Jake Auchincloss
Jacob Daniel Auchincloss is an American politician, businessman, and Marine Corps officer serving as the U.S. representative for Massachusetts's 4th congressional district since 2021. A member of the Democratic Party, he previously served as a member of the Newton City Council from 2015 to 2021.
Born to a wealthy family in New England, Auchincloss graduated with a bachelor's degree from Harvard University in 2010. Commissioning into the U.S. Marine Corps that same year, he was deployed to Afghanistan in 2012 and to Panama in 2014. He currently serves in the Marine Corps Reserve with the rank of major.
Returning home from the military, Auchincloss ran for Newton city council in 2015. After his election victory, he earned an MBA from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was re-elected in 2017 and 2019. In 2020, he was elected to the United States Congress at age 32, succeeding Joe Kennedy III.
Early life and education
Jacob Daniel Auchincloss was born on January 29, 1988, in Newton, Massachusetts, to Laurie Glimcher and Hugh Auchincloss. Both of his parents are specializing in immunology. His father, also a surgeon, served briefly as the interim director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases after Anthony Fauci resigned in 2023. His mother is a scientist and the former president and CEO of Dana–Farber Cancer Institute who was at the center of several controversies prior to stepping down from her leadership role.Auchincloss's maternal grandfather, Melvin J. Glimcher, pioneered the development of artificial limbs and the robotic arm, and was chair of orthopedic surgery at Harvard University. Auchincloss's grandfather was first cousin once removed from Hugh D. Auchincloss Jr., step-father to both First Lady of the United States Jacqueline Kennedy and author Gore Vidal.
Auchincloss was raised in Newton with his sister, Kalah, and brother, Hugh G., and attended Newton North High School. He is Jewish by matrilineality and was raised in his mother's faith. His father is of Scottish ancestry.
Auchincloss studied government and economics at Harvard University, graduating in 2010 with a Bachelor of Arts with honors. He served in the U.S. Marine Corps then returned to school and earned a Master of Business Administration in finance in 2016 from the MIT Sloan School of Management.
Career
Military service
After graduating from Harvard, Auchincloss joined the United States Marine Corps, earning his commission through Officer Candidates School in Quantico, Virginia. He commanded infantry in Helmand Province in 2012 and a reconnaissance unit in Panama in 2014. In Helmand, he led combat patrols through villages contested by the Taliban. In Panama, his team of reconnaissance Marines partnered with Colombian special operations to train the Panamanian Public Forces in drug-interdiction tactics.Auchincloss completed both infantry training in Quantico and the Marine Corps's reconnaissance training in California, profiled in Nate Fick's One Bullet Away. He graduated from the Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape school in Maine and was an honor graduate from the Basic Airborne Course in Georgia. He remained in the Individual Ready Reserve after leaving active duty and was promoted to major on September 1, 2020.
Local government
After returning home from the military, Auchincloss worked for Charlie Baker's successful 2014 gubernatorial campaign.In 2015, Auchincloss ran for Newton City Council on a platform of full-day kindergarten and expanded pre-K offerings. He defeated the incumbent councilor. He was reelected to the Newton City Council in 2017 and 2019. He chaired the transportation and public safety committee. In office, he supported progressive immigration and housing policies, sustainable transportation and co-docketed the successful Sanctuary city ordinance.
When the Newton City Council debated a pay raise for elected officials, Auchincloss voted no. Auchincloss was the first elected official to endorse Ruthanne Fuller for mayor of Newton.
Business
While serving on the Newton City Council and attending MIT, Auchincloss was the director of the MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition. He also worked at a cybersecurity startup as a product manager and at Liberty Mutual as a senior manager at its innovation arm, Solaria Labs.U.S. House of Representatives
Elections
2020
On October 2, 2019, Auchincloss announced his candidacy for the open Massachusetts's 4th congressional district to succeed Joe Kennedy III, who unsuccessfully ran for the Senate against incumbent Democrat Ed Markey.Auchincloss raised the most money during the primary election in both the fourth quarter of 2019 and the first quarter of 2020 and earned endorsements from the National Association of Government Employees, VoteVets, The Boston Globe and James E. Timilty. He earned the support of several Newton politicians, including the president and vice president of the city council and the chair and vice chair of the school committee. He earned additional endorsements throughout the district.
During the campaign, questions arose about his party affiliation. Auchincloss was originally a Democrat but was a registered Republican from 2013 to 2014 while working for Charlie Baker's gubernatorial campaign. He continued to vote in Republican primaries as an independent until late 2015 before becoming a Democrat again.
