This conversation launches an ongoing series profiling some of the people moving D.C. forward—local elected officials, activists, organizers, policy thinkers, and civic leaders whose work animates our city in tremendous ways. My hope is that these profiles help Washingtonians better understand the people shaping our local elections, neighborhoods, and government—and introduce readers to leaders they may not yet know.

1. Before the campaigns, organizations, technology, and elected office, who was Stevie McCarty growing up? Take us back to the family, community, and experiences that formed you. What did your upbringing teach you about belonging, power, service, or what it means to look out for other people? Were there hardships, periods when you felt like an outsider, or experiences around your identity that fundamentally changed the way you see the world today?

I grew up in Southeast Michigan, in what people used to call Auto Alley, as our community confronted years of economic decline and the effects of NAFTA. My parents did everything they could to protect my twin sister and me from that instability, but I still saw its effects around us.

We lived with Granny, my mom’s mom, until we were about five, then moved nearby into a doublewide. My parents divorced when we were twelve, nobody could carry the trailer alone, and it was foreclosed. We moved back in with Granny, and my dad rented a house a block away so we could all stay close. That is the thing I want people to understand about how I was raised. Even when everything came apart, the instinct was to stay within walking distance of each other.

Some of my sharpest memories come from the Thanksgiving and Christmas drives at our small Baptist church and the garden my mom, Granny, and I tended together. It took me years to understand that the food we received through church and grew ourselves helped carry us through lean periods. At the time, I simply remember long days harvesting vegetables and sitting with Granny on the porch while we prepared beans and corn for the winter. She could make limited ingredients feel abundant and never let care feel like sacrifice.

My older brother, Billy, was nine years older and struggled with heroin addiction from adolescence. As a child, I mainly understood the fear and instability that came with it. Only later did I understand how fully addiction had shaped his life and how few realistic treatment options our family could access. Addiction was never an abstract policy issue in our home; it was someone we loved, even when loving him was complicated. That experience taught me to see substance-use treatment as essential support for individuals, families, and communities.

My dad was a union worker who died with no savings or property. He bought old cars outright and drove them until they quit. Near the end of his life, he used one of those cars to give rides to people who had no other way to get around. He was killed in a car accident when I was fourteen. We lost a parent and our family’s transportation on the same afternoon, two separate catastrophes for a family like ours.

My mom and my Granny stepped up without missing a beat. My mom was not political, but she was everywhere. Boy Scout troop leader, Band Booster president, Kiwanis member the moment I joined Key Club. She gave constantly while we were still receiving, and she trusted that the community would pour it back when we needed it. It always did. That is not charity. It is a cycle, and being inside it teaches you that taking care of people when you can is how you stay close enough to be taken care of when you cannot.

I came out in phases, more slowly than most. People around me began commenting on my identity before I fully understood it myself. My friends knew first, then my classmates, then my mom. Coming out to her was painful, and we both cried. I walked out to the back porch, where Granny was sitting with her radio, and told her what had happened. She gave me the biggest hug of my life and said, “I will always love you no matter what.” That sentence made me feel safe enough to sleep in the house that night. In time, my mom came around completely. She met boyfriends, asked about dates, and became fiercely protective of her gay son.

My mom died unexpectedly when I was twenty. I had driven to Monroe that day to bring her home after what became her final hospital discharge. She had moved in and out of the hospital for two years, while her insurance coverage limited which providers she could see. My first final exam was the next morning and a snowstorm was approaching, so I wanted to stay and help her settle in. She insisted that I return to Ann Arbor, rest, and take my exam. Twelve hours later, my sister and Granny arrived at my student apartment with the news.

My mother had bought life insurance so my sister and I would have some security if she died. The insurer denied the claims, and we could not find a lawyer willing to take the case. I was twenty years old, grieving, and trying to understand a contract while facing a company with lawyers and resources I could never match.

That is where I learned what power actually means. Being right matters, but power also depends on whether a system must answer you and whether you have the resources to keep asking. Granny taught me what service looks like. The East End taught me that belonging grows through community. The insurance process taught me that rights mean little when people cannot enforce them. Everything I have done since has involved trying to shorten the distance between the people I grew up with and the rooms where decisions get made.

2. What first drew you into politics and public service? Was there a specific election, issue, person, injustice, or moment when politics stopped feeling abstract and became something you wanted to participate in yourself? As you moved from student leadership and service into labor, LGBTQ+ advocacy, political technology, and eventually elected office, what kept pulling you deeper into this work? Looking back now, how has your understanding of political power changed from what you believed when you first entered it?

My first political memory is being four years old on my dad’s shoulders in a parking lot on La Plaisance Road, watching Bill Clinton and Al Gore stump in the 2000 election. I could not tell you a single word either of them said. What I remember is how excited my dad was, and the confetti bursting at the end, and trying to catch at least one red piece, one white piece, and one blue piece before they hit the ground. Afterward my dad rushed us to the car because he had heard Bill and Hillary were headed to the McDonald’s. I still do not know whether he actually believed that or just wanted to beat the traffic. Either way we went, and we were ready.

That is politics as something you inherit. My dad was the political one. My mom was not political at all, but she was relentlessly action oriented, and between the two of them I grew up understanding that showing up was simply what you did. It stayed a feeling for a long time. It did not become a tool until my family started colliding with systems that had no obligation to answer us.

Key Club made me a builder. A high school counselor invited me to a leadership weekend, where I learned about servant leadership. I came home and started a Key Club at my school. The Student Council favored a particular kind of student, while the National Honor Society imposed grade requirements. I could not understand why the desire to improve your community should be gated behind popularity or a GPA. I pitched Key Club as a service organization anyone could join. We grew, delivered more services than established organizations, and won regional awards.

I have been following that same instinct ever since. Queering ANCs uses better tools to find people who already care, remove barriers to participation, and make the path into public service easier to navigate.

In 2016, I simultaneously worked on a red-to-blue congressional campaign and served as an unpaid Michigan AFL-CIO fellow. Labor treated me with dignity and recognized the financial constraints I carried. The campaign assumed everyone could devote unpaid time to canvassing and make political work their social life. I was attending the University of Michigan on financial aid while working enough hours to feed myself and keep the lights on. That contrast taught me how thoroughly political careers filter for people who can afford to work for little or nothing.

Being able to work for free is an extraordinary privilege. Many people around me had it. I did not.

Campaign staffing remains structurally elitist. Unpaid and underpaid work filters out people who cannot afford to subsidize politics, often before they reach the positions where decisions get made. Democrats describe the resulting brain drain as though it were a mystery. We built it, maintain it, and then act surprised by the results.

Political technology gave me a way to stay in the work. At Crowdskout, stac labs, and Universe, I helped campaigns and political organizations use technology to reach voters and support candidates. Again and again, I saw the same gap: political institutions said they wanted to develop local candidates but lacked the capacity to support anyone below the most prominent races.

I filed for ANC because my neighborhood lacked a basic feedback loop. There was no newsletter and no meaningful way for residents to shape what happened around them. I did not begin with a master plan; I simply wanted to build the missing connection between residents and their local government. Once elected, I began learning how commissioners could build coalitions, navigate agency processes, and turn recommendations into results.

My understanding of power has changed. I once believed power was mostly persuasion: if you were right and could explain why, you could move a system. Now I understand that power also depends on who can afford to remain in the room, who receives an answer, and who controls the infrastructure others must use. People who have encountered those barriers often understand them most clearly. That is why I stopped waiting for good candidates to appear and started helping build the pipeline that produces them.

3. You now lead Capital Stonewall Democrats in a city with one of the largest LGBTQ+ populations per capita in the country. What does that responsibility mean to you personally? Beyond winning elections and issuing endorsements, what should LGBTQ+ political power actually accomplish in Washington? Where do you think our community has made genuine progress, and where do you think LGBTQ+ Washingtonians still lack the political influence, protection, or representation that our numbers might suggest we should have?

The honest answer is that the role carries an emotional responsibility. I lead an organization that is fifty years old, built by people who advanced LGBTQ+ political power with far fewer protections and resources than we have today. That history keeps me grounded and reminds me what stewardship requires.

I am not going to pretend the job feels good all the time. Politics can preach inclusion publicly while practicing exclusivity behind the scenes. Information, introductions, and invitations still flow through small circles that guard access closely. I have spent my career building partnerships and coalitions, and I want Stonewall to model something different: an organization where people share information, open doors, and build power together.

