Meet Fred Francis

I live in a small house in Orange County, California, with my wife Jennifer and our 4 kids. I make my living as a technical writer and manufacturing engineer — contract work, project to project, the kind of career where you’re only as secure as your current assignment. Jennifer and I live close to paycheck-to-paycheck. We are not wealthy. We are not connected. Nobody in Washington knows my name.

I’m running for President anyway.

My mother was an elementary school teacher — not the kind who punched a clock, but the kind who believed every child in her classroom had a right to the best education she could give them, no exceptions, no write-offs. My father earned his PhD in Philosophy at Yale, in a program that bridged the Divinity School and Religious Studies, during the era of William Sloane Coffin and the Freedom Rides. Before Yale, he’d graduated from the University of Redlands and completed his BA in Ministry at Lexington Theological Seminary. He was a scholar and a minister, and the line between those two callings, in our house, was invisible.

At the kitchen table where I grew up, the conversation ran from Martin Luther King’s speeches to the rhetoric of Jack and Bobby Kennedy, from FDR and Eleanor Roosevelt to Reinhold Niebuhr and Jimmy Carter. Every Apollo launch was an event. My grandmother’s collection included the National Geographic feature issue on the life and death of President Kennedy, and I spent hours with it when I was 8 years old. At 10, I watched Richard Nixon resign and understood for the first time that government could betray the people it was supposed to serve.

These were my parents’ gifts to me: the conviction that we owe something to each other, and the understanding that power without conscience is just tyranny with a title.

I went to college as a dual major in Chemistry and Music. In my junior year my dad died and I ended up going to work instead of finishing school.

I took a job at GE Nuclear Energy in San Jose, teaching engineers to make the transition from slide rules to desktop PCs. When my trainees started asking how to apply their actual job functions to the new technology, I became a technical writer — not by design, but because the need was in front of me and I could meet it. That has been the pattern of my professional life ever since: contract by contract, project by project, going where the work is and doing what needs doing.

Over the years, I have followed that work toward the things that mattered to me and the things I needed to learn. I contributed to SpaceX’s Falcon 9 program. I worked on the landing radar for the Mars Curiosity rover — the same radar that was reused for Perseverance. I was part of the team that developed the prop manufacturing processes for parts on the James Webb Space Telescope. I did not design these missions. I helped build them — the documentation, the manufacturing processes, the work that lets the next engineer pick up where you left off.

But the work that has defined my life more than any contract was unpaid.

In 1987, I started volunteering with my old high school marching band. I kept doing it for 36 years. During the years I worked in San Jose, I commuted back to Southern California every weekend — or every other weekend — to be there for the kids. 350 miles each way. Nobody asked me to. Nobody paid me. The Director appreciated my help, and his program transformed students’ lives, including mine and Jennifer’s, by rewarding them based only on their hard work and their treatment of one another.

I met Jennifer in that band program as students ourselves — I played tuba, she played French horn — colleagues, not sweethearts. We stayed in touch over the decades the way many of us from that program still do. More than 30 years later, after her marriage had ended and my own long relationship had run its course, she called me one night in tears, and the trust we had built across all those years turned out to be the foundation for everything that came next.

We married. Her twins were about 4½. We raised all four of our children together, and we gave them one non-negotiable household rule: instrument choice is optional — band is not. Our youngest daughter — a baritone player, like her grandfather — will serve as Drum Major at our old high school this fall, while our youngest boy will start there as a freshman. Our director has long retired, but 36 years after I first showed up to volunteer, the program is still in our family’s bones.

I am not a politician. I have no campaign infrastructure, no donor network, no name recognition. What I have is a question that will not let me sit still.

My oldest daughter works an entry-level job at a local amusement park. She told me that two of her coworkers had dropped their health insurance — not because they didn’t want it, but because they could not pay for coverage and still afford to eat and pay rent.

They chose food.

28 million Americans have no health insurance at all. 41 percent of those who have coverage are underinsured — carrying a card that will not protect them if they actually get sick. Among entry-level workers, like those at the amusement park, nearly 1 in 5 workers has no coverage whatsoever. 38 percent of Americans are carrying medical debt — many of them people who have insurance. And with recent changes to Medicaid and the expiration of ACA premium subsidies, these numbers are projected to get dramatically worse.

I sat with those numbers, and I sat with the look on my older daughter’s face when she told me about her coworkers, and I could not square either one with a country we ordained and established “to promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity”.

This campaign is about transparency, accountability, and one simple conviction: each of us owes something to every other, as neighbors: as Americans. A government worthy of our founding ideals would start from that premise and never waver from it.

I am running because I can no longer sit by and watch my neighbors struggle against a system in which, while my cousin could pay her mortgage simply boxing groceries in 1974, now I know a husband and wife who are both doctors struggling to do so. Jennifer and I are barely a bad month away from the same edge ourselves.

Do I think I have all the answers? I don’t. But I’ve studied our country and its history enough that I can see how our problems were created, and I am satisfied that they are solvable. I am certain that, if we sit down with our neighbors and talk honestly about our collective problems, we can find good, workable solutions. We have before. Let’s get back to doing just that, now.