Nobody can remember the last time a Democrat held Missouri’s 7th Congressional District seat. We do know that it was last century. I’m a little tongue and cheek here, but the last Democrat to represent the 7th was Charles H. Brown. He held the office for five years between 1957 and 1961.

There are some parallels to the area’s current Congressman Billy Long and Brown. Both men had careers in radio before running for office. Long owned a talk radio station in Springfield and hosted a show on KWTO-AM. Brown was the former program director of KWTO from 1937 to 1938.

John Woodman wants to rewrite history with his election to represent Missouri’s 7th District. If Woodman is successful, he will break the Republican winning streak of five straight Representatives covering 61 years’ worth of election dominance. 2022 could be the Democrat’s year.

Two years ago, Teresa Monsery didn’t face a single challenger in her bid to become the Democratic nominee and headed into a General Election, losing by over 42 points.

Woodman is a different type of Democrat, though. That’s because he’s spent the overwhelming majority of his adult life as a Republican.

“I think I was attracted to the Republican party for a lot of the same reasons that a lot of people are attracted. We have narratives in our political discourse. And I believed the narratives from the Republican side. It did hurt that I had an Uncle that was a very committed Republican who was making fun of liberals and people on the left.”

The debunked conspiracy about President Barack Obama’s birth certificate dates back to 2008. The larger narrative became known as the “birther movement” as it was shoved into the mainstream by Donald Trump and talking heads from the right-wing media. The movement wrongly contended that President Obama was born in Kenya and not the United States as required by the 2nd Amendment of the US Constitution. Woodman says that this was a turning point for him politically. So much so that he wrote a book about the subject, Is Barack Obama’s Birth Certificate A Fraud? A Computer Guys Examines the Evidence of Forgery.

Woodman started his research into President Obama’s birth certificate three years later, in 2011.

“Being a very dedicated Republican, I was interested in this. There were rumors going around that it was a photoshopped forgery. And this is my technology; I’ll have a look at this. I did take a look at it and what I saw pretty quickly, what was in that file was not actually evidence of any forgery. And you know, I’m seeing some things that are different from what other people are seeing. I could make a YouTube video.”

Woodman made four videos, all of which remain available to view by clicking this link. The first video now has over 126k views.

Flipping a seat that one party has held over nearly six decades is no easy task, especially when the incumbent Billy Long has defeated Democrats by an average of 36.5% over the past 12-years. Woodman says that flipping the 7th from Red to Blue for a first-time candidate is

“As you noted, it’s a heavy lift in the 7th District. We are the 24th most Republican District in the country. In the last election, the Republican candidate won by a margin of 45-points. I think that in this District, one of the things we have to do is we have to reach out, and we have to win Republicans, and we have to bring Republicans over, and have people who have been Republicans in cases for decades like I was, say, you know what, the Republican party actually isn’t giving us the answers we need.”

Unsatisfied with the course of the Republican party John Woodman charted his own and wrote a book about the subject, How We Can Fix America: A Course and a Plan. He also hosts a website, Woodman2022.com, where he lays out the platform for change in Missouri’s 7th and the US.

Woodman’s plan has three main points. The country and the Ozarks (the area that much of the 7th covers) has gotten wealthier and wealthier every year since the 1980s. In contrast, the middle and lower classes of the US have worked more hours for less. The US and its representatives need to represent the majority of residents (the two lower-income wage classes in the US) instead of multinational companies that pay for access to Congress.

Woodman also asserts that the US government must continue to affirm itself in protecting the environment. Also, maintaining a stable marketplace for healthcare that doesn’t drive US residents into bankruptcy—at the same time, improving the American education system so that it can compete with other first-world nations.