A week ago, the two candidates for the District 68 seat in the House of Representatives had an intense exchange during a public forum inside Warren Town Hall. They argued over ideologies and positions, but it became especially charged when things got personal.

Libertarian candidiate William Hunt Jr. questioned Democrat Laufton Ascencao’s personal history and sources of income, particularly statements about Mr. Ascencao’s shellfishing. Holding up a printout of a 2017 Facebook post showing Mr. Ascencao with bushels of clams, and citing a letter mailed to voters earlier this year where Mr. Ascencao said, “I make most of my living split between diving for quahogs and working in renewable energy,” Mr. Hunt hit Mr. Ascencao with multiple questions about how he could earn a living off quahogs if he never held a commercial fishing license.

Mr. Ascencao responded that night, and in an interview the next day, to explain how he has earned an income digging quahogs, without ever holding a license to sell the quahogs. Mr. Ascencao emphatically pointed out that he never called himself a “commercial shellfisherman.” His opponent did.

So how did he earn a living?

Mr. Ascencao said he learned how to fish and dive at an early age, because many family members, including his father and uncle, were fishermen. Mr. Ascencao said he often dove for quahogs to help his father or uncle, who would typically sell the catch at Tony’s Seafood in Seekonk, and then Mr. Ascencao would later receive “a gift” to recognize his efforts. He said it was all legal.

Mr. Ascencao also said he never represented himself as a commercial shellfisherman, and in fact, he removed that language from his campaign materials months ago. “I’ve always talked about my work in renewable energy,” he said.
During the dustup, Mr. Hunt questioned the validity of Mr. Ascencao’s “story” — that of a kid who grew up poor and disenfranchised, shaping him into a man who now fights for issues he believes in passionately.

The Bristol Phoenix sat down with Mr. Ascencao this week to follow up on the shellfishing questions and to delve deeper into his life story. Here is much of Mr. Ascencao’s story, in his own words.

Where was he born?
Mr. Ascencao was born in 1993 to Illydia Ascencao and Charles Longo. He was the second of two boys. When he was born, his parents were living in Bristol, and his birth name was Laufton Longo.

“We lived for two years on a rinky-dink house boat in the harbor, and then we lived in the King Philip Inn,” Mr. Ascencao said. “My mother cleaned rooms. And then we lived a few years off of Bayview, on Varnum.”

A house boat?
“It was pretty run-down … My Dad got it in some kind of weird deal. There’s all these photos of me running around on it. My Dad, when I was younger, was a commercial fisherman before the collapse. The boat sank one year, so we moved to Alegria’s place.”

Growing up
Mr. Ascencao attended Walley School, until the family moved to Maine.

“Once the fishing industry collapsed, my mother — who had earned a nursing certification, so it was pretty much the only way we had to earn a living — we kind of had to go chase a job. So we ended up moving up to Maine, to a little town called Springfield … It was a town with about 400 people in it.”

Working at an early age
“I would do basically any job I could. Scrub pots and pans. Pick blueberries. We were in Eastport for a while, which is on the coast, and I would go fish and sell that door to door. I did basically everything I could to make money.”

Went to school in Lee
Mr. Ascencao and his family remained in Maine throughout middle school and high school, and he graduated from Lee Academy in Lee, Maine.

University of Pittsburg
Mr. Ascencao went to school at the University of Pittsburg, though he left before graduating.

“I got a whole bunch of scholarships out of high school, based on my SATs. It didn’t pay for my housing, so I worked to pay for that. And right about that time, my family life in Maine kind of exploded, so my mother came back down here and my whole family came back down here. I worked throughout college, and I had to send money back.

“My Mom came back here to Bristol, then East Providence for a few years, then back to Bristol.

“I was studying to be pre-Med in college, and I started working at a hospital, just cleaning and stuff like that, and I kind of quickly realized that the medical field wasn’t for me. Being there and seeing how patients were treated, seeing how hospitals were run — and I wouldn’t denigrate any of the actual staff there, they have tremendous stress on them — but that made me realize that was not going to be a life I wanted. I shifted off and went to do political work after that … I got three and a half years in and got a full-time job, so I never finished the degree.”

Asked if he regrets not getting his degree, he said, “I assume I’ll finish up at some point, but the truth is, with the work I’ve been doing since, every job I’ve gotten has been based on my previous experience. In the field I’m in, it doesn’t really matter.”