In those eight months we hosted our fiftieth anniversary, built an entire queer ballot guide, and launched Queering ANCs. The Queering ANCs work is what makes it worth it. We have helped trans and nonbinary candidates gather signatures, and more importantly we have helped them pre-validate those signatures so their petitions can survive a challenge. That is a boring technical service and it is the difference between being on the ballot and being knocked off it. The notes I have gotten from those candidates are the reason I do this.

LGBTQ+ political power should build more than an endorsement operation. Stonewall should feel like a political home: a place for culture, creative activism, professional connections, and mutual support. It should open doors for members who cannot afford access to political rooms and stand unequivocally with queer and trans young people when other leaders retreat.

We have made real representational progress. Zachary Parker became the Council’s first openly gay Black member, Aparna Raj will join the Council as a bisexual woman, and more LGBTQ+ people are running for hyperlocal office. But representation must produce material results, not merely larger numbers.

Where we remain underpowered is on material outcomes: access to gender-affirming health care, youth homelessness, safety for Black trans women, and the drug crisis, which disproportionately affects our community but receives too little sustained attention. I grew up in a household affected by addiction, and I have experienced gaps in insurance coverage myself. Everyone deserves access to treatment that helps them live safely and healthfully. LGBTQ+ adults make up a significant share of this city, and our political influence should translate into measurable progress on these issues, not only visibility and attendance at forums.

4. You’ve become particularly focused on getting more LGBTQ+ people to run for elected office, including through Queering ANCs. Why? What changes when LGBTQ+ people move from advocacy outside government into the rooms where decisions actually get made? Are there perspectives, policy priorities, or ways of governing that you think become more likely when queer people hold office? And for someone reading this who cares deeply about their community but has never imagined themselves as a candidate, what do you think keeps people from taking that first step?

LGBTQ+ people bring more than identity to public office. Many of us have personally navigated failures in health care, housing, employment, mental health services, and public safety. Those experiences reveal where systems break. They do not automatically make every queer officeholder inclusive or effective, but they can become valuable governing expertise when leaders remain connected to the communities that shaped them.

As for what keeps someone from running, I do not think we need to overcomplicate this. Nobody asks them.

So the first fix is that we have to ask people. Seriously, that is it. If you see somebody who lights up a room, who has real empathy, who understands how systems work, ask them. It does not have to be the president of Stonewall Democrats or a state party chair who asks. It can be you.

Money creates the hardest barrier. Candidates must raise enough to compensate staff before volunteers burn out, while D.C. allows wealthy candidates to finance their own campaigns with few limitations. That gives people with personal wealth a decisive head start and keeps many talented working-class candidates from running at all.

Queer and trans candidates already navigate threats in ordinary life, and public office sharpens them. That is why we built safety and privacy planning into Queering ANCs rather than treating it as an afterthought.

One trans candidate contacted me about thirty hours before the filing deadline with only one signature. It was raining, and I privately wondered whether I should encourage them to run as a write-in instead. I did not. In four hours, they collected twenty-nine valid signatures, verified them using our tool, and qualified for the ballot. The note I almost sent would have sounded kind, but it also would have meant quietly deciding what someone else could accomplish. That experience reminded me what people can do when someone gives them the right tools and trusts them to act.

If nobody has ever asked you to run, let me be the one who does.

5. A lot of your work seems to revolve around building the infrastructure underneath politics: political technology, candidate development, organizing, neighborhood government, and institutions that help other people participate. Why has that become such a focus for you? Do you think our political system spends too much energy waiting for compelling candidates to appear rather than deliberately developing the next generation of leaders? If you could rebuild the pathway from “I care about my neighborhood” to “I know how to organize, lead, and potentially run for office,” what would that pathway look like?

I focus on infrastructure because political work rewards visible moments, such as endorsements, elections, speeches, and viral posts, while neglecting the systems that make those moments possible. I enjoy studying where campaigns fail, identifying barriers, and turning those lessons into tools more people can use.

This will be my third and final term as a commissioner. Leadership should renew itself, particularly as technology and public policy change faster than volunteer officials can always follow. Building a bench also requires knowing when to step aside.

Now, the pathway.

The pathway begins with helping residents understand that ANCs exist and that they have a seat within them.

Next, neighbors need a way to identify and ask potential candidates to run. Queering ANCs gives them tools to nominate someone, host a community conversation, and recruit candidates from their own networks.

Candidates then need practical support: seat lookup, petition validation, deadlines, office hours, and mentors.

Finally, those who qualify need affordable campaign tools, including event pages, voter outreach, canvassing, and endorsement tracking.

Technology can lower barriers, but it cannot replace a candidate’s relationships, judgment, or willingness to work.

Money must form part of that pathway. Full disclosure: I work for GoodChange, which provides my health insurance. I moved Stonewall’s fundraising to the platform before joining the company, and donor-covered processing fees have since saved the organization more than $600. Candidates need this kind of practical financial guidance, not simply encouragement.

A missing party label does not make an office apolitical. We should recruit and support candidates for local office according to the values they will bring to public decisions.

6. D.C. will soon enter a new chapter of mayoral leadership. From your vantage point as an ANC commissioner, LGBTQ+ political leader, organizer, and someone who spends a lot of time thinking about how local government actually works, what does D.C.’s next mayor need to focus on? What problems have we allowed to linger for too long? Where do you think the political conversation in this city differs from what residents actually experience day to day? And if the next mayor could make measurable progress on only three things during their first term, what would you want those three things to be and why?

Before I get to policy, I want to say something about transitions, because I watch them closely and they tell you almost everything.

One of an incoming mayor’s first consequential decisions involves deciding who moves from the campaign into government. Campaigning and governing require different skills. Transition teams sometimes carry campaign structures directly into the administration, rewarding loyalty without giving enough weight to operational expertise or independent judgment. A mayor who wants to deliver results needs people who can examine systems honestly, challenge assumptions, and rebuild what does not work.

Housing has to be the first and biggest focus, and I say that as somebody living it. My rent goes up every single year. My grocery bill is higher than it has ever been and so is my Pepco bill. I am luckier than a lot of people in this city and it is still a real strain on me right now. We do not need to reinvent anything here. We need to get back to basics on housing, affordability, and utilities. If people cannot afford to live here, to buy a home here, to age in place here, to raise a family here, then there is nobody left to govern.

That brings me to oversight, my second focus and one that receives too little attention during campaigns. I want a mayor willing to acknowledge mistakes, identify implementation failures, and publish accessible data showing whether each priority is working. The public should have a clear record it can use to hold agencies, the Council, and the Executive Office of the Mayor accountable. D.C. often passes ambitious, complicated legislation without providing the same visibility into implementation and results. Effective government must measure what happens after the celebration.

Agency oversight has remained too procedural and too difficult for many residents to access. Hearings often take place during the workday, limiting participation by people who cannot take time off. Agencies exceed budgets without always explaining clearly what additional spending produced, while utility customers face rising costs with limited insight into how providers make decisions. Oversight should offer an honest, public assessment of performance rather than a routine exercise.

Washington’s political conversation often diverges from residents’ daily lives. My neighbors repeatedly ask about trash, rats, loading, sidewalks, and noise. The Council has passed legislation touching nearly all those issues, yet residents rarely feel an improvement on their blocks. That is an implementation failure, not a messaging problem.

After a serious bus crash at 7th and Q Streets NW, ANC 2G unanimously requested a formal investigation. DDOT told us the crash did not meet its study threshold but never explained that threshold in writing. Without an answer, we could not identify the policy gap or ask the Council to correct it. Agency silence does more than disrespect an ANC; it prevents the next step in solving a public-safety problem.

The next mayor must also clarify and limit MPD’s coordination with federal forces. Residents deserve a written policy explaining when federal agencies participate in local operations, who commands those operations, and what protections prevent that coordination from discouraging marginalized residents from calling 911.

So if I only get three, here they are.

First, housing and the cost of living, including utilities, measured in rent burden, in units actually delivered and occupied, and in what a typical household is paying Pepco and DC Water at the end of the term compared to the beginning.

Second, oversight the public can see, measured by a live performance dashboard for every mayoral priority, published explanations for every agency budget overage, and a public response rate showing how often agencies actually answer ANC resolutions.

Third, getting federal forces out of our policing, measured by a written MPD policy on federal coordination, published data on joint operations, and 911 call volume in immigrant and marginalized neighborhoods, because that number tells you whether people trust us again.

