Cameron Kasky, an outspoken survivor of the 2018 Parkland High School shooting, announced his bid for Congress on Tuesday, saying in a video that he’s running to work on laws that help “all Americans.”
“You and your family are working all week just to spend most of your paycheck on rent and health care,” the 25-year-old said in his launch video shared on social media. “Meanwhile, the richest people in our country are telling us that we can’t afford real solutions, like social housing and Medicare For All. No, we can only afford genocide, Palantir mass surveillance contracts and ICE thugs.”
Kasky said he’s been “taking on” members of Trump’s “regime” since he was a teenager. The video then cuts to a clip of then-17-year-old Kasky asking Marco Rubio, then a U.S. senator representing Florida, if he would promise to stop taking money from the National Rifle Association or NRA. (Rubio responded: “I will always accept the help of anyone who agrees with my agenda.”)
Kasky said in the launch video that he never planned on getting involved in politics until the shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, that killed 17 people and injured 18 others. Kasky was a junior at the time of the shooting.
“My classmates and I learned the hard way that this shooting didn’t happen in spite of the American system,” he said. “It happened because of it.”
Kasky and other survivors of the 2018 mass shooting soon entered the spotlight and became champions for gun control. Kasky, along with two other survivors, co-founded Never Again MSD, a student-led political organization that advocates for gun control. Never Again MSD, along with Everytown for Gun Safety, led a nationwide protest ― March For Our Lives ― that demanded action for gun violence.
David Hogg, another prominent survivor of the Parkland mass shooting, has already dabbled in politics. He served as the co-vice chair of the Democratic National Convention from February until he was ousted in June over disagreements with the DNC over Hogg’s effort to bring in younger politicians to primary the older ones.
Kasky, who is running to represent New York’s 12th Congressional District, ended his launch video asking for donations to his campaign.
“All of my opponents have a lot of very rich friends,” he said. “I can’t necessarily say the same thing about myself.”
In September, Rep. Jerry Nadler (D-N.Y.) announced he would not seek reelection. Since then, several people have announced their bid to take his seat, including former President John F. Kennedy’s grandson, 32-year-old Jack Schlossberg.
Like Schlossberg, Kasky is relatively young, but Kasky told Vanity Fair in an interview published Tuesday, which described him as a Democratic socialist, that he isn’t “running on youth.” He said he’s instead running on policies like opposing AI, supporting Medicare for All, abolishing ICE and ending the war in Gaza.
“Two thousand twenty-six is the year of the outsider,” Kasky told the publication. “I believe these midterms will send a message across the country that the traditional qualifications people talk about, the traditional standards to which we hold candidates—whether they have a background as a local-level lawmaker, whether they had X amount of time at Yale Law or McKinsey—these things don’t matter to people anymore. What people care about is who is going to put up a fight and who really believes in something.”
