Mamdani Triumphs While Northampton, Massachusetts' Challengers Fail to Expand the Franchise

I worked my ass off on the local mayoral race, walking about 15 miles a day passing out homemade leaflets detailing the moral and legal indiscretions of our incumbent mayor of Northampton, Gina Louise Sciarra. For three days leading up to the election I placed my flyers in the gaping mouths of rotting jack-o-lanterns, under porch matts and inside screen doors. All told, I might have sent some 1,200 or so single page manifestos into the void. I had hoped that my scathing sketch of our mini autocrat would send my fellow townsfolk to their Facebook and Instagram communities full of newfound horror. I imagined myself initiating a cascading series of soul searching, pre-election confrontations capable of bringing history to a screeching halt. Mine was an impulsive, ad hoc quest to go it alone. Politics are not usually shaped by lone guerrillas venturing into hidden brush. But the whispered predictions favored a landslide win for the mayor. I had nothing to lose.

The adventures of leaflets take shape along a continuum. Thousands of them might be used for shopping lists and scrabble score sheets, and yet one special leaflet might turn the universe around and send us all on a wild journey to an undiscovered dimension. Someone somewhere might find Jesus in a leaflet and drag half of an entire community to salvation. My feet got sore, my hands froze and darkness settled early. My shopping bag full of pages became lighter and the massive pile of copies (I paid a local print shop forty bucks per thousand) eventually shrunk to a single sheet - a souvenir of my grandiose plot to save my town. I quit an hour after sunset on election eve. The universe patted me patronizingly on the back and promised to take over from here.

As a matter of philosophical consistency, I had decided to hone in on Hampshire Heights on election eve - a low income housing development situated in Northampton voting precinct 1A. I had written in a recent piece that the US plunge into dystopian fascism can only be remediated via a massive effort to forge a connection between progressive activists and the disenfranchised poor masses. Northampton mirrors the nation as a whole - political control rests entirely in the hands of the comfortable class. Critically, the victims of Northampton’s politically callous rulers suffer invisibly within the siloed territory of public housing developments like Hampshire Heights. This development occupies space that residents of surrounding, affluent neighborhoods never see. Children from housing projects disproportionately comprise the public school population, and fail silently due to the stingy funding imposed by Mayor Gina-Louise Sciarra and her obedient, austerity minded city council sycophants. In the 2021 mayoral election less than a quarter of 1A precinct voters participated in the election, and these delivered some 80% of the votes to Sciarra. Hampshire Heights has been built in a “glacial kettle” adjacent to the wealthier 1A neighborhoods dotted with “Gina-Louise Sciarra for mayor” signs.

In Northampton, “Fully Fund Our Schools” lawn signs have popped up on manicured lawns like mushrooms after a rainstorm. A brand new movement called “Save Our Schools” (SOS) had formed and organized a “slate” of candidates to challenge the Northampton “establishment.” But oddly, the movement and the victims remain a world apart. In Hampshire Heights I did not see a single political sign in any of the windows of hundreds of apartments. At ground zero of Gina-Louise Sciarra’s war on poor people, I could not find a whisper of protest. The core strategy of both US political parties strives to neuter the agency of poor people, and, in the centrist Democratic Party fiefdom of Northampton, poor people suffer while a few detached activists ineffectually take up their cause.

I had two choices: I could focus on the surrounding areas of million dollar homes and hope that my flyer would appeal to the moral sense of privileged voters, or I could pass out my leaflets to hundreds of poor families with the understanding that poor folks in the US are unlikely to vote. As a retired outreach mental health worker I have to balance two things - I am completely at home in public housing developments, and I have had, over my decades of work, endured the pitying gaze of my favorite clients whenever I tried to convince them to register to vote.

With the goal of heading off our bourgeoise mayor and her well oiled and funded local juggernaut, I had my pick from two futile strategies. Hampshire Heights offered one advantage - poor people are concentrated together in crowded circumstances so that I could slip flyers into four screen doors at a time without walking a step. In only a few hours I unloaded five or six hundred flyers. It would have taken me four times as long to saturate rich neighborhoods. Efficacy and moral resolve sometimes come together.

At one point, an older Hispanic housing complex worker drove along side on a tractor and informed me that I needed permission from the office. “But I’m gonna let you finish with no hassles. Just for next time, go to the office.” Did this man signal approval? The interaction sent a jolt of confidence through me.