I measure my life by impact rather than titles. This will be my final ANC term, and I expect to seek one more term as Stonewall president through 2028. I want both institutions to work without me. By then, I hope Stonewall has grown from nearly three hundred members to at least one thousand, resumed a strong policy and advocacy role, and helped elect D.C.’s first trans Councilmember.

I want to end on a personal note, because this anniversary is close. My Granny passed away three years ago this September. She was my matriarch, and she is the reason I believe what I believe about taking care of people.

Near the end of her life I convinced her to come stay with us in DC. She was afraid of flying, so a friend who happened to be in Michigan flew back down with her, and I never booked her a return ticket. My husband Rich converted our den into a bedroom. I set up her radio so she could still have her radio hour. I tricked her into walking two blocks every day by refusing to buy her a lottery ticket unless we walked to the liquor store together. I took her cabin camping for the first time in her life. We had six weeks.

One night we were talking about music and I told her we should dance. She said she did not know how. I laughed and said something like, at your age, you don’t know how to dance? And she told me that her father and the church had never permitted it. So I told her that was too bad, because dancing is fun and it was now her bedtime exercise. We danced and sang every night after that until she went home.

She had gone her whole life without dancing. She did not start until somebody asked her.

That is what I would want anyone to take from all of this. You never know what barriers a person is carrying, whether they built those barriers themselves or inherited them from the generation before. Our community carries an enormous amount of that. Sometimes the only thing standing between a person and the thing they were made for is that nobody has ever asked them.

My Granny and my mom spent their lives asking me. I do not need a title. When the time comes, I will gladly step back if I know I spent my life helping people discover what they can do.

So ask someone. You have no idea what they have been waiting for.

That version misses what actually happens, at least in local DC politics. Once you register with the Board of Elections, your campaign information becomes public. Then the inbox starts filling up. Coalitions, nonprofits, advocacy organizations, affinity groups, neighborhood leaders, and even private citizens begin asking for your position on almost everything: housing policy, animal rights, public safety, Latino representation, education, tenant protections, small business support, LGBTQ+ issues, transportation, budget priorities, and the list keeps going.

Many of these questionnaires run long. They ask for clear commitments, explanations, yes-or-no answers, and force campaigns to decide where they stand.

That’s when it clicked: a platform tells people what you believe in broad strokes. The questionnaires force you to prove you’ve thought it through.

For a first-time campaign, that matters. In this next essay in my series on what it took to run as a first-time candidate in DC, I want to share what those questionnaires forced us to prove, how they shaped our policy development, and why every newcomer should take them seriously before the first one ever lands in their inbox.

What this piece looks at

By now, most of you know that my mayoral campaign didn’t run on a traditional political machine. We ran on friends, neighbors, group chats, late nights, borrowed expertise, and people who believed DC deserved a government that could get the basics right. The team brought exceptional skill sets across communications, outreach, technology, organizing, research, and design. They gave their time for free. They helped us launch on a shoestring budget, build a citywide campaign from scratch, and finish third in the race for mayor out of 7 candidates.

One of the defining features of that campaign became policy. That may sound obvious. Candidates run for office. Candidates release platforms. Candidates talk about what they want to do. But policy development on a campaign, especially a newcomer campaign, forces you to learn in public, move quickly, take criticism seriously, and decide which ideas deserve to survive contact with the real world.

So this next essay in my series to support newcomers and first-timers in their own journey running for office looks at policy development from inside a campaign: how we did it, where we improved, where we fell short, and what future races, especially newcomer campaigns without the machinery of institutional politics behind them, can do better.

A quick history lesson

Campaign policy didn’t begin as the polished platform page we recognize today. Early American political factions formed around fundamental arguments over the Constitution and federal power, but the modern machinery of conventions, platforms, and formal public commitments took longer to develop. One of the stranger origins of that machinery came from the Anti-Masonic Party, which held a presidential nominating convention in 1831 before the major parties adopted that model. Its central issue sounds almost surreal now: opposition to Freemasonry. But the lesson still matters. From the beginning, campaign policy served more than one function. It explained beliefs, organized supporters, drew lines, and forced public commitments.

Some campaigns have used policy extraordinarily well. Franklin Roosevelt’s 1932 campaign did not win because voters had read a dense white paper. It won because the “New Deal” gave a devastated country a governing frame for action during the Great Depression. Roosevelt used the phrase in his 1932 acceptance speech, then governed through a set of programs that reshaped what Americans expected from the federal government. Decades later, the 1994 Republican “Contract with America” showed another version of policy-as-campaign strategy: a shared agenda, a common message, and a promise of action if Republicans won control of the House.

Other campaigns show what happens when policy collapses under pressure. George McGovern’s 1972 proposal to give every American $1,000 drew ridicule and became a liability. In Britain, Labour’s 1983 manifesto became infamous as “the longest suicide note in history,” a phrase associated with Labour MP Gerald Kaufman, after a platform that included unilateral nuclear disarmament, withdrawal from the European Economic Community, higher taxes on the wealthy, abolition of the House of Lords, and renationalization. And in 2017, Theresa May’s Conservative campaign stumbled badly after its social care proposal became branded the “dementia tax,” triggering backlash and a damaging campaign U-turn.

The real lesson here is that policy has to fit the moment, the candidate, the coalition, and the campaign’s ability to defend it. Strong policy builds trust. Weak policy exposes confusion. And if an idea falls apart as soon as someone asks a follow-up question, it can hurt you fast.

This dynamic didn’t just play out in old presidential campaigns or national parliamentary elections. It showed up in our own race, too. Kenyan McDuffie faced backlash for floating property tax freezes, a policy that may have appealed to residents anxious about affordability but also raised hard questions about revenue, services, and who benefits most from that kind of relief. Axios later reported that his campaign had prematurely released messaging about a property tax freeze, even though McDuffie had not ruled out the idea.

That kind of proposal sounds simple until the second question arrives. What happens to the budget? Which homeowners benefit? What does the city cut or replace if revenue growth slows? The second question often reveals whether a campaign has a policy or just a sentence that sounds good.

I learned a version of that lesson myself. At one point, I tweeted about the nuance behind residents’ frustration with speed cameras. I understood why people felt frustrated. Nobody likes opening the mail and seeing a fine. But in trying to acknowledge that frustration, I didn’t stay firm enough in my own view: speed cameras exist because the data shows they save lives.

I should have said that more clearly. My waffling drew warranted backlash. That experience taught me something important. Campaigns can evolve. Candidates can listen, learn, and refine their views. They should. But every change leaves a trail, and people notice when you sound unsure. Voters can handle growth. They don’t like confusion. If you change your mind, say why. If you believe something, defend it. And if a policy protects people, say that plainly.

That history helped me understand my own race differently. Our questionnaires, housing platform, debate answers, and social media posts all belonged to the same old campaign tradition: putting beliefs into public form, then finding out whether they could survive scrutiny.

The status quo critique

There’s another critique of my campaign that I need to sit with honestly.

As DC, and frankly the country, has seen, the Democratic Socialists of America have had real electoral success in major cities. Reuters reported recently that DSA has expanded its reach, grown past 100,000 members, and backed high-profile candidates around the country, including Janeese Lewis George in DC. Metro DC DSA endorsed Lewis George for mayor in February.

I made clear during the race that I was not in DSA. Our policies did not reflect a DSA platform, either. At one point, after a Janeese Lewis George supporter called me a centrist on Twitter, I quote-tweeted and said I identified as a pragmatic progressive. A DC DSA leader responded with something close to this: I had run on wanting to manage the status quo better, and that didn’t make me progressive or pragmatic.

The tweet pained me more than I probably let on.

Part of that came from my own history. People who knew me in college knew a much more radical version of me. I came into politics through activism, and I believed deeply in the moral urgency of demanding more from institutions that failed people. I still believe in that urgency. But through difficult moments, including failings in my own activism, I also learned that righteous anger alone doesn’t always build power, change systems, or deliver results for the people you claim to fight for.

That realization pushed me toward a more pragmatic politics. I didn’t stop caring about justice, and I wasn’t trying to protect the status quo. I just became more focused on the hard part: making government actually deliver.

Through the race, I also realized I probably fit, at least for now, somewhere in the “New Liberal” tradition. That phrase has a longer history than our current internet fights. In late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain, thinkers associated with New Liberalism pushed back against laissez-faire liberalism and argued that real freedom required social and economic conditions that allowed people to flourish. Figures like T.H. Green and L.T. Hobhouse helped shape a tradition now often described as social liberalism: a belief that liberty means more than the absence of government interference. It also means creating the conditions that enable people to live with dignity and agency.

