Wednesday March 10th 2021
A special Series: The 2022 Presidential Contenders
Number Four: Jasper Irving
Jasper Thomas Irving
Born July 3rd, 1962, Syracuse, New York.
A member of the Republican party, he has served as a United States Congressman, and from 2017 has been the junior Senator for the state of Illinois. He is also a businessman and author.
When he came first came to national attention in the mid 2000’s, he was regarded as the “pin up boy for the Conservative movement” and was described in 2011 as a “Gold Standard Imperialist” but he has moderated his views in the years since 2011. He rejects that there is a scientific consensus on climate change saying in 2018 "I think it's clear that [climate change] has happened. The extent to which that has been caused by human activity I think is not as clear. I think that is still very much disputed ". He is pro-life but has moved his position since his 2011 Special Senate election run when he said that he “supported legislation to ban all abortions and impose jail sentences for doctors who performed them” but by 2016 he said that he did support abortion when the “health of pregnant women and girls was in serious doubt and limits in cases of rape and incest”, he said that his change in view came after visiting a women’s shelter for victims of rape and domestic violence. He has been a big supporter for NASA and supports a manned space mission to Mars. In October 2020 he was one of thirteen Republican Senator’s who voted for the confirmation of Emmett Franklin to the Supreme Court of the United States.
He was born in Syracuse, New York, to electrical engineer, Thomas (1934-1994) and teacher Anne (nee Hill) (1936-2017). He was the youngest child of three, with a brother Ethan (1956) and sister Val (1959). He attended George Fowler High School in Syracuse graduating in 1980 before attending Rutgers University in New Jersey, where he graduated with BA from Rutgers Business School before moving to the University of Chicago where he completed an MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. In 1989 he started his own publishing business in Chicago, and went onto to be regarded as one of the most successful self-start entrepreneurs of the 1990’s. He successfully diversified into on-line publishing and website site design. In 2007 he published his first book “Crisis Point” which concerned the middle-east, the book itself being a mixture of chapters of fiction and non-fiction, with the non-fiction elements relating to the fictional storyline of a war in the middle-east, and the United States over-throwing the Iranian Government, but being drawn into a long drawn out occupation of the country. It was well received by many conservative commentators including Nash Rockford. In 2012 he published a totally novel based sequel “Ghost Nation”.
In 2008 he ran for Congress for the 10th Congressional District in Illinois and won. He was re-elected in 2010, but in just five months into his second term he resigned his seat to run in the special senate election caused by the resignation of Democratic Senator Jack Enlow, but he lost in a landslide to former Commerce Secretary Mitch Bryce. Three years later he ran against Bryce for a second time, but despite losing improved vastly losing by just 6% (53% to 47%). After this second defeat to Bryce he declared that his “political career was over” but in 2015 he changed his mind and decided to run for the other Senate seat, which was open due to the retirement of George Montgomery. He moved more towards the centre and was able to defeat former State Senate Majority leader Alex Sweeney by just 2,977 votes (50.04% to 49.96%) a margin of just 0.08%.
After weeks of speculation he declared on March 10th, outside the Old State Capitol in Springfield that he would be seeking the 2022 Republican nomination for President. Because of state law, he will be unable to seek re-election to the Senate next year.
He married Rebecca Rogers who he met at the University of Chicago, and the couple had two children Tim (born 1988) and Alice (born 1992). The couple divorced in 2001. In 2006 he married for a second time, Katherine Dorr and the couple have a daughter Katie (born 2008).