From the Archives: State Senate candidate TJ Aldous wants people to ‘achieve their dreams’

State Senate candidate TJ Aldous wants people to ‘achieve their dreams’
August 2, 2011 9:24 PM MST

Voters in Charlottesville will see the name of only one Republican candidate on the ballot when they go to the polls on November 8.

That will be TJ Aldous, an Albemarle County attorney who is running against incumbent state Senator Creigh Deeds (D-Hot Springs) in the 25th state Senate District, which stretches from Charlottesville in the east to Bath County, touching the West Virginia border.

The 25th district also includes 19 precincts in Albemarle County (and parts of three others) as well as Alleghany, Highland, Nelson, and Rockbridge counties, plus the cities of Buena Vista, Covington, and Lexington.

Aldous announced his candidacy on June 28 in press conferences held in both Charlottesville and Buena Vista. In an interview with the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner on July 2 in Crozet, Aldous said that he began considering a run for office about a month prior to his official announcement.

‘More efficient and more responsive’
What motivated him to run, he said, were his concerns about the economy and “the direction that our country’s headed.”

In order to succeed in an election campaign against an incumbent who is seeking his third full term, Aldous said that “we need people to come together from all walks of life to see the changes that need to be made in our system in order to be better and to be more efficient and more responsive to the people.”

Aldous said that he has observed how people “are expressing that they’re tired of where we are and they want to see something change in how our system works.”

Asked to name the top three issues he will emphasize as he campaigns, Aldous provided a single-minded reply.

“Right now,” he said, “the thing that’s on everybody’s mind is jobs. Jobs and the economy. Say top three? Jobs and the economy, jobs and the economy, jobs and the economy.”

He added, however, that “there are other things that are important to people. There [are] social issues that are important to people. There are other things that are important such as providing an environment where people are free to be able to explore the things that they want to do in their lives, where they aren’t subject to regulation, where they aren’t subject to someone always telling them that they can or can’t do something. So I think those are the things that are most important.”

‘Liberal establishment’
To earn the votes of libertarian voters in the 25th Senate District, Aldous suggested that “we all ought to come together [and] work together to be united in moving against the liberal establishment.”

That can be accomplished, he said, “by finding common goals and common interests. There are a lot of things that I think we all agree on. You look at libertarians, you look at a lot of friends are libertarian, you look at people who are involved in the Tea Party, they have a lot of things in common with what the libertarians want, they have a lot of things in common with what some people would call RINO Republicans want.”

What is needed, he noted, is “to pull those same common things together and move forward in doing something that will be that will change the liberal thought that’s in Richmond, especially in the Senate.”

Although his campaign had just begun at the time of the interview, Aldous said that he had already traveled throughout the district.

“I’ve been over to Bath County, I’ve been over to Highland County, I’ve been over to Covington and Alleghany County,” he said. “I’ve been to Buena Vista and Lexington and Rockbridge and Nelson County. I’ve been all over.”

Aldous concluded by summarizing the central vision of his campaign.

“What we really need,” he said, is “to be focused on helping people achieve their dreams. We can do that by reducing regulation, by making government simpler, by making it more responsive to the people. That’s what I want to see.”

TJ Aldous has an undergraduate degree from Brigham Young University and law degrees from the University of Kansas and New York University. Raised in Hershey, Pennsylvania, he has also lived and worked in Richmond and Denver, as well as serving as a missionary in Argentina for two years.


Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on August 2, 2011. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site went dark on or about July 10, 2016.  I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.