In today’s American political vocabulary, a version of that instinct also shows up in the language of abundance: housing abundance, clean energy, immigration, economic dynamism, better infrastructure, and a government capable of building the things people need. The Center for New Liberalism, founded in 2017, describes its work around ideas like free trade, immigration, housing abundance, green energy, economic dynamism, and social liberalism.

I’m not sure whether that label will stick for me. Labels can clarify. They can also flatten. I know what I believe more firmly than I know what ideological box I belong in.

I believe in human rights. I believe government has a responsibility to protect people from exploitation, discrimination, violence, and abandonment. I believe public systems should work, especially for the people who rely on them most. I believe execution matters because failed execution hurts people with the least cushion first. A broken 911 system, a delayed affordable housing unit, an unsafe intersection, a failed benefits process, or a closed grocery store does not hurt everyone equally.

That’s where I disagree with the idea that our campaign merely wanted to manage the status quo better. In a city where residents can call 911 and not get the help they need, where affordable units sit vacant while people search for housing, where basic services fail unevenly across race and income, execution itself carries moral weight.

Ideologically, I aligned with many policies that people would recognize as progressive. I supported ending cooperation between the Metropolitan Police Department and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. I supported expanding tenant protections. I believed in strengthening labor rights, protecting vulnerable communities, and using government as a tool to reduce inequality. Those weren’t positions I adopted for a campaign. They reflected how I had thought about politics for years.

But as the race unfolded, I also saw a new wave of Democratic Socialism gaining traction in DC politics, with proposals like universal child care and other expansive social programs becoming central to the conversation. To be clear, I did not reject those ideas outright or believe they lacked moral grounding. In many cases, I understood the appeal and shared the underlying goals.

What I struggled with was whether those proposals could actually work in DC’s current fiscal reality. The city’s budget is not infinite. It faces federal oversight, revenue volatility, and competing obligations across agencies that already struggle to deliver core services. When I looked at some of the more ambitious proposals, I asked whether they could be funded, implemented, and sustained without creating new failures elsewhere in the system.

That’s where my discomfort grew. I felt some politicians presented policies in a way that prioritized political appeal over fiscal honesty. It began to feel less like a debate over values and more like a divergence in approach: populist politics versus what I would call honest politics. Populist politics tells people what they want to hear and assumes the details will work themselves out later. Honest politics starts with the same moral urgency but forces itself to answer the harder question: how does this actually get done?

For me, that distinction mattered. If a policy promises relief but collapses under implementation, the people who suffer are the same residents who were told help was on the way. And in a city already struggling to get the basics right, I believed we had to be careful not to build a platform that outpaced our ability to deliver.

But the critique still forced an important question: when does a focus on execution become too small? When does “fix the basics” sound like a promise to make the existing system run more smoothly instead of a promise to change who the system serves?

Those questions deserve real answers. A campaign can’t simply declare itself pragmatic and assume voters will hear that as courageous. Pragmatism has to mean more than caution. It has to mean choosing the path most likely to improve people’s lives, even when that path requires structural change, political conflict, or a break from comfortable consensus.

That became another lesson in policy development. Your ideology will show up whether you name it or not. It shows up in what you prioritize, what you leave out, what you call realistic, what you call extreme, whose pain you treat as urgent, and whose objections you treat as decisive. A campaign has to understand its own theory of change, because voters, advocates, and opponents will define it for you if you don’t.

The guidance for first-time candidates: don’t hide from the ideological critique. Answer it. Know what tradition you come from, even if you don’t fit neatly inside it. Know what you mean when you call yourself progressive, pragmatic, liberal, socialist, moderate, or anything else. And most importantly, make sure your policy agenda proves the label, not the other way around. Once you step into a race, those labels will show up in the questions people ask you, the surveys that land in your inbox, and the expectations different groups bring to your campaign.

The questionnaire test

The first pressure point came through those questionnaires. We quickly realized we needed one person on the campaign almost fully dedicated to answering them. Luckily for us, that person was Eric.

Eric brought the exact mix the job required: diligence, brilliance, strategy, and a deep command of policy. He read carefully. He pushed for precision. He understood that a questionnaire answer had to align with our larger governing philosophy, survive public scrutiny, and avoid boxing the campaign into a position we hadn’t fully thought through.

Every questionnaire forced a choice. Every answer created a record. Every advocacy group asks you, in its own way, whether your values can withstand detail. We also learned quickly that these surveys did more than test a candidate’s stance on a given issue.

A questionnaire answer could become a reporter’s hook, a screenshot, an opposition hit, or a reason for voters to decide a candidate lacked seriousness. In our race, people picked apart Kenyan McDuffie’s answer to the Barred in DC questionnaire, where he named Ben’s Chili Bowl as his favorite restaurant. The answer may have been intended to signal local familiarity, but to many readers, it landed as too rehearsed. Barred in DC published the questionnaire responses, and the answer later drew its own online reaction.

Other answers carried more weight. Janeese Lewis George’s early answers on divestment gave voters, advocates, and reporters a clearer sense of where she stood, and those answers shaped how people understood her candidacy. The Washington Post reported that Lewis George faced backlash from Jewish organizations after a DSA questionnaire answer in which she pledged to avoid events “promoting Zionism.”

And then there were the answers that simply looked careless. Some candidates got criticized for responses that felt AI-heavy, overly generic, or, in the worst cases, appeared to leave ChatGPT-style text in the final submission.

That changed how we approached the work. We couldn’t treat questionnaires like homework assignments to rush through at midnight. We had to treat them like policy documents, public statements, and political signals all at once. Each response needed to sound like me, reflect the campaign’s values, and hold up under scrutiny. The answer had to satisfy the group asking the question, but it also had to withstand scrutiny by a reporter, a voter, or an opponent reading it without context.

That pressure made Eric’s role even more important. He understood that the safest answer didn’t always mean the vaguest answer. Sometimes precision protected us. Sometimes nuance mattered. Sometimes the right move meant saying clearly what we believed, even when we knew not everyone would like it. The questionnaires forced us to build muscle fast. They taught us that policy development on a campaign happens every time someone asks you to put your beliefs in writing.

The guidance for first-time candidates feels simple now, though I learned it the hard way. Set up a shared campaign inbox from day one. Assign one staffer or volunteer to own it. Track every questionnaire, survey, endorsement form, and candidate request in a spreadsheet with the organization, deadline, topic, owner, status, and final submitted answer. And if the candidate’s personal email appears in the Board of Elections system, watch that inbox like it matters, because it does.

Under campaign stress, things slip. I missed a couple of surveys myself, including DCVFA’s and even Ward 1’s, which feels especially embarrassing to admit because I live in Ward 1. But that captures the point of this piece. First-time candidates learn these things by doing them. Sometimes you learn because a process works. Sometimes you learn because you miss something you should have caught. We didn’t run a perfect operation. The goal is to document what the next newcomer should know before the requests start coming in.

Housing taught me humility

The same lesson showed up in our housing platform. Sometime over dinner, or maybe on the way to it, Justin said something that stuck with me. Justin served as one of my campaign’s data directors. Like almost everyone else on the team, he volunteered his time because he believed in the race and wanted DC to work better. He also brought something every campaign needs and every candidate should want: the willingness to tell me when something needed work.

That night, he told me some of his friends had read through our housing platform. They fell into a familiar DC category: technocratic, moderate, allergic to slogans, and, truthfully, more libertarian than progressive. They liked parts of the campaign. They took the race seriously. But on housing, they thought our policy needed to go further.

I remember feeling two things at once. First, defensive. We worked hard on the platform. We tried to balance urgency with political reality, affordability with feasibility, and renter protections with the need to actually build more housing. Second, grateful. Justin’s comment captured one of the most important lessons I learned as a candidate: policy development on a campaign can happen in motion. It happens between events, over text threads, after forums, in conversations with friends, advocates, residents, and critics. And when you take the work seriously, it forces you to keep asking a humbling question: what did we miss?

At the time, our housing platform carried a certain populist familiarity. I talked about rent stabilization because I’d heard other candidates discuss it. I believed it could help protect tenants, and I knew renters across DC felt crushed by rising costs, fees, and instability. So we put it on the site. But Justin’s comment forced me to admit something important: recognizing the right problem doesn’t automatically mean you have landed on the strongest policy solution.

