Politician Jeanne Ives speaks on her upcoming campaign

Jeanne+Ives+comes+to+Student+Conservative+club+on+Friday%2C+Nov.+8+to+discuss+her+campaign+and+how+it+benefits+the+student+body.+

Lamis Alnatafgi

Jeanne Ives comes to Student Conservative club on Friday, Nov. 8 to discuss her campaign and how it benefits the student body.

On Friday, Nov. 8, the Student Conservative club invited Jeanne Ives, as part of their speaker series, to discuss her campaign as she runs against Democrat incumbent Sean Casten for Illinois’s 6th Congressional District. 

Jeanne Ives is an American politician and former Republican member of the Illinois House of Representatives for the 42nd District. Ives is currently a mother of five children and is running for Congress. 

“I got involved in politics in 2011 in Wheaten city council; at first it was over a tax issue,” Ives said. “I thought things could’ve been controlled better, but then I quickly moved on and ran for state representative.”

In 2012, certain people decided to exit the political field, so that became an open seat for Ives as she didn’t have to run against any political opponent in the Republican Party. 

“Though in 2013, I became a state representative, it was a terrific time except I served in a super minority as a Republican down in Springfield for six years,” Ives said. “Former Illinois Governor Bruce Rauner betrayed everything but what my party stood for, so I decided to run against him.”

Ives and Rauner got in the race at the end of October in 2017. It was surprising for most because very few people run for an incumbent of their own party when they’re trying to win a race.

“We knew that he had to be held accountable for his actions but we weren’t going to let the Democrats hold him accountable,” Ives said. “The people that I represented felt we had to do so for his non-adherence to his party values.”

As for her current campaign, Ives moved up forty points in the polls and nearly took out a city Republican governor. She has been pretty successful for the most part in regards to her campaign’s improvement. Ives’s campaign raised $340,000 in three months.    

Ives said that her campaign had more than 300 volunteers and recently started a youth program to involve younger individuals in her campaign. 

Her campaign wants to talk about national security, which includes securing the border and making sure the military is ready for any of its missions. Ives also wants to limit the budgeting that the Democrats want to increase as they passed a two-year budget that was more than $340 billion in the deficit. 

“I say that’s really important to your generation. Who do you think they’re going to come after to pay off this debt. It’s your generation that’s going to suffer from these policies that are in place, and my children, ages 15-28, are right in the mix of that,” Ives said. 

She doesn’t believe it’s fair for her kids who have worked hard and earned their way through school to have to suffer through all this debt in the future and not be able to get the same opportunities their parents had.

Ives said that whenever she votes on policy, she keeps in mind that the policy will always make a difference, which can be good or bad in some places. 

“I always knew every vote that I take affects peoples’ lives. Some people forget that the conscious of your vote has many implications downstream for folks,” Ives said. 

The students who attended Ives’s lecture agreed for the most part with the points she made. 

“I agreed with her to some extent,” said Alex Fuchs, junior. “I feel like she was pretty uber-conservative and had some good ideas of policies that could be put in place, but she might be a bit too conservative in the future.” 

Justin Tatooles, junior, also shared a similar sentiment. 

“I agreed with most of her political stances and especially found her criticism of the established political order to be poignant,” Tatooles said. “On the grounds of a student, I think that the connection with her kids shows that she knows our struggles as young people.”

The next conservative club meeting will be held on the morning of Friday, Nov. 22.