A Stint in Jail Prompted McKayla Wilkes to Take on a Powerful Dem Leader

Six years ago, Mckayla Wilkes experienced something that would ultimately motivate her to run for Congress: going to jail.

Twenty-four years old and pregnant at the time, Wilkes had landed there for driving with a suspended license, a result of parking tickets that she couldn’t afford to pay off. She had no choice but to drive to work or else lose her job, which would have left her in even deeper financial trouble.

In jail, she watched as women were granted bond they could not afford and were subsequently denied their freedom, not because of their actions but because of their income. “For the women that did have resources on the outside, they couldn't tap into those resources because it cost $20 to use the phone for a couple of minutes,” she told VICE. “And being incarcerated, you don't have $20.”

Now, Wilkes, 29, is running to represent Maryland’s 5th District in the U.S. House on a uniquely personal and progressive campaign supporting criminal justice reform, Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, and reparations for descendants of slaves. It will be tough; her opponent in the April 28 Democratic primary is Rep. Steny Hoyer, an incumbent who has not only held the seat for 39 years, but is the current House Majority Leader.

Wilkes said she didn’t have much faith in politics until 2015, a year after her arrest, as she watched Bernie Sanders begin his campaign with a progressive platform for the 2016 presidential election. The campaign ignited something in her. “Finally seeing a politician that was openly speaking about issues like a universal health care system, criminal justice reform, and truly affordable housing, that made me see that everything that goes on in our lives absolutely ties back to policy,” she said. “Everything is political.”

Since announcing her run in February 2019, the ethos of Wilkes’ campaign has come to embody the second-wave feminist motto, the personal is political; Wilkes seems to have a personal story that accounts for each part of her platform. She devoted one of her first ads to discussing why ending the criminalization of poverty nationwide is important to her, highlighting her own experience in the system. Wilkes has also discussed her own abortion at age 19 as a reason why she supports free birth control and repealing the Hyde Amendment, which currently makes it illegal for federal funds to be allocated towards abortion, among other reproductive freedoms. These experiences, she says, are an asset to her campaign, not a liability.

“I really decided to come clean about my background because of transparency,” she said. “I wanted to give people the option to choose if they wanted to support me or not based on the things that I had been through.”

Today, she is a mother of two. In 2014, she had a high-risk pregnancy but was only made aware that it was high-risk after several visits to the emergency room for shortness of breath. “My pain wasn't being taken seriously,” Wilkes said. “It wasn't until the third or fourth time that I went to the emergency room and I refused to leave because I knew something was wrong, that they ended up doing an ultrasound and finding out that I had a blood clot behind each of my knees.” She was hospitalized; the insurance battles that followed were a nightmare.

The experience is largely why Wilkes said she plans to focus on improving Black maternal mortality rates under a Medicare for All system if elected. While incumbent Hoyer has acknowledged the fact that Black women are more likely to die during childbirth as an important issue, he does not support Medicare for All. His top donors during this election cycle include insurance and healthcare companies.

The Democratic congressional primary in Maryland has been compared to the 2018 race between Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (another one of Wilkes’ inspirations for running) and Joe Crowley. The similarities are there: Crowley was a multiple-term incumbent and Ocasio-Cortez a young, progressive woman of color—the underdog, like Wilkes. But Ocasio-Cortez’s majority-Latinx district in the Bronx and Queens where the average household income is $46,990 is very different from Maryland’s 5th District, where 54 percent of residents are white and the average household income is $87,457. Still, 37 percent of residents in Wilkes’ district are Black, and her platform includes a section called The Black Agenda, outlining her support for reparations, ending the War on Drugs, fighting voter suppression, and allocating $2 billion to HBCUs and other minority-serving institutions. Even if a majority of Black voters come out for Wilkes, a win will be a long-shot.

But she has hope. “The majority of the response that I get [from residents] is Hoyer has been here for how long? And what has he done?” she said. “People like the fact that we’re knocking on doors and we're hosting town halls. And I resonate with that so much because I was one of those people who felt as though our representatives ignored us, that we went unheard, we went unseen. And now people in our district feel seen for the first time in a long time.”

Wilkes has received the endorsement of groups like Washington D.C.’s DSA chapter and Brand New Congress, a non-profit organization that works “to elect regular working people to Congress who put people before party to make [the] government more accountable and responsive to the needs of all Americans,” according to their mission statement.

“[Wilkes] has already demonstrated, through her impressive campaign, an ability to organize for universal healthcare, climate justice, and criminal justice reform,” said Nathan Luecking, an organizer with Metro D.C. DSA. “Over the course of his career, Steny Hoyer has pushed through damaging votes and policy that have harmed working families […].Hoyer needs to go, and Mckayla is the candidate who can beat him.”

Last month, Wilkes quit her full-time job as a project control analyst for the U.S. Army to campaign full time. Being a regular working person who is open about her experiences and how they’ve informed her politics is part of why she is convinced she can conquer the primary next month. “That's why I like to tell my story, and I always tie it back to policy so that people can understand that this is personal for all of us,” she said. “My story isn't just my story. It's everyone's story—everyone has a story.”