That critique pushed me deeper. I started talking to YIMBYs, housing advocates, policy experts, and people who spend far more time thinking about supply, permitting, zoning, financing, tenant protections, and affordability than I ever had before the race. I asked harder questions. Where does rent stabilization protect people, and where can it distort the market? How do we build more housing without abandoning renters? How do we move faster on deeply affordable units without creating another plan that dies somewhere between an agency memo and a ribbon-cutting?

I also pulled in Eric, who works on policy professionally and has the degrees to prove it. He helped us move beyond the familiar language of housing politics and into a more serious framework: build more housing, protect renters, speed up lease-ups, use public land better, and stop letting process become its own form of exclusion. That decision made the platform stronger. It also taught me something larger about leadership.

As a candidate, and certainly as an executive, you won’t know every answer. You shouldn’t pretend otherwise. The job doesn’t require omniscience. It requires judgment. It requires enough humility to know when your first instinct needs more work, enough curiosity to ask better questions, and enough discipline to surround yourself with people who understand the details better than you do.

So, I started calling more experts. I talked to people who came at housing from different angles: supply, affordability, tenant protection, permitting, land use, and government implementation. Those conversations didn’t always point in the same direction, which made them more useful. They forced me to move past the slogan version of housing policy and wrestle with the tradeoffs. That process made me a better candidate. More importantly, it improved the policy.

The guidance here, again, feels obvious in hindsight. Don’t build policy alone. Build a circle of people who will challenge you before the voters, press, or opponents do. Give someone on the campaign clear ownership over policy quality control. Let that person track what you say across platforms, questionnaires, forums, social media, and the website so the campaign doesn’t accidentally create contradictions. Most importantly, don’t confuse familiar language with rigorous policy. A phrase can sound right because you’ve heard it a hundred times. That doesn’t mean it fits the problem, the city, or the moment.

Policy and communications need each other

Another lesson came from watching the relationship between policy and communications. Anyone who has worked on a campaign understands this tension intimately. Policy wants precision. Communications wants clarity. Policy worries about caveats, tradeoffs, implementation details, and unintended consequences. Communications worries about whether anyone will read the sentence, share the graphic, remember the message, or understand why it matters in the first place.

A good campaign needs both instincts. I saw that in real time with Eric and Caroline. Eric could make sure an idea had rigor. Caroline could make sure people actually understood why it mattered. Eric pushed us to avoid sloppy claims, weak logic, and policy language that sounded good but collapsed under scrutiny. Caroline pushed us to sharpen the message, find the human stakes, and turn complicated ideas into material that people would want to read, share, and repeat.

They learned from each other, and I learned from both of them. That mattered because our campaign had to produce policy in public. A tweet could not just go viral. It had to survive public pressure. A policy page could not satisfy advocates alone. It had to make sense to a voter scrolling on their phone between meetings. A forum answer could not just sound thoughtful in the room. It had to hold up when someone later clipped 30 seconds of it.

That balance shaped some of our strongest work. The best material did not come from policy handing communications a memo, or from communications stripping policy down to a slogan. It came from the back-and-forth: what do we actually mean, what can we defend, what will people understand, what line will travel, and what detail can we not afford to lose?

That kind of chemistry does not happen automatically. It requires trust. The policy person has to believe communications won’t flatten the idea beyond recognition. The communications person has to believe policy won’t bury the message under so much nuance that no one can hear it. And the candidate has to create a culture where people can challenge one another without treating every disagreement as a turf war.

Looking back, I don’t think we would have had the same outcome without that synergy. We had a small team, little money, and no institutional machine. That meant every piece of public-facing material had to work harder. The policy had to give us credibility. The communications had to give us reach. Together, they helped us punch above our weight.

The guidance for first-time candidates: don’t silo policy and communications. Put those people in conversation early and often. The strongest campaign materials come from the tension between those disciplines.

Forums turn policy into muscle memory

The same organizations that send questionnaires often host the forums, too. First-time candidates should know that the two things are connected. The written answers you submit in March may become the verbal answers you need in April or May. Ward-based forums, coalition forums, affinity-group forums, neighborhood forums, issue-specific forums: each one tests whether your campaign has done the work beyond the website.

That tradition has deeper roots than campaign season makes it seem. American political forums borrow from the New England town meeting tradition, where residents gathered face-to-face to debate public questions and participate directly in local governance. The New England town meeting tradition stretches back more than 250 years. The broader town-hall format can be traced back to Dorchester, Massachusetts, in 1633. Modern candidate debates took a different path: the Kennedy-Nixon debate in 1960 helped set the template for the televised, performance-driven presidential debate format, while the League of Women Voters has long played a role in nonpartisan voter education through candidate forums, debates, and voter resources.

So, when a neighborhood group, civic organization, or advocacy coalition hosts a forum, it places candidates inside an old democratic ritual: stand in front of the people affected by public decisions, answer the question as asked, and show whether your policy can survive direct contact with the public.

I also found something puzzling about the politics of forums themselves. Before I jumped into the race, I had read about Kenyan McDuffie’s absences from several candidate debates and forums. After I became a candidate, I saw that dynamic firsthand. The frontrunners’ decisions to attend or skip a forum often shaped how people perceived the value of the event. If a leading candidate showed up, the room felt important. If they skipped it, even a thoughtful forum could suddenly feel easier for others to dismiss.

Vincent Orange and I would sometimes look at each other in frustration when the frontrunners didn’t show up. They might have spent the evening schmoozing elsewhere, raising money, or prioritizing a room they thought mattered more. I understood the strategic logic. Campaigns run on time, money, and attention, and every event carries an opportunity cost. But I also wondered what that meant for the time the rest of us spent showing up.

Some forums had fifteen people in the room. Some took place in schools or community spaces with no air conditioning. Some required us to answer the same questions we had answered the night before, in a different ward, for a different audience. But those rooms still mattered. Someone had organized the event. Residents had taken time out of their evening. A civic group had decided that candidates should answer questions in public. That deserved respect.

For much of the race, that consistency received little attention. It was only near the end, at one of the last forums in Ward 4, that the criticism finally broke through in the press: where were the frontrunners? Why were they not at a forum hosted by the NAACP? What did that absence mean?

Those questions mattered because forums reveal more than policy fluency. They reveal a candidate’s theory of accountability. If you only show up when the cameras are there, the crowd is large, or the room has already been certified as politically important, residents notice. And if you show up in the smaller rooms anyway, even when no one covers it, residents notice that too.

Of course, showing up did not mean I always performed well. Truthfully, my first forum performance flopped. I know I am a tough critic of myself, but even with that caveat, I remember walking away knowing I had not met the moment.

The forum, hosted by the DC Alphas at Kramer Middle School, had an unusual format. Instead of placing candidates at the front of the room, the organizers had us rotate around tables. Residents sat with us directly. They asked questions. We answered in a much more intimate setting than a stage or debate hall would allow.

That format had real value. It also exposed every gap.

At one table, a resident asked me what I would do to support Black businesses. I had not diligently prepared for that exact framing, and I made my first mistake almost immediately. I began with, “I know that Black and Brown businesses...” She cut me off.

“No, no, no. I didn’t ask you about Brown people. I’m talking about Black people.”

She was right to stop me.

I had fallen into a phrase that candidates and institutions use too often when they want to sound inclusive but avoid specificity. Black and Brown communities often share overlapping experiences with discrimination, exclusion, and lack of access to capital. But they are not interchangeable. Black business owners in DC have a specific history, a specific set of barriers, and a specific relationship to a city that has changed around them, profited from them, displaced them, and too often failed to protect their economic power.

That moment threw me off because I knew I had missed the mark. The problem was not that I lacked values. The problem was that values without precision can sound like evasion.

Another resident asked me about RFK Stadium, and my policy response fell flat to him, too. He began yelling that I did not understand his issues. In the moment, I felt overwhelmed.

That first forum taught me something no memo could have: policy has to become muscle memory. You cannot simply know what your platform says. You have to understand it deeply enough to answer the question as asked, not the question you wish you had received. You have to know when a broad coalition phrase helps and when it erases the specificity someone needs you to see. You have to know how to move from principle to detail without sounding rehearsed.

After that forum, I changed my approach. I committed to doing at least two to three hours of preparation before every forum and debate. I read about the hosts. I studied the likely attendees. I asked for formal prep documents. I researched the issues most likely to come up in that room. I stopped treating preparation as a matter of memorizing sound bites and started treating it as an act of respect.

That changed everything.

Eric’s preparation helped me understand the substance more deeply. Caroline helped me tighten my delivery so I could speak with more confidence, clarity, and discipline. And the forums themselves became part of the policy process. Every hard question revealed where I needed more work. Every uncomfortable exchange showed me which answers had not yet earned the right to sound simple.

