Trey Martin, President of Ironworkers Local 48 in Edmond, Okla., and a 20-year member of the union, joined the America's Work Force Union Podcast to talk about his congressional campaign in a state with a conservative supermajority. He also discussed why he believes the path to winning runs straight through kitchen table issues that resonate with voters, regardless of party.
Martin was motivated to seek office after watching his wife nearly go bankrupt fighting two autoimmune diseases, even with union health insurance. It convinced him that the U.S. Congress has failed working families on healthcare for decades and that the only fix is to send people who actually understand that reality to Washington. His primary is on Tuesday, June 16. He has secured Sen. Bernie Sanders’ endorsement, and said 90 percent of the voters he meets by knocking on doors already know his name.
Trey Martin spent his late teens drifting through fast-food and retail jobs with no visible route to anything better. A chance friendship with an ironworker changed that. He went down to apply at Ironworkers Local 48 in Edmond, Okla., got accepted a month later, started working a month after that, and he has not looked back. Now 20 years in, he has spent 12 years in the field and eight as an organizer. He is currently the Local's president. He is also, as of two months ago, a congressional candidate.
The Local has roughly 200 members and represents a jurisdiction where work has been picking up after a COVID-era slowdown. A new arena for the Oklahoma City Thunder is on the horizon. A major railroad bridge project is underway. Oklahoma City is growing. Martin described the Local as being in a good place, adding that his work as an organizer and Local Union president has given him a deep understanding of what working people in his state actually need — and what Congress has consistently failed to deliver.
Martin is not running for office because he has always wanted to be a politician. He’s running because his wife nearly died, and her illness nearly took their financial security with her. In 2020, she began getting sick. The couple spent nearly a year going from doctor to doctor and specialist to specialist, seeking a diagnosis. Her weight dropped to approximately 70 pounds. The eventual answer was two autoimmune diseases.
What followed was a financial fight that ran parallel to the medical one. Martin had union health insurance — negotiated coverage with advisors working to get the best possible plan. It was not enough. Specialist copays, surgeries, annual deductible resets, premiums — the bills accumulated faster than they could be paid. The couple nearly went bankrupt. And while his wife has improved with proper medication and treatment, her conditions flare up unpredictably. She has been unable to work for a period while recovering from a recent flare-up.
Martin said watching Congress fail to address healthcare for his entire life, and then living through the consequences of that failure, made his decision to run feel less like a choice and more like a responsibility. If someone from the middle class with real skin in the game can get to Washington and change something, he said, that is what he wants to do.
Martin's platform, found at treyforoklahoma.com, is organized around the issues that cause people to struggle. Wages and the rising cost of living top the list. Oklahoma's minimum wage sits at the federal floor of $7.25 per hour. State Question 832 on Tuesday's ballot would raise it to $12 per hour with future cost-of-living adjustments. It’s a step Martin supports while acknowledging it falls short of the $18 per hour he believes is a genuine living wage given current housing, fuel and grocery costs in the state.
On public education, Martin said Oklahoma ranks at or near the bottom nationally — 49th or 50th — with some of the lowest-paid teachers in the country and rural and inner-city schools that are critically underfunded. He blames voucher programs that redirect public money to private schools. They benefit families who were already sending their children to private schools and leaving 90 percent of the population with no practical access to the private school option. Martin's position is that public money belongs in public schools.
On congressional stock trading, he drew a simple line. Insider trading is illegal in the private sector. Trading on information received in a classified briefing or closed committee session is the same thing. He proposes banning members of Congress from trading individual stocks while in office. They could still invest in bonds and broadly diversified instruments — but the specific-stock trading that has allowed members entering Congress without wealth to leave as millionaires would end.
Martin acknowledged that running as a Democrat in Oklahoma with a conservative supermajority is not a conventional path to Congress. His answer to that is to run on issues that cross party lines. Inflation, healthcare costs, wages, housing affordability and retirement security are not Democratic problems or Republican problems. They are the problems of every working person in Oklahoma, regardless of how they voted last cycle. Martin said that when he knocks on doors, independents and Republicans are nodding along. The culture war framing that dominates so much political coverage is not what those voters want to talk about, he said.
He secured Sen. Bernie Sanders’ endorsement early in the campaign and said momentum has been strong from the start. Approximately 90 percent of voters he encounters on the campaign trail already know who he is. He has only one primary opponent and goes into Tuesday confident.
More information is available at treyforoklahoma.com.
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