Kyle Devlin is a first-time candidate who lives in Susquehanna County, PA. He said his campaign slogan, “People Over Politics,” attempts to refocus the discussion on local issues. 

“What’s the state representatives and our state senators supposed to be doing? Well, they’re supposed to be representing their constituents and everyone in the area, including helping their local township supervisors. Everything should be a better connected network through local politics… Right now, because everything is nationalized, and everything’s a race for attention, it’s a race to spike the algorithms, so you’re going to be saying the more flamboyant and flashy things because you need to get money to do that,” he said. 

Devlin said that increasing affordability starts with increasing competition among businesses. The tax code allows “some out-of-state grocery stores and operators to come in here and operate at a loss and claim only their losses in state and their profits out of state and not have to pay the same tax rates that, for example, a local grocery store does,” he said. Additionally, he pointed to consolidation in the agriculture industry as a factor making things difficult for Pennsylvania farmers. 

Devlin said he would support regulations of data centers at the state level as well as a moratorium or a pause that allows municipalities to get their regulations in order. 

“The pause should happen as long as it takes for every town to be able to get ordinances in place to protect their town from the data centers, however their town decides that they want it,” Devlin said. “That’s up to the town to decide their own footprint. I am not necessarily interested in placing my thumb on the scale and telling them how they should do it. I am simply saying you should do something.”

“We’ve lived the experience right here in Wayne County of what happens when you don’t have those in place and when a six billion dollar proposal comes in town and blindsides you, and how the township supervisors are scrambling and they don’t have the resources that the state government has. [The state] should be offering some additional help to help these towns fill out their ordinances and any zoning, if they want to do it, in order to have the protection,” he added. 

Devlin said that education has suffered from privatization, in particular with cyber charter schools. “Any time you’re focusing on profits over education, what type of education are you really giving the children?” He said the state needs to continue funding education, and supported stricter regulations on cyber charter schools. 

Devlin said that access to health care is an issue in rural areas—it’s a 40-minute drive to the closest emergency facility from where he lives, he said—as is the cost of health care.

“I’m ambivalent on the terms. I don’t care if we call it Medicare for All, if we call it a public option; what’s important to me is that every single Pennsylvanian has health care, and today they do not. And come January first, there’ll be even more who do not,” he said. 

He added, “There are people who have to choose, ‘Am I going to lose my prescription medicine, or am I going to eat today?’ And that’s the discussion that, in the world’s richest country, we should not be having.”

On housing affordability, Devlin emphasized the difficulties that result from major, out-of-state companies turning rent into a big business. 

Corporations “buy up whole neighborhoods and then jack up the rent and make it very difficult for people to come out, and then a lot of times, they’re not even very good landlords, either… We need to do some things to put in place to ensure these venture capitalists aren’t coming in and taking up our very limited housing supply.”

Devlin also said that programs to refurbish and winterize homes should be strengthened, and that red tape should be cut to allow for the building of new homes. 

Devlin emphasized the personal experiences he would be taking to Harrisburg: he said he grew up struggling with food and housing insecurity, that he and his wife struggled with making the choice to terminate a non-viable pregnancy, that he had a younger brother who lost his struggle with addiction. 

“These are some of the things that I’m looking to bring to the table, just the lived experience of someone whose family didn’t come from money, and just had to struggle, living, working [paycheck] to paycheck to get by,” he said.