Matt Gromlich says he is running for Congress because too many people in Louisiana’s 4th District have gotten used to a kind of representation that feels distant, performative, and largely absent from everyday life.
A Shreveport educator now in his 14th year teaching, Gromlich is challenging House Speaker Mike Johnson as a Democrat in one of the state’s most Republican congressional districts. In an interview with The Bayou Progressive as part of its 2026 midterms series, Gromlich argued that the race is not just about ideology. It is about whether the district has a representative who is actually present, engaged, and accountable to the people back home.
“Why am I running? I’m running because I care about my students, I care about their families, and I care about my community,” Gromlich said. He traced that motivation back to his time teaching in Las Vegas during Donald Trump’s first term, when he said students came into class terrified their parents might be deported. “I had students who came into class the day after the election crying because they didn’t know if their parents would be home when they got home,” he said. “That was every day that that was on their mind the entirety of the first Trump term.”
That experience, he said, stayed with him. So did what he sees as the growing damage of national politics on ordinary people’s lives. “I knew that I had to step up and do something now,” he said.
For Gromlich, that meant taking on Johnson directly.
“Why Congress? Because Mike Johnson is my representative,” he said. “The longer that I’m here, the more students that I teach, the more I believe that he is not a good representative for our district.” Gromlich said Johnson has “kind of been allowed to skate by” without a Democratic challenger in recent cycles and argued that one goal of his candidacy is to force a level of accountability that has been missing. “He doesn’t hold town halls. He’s not present in the community,” Gromlich said.
Still, he was careful not to define the race purely as a protest campaign against the speaker. Asked how much of his pitch is about Johnson versus his own agenda, Gromlich put it this way: “30% Mike Johnson’s bad and 70% this is what I can do here.” He added, “Any campaign cannot just be an opposition campaign. We’ve seen that that doesn’t work. People don’t want to just vote against something. They want to have hope. They want to vote for something.”
That “something,” for Gromlich, starts with education.
“One of my biggest priorities is education. I’m an educator,” he said. He pointed first to free school lunches, arguing that “there is a pathway” to fund them federally, and then to universal pre-K, which he described as both an education policy and an economic one. He argued that earlier access to education helps children, eases pressure on parents, and could help Louisiana hold onto more young families. “We’re losing people in their 20s and 30s to other places,” he said. “We could retain more of our population if we have just a better support system for families.”
Health care is the next major piece of his pitch, and here Gromlich broke more clearly to the left than some Louisiana Democrats tend to. He argued that Democrats damaged their own credibility by treating the Affordable Care Act as an endpoint instead of a starting point. “We did this half measure,” he said. “The goal was never to stick with the Affordable Care Act as it is.” His preferred direction, he said, is “ideally, a single-payer system,” or at minimum a federal option not tied to employment. “People stay at jobs for healthcare,” he said. “It handcuffs a lot of people when it’s tied to our jobs.”
On the economy, Gromlich’s most interesting critique was aimed not just at Republicans, but at Democrats’ own inability to talk about economic pain in a way people recognized as honest. “We have been conflating economy with stock market,” he said, arguing that too much political messaging treated strong market numbers as proof that families were doing fine. “It doesn’t matter if the stock market is, if the Dow hit 50,000 … because people have $0 in it,” he said. “Three percent of zero, still zero.”
In northwest Louisiana, he said, the issue he hears about most is not simply inflation, but the lack of enough “real wage jobs, sustainable wage jobs.” His answer is a mix of higher wages and public investment. He pointed again to universal pre-K as a source of both short-term construction work and long-term employment, and argued that stronger infrastructure could make the region more attractive to employers. “Fixing our roads and making sure that our water is clean and manageable and works, and that you don’t lose power for 10 days,” he said, would make it easier to attract business and opportunity.
He was also notably more candid than many candidates are when asked whether government can simply lower prices. “Costs always tend to rise,” he said. “Inflation is a thing.” The better focus, in his view, is making sure wages keep pace. “We really should be looking at increasing minimum wage and increasing those financial inputs instead of focusing on the output,” he said, while acknowledging there are narrower areas such as price gouging where government can intervene more directly.
Gromlich also used the interview to make a broader case about how Democrats should talk to voters, especially in a district like the 4th. He said too many Democrats come across as condescending or overly academic, even when their policies are stronger. “Sometimes the Democratic Party speaks up here too much and isn’t able to translate that information down,” he said. By contrast, he said his years in education have taught him that people respond first to being heard. “People just want to be heard, and I’m here to listen,” he said.
That instinct showed up most clearly when he talked about persuading voters whose frustrations may be real even if their explanations are not. Rather than meeting grievance with more grievance, Gromlich said he tries to get underneath the anger and toward the actual problem. If someone blames immigrants for losing a job, he said, the deeper issue may be fear, instability, or lack of opportunity. “We need to get you to a place where you’re safe and secure enough to then start thinking rationally,” he said.
That may be the clearest thread running through his campaign. Gromlich is not just pitching a more progressive politics. He is pitching a more human one — rooted in schools, healthcare, wages, and the idea that representation should feel less like national performance art and more like someone actually showing up. In a district represented by one of the most powerful Republicans in the country, that is the contrast he seems most intent on making.