GRAND RAPIDS, Mich. — When the new congressional districts were finally decided on, longtime West Michigan Congressmen Bill Huizenga and Fred Upton had a bit of a problem. The new maps pitted Huizenga, who was first elected to the House of Representatives in 2011, and Upton, who’s served in the House longer than almost any current member, against each other in the new 4th Congressional District.
“I called him to let him know that I was going to be running,” Huizenga told FOX 17. “I didn’t really know what his plan was going to be. He was playing it pretty close to the vest. Obviously, it was something he had to decide. I had to make my choice and my decision independent of whatever he was going to do.”
It never came to that. Upton announced his retirement this past spring, clearing the way for Huizenga to run unopposed in the August primary. But he’s running in a new district that includes almost none of his old one.
Swaths of lakeshore territory that Huizenga was reliably elected to represent for years disappeared, and the new District 4 picked up counties to the south, including the cities of Kalamazoo and Battle Creek.
For Huizenga, it may as well be his first race, and that’s exactly how he’s running it.
“I don’t take anybody or anything for granted,” he said. “You can’t go into a new territory and just make assumptions that people know who you are or know what you stand for or know what your track record is.”
Huizenga is trying to remind voters of his work signing and authoring bills aiding the Great Lakes, and on agriculture. Although the geographics of the district have changed vastly, Huizenga, who also co-owns Huizenga Gravel Inc., sees the similarities in the economics.
“We still have agriculture, we still have manufacturing centers,” he said. “What’s kind of been different is maybe not as much emphasis on automotive and office furniture it’s now more medical equipment.”
He also knows people in his current, and potentially new district, are losing the battle against rising inflation.
“People are feeling it in their pocketbook and that’s universal,” said Huizenga, who did not sign the recently passed Inflation Reduction Bill. “Because it didn’t reduce inflation, it actually exacerbated it,” he added.
Huizenga sees inflation by the numbers: 20% can be attributed to the supply chain, 20% is tied to a shortage in labor and 20% is linked to high energy costs.
“The other 40% in this comes directly from the federal government, however,” he said. “It’s our monetary policy, and it’s our spending. We’ve got to restrain our spending. We’ve got to unleash American energy again. That will then help with the labor side as well as that supply chain.”
Huizenga is anti-abortion and is hoping to see Proposal Three fail on the November ballot. A recent effort by some federal legislators to ban abortion at the federal level was unsuccessful, and Huizenga staunchly believes it should be an issue best left to state legislatures.
“I said this before this court decision and I say it yet, this needs to predominately be a state issue,” he said. “The original Roe decision was very tenuous judicial grounds, very tenuous. And it’s somewhat surprising, frankly, that it took this long for it to fall because there was no precedent to it, literally no precedent. [The Supreme Court] created the precedent.”
Huizenga, who is a graduate of Calvin University, also believes funding for education is an issue best left to the states.
“We have to get education back on its feet but that’s got to be a state funded and state focused issue,” he said. “We’ve got to extract ourselves, from the federal government, out of some of these things to then really allow the states to do their work and make sure that we are focused in on the priorities we have as a federal government.”
As for priorities, Huizenga points to military and defense.
Huizenga also previously served in the Michigan legislature from 2002 until 2006.
WATCH our full interview with Huizenga:
To learn more about his campaign, click here.
The midterm elections will take place on Tuesday, November 8. Polls are open in Michigan from 7 a.m. until 8 p.m.
