John Davis Jr., a virtual unknown on the presidential campaign scene, is traveling the United States with his giant red, white and blue pipe wrench. His mission? To get America back to work. He stopped in Grand Marais on Saturday, Sept. 17.
For more than 30 years, John Davis Jr. was an independent homebuilder, but about a year and a half ago he said, “God told me to run for president and here I am. Cook County is the 1,201st county I have visited so far out of the country’s 3,143 counties. It is my plan that by next summer I will have visited all of the counties in the country.”
A native of Grand Junction, Colorado, Davis, a family man with six kids and four grandkids, is traveling in an elaborately painted bus—“We call it a traveling billboard,” he said—running as a conservative Republican.
He has neither Secret Service protection nor a throng of staff fending off an even-larger throng of reporters because so far, no one from the national media has covered the 54-year-old Davis. “But they will. They will find out about me and they will cover my candidacy,” he said confidently.
What he does have is a friendly bus driver and his wife, who hands out literature to anyone who will take it, and then there is the energetic Davis, who wields a red, white and blue painted pipe wrench as a symbol of the need to get Americans back to work and “ratchet up the economy.”
Last Saturday, after a stop in International Falls, Davis talked and answered questions with folks in Grand Marais, first at the Blue Water Cafe and then on the sidewalk across the street from the eatery. Following his Cook County visit Davis planned to stop in Two Harbors then head back to Colorado for a week’s rest before hitting the road again.
His platform advocates for term limits, a balanced budget, less government, better control over our borders, enforcement of work visas and citizenship for law-abiding aliens.
As an owner of seven guns, he believes in Second Amendment rights and is against abortion.
Above all else Davis said he would like to see the Constitution of the United States upheld and believes he can bring common sense leadership to the position of the presidency.
“What most people are telling me is that they would like to see more jobs, more Americans back to work. Before running I thought the country had lost hundreds of factories to overseas. But since then I have found that American businesses have shuttered thousands of factories here and sent those jobs overseas. We need to figure out a way to keep those jobs in America,” he said.
Although he has never held an office nor run in a political race before, Davis feels his more than 30 years as a small business owner would serve him well as president. “I have had to make tough decisions concerning my business throughout my career. I know how to balance a budget, create jobs, work hard and if elected I will take a practical, common sense approach to solving our nation’s problems.”
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