Thoughts on elections: part two

Today when my neighbors in Maplewood’s 8th district go to vote, they’ll see my name on the ballot. I’m doing the thing I said I wouldn’t do, which is to run for something. I wanted to be the one outside the ropes, remember? Rinsing off the valiant boxer’s mouthguard and telling her to get back in the ring for one more round. I didn’t want to be the boxer, but here I am, running for District Leader against a 22 year incumbent and his friend, who he apparently asked to run once he heard I was. Two of the three of us will win, and soon I’ll know if one of them is me.

I am running on a slate with a dozen other people in Maplewood and South Orange, to try to break up the opaque behemoth that is our current local representation on the county committee. Over the course of getting more and more involved in trying to abolish the line and defang the county executives that control how the ballot is designed, and therefore who wins primaries and therefore who wins general elections, it became clear that these District Leaders, though their individual power is limited, could play a significant role in forcing the county to be more democratic, more transparent, more accountable. And yet no one - not one single friend or neighbor I spoke with - had ever even heard of the role. A group of us started looking around and seeing how many District Leader seats remain vacant, and realizing that change would only come from strength in numbers, we all decided to run.

One of the main organizers of this effort had spares of the big yellow double legal pad sized petitions we had to use to collect signatures, and I drove to her house one Monday morning to pick it up, six days before they were due. I was exhausted from the weekend and the mad dash of getting kids out of the house, already in the trance of to dos from a growing body of clients I had to keep adding to in order to remain in my home following my divorce, on speaker phone with a dear friend going through her own hard time, remembering I needed to order a new door knob and overnight it before the handyman came tomorrow, bogged down with worry about the broader political moment and uneasy with the baseline sickness I felt about what was happening in Palestine.

Erika came to my car window and handed me the petition. She looked at me, in all my Monday fragility, and said: “You don’t have to do this. We can do it without you. If this is going to take away your joy, you shouldn’t do it.” I took the form, blearily said thanks, and drove away thinking, damn right. The last thing I fucking need is one more thing to do.

I got home and drafted a text to the District Leader group that said; I’m sorry you guys, I just don’t have the bandwidth. But the day got too busy for me to send, and by the end of it I thought, what the hell. I can get 10 signatures and at least light a fire under this incumbent, and then once I’m on the ballot I can decide how much I care.

My best friend, with whom I communicate throughout the day via audio messages, laughed because every time I mentioned having to go to someone’s house to get a petition signature or the impending filing deadline, in the midst of the other litany of things I was regaling her with, I would start by saying “I don’t know if I’ve told you but I’m running for District Leader….” “I can’t remember if I’ve mentioned this but…. ”

Yes, she would say, I know. You’re running for District Leader.

I got 25 signatures, more than double what was needed, and filed the petition before putting my kids in the car to drive to Foxwoods Resort and Casino, the cheapest option I could find for a still fun and exotic-ish spring break destination. And exotic it was - the smell of cigarettes assaulting us like casino tear gas immediately upon walking through the sliding glass doors.

While I was there, sitting by the indoor pool as my kids played and I worked on my laptop “from home,” I received a voicemail from the incumbent, the former mayor of Maplewood. “Jessica,” he said, “I’m sure we’ve met somewhere. I heard you are running in my district and I think you assumed other seat was vacant but it is not. My friend will be running with me, so I wanted to make sure you knew you would be running a contested race.”

And that’s when I started to care - when he put “my” before district.

Just because you’ve lived here for 40 years and I’ve only been here seven, just because you probably aren’t working 60+ hours a week to pay your taxes, just because you’ve held a position for over two decades because no one has ever challenged you because no know even knew you held it, this district is no less mine than yours.

And even though the last thing on earth I have time to do is challenge you, now I must.

My best friend made me a graphic, which I turned into a lawn sign. And even in this town of endless lawn signs - lawn signs about candidates, artificial turf, criminal trials and parties - there had never been one for District Leader, or certainly not one like this:

When I and my coterie of vivacious, Jessica t-shirt wearing canvassers went out knocking on doors, people would say, “oh yeah I’ve seen those signs!'“ And when we would ask, “do you know what a District Leader is?” not one single one of them said yes. It’s such an easy pitch it just writes itself.

I keep telling everyone that it will be a more interesting story if I lose. “Thoughts on losing” has more of a ring to it, especially when you lose against a person who embodies why change is hard. Who is significantly older and male and white and wealthy and well connected, who benefits when people aren’t talking about the role, asking for more information, figuring out how things at the county level work. How interesting will it be to see that it did come down to just three votes. How much can we learn about democracy when we can see so clearly why people don’t throw their hat in the ring, why it’s so rare to run, why winning, especially winning against entrenched old school power, is hard.

But maybe I say that because it’s scary to say you want something. It’s so much easier to say I never wanted it to begin with, so it doesn’t matter that it didn’t happen.

In the midst of all of this, a relationship ended. Or I stopped seeing someone I was seeing; or we broke up; or we were dating, and now we’re not. I’m not sure what the right words to use are, because I had decided that I didn’t want or need to put words on it, and made a conscious decision not to. But that too was a way of saying I never wanted this to begin with, so it can’t hurt now that it’s over.

It’s scary to put your name on a lawn sign and say I want your vote. It’s scary to knock on a stranger’s door, even scarier if they are your neighbor who you will inevitably see again at block parties and bus stops. And it’s scary to meet someone in person that you matched with on a dating app. It’s scary to get naked with someone, to tell someone you care about them, to say you hope it works out.

Maybe the biggest risk is to say “I want this.” To say: “I want to win.” Because of course, the chances are, you might not.

It’s easier to be outside of that ring. It’s easier to believe in someone else, someone who isn’t you. It’s easier to be disappointed than to feel like you’ve disappointed people who have believed in you and invested in you.

Another thing I keep saying is, I’ll never do this again. It’s a fun exercise but this will be it for me. And maybe because I’m 40, or because I got divorced after a decade of thinking I couldn’t, or because at least for now I am just barely managing to stay in the house and life I love, or maybe its because when I ring the doorbell and say “I’m running for District Leader” it actually makes me feel excited and alive, proud and present and ready for whatever the next question is… maybe I know that’s probably a lie.

If I was a betting person, if I was betting on a boxer in a ring who was me, I’d probably say - I have no idea if she’ll win this one, but the chances are she’ll be back.

I forgot if I’ve mentioned it; there’s just been so much else going on.

But I’m running for District Leader.

And I really hope I win.