User:BM6/Christian Bradley Hubbs

Christian Bradley Hubbs (born October 8, 1998) is a Progressive political activist, electoral reform advocate, and political scientist from Vermont. He is also a local political officeholder, currently serving at the county level in the Northeast Kingdom, is a member of the Progressive State Committee, and was the first Progressive elected official in Caledonia County.

=Political activity=

Background
Hubbs was born October 8, 1998 in Florida and moved to Vermont, where most of his family resided, in April 2001. Via his mother, he is related to the Harrison family of Virginia; a direct descendant of Mary Harrison McKee, and U.S. Presidents Benjamin Harrison and William Henry Harrison.

He had a tenuous interest in politics from an early age; after witnessing the political fallout of the presidential election recount and results in Florida in 2000, he had further experiences with elections from 2002 to 2012 via family members being active in state and local elections in Vermont during his childhood, a time in which he describes the rural area where he lived as being very conservative, and also witnessed the economic and political effects of the Great Recession from 2008 to 2012 on both his local community and the country. He traveled to Washington, D.C and visited the U.S. Capitol and other historical and political sites of the East Coast in May 2012. He became active in local politics and in various national issues following the 2014 elections and attributes his early political interests to media resources such as C-Span and Gabe Fleisher’s Wake Up To Politics as well as political talk shows such as The David Pakman Show, The Thom Hartmann Program, and Secular Talk.

Positions
He has advocated for limiting the borders of state legislature districts to counties and towns within counties, as some districts such as Essex-Orleans-Caledonia can include towns from separate counties, or the senate district Orleans-Essex encompassing multiple counties. He is in favor of 4-term consecutive term limits for executive offices in the U.S. including the presidency and governorships (8-term in the case of Vermont and New Hampshire Governors which have 2-year terms), and for state senators to have 4-year alternating terms.

He supports lowering the voting age to 15, but possibly requiring registrants aged 15-19 to take a “basic political competency test” to be eligible to vote. He believes that many political issues at the national, state, and local levels affect young people, many of whom have enough experience to make informed decisions when voting in elections, and that boosting youth political engagement will make the country more adaptable and quick to address new problems that arise.

He has supported and been involved in various legislative campaigns in the Northeast Kingdom for the Vermont House of Representatives, to spread the Progressive movement outside of just Washington and Chittenden counties where the party has been the most popular, noting that the northeast region of the state is the most rural and conservative.

He supported U.S. Senator from Vermont Bernie Sanders in the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections, and supported Bill Lee and Brenda Siegel in the 2016 and 2018 Vermont gubernatorial elections, respectively.

Political Parties
As a member of the Vermont Progressive Party, he has supported measures such as ranked-choice voting in order to make third parties more viable in elections, although advocates specifically for an exponential system of multi-point voting as opposed to the linear systems of single-transferable voting or instant-runoff voting.

He has expressed his displeasure with the Democratic Party and that he would like to see the progressive movement "make a clear, bold, breakaway from the Democratic Party and their un-progressive policies", and that he would like to see a Progressive Party at the national level as was the case at various times in the past.

In reference to a modern Progressive Party, he has stated: ''""If you take the members of the Progressive Caucus, assuming they're all truly progressive, various existing parties such as the Green Party, Justice Party, Reform Party, the Socialist Party if they're so inclined, and state-level Progressive parties, and organizations such as DSA, Our Revolution, Justice Democrats, and you put them all together, you would have all the organizational structure that you'd need. But then, if you awaken the Democratic base of voters, who mostly are ideologically Progressive even if they don't know it, and get them to break away, then you'd have a full party and political force that would be able to win elections all down the ballot and all across the country. It would be larger and more successful today than the parties of James Weaver, Teddy Roosevelt, Robert La Follette, and Henry Wallace ever were."" ''

Aerospace Policy
Hubbs has been a firm, vocal advocate for space sciences, for policies that support spaceflight, exploration, and travel, the increase in budget for NASA as “an immeasurably important investment for the nation, the planet, the future, and for humans as a species”, and has called for “a return of the federal agency leading a bold space program that pushes the frontier and supports public and private space travel infrastructure in the near-Earth and cis-Lunar space regions. Essentially Apollo program level undertakings, without the Cold War motivational downsides.” He has been a critic of the management of the federal space program under the Clinton, Bush, Obama, and Trump administrations, and has said that "…[T]he militarization of outer space by the United States, or any country, would be "the single greatest mistake of any government since the Iraq War, and most outrageous misuse of taxpayer money and national resources". He also believes, on the matter of the creation of the United States Space Force, that a military branch in space is unnecessary, and instead an agency analogous to the Federal Aviation Administration is needed, for regulation of space transportation, satellite management, and space communications as pertaining to interests of the U.S. and U.S. companies in space, similarly to the relationship between NOAA and NASA in terms of science, research, and development in the oceans and atmosphere, compared to high atmosphere and space, respectively. Hubbs is, however, a strong supporter of the Commercial Resupply Services Program, Commercial Crew Program, LOP-Gateway station, Orion Program, Artemis Program, and Space Launch System developed under said administrations and continued under the direction of NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine.

He supports a proposal to create a civilian spaceport and launch facility along the coast of Maine or Massachusetts, capable of supporting sounding, sub-orbital, small-lift, and potentially medium-lift and stratolaunch vehicles, to be a public utility and economic asset for New England, and an infrastructural resource for the U.S. spaceflight industry, citing the creation of a spaceport at a similar latitude in nearby Nova Scotia.

Hubbs has worked on public engagement and as a curator and speaker for topics on astronomy, rocket science, aerospace engineering, planetary science, astrodynamics, and space exploration at the Fairbanks Museum and Planetarium in St. Johnsbury, Vermont since 2015.

=Electoral history=

Hubbs first appeared in elections at the municipal-level, before he was even old enough to vote, when in March 2015 at age 16 he received 2 write-in votes for Town Auditor of his hometown Burke, Vermont.

At the 2017 County Committee meeting in St. Johnsbury he was appointed to be the lone delegate from Burke to the Caledonia County Progressive Committee by the County Chair and State Committee Secretary, John Christopher Brimmer. One year later he was one of the founding members of the Progressive Town Committee of Burke at a caucus on August 8, 2018 and became its first Vice Chair in a special election. Also at the caucus he was nominated and went on to successfully run for Caledonia County Justice of the Peace from the town of Burke, ranking third in the results with 14% of the vote, after he was recruited and encouraged by town officials to fill one of two vacancies out of the seven Justice seats allotted for the town. He succeeded retiring Justice Ernest Broadwater (D) when his two-year term began on January 31, 2019. In November 2018 he was appointed as the second State Committee Delegate from Caledonia County and was formally elected to the Committee as a voting member in 2019.

Past election results
2015

2017

Upcoming elections
=Notes=

=References=

=External links=
 * Christian B. Hubbs Candidate Profile @ Next In Office
 * Christian Bradley Hubbs Campaign (2018) @ CrowdPAC
 * Christian Bradley Hubbs Campaign (2020) @ CrowdPAC
 * Candidate Profile @ Ballotpedia