- Former truck driver Joshua Collins is running for the House of Representatives on a platform of socialism, a green new deal, and abolishing the CIA.
- He's achieved viral notability and is betting TikTok and Twitter will take the place of traditional advertising to achieve his goals.
- In the year leading up to his campaign, Collins and his wife moved their belongings to storage and lived in the truck to save money.
- Collins was an owner-operator, someone who owns his own truck and chooses jobs to take on.
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Joshua Collins isn't the typical congressional candidate, and his path to running for office hasn't been typical, either.
The 26-year-old former truck driver is running an unconventional campaign for congress in WA-10, banking on the free and low-cost publicity he can get on TikTok in place of spending any money on traditional ads. As a young trucker who says he didn't attend college due to prohibitive costs, Collins says he knew that taking time off to campaign without any income wasn't an option for him.
Collins and his wife Zelzah Baez put most of their possessions in storage and spent the better part of a year living out of their truck, which they owned.
In October 2019, Collins tweeted "I lived in my truck for the last year. I moved out of my apartment & put all my stuff in storage to save money so I can afford to campaign full-time next year."
These photos show what that year on the road was like.
