Independent congressional candidate Sandeep Dixit says party extremism is his real opponent
CANTON, Ohio - Sandeep Dixit’s encampment at the Stark County Fair was several buildings away from the grandstand where the county’s Democratic and Republican parties had set up shop with signs and literature for candidates up and down the ballot.
The distance was the point for the independent candidate for Ohio’s 13th congressional district, running a longshot bid to unseat incumbent Democratic U.S. Rep. Emilia Sykes of Akron and defeat GOP candidate Carey Coleman of Sagamore Hills. The district they want to represent includes all of Summit County, and parts of Portage and Stark counties.
“Political parties are like fighting fourth graders,” says Dixit. He has concluded Washington’s policy decisions are driven by the political parties corporate backers instead of voters. He said both political parties prioritize helping states like California, Texas and Florida, leaving Ohio behind.
“We need rationality and people to work together for everyone,” says the 58-year-old mechanical engineer from Mayfield Village. Although he lives outside the district he wants to represent, he says he lives close enough that many of the people in his social circle reside there. He serves on Mayfield Village’s recreation board, and helped start the community’s yearly yoga festival. He was also president of a national Indian-American organization called Bruhan Maharastra Mandal, with 60 chapters and roughly 500,000 members.
With no party apparatus behind him, Dixit and his volunteers had to collect 6,000 signatures to get on the ballot. He’s been handing out campaign literature at parades and county fairs and posting videos on Instagram to gain name recognition. The $58,496 his campaign raised through the end of June includes a $24,000 loan from the candidate.
“We want to stop party extremism, we want to stop PAC (political action committee) money,” he said, adding that he does not consider himself to be running against Sykes or Coleman personally. “My real opponents are party extremism and PAC money.”
On the campaign trail, Dixit says he’s heard repeated concerns about property tax increases, citing the case of a retired Akron grandmother who took a job just to pay her taxes. He suggests there should be no tax hikes on people who have fixed incomes. Voters also repeatedly raised concerns about Flock cameras, telling him citizens’ privacy should be the top priority.
Dixit traces high gas and food prices to oil industry profits. He also points to wage stagnation. He’d like to see the minimum wage increased enough to pay a full-time employee’s living expenses, end federal taxation of Social Security benefits and stop property tax increases for people on fixed incomes.
He’d like to see strict federal environmental rules for data centers, including requirements to conserve water. He compares the current moment to debates over manufacturing pollution decades ago.
Dixit was born in India and came to the United States in 1989 at age 21, arriving with an assistantship offer in an integrated manufacturing systems engineering program at North Carolina State University. He later moved to Cleveland, married and earned an executive MBA at Cleveland State University. In 1996 he and his wife, who is an electrical engineer, started their own manufacturing company, which later moved into software.
As someone who became a U.S. citizen about 25 years ago, he argues immigrants helped build the United States and make valuable contributions. He says immigration law needs to be enforced, but not in a way that stokes hatred towards immigrants, as the current administration is doing. He noted that President Barack Obama’s administration deported 2 million people who were in the United States illegally, with no backlash.
“I’m an engineer,” says Dixit, who is making his first run for public office. “I take positions based on facts, reason through them, and then come up with a conclusion.”