Alissa Ellman takes her shot

(Editor’s note: Lost in the ethos of every-man-for-himself is the testament of real people, struggling, fighting, trying to make a difference. People like Alissa Ellman, a combat disabled Army veteran who served in Iraq and Afghanistan and then tried to settle into a job at the VA Hospital only to get Doge’d. She complained publicly that the MAGA administration was hurting veterans and patriots. They offered her her job back. She told them to take this job and shove it and has been tilting at Claudia Tenney ever since in an incredibly gerrymandered district designed to protect Republicans. She’s turned it purple and is on the verge of blue. Jim Shultz wrote about her today. You can find his column in today’s Express.)

By Jim Shultz

Lockport Union, Sun & Journal

Sometimes I think that Alissa Ellman is out of her mind running for Congress.

In a huge district that stretches from Lockport to Watertown, Alissa has driven enough miles meeting voters to have driven across the country and back five times. She’s already on her second car. Her first got totaled when she hit a deer one night coming home from a late evening campaign event. Her new one has a giant crack across the windshield from a flying rock, but she’s had no time to get it fixed.

Who in their right mind would take on running a grassroots campaign like this for Congress? In Alissa’s case, it is someone relentlessly committed to the well-being of others. “I’m not doing this for any other reason than to fight for people,” says Alissa, “for my friends and family, my community, the children that my children will grow up with. That’s who I’m fighting for.”

Alissa has been doing that her entire adult life.

When she was 17, Alissa joined the U.S. Army and was sent to the front lines in Afghanistan. She was exposed to the Army’s toxic burn pits, got cancer and almost died. With help from the Veterans Administration health system, she beat the cancer and later went to work for the VA helping other veterans get the kind of care that saved her life.

Then in February 2025, she became one of the first federal employees fired by Elon Musk and DOGE. Blunt and plainspoken, she was invited by national television networks to do interviews about what Musk’s slashing of services actually meant for real people. The Trump administration took notice and offered her job back, on the condition that she no longer spoke to any media.

But Alissa doesn’t do silence. Instead, she told Trump and Musk where to stick it and announced that she was running for Congress.

As a candidate, she is focused on practical change that matters to real people, especially when it comes to the skyrocketing cost of living.

To make health care more affordable, she wants to expand Medicare to people who need it most. “Why don’t we initially cover everybody who does physical labor, expand Medicare for those people down to age 45.”

She supports investment in child care programs to make raising a family something regular people can actually afford. To help ease the housing crisis, she wants the federal government to help local communities build the water systems, sewers and infrastructure that make new construction possible.

On the other hand, Alissa’s November opponent, incumbent Congresswoman Claudia Tenney, is a political species of a whole other kind.

Tenney’s loyalty is not to the citizens she supposedly represents, but to Donald Trump and anything he does. She has introduced legislation to make his birthday a national holiday.

Tenney never served in the military (she was busy studying art in Italy), but she gleefully supported sending U.S. servicemen and women to Trump’s new forever-war in Iran. But as soon as the war pushed the price of gas up by more than a dollar a gallon, she became as quiet as a cowardly mouse. She also proudly supports Trump’s idiotic tariffs and attacks on Canada.

Tenney’s real interest in being a congresswoman is not about making life better for the people who live here. It is about living large at other people’s expense.

She raises millions of dollars from the same big corporations who jack up our electric bills and want to pave our farmland with data centers. Then she funnels that money into her family’s businesses and uses that campaign money to fly around the country following her favorite Serbian tennis star.

She yells America First out of one side of her mouth, then happily jets first class across the world, courtesy of the government of Qatar, to attend a World Cup soccer match. She bills taxpayers for an Easter junket to visit castles in Scotland.

And all the while she just hopes we won’t notice.

The working people of Tenney’s district wake up in the morning worrying about the price of groceries and gas. Tenney wakes up in the morning wondering what new thing she can say about New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani that might get her on Fox News.

It’s no surprise that you haven’t seen Tenney once in person since the campaign began. She avoids any event where she might have to face actual questions from the public. You can also bet she hasn’t hit any deer while out meeting with voters.

One of the sad things about the current state of politics in America is that so many voters treat it like NFL football. Everything is about the team you have sworn loyalty to (be it Republican or Democrat) instead of thinking for yourself and looking at the individuals running and what they stand for.

If stupid wars, high prices, and blatant corruption are what you are looking for, then Claudia Tenney is your gal. But if you want a representative in Congress who will wake up every day fighting for regular people, you will find no one more committed than Alissa Ellman.

Jim Shultz is the author of Lessons from Lockport: Dispatches from the Great American Divide (SUNY Press). He can be reached by email at: jimshultzthewriter@gmail.com.