Life recently took an interesting turn for 21-year-old New Hampshire State Rep. Denny Ruprecht.
Ruprecht, the youngest member of the New Hampshire House of Representatives, was tapped as one of 17 rising stars in the party to give Tuesday night's keynote address at the Democratic National Convention.
"I got a phone call, followed by an email, about three weeks ago from the Biden campaign," he said.
The message Ruprecht and the others gave was that leadership matters.
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"That there is a clear contrast between the chaos of the Trump presidency and the vision and the direction of Joe Biden and Kamala Harris," he explained.
Ruprecht, a Plymouth State University senior, says he was inspired to get into politics as a high school student when he met Bernie Sanders.
"How forceful he was on climate," he recalled. "And working class issues."
Ruprecht knows about the working class. His father, who worked in a mill, died when he was 3, leaving his mother to raise him and his three older siblings.
Biden, he says, understands that kind of upbringing.
"He's middle-class Joe. And you know, Joe Biden, he grew up as a scrappy kid in Scranton, Pennsylvania," Ruprecht said.
Ruprecht, from Landaff, won his House seat two years ago at the age of 19. He says he was reluctantly recruited when they couldn't get a Democrat to run in the traditionally-Republican district.
"A lot of people have this expectation that you get in there and you just kind of wave a magic wand and things happen," he said. "That's not at all how it works."
Ruprecht is graduating from college in May. He says he's considering business school, but that if Biden wins in November, who knows what opportunities could open up?
