“It is incredibly important to have leaders who can not only talk about it, but have experience with it,” said Stacey Abrams last week, spinning her personal debt as an asset rather than a liability for a political hopeful.
Abrams is the Democratic nominee for governor in Georgia. She’s also more than $227,000 in debt. The steep sum stems from credit card and student loan debt, in addition to back taxes. As of late 2017, the average American household carried around $137,000 of debt, with $16,883 in credit card debt and $50,626 in student loans. Abrams, by comparison, is in $77,500 of credit card debt and $96,000 of student loan debt, per her own calculations.
Up in Wisconsin, Democratic House hopeful Randy Bryce is making a similar argument. Ahead of reports on his financial woes last November, Bryce, who’s running in the Democratic primary for retiring Republican House Speaker Paul Ryan’s seat, confronted those struggles in an emotional op-ed for HuffPost. “I’ve survived some really awful times and it’s time there’s someone in Congress who knows what everyday people are going through,” he wrote. Bryce paid off a $1,257 debt from late child support payments and a $4,200 debt to an ex-girlfriend who loaned him money for a car in 2002, only after launching his bid for Congress. He also filed for bankruptcy in 1999.
The argument advanced by these two candidates, both of whom are popular with national Democrats, is that personal debt makes more empathetic and relatable politicians. In that sense, pitching this obvious weakness as a strength is less absurd than it sounds because it’s true that many voters have faced similar financial struggles and that most lawmakers have limited insight into that experience. The working class is grossly underrepresented in Congress. But persuasive as that may be, poor judgment helped put both Abrams and Bryce in their respective financial holes.
Addressing her $77,500 credit card debt, Abrams explained, “I did not understand that those magical slivers of plastic that I was getting in college — a hundred dollar purchase was going to cost me like $3,000 over the next seven years.” Abrams’ debts are also well above the average household’s. And Bryce left his debts untouched until they became a campaign issue, leaving both his ex-wife and ex-girlfriend hanging while he could get away with it.
The question for voters, then, is whether the reliability factor outweighs their poor personal judgment. It’s one thing to go $227,000 into debt or to fall behind on child support, file for bankruptcy, and leave a car loan unpaid — it’s another thing to then ask the public to entrust you with important financial decisions for a state or for the country.