Auchincloss faced some controversies throughout the campaign and apologized for his old statements that defended the harassment of Black students with a Confederate flag for protecting Newton's free speech values and compared it to banning a pride flag or Black Lives Matter banner, appeared to justify the burning of the Quran, for making fun of a local community efforts' to rename Columbus Day "Indigenous Peoples' Day" in 2016 and he voted against a symbolic 1 percent decrease in the local police budget. He modeled himself after the moderate Republican Governor Charlie Baker.
The Democratic primary took place on September 1, 2020. In a race with eight other candidates, Auchincloss won with 22.4% of the vote. It took the Associated Press three days to call the race because nearly one million votes were cast through mail-in ballots due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
In the November general election, Auchincloss defeated Republican nominee Julie Hall. He assumed office on January 3, 2021.
Tenure
On January 6, 2021, after the 2021 attack on the United States Capitol, Auchincloss tweeted his agreement with lawmakers' calls to remove President Donald Trump from office, either through the Twenty-fifth Amendment to the United States Constitution or impeachment. Auchincloss voted to certify the results of the 2020 United States presidential election in the early morning of January 7, 2021. On January 21, he voted to approve the congressional waiver for General Lloyd Austin, President Joe Biden's nominee for Secretary of Defense.On June 16, 2022, seven people affiliated with The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, including Robert Smigel, were arrested by U.S. Capitol Police and charged with unlawful entry into the complex. According to a letter from Jim Jordan and Rodney Davis, the Colbert crew was let back into the building with the help of Auchincloss and Adam Schiff, leading to the unlawful entry charges. In a statement released by an Auchincloss spokesperson, Matt Corridoni said of the incident, "We do not condone any inappropriate activity and cannot speak to anything that occurred after hours."
File:Wei Jingsheng Foundation presents Pelosi with a lifetime award.jpg|thumb|Auchincloss with Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Wei Jingsheng, 2023
In Congress, Auchincloss voted with President Joe Biden 100% of the time according to FiveThirtyEight. This gives him a Biden Plus/Minus score of +1 with higher support for Biden than would be expected given the makeup of his district. Auchincloss backed Biden to run for re-election in 2024 and urged Democrats to more aggressively defend him despite concerns about his age and health, including on right wing media.
On January 25, 2023, Auchincloss delivered a one-minute speech on the House floor entirely generated using ChatGPT, making it the first speech in Congress to be written with artificial intelligence programs. The speech was about creating a U.S.–Israel research facility centered on artificial intelligence.
Auchincloss endorsed Pennsylvania governor Josh Shapiro for role of Kamala Harris' running mate in the 2024 Presidential election outlining his centrist appeal, "Harris needs to win Pennsylvania, signal moderation and reassure Haley voters that she'll stand up to the left. The more the Twitter left piles on , the more helpful he is to Harris."
On September 17, 2023, Auchincloss told The Boston Globe that he would not be challenging Ed Markey in the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate in Massachusetts, ending long-running speculation that he may join the race. He said he would instead be focusing on serving as the inaugural chairman of Majority Democrats, a new group of Democratic elected officials.
Political positions
In 2022, Auchincloss criticized the far-left and right as "carnival barkers for socialism or strong-man rule." He said that the goal is not to "scold the other side" but to "work on what the two sides agree on." He has held varied political positions over his career, starting as a Republican in local government, then running for Congress as a moderate, and later emphasizing his progressivism in his first term in Congress. He returned to his moderate positions after his first term in 2022.Auchincloss calls himself a Barack Obama-Charlie Baker Democrat and is a critic of the Democratic Party's progressive wing. He is a fan of Jonathan Haidt's moral psychology and believes Democrats lost ground by not being seen as upholding "social order," which he defines as care, fairness, authority, and loyalty. He argues that the "cost disease" is a key factor eroding this sense of order and has also targeted social-media companies for delivering "digital dopamine" to children citing Haidt as an influence. He said that open-air encampments should be cleared and criticized Democrats for not being "muscular" enough in addressing homelessness and crime. He has argued that the current Democratic Party is too preoccupied with policing ideology, "There used to be this old joke: 'Democrats fall in love and Republicans fall in line, It is exactly the opposite. Democrats are much more ideologically straitjacketed these days. We cancel each other." He said that he misses when "it was cool to be a Democrat." Reflecting on the party's pre-COVID image, he recalled Bill Clinton's 1992 saxophone performance on The Arsenio Hall Show, calling it "the coolest freaking thing."