Thomas Casez
Thomas Casez (Democratic Party) ran for election to the Georgia House of Representatives to represent District 40. He lost in the Democratic primary on May 24, 2022.
Casez completed Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection survey in 2022. Click here to read the survey answers.
Biography
Thomas Casez's career experience includes working as a software engineer and a contractor for National Geographic.[1]
Elections
2022
See also: Georgia House of Representatives elections, 2022
General election
General election for Georgia House of Representatives District 40
Doug Stoner defeated Fun Fong in the general election for Georgia House of Representatives District 40 on November 8, 2022.
Candidate | % | Votes | ||
| ✔ |  | Doug Stoner (D) | 64.2 | 17,265 |
| Fun Fong (R) | 35.8 | 9,623 | ||
| Total votes: 26,888 | |||
 = candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey. | ||||
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Democratic primary election
Democratic primary for Georgia House of Representatives District 40
Doug Stoner defeated Thomas Casez in the Democratic primary for Georgia House of Representatives District 40 on May 24, 2022.
Candidate | % | Votes | ||
| ✔ | | Doug Stoner | 59.6 | 3,360 |
 | Thomas Casez | 40.4 | 2,281 | |
| Total votes: 5,641 | |||
| = candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey. | ||||
| If you are a candidate and would like to tell readers and voters more about why they should vote for you, complete the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection Survey. | ||||
Do you want a spreadsheet of this type of data? Contact our sales team. | ||||
Republican primary election
Republican primary for Georgia House of Representatives District 40
Fun Fong advanced from the Republican primary for Georgia House of Representatives District 40 on May 24, 2022.
Candidate | % | Votes | ||
| ✔ | Fun Fong | 100.0 | 4,536 | |
| Total votes: 4,536 | |||
| = candidate completed the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection survey. | ||||
| If you are a candidate and would like to tell readers and voters more about why they should vote for you, complete the Ballotpedia Candidate Connection Survey. | ||||
Do you want a spreadsheet of this type of data? Contact our sales team. | ||||
Endorsements
To view Casez's endorsements in the 2022 election, please click here.
Campaign themes
2022
Ballotpedia survey responses
See also: Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection
Thomas Casez completed Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection survey in 2022. The survey questions appear in bold and are followed by Casez's responses. Candidates are asked three required questions for this survey, but they may answer additional optional questions as well.
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The most important thing about me though is that I am a regular citizen, not a long time politician. I decided to put my hat in the ring and run for office because I believe that the politicians of yesteryear have failed in their duty of advancing the interests of everyday people and have instead retreated into self interested aggrandizement.
I'm seeking to represent district 40 because I know what it's like to live there - I send my child to daycare, I work at a regular job and pay my taxes like everyone else.- Economic democracy is as important as political democracy. The root of the problems that America and Georgia are facing are due to the disconnect that everyday folks feel towards the economy. Endless money has been shoveled into corporate tax breaks while Georgia's workers and small businesses suffer every day from out of control inflationary prices. It's time that everyone was able to enjoy the fruits of our economy proportional to the fruits of their labor, not from how many lobbyists they can fit on the legislature's floor.
- Georgia's politics have been intentionally designed to cut out regular people. Leaving politics to the politicians has caused untold misery in the past 30 years - it's time that regular Georgians actually push for the changes that they want instead of the issues that politicians care about. That means that Georgia's politicians needs to do its utmost to bring politics down to the people and bring regular folks to the decision table instead of deciding everything up in their ivory tower.
- New, bold and structural ideas are needed in order to fix Georgia's problems. We are just seeing the tip of the iceberg, but Georgia's problems will not improve in the near future unless we push the envelope. To reduce prices, we need to focus on increasing Georgia's productive capacity; to help Georgia's parents we need to give free universal childcare to all children; to survive the upcoming climate castrophe we need to focus on transforming and hardening our electrical grid; to protect workers we need to push for a higher minimum wage and union protections; and to protect our ballot box, deep reforms need to be enacted.
One thing that I don't get to talk about as much as I want though is the impact of large business interests on Georgia's economy and on its legislature.
I don't think that Georgia can develop a fair, democratic economy while still being the defender of a swath of large businesses. There is something wrong with using public funds to fund private, out-of-state businesses over local Georgia businesses.
Georgia has the potential to use that money to foster wealth at home - in both historically black and brown communities that have been intentionally abandoned by previous Georgian administrations, and also rural communities that have been hard hit by the industrial exodus of the 90s and 00s. Many small businesses in those areas have little access to capital, and yet instead of helping to fund them Georgia decides again and again to reward large corporations with an ever greater piece of the pie.
Less related to current politics, but both books by Mike Duncan are fantastic reads: Hero of Two Worlds and The Storm Before the Storm. They're great at making parallels between current and historical events.
I do hope I'm able to raise my daughter well. At the end of the day I guess she's my true legacy.
It's an earworm honestly.
However of course, that's the ideal situation. The reason that the Governor and the US President have been vested so much power is that the legislature has proven incapable of having independent initiative. That would need to change if we were to have an ideal world.
Inequality.
Georgia still has a minimum wage below the federal level. Our worker protections are non-existent, our local businesses are being chocked by large corporate handouts. Our farmers are shackled by packers, our education budget is being slashed. Worst of all, Georgia's legislature is a nest of lobbyists - try as they might, our representatives cannot do their jobs as long as we let mega corporations hold our constituents jobs hostage to their unending demands for tax incentives and subsidies. When corporations run the state, they reinforce the same race and class divides that define the south - and the global south.
The one that really sticks out to me, however, is the one time we talked to a long time Democratic supporter as he was bringing in his groceries from his car. I remember quite clearly asking the usual questions - "What are you looking out of voting democrat?" - and he answered me that he didn't know. He told me that he had spent the last few elections cycles throwing money at democratic candidate, that he believed what they were saying and that he hoped his support would help make America better.
He was a true supporter.
And yet, he said, he feels like a chump. Democrats retook the house, then the presidency and then the senate. What happened? Nothing. His son still had to pay for his enormous student loan debts that the democrats had said they would cancel. Healthcare was still a mess, inflation made his life even harder.
The luster of the democratic party had worn off him.
Of course when I asked him if he would consider voting Republican he said "hell nah". He may stay home and not vote though.
Note: Ballotpedia reserves the right to edit Candidate Connection survey responses. Any edits made by Ballotpedia will be clearly marked with [brackets] for the public. If the candidate disagrees with an edit, he or she may request the full removal of the survey response from Ballotpedia.org. Ballotpedia does not edit or correct typographical errors unless the candidate's campaign requests it.
See also
2022 Elections
External links
Footnotes
- ↑ Information submitted to Ballotpedia through the Candidate Connection survey on April 30, 2022
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