Mass. congressional Democrat will face challenger seeking 'new generation of leadership'
U.S. Rep. Stephen Lynch will face a challenger next year for the congressional seat he has held since 2001.
Patrick Roath, a lawyer and voting rights advocate from Boston, said Wednesday that he will aim to unseat Lynch to bring 'a new generation of leadership' to Capitol Hill.
'I think we are in desperate need of new voices, new leadership, and big news ideas in D.C.,' the Democrat said in a LinkedIn post Wednesday morning.
Roath, who also worked for former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, was first reported to be considering a run for Congress in late February.
That was shortly after Lynch verbally sparred with constituents at a rally in Boston as he and his Democratic colleagues faced pressure to oppose President Donald Trump's agenda in Congress more forcefully. At one point in a contentious back-and-forth at the rally, Lynch suggested people should run for Congress if they disagreed with his strategy or judgment of what was in the best interests of the country.
'I'm running because everything is on the line right now with Trump in the White House,' Roath said in a campaign launch video. 'And we've got to have people who are ready to go down there, and fight for us, and stick up for us, and defend our democracy.'
Roath was raised in Connecticut and has lived in the Boston area since he attended Tufts University in the early 2000s.
After college, according to his campaign, he interned in the Obama White House before joining then-Gov. Deval Patrick as a campaign aide and staffer at the State House.
Roath also chaired the board of Common Cause Massachusetts, a Boston-based democracy and voting rights nonprofit, where he was involved with campaigns to pass automatic voter registration in Massachusetts, adopt universal mail-in voting in the state, and other voting accessibility initiatives.
For the last decade, he also worked as a commercial civil litigator at Ropes & Gray, a global law firm based in Boston, where he ran a pro bono practice focused on voting rights.
The resident of Boston's Jamaica Plain neighborhood will challenge Lynch for the Massachusetts 8th Congressional District, which includes part of Boston and stretches south to Brockton.
In his campaign launch video, Roath said he felt the 'American dream' success stories of his parents, whose stable jobs at IBM brought them into the middle class, are fading away.
'It was that sense that you don't hear that American dream opportunity story so much anymore that really got me motivated to be in public service for the first time,' he said.
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