“Do you care about black lives?” asks congressional candidate Kimberly Klacik as she strolls through Baltimore in red high heels and a red dress.
“The people that run Baltimore don’t,” she says in a video ad for her campaign for Maryland’s 7th District seat. “I can prove it. Walk with me. They don’t want you to see this.”
Klacik, the Republican nominee, unsuccessfully challenged former NAACP CEO Kweisi Mfume in a special election in April for the seat vacated with the death of Democrat Elijah Cummings last October and faces him again. She garnered just 27% of the vote last spring in the Democratic stronghold.
“This is the reality for black people every single day, crumbling infrastructure, abandoned homes, poverty and crime,” she says in the ad, with boarded up buildings in the background.
“Baltimore has been run by the Democrat Party for 53 years. What is the result of their decades of leadership?” she asks.
She points out the city is one of the five most dangerous in the nation. The murder rate is 10 times the U.S. average, and the poverty rate is over 20% while homicide, drug and alcohol deaths are skyrocketing.
Klacik charges Democrats have “betrayed the black people of Baltimore.”
“If the politicians walked the streets like I do, they would see exactly how their policies and corruption affect us,” she says. “But they don’t want to see it. They don’t want you to see this.”
She features black residents who say they are adamantly against defunding the police.
Baltimore isn’t unique, she points out.
“The worst place for a black person to live in America is a Democrat-controlled city,” she says.
“It’s 2020. Name a blue city were black people’s lives have gotten better. Try. I’ll wait.”
She says Democrats “think black people are stupid and that we’ll keep voting for them forever, despite what they’ve done to our families and our communities.”
Klacik is known for rallying people to help clean up her city, which prompted President Trump to issue his tweet about “rat infested Baltimore.” That opened the door for her to run for Congress.
‘Unbought and unbossed’
In an interview in June with WJZ-TV, Klacik admitted she is fighting an uphill battle to defeat Mfume.
She said her priorities include courting more businesses to Baltimore, more job training, school choice and allowing for over-the-counter sales of birth control.
She was asked what she would “bring to the table” that Mfume doesn’t bring.
“I would say innovative ideas and I would say, I’ve been using that term unbought and unbossed. I get a lot of money across the nation, a lot of small donors,” she said. “I don’t have anyone in my back pockets. I don’t have anyone … no special interest groups where I owe them any favors. I am strictly here for the people.”
Democrats don’t want you to see this.
They’re scared that I’m exposing what life is like in Democrat run cities.
That’s why I’m running for Congress
Because All Black Lives Matter
Baltimore Matters
And black people don’t have to vote Democrat
Help us win https://t.co/CSOjc9aQlS pic.twitter.com/XnEDTaDDIG— Kimberly Klacik (@kimKBaltimore) August 17, 2020
