David Baria’s career in politics was born out of tragedy.

Eighteen months after he and his family moved to Bay St. Louis from Jackson, Hurricane Katrina devastated the area. 

“Katrina rolls through and wipes us out, home, everything we own just completely wiped out,” Baria said.

Then, just a month later, Baria’s oldest child died. With two tragedies in a month’s time, Baria, who is running as a Democratic candidate for the U.S. Senate in Mississippi, and his wife Marcie decided to dedicate their lives to bettering their community. His wife made it her mission to help the area by promoting green initiatives such as recycling and planting trees, while Baria ran for his first political office and was elected to the State Senate.

“We were pretty devastated after all that and trying to figure out what we were going to do with our lives moving forward. Both my wife and I decided we liked Bay St. Louis and Hancock County so much we were going to commit to helping rebuild not just our smaller community, but the larger community of the Gulf Coast,” Baria said. “I felt like if ever there was a place that needed an advocate in Jackson that it was Hancock County, so I ran against a sitting senator.”

Baria, who is a lawyer by trade, served in the Mississippi Senate from 2008-11 and has served as the District 122 representative in the Mississippi House of Representatives since 2012.

After serving at the state level for a decade, Baria said he decided to run for a national office after seeing the lack of progress being made in the state.

“For 30 years, we have been sending the same people to Washington pushing the same tired policies,” he said. “They keep getting the same results and Mississippi is 50th in most of the categories that are important to everyday Mississippians. We are not getting any leadership.”

Baria is one of six Democratic candidates running in the primary for the seat currently held by Roger Wicker. Both senate seats in Mississippi will be contested in November after Thad Cochran decided to retire in March due to health issues, but Baria said he decided to stay in the race to unseat Wicker as he had already qualified before Cochran’s announcement.

“It would be antithetical to my being to commit to this race, start raising funds and doing everything I need to do to focus on beating Roger Wicker and then just jump out,” he said.

If Baria wins the Democratic nomination Tuesday and can unseat Wicker in November, he said his three main focuses will be on public education, health care and infrastructure, all of which he’s sees as playing a role in Mississippi ranking among the worst states in the country and the “brain drain” of young people leaving the state.

“The folks that we send up there keep talking about things that divide us rather than how to solve big problems like public education, health care and infrastructure we suffer from in Mississippi,” Baria said. “I think there is a failure to recognize that when we fail to address those problems, it has an impact on everybody, but it has a disproportionate impact on underserved communities.”

Baria added that he is also a big proponent of prison reform and believes in “reasonable gun safety measures,” including enhanced background checks, lists of people who shouldn’t have guns, “like abusers and folks who have committed gun crimes before,” and stopping the production of AR-15s and large capacity magazines going forward.

But no matter the policy, Baria said his overarching goal is to change the conversation and bringing the people of Mississippi together.

“One of the first things I hope to do, and I think I can do it through the campaign before I am even elected, is to change the narrative and the conversation we have around politics in Mississippi and stop trying to divide people,” he said. “I want to talk about things that unite old and young, black and white, Republican and Democrat. What can we get together on as Mississippians? What can we agree on?”