A personal reflection on the campaign
Last night, after a very long and protracted process that involved a broken printer on a vote-counting machine, I found out, sometime between 12:30 AM and 1:00 AM in City Hall, that I had been elected to Medford City Council with 5,509 votes. It was an honor, and, with the overall progressive win, a crystal-clear sign that residents were ready for change. I nearly lost my balance when I found out, but I was saved from falling over by a group hug. The elections office had initially reported about 10,000 day-of votes, but there was a technical delay in tallying the mail-in and early ballots, of which there were approximately 3000. The margins of the six other candidates were high enough that it was safe to call the race for them, but the vote difference between myself and the eighth- and ninth-place finishers was small enough to potentially be swayed by the early and mail-in ballots. This left me in a unique limbo (which wasn't helped by the fact that I had gotten to sleep at 4:00 AM the previous night). With the delays, the election-night party was extended later than anybody anticipated, and after it ended we drove to City Hall at midnight, just as the elections commission was finalizing the recount. They handed out several sheets with the final vote count; a friend looked at it quickly, then said, “Matt, you won.” With the middle-of-the-night group hug, I physically felt a weight lift off my shoulders, and it ended a journey that had begun one year before when I received an email from an incumbent councilor asking me if I'd be interested in running. I took the next day off work to calm my nerves and thought about the previous year.
Me and the two other successful city council challengers, Anna Callahan (center) and Emily Lazzaro (right), as we watched a projector screen with the vote tallies coming in.
A very personal part of the election is that, in some specific ways, it changed the way I interact with people. In order to run a successful campaign, a candidate needs money (as can be seen in the public campaign finance reports, my mailer alone cost just under $7000), which means asking for it, which is a behavior that needs to be learned; I needed to talk with more people than I'd ever talked with before, and I had to learn to be much more careful about what I said in front of them; and I needed to switch from the mentality of criticizing policy ideas to generating them, which would then be subject to others' criticism.
Campaign funding at this level doesn't come from outside organizations or super PACs. There aren't a lot of organizations that are trying to throw money at first-time progressive candidates running for local offices. United Automotive Workers committed $500 to my campaign, and the Environmental League of Massachusetts gave $61.35 in in-kind campaign contributions (i.e. their paid staff, which canvassed for me and a few other candidates a few times in the election). Of the money I raised just prior to the election, $6000 was a loan from my own personal bank account, and about $12,000 was from friends, family, colleagues, and residents around the city, including around $1400 from people who donated to the Our Revolution Medford slate of candidates.
No normal person enjoys calling their closest friends, distant relatives, college roommates, acquaintances who barely remember them — anyone they know, and asking "hey, can I have $100?" Some people immediately and reliably donated to me; some could not; a few politely refused; and some said they would but didn’t. Each of those conversations initially made me feel like a swindler, but at the same time I kept reminding myself that it's necessary: good candidates benefit an entire community, and good candidates usually cannot totally self-fund a race. Over the last year, I got very good at asking for things — resources, money, others' time — and the mental exhaustion of a campaign had a way of chipping away at my shyness.
I've also talked to more people in the course of a few months than I've likely spoken with in the decade before that. This gave me exposure to a range of municipal needs and political ideas across Medford. Many people that I've spoken with want better roads or more parking around Medford Square; some asked me about my views on Roe v Wade and Critical Race Theory; some people wanted to be taxed more, and others wanted to be taxed less; many were happy to vote for a candidate that bothered to come to their door; and others just wanted to get back to eating dinner. In a few cases, I would knock at doors, wait for a bit, drop my literature, and depart, only to have the person quickly open their door to take my literature when I got to the next door. In having thousands of conversations about the issues facing Medford, I became very familiar with what is on residents’ minds. I also got better at navigating certain talking points because I did it so often. I realized that experienced politicians sound so refined when they talk because they've just had so much practice talking about the same handful of topics.
As the campaign season went on, I focused more and more on talking with a coalition of left-leaning and progressive voters. Bridge-building across ideological lines is difficult during a campaign, and there are practical reasons for this. The goal of a local campaign is to talk to as many people as possible and get as many votes as possible in the process. Talking to fifty progressives in two hours means that I spent two hours getting fifty votes. Talking to people who disagree inevitably takes more time as one hashes through the various issues that we disagree about. This is more productive for bridge-building, but, at the same time, it will only net five votes in that same two-hour period. Introducing myself to a certain coalition was absolutely necessary to win. But it's also one way that the current environment disincentivizes cross-group communication and thus contributes to polarity. This state of affairs doesn’t sit well with me, but, unfortunately, it is what it is.
Now that the campaign is over, there is a lot of work that needs to be done. Rezoning, the budget, fixing the charter, learning the nitty-gritty mechanics of government, seeking out and interrogating policy wonks. The soft work, which is just as important, is bridge-building: seeking out residents who feel disengaged or left out and bringing them into the fold. Now that the campaign is over, I can spend productive time on that. And it will take time, and it will take more learning on my part, but that’s the case with all worthwhile projects.
