Within the Margin

Watching the right and left battle on social media spaces ranks as one of the least enjoyable activities available to us on the internet today. With few exceptions, I don’t wade into threads anymore, be they populated by friends or strangers. Persuading the person I actually disagree with seems nigh-impossible, especially given the bad-faith argumentation that dominates such discussions, so the only hope is that silent and undecided observers of the thread might come around to my way of thinking. That’s a worthy goal, but it’s one that I put into practice through my governing and political activities damn close to 365 days a year. So I simply don’t have much interest in doing it online, and never less so that November and December when I’m coming off of months of 12-18 hour days on the campaign trail without days off let alone these mythical “weekends” that people sometimes reference as part of their lives.

But shortly after the recently-concluded campaign, I found myself sitting at a table with several conservative Republicans in a dynamic lending itself to banter and occasional verbal jousting. No more Democratic bubble of the campaign office, full of agreeable voices – now I was in the Dutchess County Board of Elections for an absentee and affidavit ballot count. Or, more accurately, for the dwelling-upon of said ballots to find excuses not to count them. My candidate was trailing in a tight state senate race – we wanted every legal ballot opened as that was the only path for us to make up the numbers. The Republicans were in a different position. Knowing that absentee ballots in Dutchess County include a high proportion of Dem-leaning second homers and college students, they had two goals:

• slow the process down, so that the inevitable shrinkage in margin unfolds tediously and the status quo is cemented in public perception (“Serino’s still ahead – this thing’s not changing.”)
• find reasons to throw out ballots (like a blurry postmark, or an affidavit ballot envelope missing information that the election inspector should have alerted them to cure, since a basic tenet of democracy ought to be that election workers facilitate eligible voters in casting ballots rather than hindering them).

Having once worked at the BOE myself as a staffer, I had seen many of these counts up close, and heard many of the frivolous arguments for challenging ballots. But either the quality of discussion around the ballot-tossing table was higher ten years ago, or my tolerance for cliched, predictable, bad-faith banter has declined.

Each day, my face would tire from the brow-furrowing that came with reacting to the GOP election commissioner and a local Republican operative argue for or against this ballot or that one. Dozens of ballots would be treated one way, and then *poof* – conditions change!

Let’s take military and overseas ballots. We all want to ensure that those serving our country in the armed forces or foreign service can participate in our democracy, right? Quick digression: this has been a professional concern of mine for years, as I work in the New York State Senate. There, the Democratic conference has tried for years to join the Assembly in passing a bill to consolidate the federal and state/local primaries in June, rather than the June/September split that currently exists. Senate Republicans – in the majority the last eight years and seventy-seven of the last eighty – have insisted on an August consolidation, even though this does little to protect those military/overseas voters from a drawn-out primary certification that could result in them getting their ballots too late to return them on time. We had ballots postmarked by the deadline that arrived days after the later military/overseas postmark this year…in other words, the voter did everything right but the post office just takes too long to move the mail. We need as much time as possible between primaries and general elections to ensure that those voters have the lead time necessary to receive and submit ballots.

Back to the counting table: dozens of absentee ballots get tossed because an envelope is unsealed, or the voter failed to fill out the inner envelope correctly. And then comes a military/overseas ballot with the same problems…and the GOP commissioner wants to count it. OK, I say: I understand that we feel badly about this individual, likely in the armed forces, losing their vote. But what’s the legal argument for treating it differently, I inquire. “I have none,” says the GOP commissioner. “Ok…well, what’s the logic, then? I’m trying to find a path here to count this vote that isn’t arbitrary, since plenty of similar ballots have been challenged.” “I have none, comes the reply. “I just want it to count,” he says.

Well, that’s great. So do I! But I wanted the other ones to count, too. Remember, we have no idea what their party affiliation is at that point. Those college absentees include plenty of Republicans, and those military absentees include plenty of Democrats – including the former treasurer of the county Young Dems, a good friend of mine now residing on a naval base. My goal is to maximize the franchise, so if we want to let unsealed inner envelopes slide because we think maybe they got jostled open in transit, hey: I can do the benefit of the doubt thing even if the legality is iffy – if we’re being logical and consistent. What I can’t do is support an arbitrary process, treating one class of human being differently from another when it comes to voting. This country shed blood over that very issue, and established legal protections accordingly. But to call for consistency in one direction or the other is met with mocking disdain: because it implies an interest in governing or in good faith, and this is not about either of those things. For them, it’s about point-scoring and controlling the discussion – owning the libs, in other words. It’s not as nasty in person, at that counting table, as what we see in online spaces, but it has the same effect of rendering discussion devoid of any greater meaning.

This sort of thing was punctuated by interludes of talking about state politics, given the impending Democratic majority in the state senate, which has promised to unlock voting reforms long-stalled under Republican rule in the chamber. The Republican commissioner and party operative would raise the perils of early voting and their assurances that it would lead to voter fraud – never mind the infinitesimally-rare occurrences of it in states already using early voting. They’d extol the virtues of no-excuse-needed absentee balloting as being sufficient to open the franchise to all who desire to cast a ballot…while literally sitting a table tossing out absentee ballots because the post office failed to execute its job properly. 