Over time, forums became one of the places where I received validation that I deserved a seat at the table in the mayoral race. I showed up prepared, learned quickly, and took the questions seriously. Residents could tell when a candidate had done the reading. Advocates could tell when a campaign had thought beyond the slogan. Even when people disagreed with me, the conversations became sharper because the preparation gave us something real to argue over.

The guidance for first-time candidates: treat forums as policy development. Read the questionnaires before the forum. Study your own answers. Research the host. Think about who will sit in the room and what they will need you to understand. Practice out loud. Prepare for the question beneath the question. And when someone asks about a specific community, agency, neighborhood, or harm, answer with specificity. Broad language may feel safe, but in a room full of people who know exactly what they are asking, it can expose that you have not done the work.

Pressure can sharpen a campaign

That became one of the strangest surprises of running for office. The public sees the candidate at the podium. They see the forum answer, the debate clip, the policy page, the social media post. They don’t see the smaller moments that shape whether a campaign grows sharper or stays shallow: a volunteer flags a weakness, a questionnaire forces a yes-or-no answer, an advocate pushes back, a voter explains how the program that looked good on paper failed their family in real life, or a reporter reads an old answer and asks whether you still stand by it.

Campaign policy accumulates through pressure. That pressure can expose a campaign. It can also improve one. Our campaign became known, at least in part, for policy. It happened because we treated policy as a living process. We listened, argued, revised, tested, and learned in public. Sometimes advocates pushed us. Sometimes residents pushed us. Sometimes our own volunteers pushed us, because they cared enough about the campaign to tell us when an idea needed more rigor.

That lesson should matter to anyone thinking about running for office for the first time. You don’t need to enter a race with a fully staffed policy shop. You do need discipline. You need curiosity. You need people around you who will challenge your assumptions. You need enough humility to admit what you don’t know, and enough confidence to keep asking why the system works the way it does.

Most of all, you need to understand that policy means translating what people feel in their daily lives into a governing agenda. It means taking the frustration behind a 311 request, a delayed housing unit, a failed 911 call, a closed grocery store, or a small business permit delay, and asking what government would need to do differently to prevent that failure from happening again.

That work takes time. It takes rigor. It takes people willing to challenge you before anyone else does. And for a newcomer campaign, it may matter more than almost anything else.

Clear takeaways for first-time candidates

If you run for office for the first time, policy will become part of your campaign faster than you expect. It will arrive through questionnaires, forums, endorsement interviews, voter conversations, social media replies, reporter questions, and criticism from people who know the issues better than you do.

Here is what I would tell the next newcomer:

1. Don’t treat policy like a nice-to-have. A platform page matters, but the real work happens in the systems behind it: who tracks requests, who drafts answers, who reviews for consistency, who checks your assumptions, and who makes sure your public statements align with what you actually believe.

2. Assign clear ownership. Someone on the campaign needs to own policy development, questionnaire responses, and policy quality control. Even on a volunteer campaign, that role matters. Without ownership, deadlines slip, answers contradict each other, and the candidate ends up improvising on issues that deserved preparation.

3. Set up the process early. Create a shared inbox. Track every questionnaire, forum invitation, survey, endorsement request, and deadline. Keep a record of your submitted answers. Future you will need them before forums, interviews, debates, and follow-up questions.

4. Don’t build policy alone. Surround yourself with people who will challenge you before the public does. Talk to advocates, subject-matter experts, residents, organizers, agency veterans, and people outside your ideological comfort zone. The goal isn’t to outsource your beliefs. The goal is to make them stronger.

5. Understand the importance of growth. Campaigns can evolve. Candidates should learn. But if your position changes, explain why. If you believe something, defend it clearly. Voters can forgive growth more easily than they forgive uncertainty dressed up as nuance.

6. Prepare for forums. Read about the host. Study the audience. Review your own questionnaire answers. Practice out loud. Prepare for the question beneath the question. A small room still deserves serious preparation.

7. Don’t silo policy and communications. Strong policy needs clear language. Strong communications needs substance. The best campaign material comes from the tension between the two: what do we mean, what can we defend, what will people understand, and what detail can we not afford to lose?

8. Answer with specificity. Broad language may feel safe, but it can erase the very people asking you to see them. If someone asks about Black businesses, answer about Black businesses. If someone asks about Ward 7 grocery access, answer about Ward 7 grocery access. Respect starts with hearing the question as asked.

9. Understand that policy reveals leadership. You will not know every answer. You should not pretend otherwise. But voters will see how you learn, who you listen to, how you handle critique, and whether your ideas survive pressure.

I entered the race thinking policy would prove what I knew. I left understanding that policy also reveals how you learn. That may matter more. No candidate enters public life with every answer. The real test is whether they build the habits, team, and humility to find better ones under pressure.

Sara understood the weight of the decision, asked serious questions, and began connecting me with people who could help turn this private ambition into a credible campaign.

IGNITE first entered my life in college. My running mate, Jordan Fowler, and I won election as the first all-woman ticket to serve as student body president and vice president in Pac-12 history. That campaign introduced me to Sara and launched years of work urging young women to imagine themselves in office.

I shared some version of the same advice with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of young women: recognize your qualifications, trust your voice, and run.

Yet when my turn came, I hesitated.

Why could I give the advice so easily and follow it only with great difficulty?

My senior advisor, Caroline, frequently told me, “There are plenty of women who need bigger egos.” The line sounds provocative at first, but once I became a true participant in the local political scene, I understood her thinking fully.

Women often wait for permission long after they’ve earned the right to get started. I’d spent years giving that permission to other women. The harder question was why I struggled to give it to myself.

The advice I could give but struggled to take

I don’t want to reduce every question about a woman candidate’s qualifications to identity politics. Voters should scrutinize anyone who asks for power. Representation should never shield a candidate from criticism. Women can run weak campaigns, offer bad ideas, exercise poor judgment, and fail in office. Equality requires voters to take women seriously enough to question them.

It also requires consistent standards.

For years, I’ve watched the same contradiction play out: women often build an airtight case before they even consider running, while men treat ambition itself as evidence that they belong in the race. Women ask whether they’ve earned the right to enter. Men enter and make their case afterward.

Men with unconventional résumés certainly face criticism. Andrew Yang, Pete Buttigieg, Vivek Ramaswamy, Zohran Mamdani, and other male candidates have faced serious questions about whether their experience matched the offices they sought. Some of those questions carried merit.

I’m not asking whether men receive criticism. I’m asking why men so often enter races despite it while women remove themselves before voters ever get the chance to judge them.

When I looked at the men who pursued public office, I saw many step forward without decades of government experience or a conventional political résumé. They treated whatever experience they already possessed as sufficient grounds to begin.

That doesn’t mean every ambitious person should immediately seek the highest office available.

No one should treat the mayoralty of Washington, D.C., as an entry-level job. The mayor leads a large and complicated government, and voters had every right to ask whether I possessed the experience, judgment, temperament, and local knowledge necessary to manage it.

Experience matters. Scale matters. Preparation matters.

But the traditional political ladder often measures access more accurately than competence. It rewards longevity, relationships, institutional fluency, and acceptance by people who already hold influence. Those qualities may matter, but they can’t tell us who can build a team, manage a government, solve hard problems, or deliver results.

Ambition should not replace preparation. But women shouldn’t assume that only one résumé qualifies someone to lead.

An election should resemble the hardest job interview in the world. Elected officials work for taxpayers, and taxpayers deserve the opportunity to probe their experience, temperament, judgment, and record. But women should get to enter the interview before proving beyond all possible doubt that they deserve a seat at the table.

Before I examine the gender dynamics that shaped my candidacy, I need to acknowledge something equally important: this campaign grew from a community of women and men who poured their judgment, creativity, labor, and faith into it.

My father has always ranked among my greatest supporters. Long before I considered running for office, he shaped my understanding of work, leadership, responsibility, and service. He encouraged my ambition without treating it as unusual or excessive. When I decided to run for mayor, he believed in me with the steadiness of someone who had spent my entire life teaching me to believe in myself. He is, of course, a man, and any honest account of the forces that propelled my candidacy must begin with him.

My college mentor, Dan Schnur, took call after call as I worked through the decision to run and the challenges that followed. Jason, Eric, and Payton attended nearly every forum and debate with me. They prepared me, steadied me, challenged me, and pushed me to walk into each room as the strongest version of myself.

