The race for the Bay State’s 8th Congressional District has become a contest in earnest, after an ex-staffer from former Gov. Deval Patrick’s office announced he will challenge U.S. Rep. Stephen Lynch for the Democratic Party’s nomination.

Patrick Roath, the Boston-based attorney and voting rights advocate, in making his campaign announcement, said he’s seeking a seat in Congress to bring “real solutions to Massachusetts’ 8th District.”

“We need new leadership, big new ideas, and new people in Congress. Just doing the same thing we’ve been doing for years is not working. That is more obvious now than ever. We need people in Congress who can stand up to the Trump administration and fight for our rights with urgency and creativity, while also laying out a plan to ensure that future generations get to experience the American dream of opportunity,” Roath told The Boston Herald.

Roath previously worked as a Patrick campaign deputy press secretary, before briefly becoming an aide in the former governor’s office. According to his LinkedIn page, he interned in the Obama White House and with the U.S. Attorney’s office in Boston. He also served as a law clerk in the U.S. Court of Appeals and most recently as an associate at the law firm Ropes & Gray.

In a video shared to social media, the 38-year-old Roath said he’s running because “everything is on the line right now with Trump in the White House.”

“And we’ve got to have people who are ready to go down there and fight for us, and stick up for us, and defend our democracy,” he said.

He told the Herald “that kind of leadership is absent in Washington right now, and it is absent in this district. The priorities and style of governing that may have worked twenty-five or thirty years ago are not suited to today’s challenges.”

Roath spoke about his family history, sharing that his mother and father met and found a way into the middle class via good jobs at IBM. An apparent modern absence of that sort of “American Dream” story, one which people don’t “hear so much anymore,” is what led him into public service, Roath said.

After declaring that it’s time to “fix our politics,” Roath said he wouldn’t accept money from corporate political action groups, but would instead aim for grassroots funding support. According to Roath, the campaign has “had a great start so far, raising $115,000 through the first 24 hours of the campaign.”

Lynch, whose campaign did not return a request for comment, first entered Congress via the state Legislature in 2001 when he won against a large field of contenders in a special election to fill the seat vacated after the death of longtime U.S. Rep. Joe Moakley. Not long after he would go on to win a general election against state Sen. Jo Ann Sprague.

The voting demographics of the 8th District have historically been such that the Democratic Party primary is, for all intents and purposes, the actual election. The last time a Republican held the seat was from 1943 to 1955, when Angier Goodwin served in 78th through 83rd Congresses.

The former iron worker last faced a primary challenger in 2020, when current Commissioner of the Massachusetts Department of Public Health Robbie Goldstein launched a bid for the seat only to lose by more than 30 points. In 2018, Lynch fended off another pair of challengers by an even larger margin. Since his first election, no Republican or Independent has managed to secure more than a third of the 8th District electorate in a general election race against Lynch.

In short: it’s fair to say no one has ever successfully offered the congressman a serious challenge from within the Democratic Party or from without.

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