Pitt Student to challenge Doyle for House Seat

Pitt senior Scott Grimes is going after the seat that U.S. Rep. Mike Doyle, D-Pa., has held… Pitt senior Scott Grimes is going after the seat that U.S. Rep. Mike Doyle, D-Pa., has held since 1994 with little more than $100 and the strength of his convictions.

At 29, Grimes, a communications major, is taking the spring semester off to run for Congress as a nonaffiliated independent against incumbent Doyle in the November election. Grimes said that his decision to run arose from his personal research on the Occupy movement and his dissatisfaction with the current partisanship in government.

He said he is concerned that the government doesn’t represent the people’s true interests.

“My decision to run came out of anger and feeling betrayed by my own government,” Grimes said. “There’s never been a better time than now.”

Doyle said that while he hasn’t heard of Grimes, he does agree with his opponent on a number of issues, including the Occupy movement and reducing special interests in political elections.

“I’ve always supported public financing for elections,” Doyle said. “I think we agree that a better system keeps special interest out of politics.”

Public finance is a system that gives the same amount of money to each candidate in a political race, rather than having them try to out-fundraise each other.

Doyle also said he supports a number of the Occupy movement’s goals and sent a letter of support when the movement began.

In the past eight weeks that he’s been campaigning, Grimes said he hasn’t spent more than $100 on his candidacy and isn’t accepting campaign donations from his supporters. He feels political action committees and lobby groups sway the opinions and stances of politicians with their large donations.

Doyle said that he thinks public financing for elections is a better system than Grimes’ “no donations” ethos because candidates need to reach all 700,000 residents of the district, and that takes money.

“There was an election out in California where a politician spent $50 million of his own money on his campaign,” Doyle said. “He could have said ‘no’ to donations too, and there Scott would have been with his $100.”

Although Grimes admits that not accepting campaign donations gives him “a pretty severe handicap,” he said that he has turned to social media to increase awareness of his campaign and goals.

Grimes said he is relying heavily on social media because of the low cost and broad outreach that sites such as Twitter and Facebook provide. As of Thursday, Grimes had a total of 160 followers on both his Facebook and Twitter sites.

He admits that without hefty donations for campaign funds, “it’ll be an uphill battle to generate awareness” for his campaign.

But Grimes felt that now was the right time to run because of Congress’s single-digit approval rating and the lack of a Republican challenger from District 14, which includes Pittsburgh and some surrounding municipalities.

“It seems like it’s becoming more and more of a self-serving government,” he said.

Grimes said that the unwillingness of members of Congress to work together on pressing economic issues also influenced his decision to campaign. He hopes to make a statement with his campaign and inspire other people to run as well.

“I think there’s a general consensus, especially among younger generations, that the party candidates aren’t really thinking for themselves or for the voters in their districts,” he said.

Pitt professor Bernard Hagerty, who had Grimes in his Irish and America class last year, feels that Grimes stood out among the crowd because he has a “strong social conscience” with “a bit of a rebel persona.”

“One of the things I will say is that he is a person with a strong social conscience. You could see that he felt it when we talked about political corruption,” Hagerty said.

Hagerty said that Grimes stood out as a student that was “morally uncompromising.” Although he thinks Grimes’ running is a good idea, he wishes that he wasn’t running against Doyle and thinks it will be “very difficult” for Grimes to win.

Grimes currently works as a bartender Downtown and considers himself to be “loosely involved” in Habitat for Humanity on campus, although he said he wishes he could have been more involved in student-run organizations at Pitt.

Grimes said that since he won’t be on television or radio, it will be very difficult for him to compete with the incumbent, who spent around $1 million in his last campaign.

Doyle beat Republican Melissa Haluszczak in the 2010 election with 68.8 percent of the vote.