Mile 3/26: Running for Office
TOMORROW IS ELECTION DAY PLEASE VOTE!
By the third mile of a race, your body has warmed up and you are ready to run. As your mind starts to drift thinking about what you’ve gotten yourself into – a distance, which was run by Pheidippides from Marathon to Athens, and led to his immediate death – you must recenter yourself and remind yourself why you’re running. This is something you also have to do every day when you’re running for office. If your why isn’t strong enough – you will either quit or perform poorly. So think carefully about your why before embarking on either of these decisions.
When I first made the decision to run for office, it was in the summer of 2016. At this point in my life, I was entering my second year of college at Rutgers-Newark University. I was 19. I was pre-med with plans to do a dual major in neurobiology and economics. I knew of 2 politicians – the President of the United States, and the Mayor of my hometown, Jersey City. I had no connection to the political system and was civic engagement not encouraged in my community. To be quite frank, I didn’t know of any role models in politics. Particularly in my city, I didn’t see anyone who looked like me in a position of leadership. Looking back at it with the experience I have now, I don’t think I would’ve run in that election. But sometimes, on occasion, we do things we wouldn’t normally do because of circumstances that force us to rise to meet the moment.
My moment came when then-candidate for president Donald Trump said, “I watched in Jersey City, New Jersey, where thousands and thousands of people were cheering as that building was coming down. Thousands of people were cheering.” He would go on to say that those “people” were Muslims. Jersey City is my hometown. I lived among the Muslims in Jersey City. No one was cheering. What those remarks did though, was open wounds from the aftermath of 9/11 and the impact of growing up Muslim in a post-9/11 society. I remembered how my father was laid off from his job, my mother had people throw stones at her, and my brother was harassed by jokes asking if Osama Bin Laden was our uncle. It was November 2015 and while I felt a sense of urgency – I didn’t know how to channel my emotions to make a change.
Enter, my friend and first campaign manager, Saad Admani. Unlike me, Saad was two years wiser and had always planned to be a lawyer. Saad had originally kicked around the idea of running for the Board of Education as a means to make a change. Because he was someone I deeply respected, I told him I would support him in any way possible and started to research the political dynamics of Jersey City. As the summer drew closer, however, Saad concluded it didn’t make sense to run for personal reasons. My research, on the other hand, had lit a fire in my belly about the ways that I could help to instill real change on the ground. Beyond the macro-political environment, it frustrated me that our educational outcomes in Jersey City were substandard. It bothered me that young people did not have a seat at the table. My first campaign really focused on engaging students. The argument I often made to skeptics was that when we talked about education we spoke to several stakeholders – we spoke to parents, teachers, principals, administrators, elected officials, policymakers, and taxpayers. However, we ignored the voices that I thought mattered the most: the students.
Caption: This photo was taken after our campaign complained that while every other candidate that ran for office in 2016 had a headshot in the newspaper, our headshots were left out. That moment was a reminder of how little people thought of our candidacy. After a viral video calling out this injustice, our campaign finally got photos taken by the local paper, I decided to let people know I meant business. (PC: Michael Dempsey | The Jersey Journal)
The Board of Education consisted of 9 candidates, and every year 3 seats were up – this staggered system made it so that every year someone could run for a 3-year seat. I teamed up with Kimberly Goycochea, another 19-year-old student, and ran as a dynamic duo (Note: Rookie mistake as a politician – if there are three seats up for election, you should run a three-person team). As two 19-year-old candidates though, we thought we were uniquely positioned to serve as that voice for students on the board.
The campaign trail was brutal. I had to remind myself several times why I was subjecting my mind and body to the torture of the campaign cycle. That semester, I would wake up around 5 am to get to campus to perform a 4-hour-long surgery on pregnant rats. Then I would try to manage my course load, which consisted of 8 classes - including organic chemistry. Finally, I would spend every other hour possible trying to campaign. It was an ordeal that I naively hoped I would never have to put myself through again.
That election in 2016 is one that I will never forget. I had to deal with candidates that had illegal posters on telephone poles, people who ripped down my campaign material, and a team distributing literature that had a picture of Hillary Clinton saying, “Don’t forget to vote for my friends!” On that election night, November 8th, 2016 – I both lost my election and watched Trump win his. But, I remember every single vote I received that day: 7,167. That number always stood out to me to remind me to have faith in our democracy. It was that faith that led me to run again in 2017. In that election I won by only 68 votes - the final tally was 9,388 to 9,320.
This is a friendly reminder to exercise your right to vote tomorrow on election day - every vote really does count!