When Jake Auchincloss was starting his first term in Congress, the world was in the grips of a pandemic as the nation awaited a vaccine rollout that had already begun to be politicized. And the Capitol—the former Newton city councilor’s new workplace—was invaded by a violent mob chanting about hanging a few of his new colleagues.

It was quite an orientation.

“I think it underscored the stakes for our democracy,” he said as he sat outside the George Howell Coffee shop on Walnut Street.

Indeed, the third-term congressman and Marine veteran has borne witness to a transformation of Washington from the seat of the federal government to a nonstop circus of chaos.

And along the way he’s had to, as the Marines say: Adapt, improvise, overcome.

“We’ve got a reality TV president, we’ve got a bunch of social media influencers trying to become policymakers, and so the the greatest rupture I think from today versus the kind of politics that I grew up in is just—it’s unserious,” Auchincloss said. “So much of it’s unserious now, and I think there’s a real appetite for a moral, a morally serious approach to the grand challenges of the moment.”

A generation in exodus

First and foremost on the domestic front, Auchincloss said, the nation needs to address its housing shortage.

“The problem is that baby boomers were able to buy homes for something like three years’ worth of salary, and now Gen-Z and millennials are looking at six to 10 years’ worth of salary, and so home ownership by the time you’re 30 is not attainable anymore in Massachusetts,” he said. “That is causing outmigration from our state.”

Massachusetts is in the midst of a domestic out-migration trend, which means that although the state’s overall population is still growing, the growth consists of immigration and new births. People are moving out of the state, though not into the state from elsewhere in the United States. That includes a lot of young adults who can’t afford rent or mortgages anywhere near Greater Boston.

“It’s particularly hollowing out the sort of next productive segment of our economy,” Auchincloss said. “Those 20- to 45-year-olds who maybe came here for school, maybe they came here for a job. But are they putting down stakes, starting a family, starting a business? No, because they can’t afford a house.”

Congress passed a bipartisan bill (which became law in July despite the president refusing to sign it) which Auchincloss describes as “a series of carrots and sticks to unlock more housing production at the state level.”

But states need to act as well, Auchincloss emphasized, so he’s endorsed Ballot Question 7.

If Question 7 is approved by voters in November, a new law will take effect requiring cities and towns to allow single-family homes on residential lots that are as small as 5,000 square feet, provided the lot meets setback and utility connection requirements. It’s aimed at fostering construction of small starter homes.

In Newton, many small starter homes have been demolished to make room for massive multi-million-dollar McMansions, sending the average home price up to $1.7 million last year and driving young people to look elsewhere to set down roots. Question 7 is seen as a way to improvise, adapt and overcome when it comes to getting those small starter homes back.

“It’s very much in the spirit of the 21st Century Road to Housing Act, and it can produce something like 1,000 new starter homes every year if passed,” Auchincloss said.

Young adults also need a thriving economy, and Auchincloss wants to invest in sectors that have made Massachusetts stand out: lab sciences and tech.

More than a third of all wages in Massachusetts are connected to research and development. And both Metro Boston and the I-95 corridor have blossomed with life science and tech jobs. Auchincloss has been a loud critic of the Trump administration’s gutting of funding for research.

“Solving hard problems pays mortgages here in Massachusetts, but it’s getting harder and harder to keep, attract and support the people who solve them,” he added.

Trump’s persistent pursuit of tariffs, Auchincloss said, was a stick in the spokes of any effort to do that. Despite the Supreme Court overturning Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariff spree, the president is imposing more tariffs through Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act, signaling that tariffs would keep coming.

“The irony here is, it’s increasingly evident to Americans that tariffs are raising the price of consumer goods. But what’s less obvious to Americans, but equally important, is that tariffs also raise the cost of manufacturing,” Auchincloss continued. “So when I go to Fall River and I visit a textile manufacturer, one might presume, oh, they’ll like tariffs, right? Because they’re competing against Chinese textile manufacturers who have a lower cost of doing business, and maybe this levels things. No, they don’t like that because their import prices are higher for what they’re trying to produce. They’re free traders, just like me.”

U.S. Rep. Jake Auchincloss talks with Charles River Regional Chamber President Greg Reibman about ways he and other Democrats are dealing with the new Trump administration. Photo by Bryan McGonigle

The costly pandemic residue

America is still trying to adapt, improvise and overcome the impacts of COVID-19. The pandemic upended public education like nothing before it, and Newton had its schools closed for 18 months. The learning loss associated with that shutdown was met with an inflation crisis that made managing the impacts of it nearly impossible.

“Teachers all tell me the same thing: one, these things are a disaster in the classroom [he holds up his smartphone] and two, the kids have real learning loss,” he said.

Auchincloss is proposing a bill that would levy a tax on social media companies to fund live, online student tutoring like Massachusetts is trying out.

“Massachusetts did a pilot of 400 first graders, mostly my district, with very effective results for phonics instruction for first graders,” Auchincloss said. “They’re now scaling it to 10,000. My legislation will let states across the country scale it to all kids. It’s not just literacy, but also mathematics. The social media companies made trillions of dollars off these kids. It’s time for them to invest in human intelligence, not just artificial intelligence.”

Funding schools is a mountain to climb all by itself. Newton has what’s become an annual budget crisis, as the schools already use almost 65 percent of the city’s revenues and still come up in need of more.

The main driver for that is healthcare. Newton, for example, spends more than $50 million on health insurance. And premiums went up 14 percent last year, while Proposition 2 ½ limits how much revenue can be raised to try to offset that.

And that’s where Auchincloss differs from many progressives, including his primary opponent, AI research professional Jason Poulos from Sherborn. Poulos is running on a pledge to push for Medicare for All, the policy idea made famous by Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont during his 2016 presidential bid.