Women also carried this campaign at every level.

Caroline helped hold our strategy, communications, and internal dynamics together. Sara opened doors and connected me with people who understood both the promise and difficulty of the path ahead. Crystal Patterson brought the perspective of a Washingtonian and seasoned political operative. Anurima Bhargava offered informed belief grounded in years of advocacy and political experience.

Reyhan, Nikita, and Jill poured themselves into the campaign’s daily work. They organized events, managed logistics, recruited volunteers, communicated our message, solved problems, and carried the emotional strain of a citywide race.

I don’t take any of that support for granted. Any honest examination of gender and my campaign must leave room for the full truth: some people questioned whether I belonged in the race, while women and men I trusted invested their time, talent, judgment, and faith in helping me build something worthy of the voters’ consideration.

But support from people who believed in me didn’t erase the doubt. Some of the sharpest skepticism came not from strangers, opponents, or anonymous accounts, but from people in my personal life. Their questions forced me to confront a more painful version of the same problem: what happens when the people closest to you cannot yet imagine you in the role you want to pursue?

When doubt comes from people who know you

Questions about my qualifications didn’t remain confined to Twitter or the depths of Reddit. They came from my own circles.

Friends asked what, exactly, about working as a consultant qualified someone to serve as mayor. Some sent long voice notes expressing frustration that I would even consider running. One compared my dreams to the failed DC establishment Political Pattie’s. Ouch.

I can’t assign a single motive to everyone who questioned me, and I don’t intend to try. Some raised legitimate concerns. Others may have recognized weaknesses I couldn’t yet see. Friends who knew me personally may have based their objections on far more than my age or gender.

Still, their reactions puzzled me.

Some didn’t merely question whether I represented the strongest candidate. They questioned whether I possessed enough experience to enter the race at all.

Four or five months later, after our campaign stood outside in rain, sleet, and snow collecting petition signatures, attended forum after forum, and made a significant splash in the D.C. electoral scene, some of those same people began to come around. They seemed intrigued, impressed, perhaps even dazzled by the dent our team made.

The ambition that looked implausible in February looked impressive by June. It’s interesting to note: My résumé hadn’t changed. The evidence had.

Of course, their reversal didn’t prove sexism. It showed how quickly visible success changed their definition of what seemed reasonable. Why did the campaign need to prove itself before people could imagine that I might have belonged in the race from the beginning?

Finishing in third place didn’t prove that I would have governed well. A campaign can’t fully answer that question about any first-time executive candidate.

What the campaign proved was narrower: I could build an organization, qualify for the ballot, develop a policy platform, withstand public scrutiny, compete in forums, and earn meaningful support across the city.

Those accomplishments justified my presence in the race. They did not entitle me to win it.

This essay doesn’t attempt to dispute every criticism leveled against me during my candidacy. I don’t intend to relitigate every argument about my résumé, my age, or my decision to run.

Still, I’d be lying if I said I felt no temptation to answer some of it.

Some internet skeptics questioned whether my work as a director at a cybersecurity company qualified as “real technology” because I wasn’t a hands-on keyboard engineer. The criticism ignored the range of technology work I had actually done, from learning-management-system transitions to vulnerability-management projects for federal government, higher education, and state & local customers. It also ignored the broader record I brought into the race: multiple early promotions, consistently strong year-end evaluations, responsibility for teams of more than 25 people, and service as chief of staff to an organization of more than 400.

My team often reminded me that fighting keyboard warriors online would consume time without persuading anyone. They were right. A candidate can spend an entire campaign rebutting people committed to misunderstanding her.

What troubled me more was that a small number of people who knew me personally raised similar doubts. They were not representative of my life. The overwhelming majority of the people closest to me threw themselves into the campaign. They donated, volunteered, attended events, made calls, carried signs, offered advice, and rearranged their lives to help me compete.

But the skepticism from that smaller group stayed with me precisely because they had watched my personal and professional life up close. They knew the hours I worked, the teams I managed, the responsibilities I carried, and the success I had earned. Yet even they sometimes struggled to imagine those experiences translating into public office.

That failure of imagination matters. Women don’t only face skepticism from strangers who know little about them. Sometimes even people who know the evidence can struggle to picture us in power.

Instead of relitigating every criticism, I want to examine the assumptions that shape who feels entitled to seek power in the first place.

The résumé gap that isn’t really about résumés

At first, I treated my hesitation as personal. Perhaps I lacked confidence. Perhaps the office really was too large. Perhaps I simply understood my limitations better than the men I watched enter public life.

But the more I studied the research, the less personal the pattern appeared.

According to the Center for American Women and Politics at Rutgers University, 14 women currently serve as governors, matching the highest number in American history. Men govern the remaining 36 states. No Black woman has ever served as governor of an American state.

Across nearly two and a half centuries of American history, voters have never elected a Black woman to that office.

We can’t explain that outcome simply by claiming that women lack the talent, experience, or public support required to govern.

We narrow the field long before voters enter a polling place.

We narrow it through who considers running, who receives encouragement, who views their résumé as sufficient, and who assumes that public ambition belongs to them.

According to research published by American University’s Women & Politics Institute, men with professional and educational backgrounds comparable to those of women proved almost 60 percent more likely to describe themselves as “very qualified” to run for office. Women proved more than twice as likely to describe themselves as completely unqualified.

According to another Women & Politics Institute study of more than 2,100 college students, men proved twice as likely as women to say they’d considered running for office many times. Fourteen percent of the men said they definitely intended to run one day, compared with 7 percent of the women.

Encouragement plays an even more crucial role. According to the same study, 35 percent of the young women reported that someone had encouraged them to run, compared with 49 percent of the young men. Among women who received encouragement, 66 percent expressed interest in seeking office. Among women who received none, that figure fell to 21 percent.

Women did not lack ambition by nature. Too often, no one cultivated it.

That helps explain why organizations such as IGNITE matter. IGNITE’s leadership programming begins as early as high school and builds political ambition through civic education, practical training, exposure to women leaders, and peer networks.

Tell a young woman to run, and you may change what she imagines for herself. Politics can move from something she watches to something she believes she can shape.

This is something that Caroline and I both intimately understand as women in politics: The suggestion that women simply need bigger egos captures only part of the problem. Confidence can’t overcome every structural barrier. Women also need donors, political networks, childcare, fair media treatment, institutional support, and room to make mistakes. Women of color, queer women, working-class women, and women carrying significant caregiving responsibilities often face additional obstacles that confidence alone can’t solve.

According to the OECD, barriers to women’s political participation include gendered recruitment practices, gaps in campaign financing, harassment, media coverage, voter bias, and assumptions about women’s electability.

Still, my experience taught me that encouragement matters, even when it can’t erase years of conditioning overnight. I sat on the board of an organization devoted to helping young women run. I built part of my public identity around encouraging women to recognize their own power.

Yet when I contemplated seeking office myself, I assembled a private prosecution against my own ambition.

Was I experienced enough? Had I lived in DC long enough? Would people take a 31-year-old South Asian immigrant woman seriously? Had I earned the right to ask voters to consider me?

The men I watched enter politics rarely seemed to conduct the same internal trial.

That difference matters not only because it shapes who runs. It also shapes whose experiences reach the rooms where public decisions are made.

What representation changes, and what it doesn’t

Sometimes I wonder whether I’m asking too much of history.

Women in the United States secured a constitutional right to vote only in 1920, after generations of organizing. Jeannette Rankin became the first woman elected to Congress four years earlier, representing Montana before women nationwide could vote on equal terms. Other democracies extended political rights to women at different moments and often only after similarly long struggles. New Zealand granted women the national vote in 1893. Finland extended full political rights to women in 1906. The United Kingdom didn’t grant women voting rights on the same terms as men until 1928.

Against that history, perhaps the slow pace of women’s rise to political power shouldn’t surprise me. In only a few generations, women have moved from fighting for the right to cast a ballot to asking voters to entrust them with entire governments. Institutions built almost entirely by men didn’t suddenly shed their assumptions when the law changed. Neither did political parties, donors, families, voters, or women ourselves.

But history doesn’t move on its own schedule. Every gain that now looks inevitable began when someone demanded more than the prevailing moment seemed prepared to give. Women didn’t win the vote by waiting for unanimous agreement that they were ready for citizenship. They won it by insisting that democracy could not remain legitimate while excluding them.

So perhaps I am asking too much. History suggests that women have often needed to.

A more representative government matters not only because women deserve an equal opportunity to hold power. It matters because democratic institutions waste talent when they draw leadership from the same narrow networks.