To sit with these talking points merchants for hours and argue over absentee ballots and public policy is not to engage in political discourse with the hope of persuading one another on the merits. Nor is it to arrive at a place where each says, “hey, we’re just weighting certain components of this question differently and arriving at a different conclusion accordingly.” Instead, one simply furrows one’s brow and shakes one’s head as contradictions are uttered with a bewildering joyfulness, as the subject is changed every time a previous statement is challenged, and as their interest in actual governance recedes further into the rear-view mirror amid the pursuit of landing one more blow for willful public ignorance. I knew that good faith discussions among strangers had largely disappeared, and even among acquaintances and friends behind keyboards. It wasn’t until this fall that I realized the extent to which it has disappeared from in-person discussion among people making decisions in that moment, in that space, about the very functioning of our democracy.

I spent a good chunk of 2018 running the field operation for a state senate campaign in New York’s Hudson Valley. Democrats needed to flip one seat to finally retake the senate after spending 77 of the last 80 years as the chamber’s minority conference while stalled legislation piled up at the feet of a Republican majority unwilling to move the state forward on voting reforms, on ethics and campaign finance reforms, on reproductive rights and contraceptive access, on justice for victims of child sexual assault. It has been my calling and my mission for many years to flip this body, and toward that end I put everything I had into winning the 41st Senate District this year.

Statewide, we succeeded! We flipped eight seats. But in the 41st, the result was not so triumphant. We lost by less than 700 votes, or about 0.58% of the total votes cast. It was heartbreaking, but make no mistake: it was vastly better to come close than to be blown out. 683 votes is a better margin than 684. And I’d rather it be 682. Or 681…you get the idea.

And make no mistake on this point, either: it was never supposed to be this close. The incumbent, Sue Serino, is vapid but popular. She’s reasonably visible in much of the district, and she hides behind her conference’s unanimous procedural votes to block popular legislation rather than actually ever having to vote against the bills themselves (with the occasional exception). As a member of the majority, she has been able to deliver dollars to her district. She maintains a friendly demeanor and until this campaign, generally received a pass for a decidely unfriendly voting record. On top of Serino’s strengths, the 41st Senate District (featuring most of Dutchess County and three towns in Putnam County) had a unique relationship to the governor’s race atop the ballot. Andrew Cuomo is not popular here, and his Republican opponent was the Golden Boy – Dutchess County executive Marcus Molinaro. While the latter’s gubernatorial campaign was underfunded and often flailed as he tried to thread the needle between appeasing his Trump-loving base and moderating himself for a blue state in a blue year, he was always going to do reasonably well in Dutchess. Previous elections offered a mixed bag in terms of Molinaro’s coattails, but the general political public’s expectation was that he would bring out otherwise-demoralized local Republicans and provide a boost to Serino by actively campaigning for GOP representation in Albany. Serino + Molinaro was supposed to be an unbeatable combo in a district with a long GOP history, and that voted for Hillary Clinton by a tiny margin, with a sizable third party vote.

But Karen Smythe ran a great campaign, and ran far ahead of Cuomo in Dutchess (and Putnam). Serino’s real estate allies spent big in an effort to bail her out in the campaign’s final weeks, but their paid out-of-district army of lit-droppers leaving generic door hangers at voters’ homes was not quite as inspiring as the legions of local Smythe volunteers talking to their neighbors about Karen’s background and ideas, and Serino’s problematic issue stances. We built a phenomenal field operation to back our engaging and indefatigable candidate.

***

There wasn’t any time to waste thinking about bizarre scenarios that would upend the race and weaken Sue enough to defeat her. There wasn’t going to be a corruption scandal (beyond all the forms of corruption that are perfectly legal in state politics). There wasn’t going to be a dramatic gaffe. There wasn’t going be a sexual harassment claim, or a shouting match with a constituent, or a comment about public hangings. Nothing was going to fall from the sky and gift us the glorious ending that we wanted. We had to win the race ourselves, one voter at a time, through the interactions Karen and her volunteers were having with volunteers, and through our mailers and advertisements. We came incredibly close.

We may find that the current president of the United States – who indeed offers a teeming pile of corruption, gaffes, sexual harassment claims, and horrific statements about racial violence – has already had all of his weaknesses priced in by voters, and it seems clear that his fervent base simply won’t leave him. Yes, he prevailed in 2016 against a similarly unpopular opponent and thanks in no small part to the third party votes cast by individuals who thought it safe to do so. But he did, nonetheless, prevail. One assumes Democrats will nominate a better candidate in 2020, but they might not. One assumes third party votes will drop, as they did in the 2018 midterms, but they might not – especially if a high-profile independent bid emerges (Kasich?) One assumes that the Mueller investigation, when concluded, will paint the president in an unflattering light, but one cannot assume it will lead to legal action or anything that damages the president beyond his already historically weak standing…standing that does not rule out his election.

He already has all the problems that we could never truly hope a Serino to have, and that hasn’t been enough to finish him off. To hope for more – a deus ex machina scenario where the shortcomings of the electorate, or the opposition party, or both are rendered moot, or a sudden reawakening of American idealism – cannot be the strategy. We have to win in 2020 the same way we tried to, and very nearly did, win 2018 in Dutchess and Putnam counties: one voter at a time, with a great candidate and fantastic volunteers having meaningful discussions with that segment of the electorate that can be persuaded and mobilized if only we put in the work – if only we make the ending ourselves.