GREENFIELD — Since he was 6 years old, Johnathan Creque has felt a pull to politics. Now 25, the former staffer for U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren is running for representative of the 1st Franklin District to advocate for the communities that have always felt like home.
Creque is running for the open seat left by state Rep. Natalis Blais, who resigned on Jan. 19. As Speaker of the House Ronald Mariano opted not to call a special election to replace her, Blais’ seat will remain open until the November 2026 election and the winner will be sworn in next January to represent the 1st Franklin District.
At a young age, Creque’s family moved from Boston to Deerfield. There, he was raised on a farm by a single mother before they moved to a different corner of town during Creque’s time at Frontier Regional School. After high school, he moved to Greenfield and never left.
“Being mixed race, being queer, to grow up in a community where I felt welcomed, where I felt like people treated me with dignity just like anybody else — I love Deerfield, Sunderland, Whately, Greenfield, all of our towns, and it’s getting to represent my home and advocate for what the people here really want and making sure our voice is heard,” Creque said.
When Creque visits Deerfield, he can still point to the houses of his high school friends and other locals.
“I think western Mass. is really unique, especially Franklin County. Everybody knows everybody, we all are a family,” Creque said. “I’m such a lucky person to have grown up here, and I want to make sure we protect that. The federal government is trying to destroy everything that makes our country and the state unique and special. This is where the revolution started and we need to protect those values.”
Thinking back to how his interest in politics got started, Creque remembers holding signs cheering on former President Barack Obama on the night of his election. In high school, he protested gun violence. While earning a political science degree at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, he volunteered for U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders and former President Joe Biden’s campaigns and served as treasurer of the University Democrats on campus.
In college, he had his sights set on law school.
“But then I realized what I really enjoyed, what I really wanted to do was directly helping people,” Creque recalled.
He asked his professor about career paths in politics where employees work one-on-one with people in need, and his professor recommended constituent services, so Creque applied to work as a staff assistant for U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren.
As a staff assistant, casework filled Creque’s days, helping constituents navigate issues like losing Social Security or Medicare benefits, even if his phone rang at 7:30 p.m.
“Our goal was always helping constituents, no matter what it took,” Creque said.
A year into the job, he was promoted to regional director for Worcester, MetroWest and Norfolk County with a focus in health policy. He met with community leaders and stakeholders like mayors, hospital workers and nonprofit teams about the role Warren’s office could play in supporting them.
“The reason I was able to go to college, that I was able to do all of these things, is because of government assistance programs,” Creque said.
In Deerfield, his family relied on food stamps, heating assistance and “every sort of government program you could imagine,” he said.
“We’ve seen that our system has completely broken, because of cuts from the federal government. Our MassHealth system now is massively going to be in trouble,” Creque continued. “There’s just so many different areas where people are completely being passed over and ignored, and I really want to make sure that there’s someone who understands the struggles that people have gone through. … I want to make sure that we have representatives that are actually going to go and fight for people.”
If elected to represent the 1st Franklin District, Creque will advocate to protect these assistance programs from the Trump administration’s sweeping cuts and changes, with health care as a top priority.
He mentioned the rippling impacts of the One Big Beautiful Bill’s cuts to health care on local hospitals. According to an informational flyer released by Baystate Health in December, the hospital system is projected to lose $146.7 million annually, or 4.8% of the hospital’s bottom line, likely leading to layoffs, mergers, reduced services and longer wait times for the emergency room. Creque expects hundreds of thousands of Massachusetts residents to lose their health insurance coverage due to federal cuts.
“It can be devastating for a community, both economically and also for providing health care access,” Creque said. “We need people who are going to make sure the state government [is] going to care about western Mass. and are going to protect our desperately needed institutions.”
Affordability will also be top of mind for Creque if he is elected. To cut costs, he mentioned increasing minimum wage in Massachusetts from $15 to $20 as one starting point and tying the rate to inflation “to ensure that people aren’t always just falling backwards.”
Creque also wants to boost housing and lower electric bills by encouraging renewable energy development and repealing the referendum concerning nuclear energy in Gov. Maura Healey’s Energy Affordability, Independence & Innovation Act.
“I think there’s a lot of talk of grand ideas of transformative change, and I think that’s great to have these ambitions, but we need real policies that are actually going to improve the material conditions for people,” Creque said.
For Creque, these “real policies” include expanding eligibility for the Healthy Incentives Program (HIP), which gives Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) enrollees extra funds to pick up local produce from farms, and establishing a “floor” in the funding formula for schools to ensure rural schools in the 1st Franklin District receive a baseline of financial support, no matter the enrollment numbers.
“I’m a democratic socialist. At the end of the day, I believe that our government needs to work for the people and not corporations,” Creque said. “The state should use every single tool that it has at its disposal to lower costs for people.”
While working for Warren, who has been an inspiration to Creque from a young age, he learned the importance of states stepping up.
“Right now, the main thing that’s going to be able to protect us from the Trump administration is our state elected officials,” Creque said, stressing that Republicans hold the majority in the Senate and House of Representatives. “The states are supposed to be laboratories for democracy. We have an opportunity to really lead the nation by introducing even more radical change that’s really going to improve people’s lives and, by doing that, we demonstrate to the rest of the country these policies actually work, this actually helps people. … It’s not just Massachusetts that we’re helping, but it’s also demonstrating to the rest of the country that progressive policy does improve people’s lives.”
At 25 years old, Creque sees his age as an asset for enacting change. He described his generation as a group with “a real hunger for change” due to coming of age during Trump’s presidencies.
“We’ve seen this erasure of all the good things that were happening in this country, and this sort of massive failure to us of what was the American Dream, of what was promised to us,” Creque said. He called out affordable college tuition and the ability to buy a home and support a family as examples of these empty promises.
“We need a new generation of young people with fresh ideas,” Creque continued, “and I really want to get involved in the government to be able to directly help my community.”