No one expected Gina-Louise Sciarra to lose the election against her overmatched opponent, Jillian Duclos. The latter struggles to articulate insight, passion or much confidence. Duclos seems well intentioned, likeable and a viable default given no other choice, but she is no Zohran Mamdani, no talisman for Northampton’s alleged progressive soul. Northampton had a very strong candidate, Dan Briendel, who had somehow failed to win the “SOS” endorsement - and lost to the “SOS” endorsed Duclos in a preliminary runoff in September. In Northampton even the more progressive political organizations prefer the comfort of centrism. Furthermore, the entire slate of Sciarra’s opposition - running for town council and school committee - lapsed into one of the favorite pastime of left leaning political organizations, infighting and internecine accusations. I wasn’t campaigning out of a deep confidence for a growing movement in the manner of workers for Zohran Mamdani - I only walked in the November gloom out of a sense of discouraged obligation.

The next day I voted and wondered about the well being of my leaflets that detailed Mayor Sciarra’s (likely) fraudulent purchase of a local church with tax payer money - seemingly as a favor to a notoriously corrupt and hated landlord named Eric Suher. The church cost the town over three million dollars and involved a suspicious appraisal. The church, purchased two years ago, rots in neglect and will most likely never be used for its alleged purpose of becoming a place of respite for the unhoused. I also focused a sentence or two on the mayor’s eagerness to both piss away cash and shortchange the schools. At 10PM the results came in - Duclos led Sciarra by 33 votes! Had we done the impossible? Had my leaflets flown out like so many angelic apostles and redeemed this town? Had the centrist Democratic Party soul of “Paradise City” been so rotted and hollowed that a fistful of leaflets brought it crashing down? Well, uh, no. One precinct remained to be counted, 4B, Sciarra’s home precinct, a place of wealth - I held my breath.

Of course Sciarra won by a whisker, a mere 76 votes out of over nine thousand cast. Could I have flipped 39 votes if I had more leaflets and another hour? Did my leaflets make any difference? Here is what I learned: precinct 1A, home to Hampshire Heights, voted narrowly for Sciarra. Of some 1,600 registered voters in this precinct only about five hundred voted, but in the last election in 2021 fewer than four hundred cast ballots, and Sciarra won in a landslide. A few other Northampton precincts saw spikes of over a hundred votes compared with the 2021 mayoral election. One was precinct 3B where I also distributed a couple of hundred leaflets. 3B voted narrowly for Duclos. Precincts 6A and 6B also saw spikes in turnout and huge victories for Duclos. I passed out no leaflets in either of those precincts. Overall, the verdict on my influence is only a guess, but one trend appears to be certain - where turnout increased, the electorate rejected the centrist Sciarra. But Sciarra vastly underperformed her sycophants running for city council seats - both in wards where I dropped leaflets and where I did not. Also, another act of guerrilla journalism, The Alt-Daily Hampshire Gazette (a play on the local “lamestream” media outlet, “The Daily Hampshire Gazette”) published by Nick Mottern and Jenifer Scarlott (my partners in guerrilla media) had saturated Northampton with hundreds of copies featuring a piece trashing our mayor that I had rather instigated.

Mamdani’s victory in the New York mayoral election taught us that turnout drives radical politics. And voter turnout hinges on broadening the franchise to include the most alienated, discouraged people. It all seems clear after the fact. Distributing leaflets to mostly non voters may have influenced a small number of people to reject Mayor Sciarra, but the real task involves major organization to register voters and to forge alliances with people who have given up hope. Why did only 30% of precinct 1A vote?

The task, we often mistakenly believe, is to overthrow MAGA, but the preliminary aspiration, role modeled by Zohran Mamdani, is the first priority. Neo Reaganite Democrats like Gina-Louise Sciarra have got to be defeated. We Northamptonites blew the task because we had little sense of class issues. Northampton is full of poor people, but our “educated progressives” did not reach out to form the cross class alliance that Mamdani achieved. Poor people will either become leaders, voters and the primary voices of moral agency, or we will all crash together in a fireball of fascist violence. If we can’t even get rid of Mayor Sciarra in Northampton, how the hell do we battle against Trump? Those of us who paid attention to Zohran Mamdani know what we have to do. Gina-Louise-Sciarra barely won her election, and the next one will be the end for her.