Councillor is going Stateside to work on Clinton campaign

Councillor is going Stateside to work on Clinton campaign

17 August 2016

PATRICK Brown is briefly leaving the political battles of Newry Mourne and Down behind for a bigger fight in the US.

The Alliance councillor is so concerned that Hillary Clinton may not win the presidential race against controversial Republican candidate Donald Trump, he is offering his services to the Democratic campaign.

Patrick is going on a three-week trip to the US in October and basing himself at Miami-Dade in Florida, after an Alliance colleague put him in touch with a volunteer organiser.

“I’m not 100 per cent sure what I am going to be doing, it is probably going to be door knocking, help with events or marketing,” he said.

“I am funding this myself. I did not get a holiday this year so this is also my holiday.”

And before his critics have a go — he says he hopes to miss only one of his council meetings.

“It really is a result of two things,” he said of his US plans. “Firstly, Trump could get the amount of votes he needs to win, and secondly there’s the Brexit vote.” Accusing Trump of being a “demagogue”, Patrick said he was concerned US politics is being pushed to the extremes.

“If Trump is elected it is a concern for the whole free world,” he said.

The 24 year-old said his sympathies may have initially lay more naturally with former left-wing Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders but that Hillary was the woman to get the job done.

“Hillary is much more experienced,” he said. “She is the best of both choices.”

Turning to his concerns over Brexit, Patrick said: “Just look at the EU. There were problems with the EU but no-one was really alarmed. Many of the same dynamics are there.

“A lot of people said Brexit would never happen, that people would see sense.”

And Patrick doesn’t want to take any chances. The Crossgar man is used to political shocks, having pulled off one of his own back in the May 2014 council elections when he dramatically took the final seat in Rowallane. At the time a final year politics student at Sheffield University, he surged past the Ulster Unionist Walter Lyons who had been battling with Eddie Hughes of Sinn Fein throughout the day without realising the real threat would come from a different direction.

Patrick has been to the US several times and shortly before he was elected he was one of just 50 students from the UK chosen to participate in the prestigious Model United Nations conference in Manhattan.

It is President Obama who is his own political inspiration, and Patrick is worried that this time round a lack of enthusiasm among Democrats could affect the outcome.

“In 2008 Obama came and changed the narrative,” he said. “I think it is possible this time it is going to be a depressed vote.”

American documentary filmmaker and author Michael Moore recently wrote a piece detailing why he thought Trump would win, but that if “people could vote from their couch at home on their X-box or PlayStation, Hillary would win in a landslide”.

“It was his article that really spurred me and really made me want to get involved,” he added.

Patrick said he had chosen his campaign area carefully as he felt this part of Florida could swing either way. He doesn’t believe he is speaking out of turn in any way with regards to Donald Trump, nor is he concerned about getting involved in a political battle that isn’t his own.

“In the global world we live in this one could have a massive impact,” he added.