Auchincloss, in contrast, wants America to stick with its market-based healthcare system, with regulations aimed at driving down costs. It’s estimated the nation spends more than $5 trillion a year on healthcare.

“It is $5 trillion every single year, regardless of who pays,” he said. “It’s like going to a restaurant, getting an astronomical bill, and then spending all the time talking about who’s paying the bill, as opposed to being like, ‘Why did the tuna tartare cost $75?.’”

To that end, Auchincloss has targeted pharmaceutical benefits management practices, including vertical integration and price gouging, and he’s specifically called out CVS.

“CVS Caremark is, I would argue, the epitome of bad actors in healthcare,” he said. “CVS Caremark is really a rotten organization.”

U.S. Rep. Jake Auchincloss speaks at a rally against antisemitism in April 2024, after a string of hate crimes left the city on edge. Photo by Bryan McGonigle

‘The war is lost’

Auchincloss makes no apologies for his support for Israel, and that’s another area in which he and his primary opponent are at odds, as Poulos has repeatedly called out Auchincloss over campaign donations Auchincloss received from the American Israeli Public Affairs Council (AIPAC).

“Israel has a right to defend itself against Hamas,” Auchincloss said. “Hamas has in its charter the extermination of the Jewish homeland, Israel, and (Israel) has a right to defend itself against those terrorists.”

Auchincloss has also criticized Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his cabinet for the way they’ve handled both its response to the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks against Israeli civilians and the lack of coherent endgame for the decades-long crisis. And he recently voted alongside the rest of the Massachusetts congressional delegation to cut more than $3 billion from aid to Israel.

“Hamas has a nihilistic agenda. It has emmiserated the Palestinian people, and its true enemy is not actually Israel,” Auchincloss said. “In fact, Israel is a useful foil for Hamas. Hamas’s enemy is a competent Palestinian authority that could actually deliver humanitarian and economic security to the Palestinian people, and that alternative has not been allowed to arise. And so, what I want to see in Gaza is, I want to see those improvements to the well-being of the Palestinian people, led by Palestinians.”

Israel is not a member of the International Criminal Court. But does Auchincloss think Netanyahu’s government has committed war crimes, as accused  by the ICC?

“I would need to look at specific charges against them and see how they are weighed,” he said. “What I would say is that the humanitarian conditions in Gaza have not been acceptable, and I don’t think the military operation in Gaza is going to achieve the defeat of Hamas unless it uplifts the well-being of the Palestinian people that Hamas has brutalized.”

In contrast, Poulos has called for the United States to end military support for Israel altogether.

What Auchincloss is less nuanced about is Iran. He supported Israel’s strike on Iranian targets last year and defended that strike when a young man from Iran asked him about it at a Town Hall two years ago.

But since Trump brought the United States into all-out war with Iran this spring, Auchincloss has fought to hold the administration’s feet to the fire over what he calls an “illegal and unwise” military campaign.

“This president launched an illegal war of choice, and he’s the first president in American history to start and lose a war by himself,” Auchincloss said. “Congress needs to take back the steering wheel from him.”

Winning this war against Iran is not in the cards, he added.

“The war is lost,” he said. “What must be averted is a lost war becoming a forever war. Policymakers in Washington are prone to ‘sunk cost bias.’ We saw this in Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan. Sunk cost bias is when troops and treasure have already been deployed, and so cognitively the policymakers say we don’t want to admit defeat. We’ve got to send more; more troops, more treasure. That’s how you end up with a debacle, and that’s what we have to prevent here. He’s already lost the war. We have to prevent it from becoming a forever war that more Americans lose their lives in, and that, frankly, more Israelis lose their security through.”

Karen Bray of Newton Indivisible speaks at a protest outside U.S. Rep. Jake Auchincloss’s district office on Crafts Street on Monday, March 2, 2026. Photo by Bryan McGonigle

A party at a crossroads

Auchincloss wants accountability for the people currently in power. He wants to impeach some of Trump’s cabinet members, starting with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. And Auchincloss wants to see administration officials prosecuted.

“One thing we learned from the election of 2020 is that, even though he could pardon himself or immunize himself against oversight, his lawyers and his minions couldn’t, and it actually mattered,” Auchincloss said. “You saw them talk real differently in front of judges than they would talk on cable news. We have to put that same opprobrium on his cabinet members and his courtiers.”

But there’s also a battle raging on the left, between the moderate, more capitalist and the progressive, more socialist wings of the Democratic party.

Poulos has hammered away at Auchincloss over campaign donations Auchincloss received from Palantir, a controversial surveillance company that has helped Immigration & Customs Enforcement track undocumented immigrants, despite Auchincloss having spoken out against ICE after every civilian death.

A poll commissioned by Auchincloss’s campaign shows Auchincloss with a massive lead over Poulos. But in a year when, elsewhere, Democratic incumbents are seeing strong challenges from—and in some cases are being defeated by—progressive and socialist primary opponents, there seem to be more and more Poulos campaign signs popping up on lawns throughout Newton’s villages.

As the congressman and the Democratic party look to adapt, improvise and overcome for a post-MAGA nation, there’s a growing sense that the party of Barack Obama and Franklin Roosevelt first needs to adapt, improvise and overcome its own identity crisis.

Auchincloss recently talked about that left-wing insurgency as a symptom of frustration over the decline in quality of life young people and working class families face and says Democrats need to have laser focus on affordability.

“I think the opportunity for Democrats in 2028 is to speak to the two-thirds of Americans who are disgusted by the corruption of this administration, and we should speak to them with a morally serious, market-oriented vision for how to build a middle class, one in which you can get an excellent education by the time you’re 18, you can get a home of your own by the time you’re 30, and a dignified retirement by the time you’re 65,” he said.

The primary is set for Sept. 1.