and I’m not against that.”

Jack Bergman

Bergman, first elected in 2016, is a Minnesota native who served 40 years in the U.S. Marine Corps, rising to the rank of Lieutenant General. He also worked as a commercial airline pilot. When not in Washington, he resides in the western U.P. town of Watersmeet.

Bergman says he went into politics with a desire to support men and women of the armed forces, and he touts his service on several military subcommittees during his first several terms.

“When I went to Congress eight years ago, I said what I was going to do, and I’ve done what I said, unlike a lot of people in politics,” he says. “I said I was going to help our military, whether it be in the recruiting side, the training side, the war-fighting side, all of those things, and also to support their families… I went there and I’ve gotten involved.”

Bergman says he wants to continue to “move the ball down the field,” on that front, but he’d also like to make a bigger push towards supporting the district and state’s school systems. He wants to “cut the wasteful spending at the D.C. bureaucracy level” and get more money directly to districts.

“We’re going to heat that up a little bit in this next term because we’ve seen enough now where the money hasn’t been well spent,” he says.

Asked about the issues or concerns he hears about from residents within his district, Bergman says “safety and security” is number one.

“Over the last few years and especially in the last few months, it’s safety and security. They’re concerned about people in their towns who have just come there,” he says. “They want the federal government to secure the border…I hear that all the time.”

Bergman is also in support of a Line 5 tunnel.

“There’s an irrational fear not founded in data out there about Line 5,” he says. “The bottom line is it’s safe…and we need to get the tunnel built so that it even increases the level of safety. I’m not going to enable anything that risks the security of our people, our environment, or our water.”

Bergman has long been dogged by folks who question his ties to the region after spending most of his life elsewhere. His dad was born in the U.P. and left at the age of 17 to find work, he says.

“My dad’s family got here in the 1880s, and I live 40 miles from where my father was born in a company mine clinic in Ironwood,” he says. “I made the decision in the ’80s to find property close to [here].”

Bergman rejects Barr’s notion that he’s too partisan, saying he works “across the aisle single every day.” When asked about his stance on the 2020 U.S. presidential election, Bergman dismisses the topic as “clickbait.”

“We are a country of state’s rights, and the Secretary of State of any state has the authority and the responsibility to ensure the elections are conducted with integrity,” he says. “We need to shine the light on election integrity.”

He does acknowledge that work in Washington keeps him away from his district for long periods of time, and that his district size presents challenges.

“It’s basically about a ten-and-a-half-hour drive from one end of my district to the other, so there’s a lot of times I’ll come back from D.C. to the district for a week and never get within six hours from home,” he says.

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