Matias banks on her message in run for Congress

Oct. 11--LAWRENCE -- Juana Matias was dismissed as an overreaching 20-something who needed to wait her turn last year, when she challenged a man who had been a fixture in city politics since 1991. Marcos Devers had been a city councilor, an acting mayor and then a state representative with the backing of the Democratic Party establishment in his bid for a fourth term.

But Matias saw something happening locally that also was unfolding on a much larger scale in the state and nationwide -- a dissatisfaction with party establishments and a thirst for change that gave this Democratic state a Republican governor the year before and seemed ready to give the nation the improbable presidency of Donald Trump.

On Nov. 6, 2016, as the nation elected Trump to the White House, Lawrence elected Matias to its 16th Essex District seat in the state House of Representatives.

Matias, a Democrat, won the House seat by emphasizing a generational shift in power, promoting her local working-class roots and digging into the challenge. She raised nearly $50,000 and knocked on doors in all of the district's 16 precincts while Devers mostly coasted, raising just $10,000 -- not including the $20,000 he lent his campaign -- and depending on events like his annual backyard barbecue to rally his supporters. Her energy and progressive message was a contrast to Devers' record in the Statehouse, where his most recent bill at that time was one that would make dominoes the state's official sport.

She won in a landslide.

Now Matias wants to do it again, on a vastly larger scale.

Less than a year into her term representing Lawrence on Beacon Hill, Matias last week announced she will seek the seat U.S. Rep. Niki Tsongas, D-Lowell, is giving up after a decade.

On Tuesday, Matias, 30, said she's expecting she'll again be dismissed as an ambitious upstart who should allow more established Democrats who've paid their dues to the party to succeed Tsongas in state's 3rd District.

There's plenty of them already in the race or considering it. They include Sen. Barbara L'Italien, 56, of Andover, who earlier served as a state representative and as director of government affairs under former Treasurer Steve Grossman, and Steve Kerrigan, 46, of Lancaster, who was director of constituent services for former U.S. Sen. Ted Kennedy and then the Democratic nominee for lieutenant governor in 2014.

Other candidates could muddy Matias' message as the youthful change candidate if she runs on that theme again. Among them are Dan Koh, 32, a former chief of staff for Boston Mayor Marty Walsh who returned to Andover to make the run, and Nadeem Mazen, 33, a Cambridge city councilor, who also would need to move into the district.

Haverhill Mayor James Fiorentini, 70, says he's focused on his election to an eighth term this year but he's widely expected to make a run at the congressional seat.

Donoghue out

State Sen. Eileen Donoghue, D-Lowell, who ran for the seat in 2007 and was considered a front-runner to succeed Tsongas this year, shook up the race Tuesday by announcing she will not run.

Matias said she'll answer suggestions that her ambitions for Congress are premature as she did when she ran for the Statehouse last year, adding that the need for new and younger voices is even more urgent with Trump as president. She waived off the suggestion that she and Trump rode same wave of discontent into office.

"When I was running last year, I was told I needed to wait in line and that it wasn't my turn, but I felt the challenges that families were facing in Lawrence were too important for me to sit on the sideline," she said. "I believe what's happening in our (congressional) district and our country is the same. Our fundamental values of what makes us American are really at stake. We have a president who each day is attacking different groups of Americans but is willing to embrace and empower neo-Nazis and Russian hackers."

As it was a year ago, Matias' platform is solidly progressive. She's for expanding immigrant rights, raising the federal minimum wage, universal health care, stricter gun laws, preserving the environmental protections that Trump is dismantling and protecting social safety nets such as Medicare and Social Security. In her campaign for the Statehouse last year, Matias was endorsed by the state's leading gay rights and abortion rights groups and posted the endorsements on her campaign web page, a daring gesture in a city with a majority Latino population whose deep religious convictions tilt it conservative on such issues.

Beyond all that, Matias regularly returned to one issue in an interview Tuesday, which she said will separate her from the other candidates and give resonance to what is shaping up to be her central message of economic opportunity: her immigrant, working-class story as a woman born to factory workers earning minimum wages, who paid for her college and law degrees with part-time work and student loans and went on serve in the Statehouse.

"My story is the American dream," she said. "I'm the product of public schools. The struggles and difficulties working-class families face are real to me. I've lived them. That's what will make me stand out. I know what it is to be a part of a working-class family because I grew up in one. I know what it's like to live paycheck-to-paycheck, to repay student loans, to make ends meet."

Matias immigrated from the Dominican Republic with her parents and three brothers when she was 5-years-old. She went to Haverhill public schools, earned a bachelor's degree from the UMass Boston and a law degree from Suffolk University in 2014, then worked as lawyer with AmeriCorps representing children younger than 15 in deportation proceedings. She left the agency when she was elected to the Statehouse last year.

She'll have to give up that seat to make the run for Congress.

Formidable hurdles

Her hurdles are formidable, even as she brings her reputation as a giant-killer to the race.

Among them, she's little known outside Lawrence and is running in a district that for decades has been represented by someone from Lowell, including Niki Tsongas, Marty Meehan and Tsongas' late husband, Paul. Lowell has 110,000 residents, making it the largest municipality in the district, followed by Lawrence. The district is mostly north and west of Boston and also includes suburbs such as Acton and Concord and cities like Marlborough and Fitchburg.

She said she may have to raise as much as $1.2 million to make the race. She now has just $492 in her campaign account, but state law will prohibit her from spending even that on her race for a federal office because she raised it to run for a state one.

She said she'll need three things to win: a strong campaign team, the right message and the money to transmit it. The team she assembled when she upset Devers for the Statehouse last year was led at least in part by her boyfriend, Pavel Payano, the son of a former mayoral candidate who has sizable political ambitions of his own. Payano ran for state Senate three years ago in a primary that L'Italien won and is now running for Lawrence City Council. He is vice chairman of the Lawrence School Committee.

Beyond at least some measure of ambition, candidates for Congress typically have some measure of self-confidence, especially the long shots. Matias appears to have that as well. In the press release she issued announcing her candidacy last week, she describes herself as "one of the rising stars in the Democratic Party."

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