His entry into politics
“I worked on Obama’s 2012 campaign, first in the summer when I went back to Maine and got really engaged, and then in Pittsburg, doing campus organizing. I was organizing students, getting them registered to vote, and I ended up meeting a candidate for mayor, a guy named Bill Peduto.

“Bill was very progressive, very smart, a new urbanist, a very forward-thinking mayor. He was running in a field of four, and when the race started he was considered a long shot, but I hopped in his race, and we ran a very smart campaign, knocking doors every day, and he ended up winning by 12 points. It was a huge upset, a very big deal.”

A full-time job
“I went to work in the mayor’s constituent services office. I started doing work on a community organizing basis, meeting with organizations and neighborhoods and helping them interact with city services. Manchester is a very poor and African American neighborhood in Pittsburg that had been kind of ignored by the previous administration. So I was the first representative to go to a meeting there in six years

“They were asking for meager things, like their storm drains didn’t work and they hadn’t been cleaned in like a decade. So I would go to public works and say, ‘can we just do the storm drains.’ And that was amazing, because something so small like that, the appreciation level was sad, but it was wild.”

Deeper into politics
“I got very frustrated with funding issues we were having in the city, so I ended up leaving the mayor’s office and going to work for Tom Wolf, who was a gubernatorial candidate. I took over the western part of the state, running his campaign. We ended up winning the primary in every single county, and we went on to beat Tom Corbett in this huge landslide, and he was like the only Republican who lost in 2014, so that felt good.

“I worked on one more batch of local races in Pennsylvania … and then I had a kind of reckoning moment. I got a job offer that was very good, but it would have meant staying in one place for seven or eight years, and I didn’t want to do that. I loved Pittsburg. It was a beautiful town full of great people, but it wasn’t home.”

He worked on a state Senate race in Virginia that attracted some national attention, but after that, he went home to Rhode Island.

Political activist
“If you ask me what I do, day to day, I’m primarily an organizer. It’s the work I’ve always done. It’s the work I believe in. And what that means is, sitting down with volunteers, making them feel engaged, getting them to go out and knock doors, make phone calls, designing targeting for campaigns, who are we knocking, taking things we hear on doors and using that to craft messaging, so we’re a better match for what people want and need.”

Environmental Council of R.I.
“I came back to Rhode Island near the end of 2015 and didn’t have any idea what the hell I was going to do, but I knew this was where I wanted to be. I started applying for jobs, looking for work, and that was when I got the biggest contract I’ve had, the Environmental Council of Rhode Island work.

“That is rooted in renewable energy and conservation work. And it starts with a truth, that climate change is real, so what do we need to do about it? It targets all the barriers that are between us and renewable energy, and it tries to break them one by one.

“So sometimes that means things like carbon pricing, or cap and trade. Other times it’s smaller things, like virtual net metering, making sure we can sell back to the grid.

“It’s also mitigation work — we’re already a little bit screwed because of climate change, so what are we going to do about it? What are we going to do about flooding? Because the government isn’t really thinking about it. All the time, they do these big public works projects that are going to be moot in about 10 years, because the sea is going to swallow up the bridge they just rebuilt. Great job!

“So I was doing that work. A portion of it is education. A portion of it is organizing. And a portion of it is at the Statehouse, with activism.”

‘The horror’ of the Statehouse
Mr. Ascencao said his work with the Environmental Council exposed him to the “horror” of the General Assembly.

“When I started going to the Statehouse, the first bill I was up there for was virtual net metering — let’s allow you to sell your energy back to the grid, because it’s your energy — this is a ridiculous idea that you can’t do this. Every other state in New England has it.

“I went up to reps on the floor, and I would say, ‘This is a good bill for business. We have to do this. It will help us fight climate change.’ And I remember Democrats from the core of Providence telling me, ‘Oh, climate change isn’t real. It’s a hoax. Get out of here.’ And that’s crazy. So I got frustrated. I got really deeply frustrated at that.”

Recruiting ‘progressive’ candidates
“So I took that frustration and I got to work. I took the skills I had learned across the country, and I started recruiting candidates to challenge those reps. I recruited Marcia Ranglin-Vassell in Providence. I recruited Moira Walsh. I helped recruit Jason Knight. And we challenged incumbents who had been in office for 30 years … And this was all unpaid work. I didn’t receive any compensation at all.

“It was literally sitting down and saying, ‘Your rep is awful. Please consider running. If you run, I will help you.’ And we challenged these Democrats who had been in power for 30 years, who I don’t think share the values of their districts — I can’t believe the core of Providence doesn’t believe in common sense gun reform — and we ran really thin, hard campaigns. They had hundreds of thousands of dollars, and we had really thin budgets. We basically used shoelaces to get the job done. We won just by knocking and talking to voters every day.”

