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Evankovich Grounded in the Basics

July 18, 2013

In 2010, Eli Evankovich left a job as a financial analyst with U.S. Steel to run for a state House district that, on paper, wasn’t likely to welcome his Republican registration. The 54th legislative district in Westmoreland and Armstrong counties is nearly two-to-one Democratic in registration and had voted that way for decades.

“I owed it to my three kids. I don’t like the direction the country is headed and I don’t like what it was going to mean to them down the road.”

The then 27 year-old defeated a five-term incumbent, carrying 60 percent of the vote, and two years later, in 2012, bested that with 67 percent of the vote. “My message was and still is accountability in government; we should be running government as families run their households.”

Evankovich learned the “back-to basics” lesson by “growing up poor” on a farm. His five siblings left the area for better opportunities. “We made a series of bad decisions that got us where we are. Now we need a series of good decisions to get us back.”

He’s a student of presidential history who is most enthusiastic about Ronald Reagan. “I still remember my dad calling us in to watch TV to see Reagan’s speech at the Brandenburg Gate when he told Gorbachev to tear down the wall. He had a way of speaking so the average person could understand what he was talking about, and it was a good message.”

His favorite writer is New York’s John Steele Gordon. He is drawn to his works because, “he studied history but knows more about how the economy works than the academic economists.”
He’s also dedicated to his constituency. On Monday, July 15 he drove 320 miles from Virginia Beach, where his family is vacationing, to Harrisburg to place one vote on a budget clean-up bill.

He still tends the family farm in Murrysville; a job that keeps him tied to the basics.