This was 2016, and Mr. Ascencao said he lived in Fox Point at the time “so I could get to work faster.”

The Trump Effect
“After Trump won, I basically spent December, January and February, all my time, to form a group called ‘Resist Hate RI,’ which is a group around getting federal officials to do their jobs, and getting states to step up, and we did organizing around the state, and I’ll be honest and say that was the first time I had thought about running myself.”

Earned sick days
“In 2017, I got super involved in the fight for earned sick days. That was the bill that finally made me snap. I would go around and set up community meetings. I would motivate people to interact. And I would actually see them go up to state reps and be told, ‘screw off, come back in the summer.’ And then I would come back in the building later in the day and see those same reps sit down with corporate lobbyists.

“And that drove me to a boiling point, where I spent a ridiculous amount of my time out knocking doors. Angry knocking. And we won that one just by literally terrifying people, by calling reps and letting them know that if they voted no, they would lose their reelection. And it’s also probably the point where Nicholas Mattiello developed a hatred of me. Which I’m a little proud of. I won’t lie.”

Mr. Ascencao moved to Bradford Street in Bristol in June of 2017, when he started to build a new base of support.

Working Families
“In 2018, I started thinking about what I wanted to do in life, and what I wanted to accomplish, so I started doing small house parties and community gatherings here in the East Bay, in the hopes of starting a chapter of Working Families. It’s a political organization.

“Basically, you take my ideology about progressive values, and you build an organization that’s about electing people who believe things, rather than in a party. They do electoral work. They do issue work. And they have a very good philosophy where you set up your own chapter in your community, and you do your own work and develop your own causes, and they support that.”

Building a team
“When I came to town, people told me I should run for town council or school committee, and I thought that was kind of ridiculous, because my passions are not at all for town council or school committee. I would be awful in those jobs, just awful.

“I started hosting parties at my house every few weeks. You basically get some food, some wine, and you sit down and talk politics.”
Those conversations got him active in local causes like Bristol’s plastic bag ban and common sense gun control.

The 2018 General Assembly
More than anything, Mr. Ascencao said, the 2018 General Assembly session motivated him to run for office.

“In 2017, General Assembly leadership worked together to pass some bills that were reasonable, to find some compromises. We had the domestic violence bill pass. We had earned sick days pass. We had voter registration pass.”

Then things changed.

“In 2018, the answer was ‘No, you do what we say. You’re socialists. You’re progressives. You don’t belong here. Get out.’

“And they worked actively in the chambers to punish people who believe in my values. In a big way. And that’s what you see with the pay equity bill. And that’s the bill that made me end up deciding to run.

“The pay equity bill was a pretty modest bill. It said that if a man and a woman are doing the same job, they have to get the same pay … It’s currently the law in Massachusetts … At the Statehouse, they fought against the bill, they blocked the bill, and on the last night of session, they didn’t only kill the bill, they made amendments that stripped away protections that had been in place since the 1930s.”

He changed his name
This spring, Mr. Ascencao formally changed his name from Laufton Longo to Laufton Ascencao, his mother’s maiden name.

“My mother raised me. Since I was 12, I was going by Laufton Ascencao or Laufton Ascencao-Longo. It’s always been important to me. I don’t know how much you know about Portuguese people, but they’re kind of intense about last names. It’s a family honor kind of a thing.

“So it mattered to me that my mother always got credit for things I accomplished in life. But I hadn’t legally changed my name. So when I decided to run, I changed it to Laufton Ascencao, because that’s the side of the family that raised me, that’s the side that deserves the credit.

“Regardless of how much my relationship with my father has improved, my mother was there in my life at every moment, and there is no one on this planet I love and respect more than her.”

On fishing and the water
“I was born and lived on a houseboat. I learned how to fish and swim before I could walk. I learned how to dive when I was a little guy. As soon as I had arms, I learned to bull rake. Being on the water and doing that work has been an incredible part of my life. And I come from a family of fishermen. It’s a huge, huge part of my identity that I always want to acknowledge and talk about.”

Ties to this district
Though Mr. Ascencao left Bristol when he was in elementary school and returned just over a year ago, he refutes critics who say his ties to the community are thin.

“I was born here. I was baptized in St. Elizabeth’s Church. My family has lived here their entire lives. My family lives here now. My mother immigrated to this town from Madeira. My grandmother lives here in town. This is my home.”