Other democracies have moved closer to political parity than the United States. According to the OECD, women held at least half of cabinet positions in Finland, Iceland, Estonia, Chile, Spain, and the United Kingdom in 2025. Across OECD countries, however, women held an average of only 35 percent of cabinet posts.

Representation alone can’t guarantee wise, humane, or effective government. Women don’t share one ideology, one governing style, or one set of priorities. Women can defend authoritarian systems, suppress civil liberties, enable injustice, and abuse power just as men can. Aung San Suu Kyi, once celebrated internationally as a democratic icon, appeared before the International Court of Justice to defend Myanmar against allegations that it failed to prevent genocide against the Rohingya.

I don’t argue that every woman will govern better than every man.

I argue that democracy should draw leadership from its full population, judge candidates by consistent standards, and stop confusing the historic dominance of men with proof of superior competence.

Representation can’t guarantee better judgment, but it widens the pool of people we consider capable of leading. It brings more experiences into the rooms where leaders set priorities, negotiate tradeoffs, and spend public money. It also makes it harder for institutions to dismiss the concerns of women, queer people, immigrants, caregivers, and working families as niche interests raised from outside the room.

A truly representative society doesn’t promise perfect outcomes. It gives democracy a better chance to see the whole public it claims to represent.

But broader representation will not emerge on its own. Someone must notice talent before it becomes obvious, encourage ambition before it becomes respectable, and help people enter politics before every gatekeeper agrees they belong.

Encouragement should not depend on luck

When I texted Sara about running, she did more than encourage me. She immediately introduced me to Crystal Patterson, an IGNITE board member, Washingtonian, and veteran political strategist.

Crystal helped me understand D.C. politics from the inside. I turned to her frequently because she could read personalities, anticipate tactical problems, and distinguish a real threat from the sort of temporary panic that can consume a campaign. Her advice carried weight because she paired political experience with an instinct for what mattered and what didn’t.

Caroline played a different but equally essential role. As my senior advisor, she understood how to manage both the campaign and the many personalities inside and around it. She helped shape our public voice, navigate internal tensions, and protect the larger strategy from the distractions that arrive every day in a competitive race.

She also understood me. She knew when criticism contained something useful and when it simply threatened to pull me off course. She pushed me to communicate more clearly, claim my authority, and resist the urge to shrink my ambition to make other people more comfortable. More than almost anyone, she understood what a difficult moment required before I did.

Dave Thompson was one of the first friends I called. Like me, he’d served as a student body president, and he knew how to push past the vague language people often use when they first describe why they want to lead.

He asked me to pitch myself.

Why did I want to run? Why did I believe D.C. needed someone like me? What, exactly, would I ask voters to trust me to do?

I began listing the campaign’s three central pillars: fix the basics, strengthen neighborhoods, and lower the cost of living.

Dave stopped me.

“Fix the basics,” he said. “That’s your slogan.”

He was right.

Within weeks, those three words appeared across our campaign materials and eventually across 1,500 pole signs throughout the city. What began as one line in a longer answer became the clearest expression of why I entered the race.

Political encouragement can take many forms. Sometimes it arrives as a sharp question, a challenge, or a friend who hears the idea before you fully recognize it yourself.

Anurima Bhargava offered another kind of encouragement. I first met her in 2015, when I worked as a campus advocate and student leader. By the time I considered running for mayor, she’d watched Zohran Mamdani’s political rise at close range.

Through that experience, she learned how little certainty politics offers. She told me that even a week before the election, people close to Mamdani’s campaign still believed they might lose.

“Anything can happen these days,” she reminded me.

I couldn’t shake that line.

She didn’t mean that preparation no longer mattered, or that every long-shot candidate would suddenly win. She meant that campaigns resist the tidy predictions people make before voters actually vote. Coalitions shift. Messages catch fire. Unknown candidates become serious contenders. Political certainty often sounds most convincing immediately before events disprove it.

Experienced political operatives understand this better than most. They know how quickly a race can change and how often outsiders mistake the current order for a permanent one.

Sara opened doors. Crystal helped me understand the terrain. Caroline sharpened my voice and helped hold the campaign together. Anurima expanded my sense of what politics might make possible. Dave found the clearest expression of our message. Dan offered perspective. Jason, Eric, and Payton stood beside me through forum after forum. Reyhan, Nikita, and Jill helped turn our ideas into outreach, events, execution, and daily momentum.

Each person gave me a different form of belief. The campaign needed all of them.

Their support revealed a larger problem: encouragement shouldn’t depend on whether a young person happens to meet the right mentor, join the right board, or find someone willing to answer a late-night phone call.

Political parties and movements need to find talent early, develop it deliberately, and encourage promising people to lead before they collect every imaginable credential.

The Republican movement has understood this for years.

Take Turning Point USA, for example, an organization I have butted heads with since my college days. Its mission centers on identifying, educating, training, and organizing students. The organization says its network operates across thousands of high-school and college campuses, with the explicit goal of building a durable conservative activist infrastructure. Its work begins not when someone declares a candidacy, but when young people first form political identities, build networks, and imagine themselves as leaders.

Democrats and progressives do have organizations devoted to this work. IGNITE trains young women. Young Democrats of America develops young political leaders. Leaders We Deserve supports young candidates seeking state and federal office. Run for Something recruits and supports progressive candidates seeking state and local office, often for the first or second time.

Run for Something deserves special mention in my story. The organization endorsed my mayoral campaign at a moment when many traditional political institutions still treated my candidacy as an unlikely experiment. That endorsement didn’t erase the difficulty of running, but it offered something every outsider needs: an established organization willing to say publicly that this person belongs in the race.

According to Run for Something, it has endorsed thousands of candidates across all 50 states and Washington, D.C., since its founding. Its model recognizes a basic truth political parties too often miss: the people who eventually transform public life rarely arrive fully formed, fully funded, and universally approved. Someone must recognize their potential before the rest of the political world considers it obvious.

That kind of early investment matters especially in Washington, D.C. Our political culture places enormous value on relationships, neighborhood history, institutional fluency, and proof that someone has already served the city. Those expectations can protect voters from unserious candidates, but they can also create a closed loop: outsiders need political credibility to enter, yet they can’t build political credibility until someone first gives them an opportunity to serve.

The Democratic Party can’t wait until a promising person reaches her thirties, builds an impressive résumé, assembles her own network, and independently decides to run. By then, years of organizing, mentorship, and leadership development have already passed.

Politics starts much earlier. It starts when a high-school student organizes her classmates. It starts when a college student runs for student government, leads an advocacy campaign, or learns to speak before a hostile audience. It starts when someone recognizes that talent and says: You could do this at the next level.

To mount a meaningful long-term fight against the Republican Party, Democrats must treat political talent the way successful institutions treat every other form of talent. Find people early. Train them seriously. Give them meaningful opportunities. Remain invested even when they lose their first race.

“Run anyway” can’t function only as a slogan directed at individuals. It must become an institutional commitment.

We need to tell talented people to run. We also need to give them the training, relationships, money, and support that make running plausible.

And encouragement cannot stop once a woman enters the race. The next test comes when she speaks with authority, defends her record, or refuses to absorb criticism quietly.

When the accusation is substance and the response becomes tone

One of the campaign’s most revealing moments didn’t involve me. It came during an NBC4 forum featuring Kenyan McDuffie and Janeese Lewis George.

Lewis George entered the race with far more elected experience than I did. She’d already built a public record and earned the support of a distinct political coalition. Our candidacies didn’t encounter identical barriers, and I don’t claim that they did. That distinction made the forum exchange even more instructive.

During the discussion, McDuffie accused Lewis George of taking credit for work connected to Charles Allen and the Pay Equity Fund. As Lewis George began to respond, I heard moderator Mark Segraves interject, “Oh, here we go again.”

I kept returning to that interruption.

Lewis George finished her response by naming what she saw as a familiar dynamic: men accusing women of claiming credit that doesn’t belong to them, even though women often work harder for less recognition.

Whatever one thought of the underlying policy dispute, the exchange exposed a familiar double bind. A woman must defend her record when someone diminishes it. But when she responds forcefully, the defense becomes the story.

McDuffie’s accusation remained a question of substance. Lewis George’s response became a question of tone.

Women in politics must not only accomplish the work. They must also establish ownership of it while navigating pressure to remain calm, agreeable, and restrained. Push back, and observers may call you combative. Stay quiet, and someone else may walk away with the credit.

A televised exchange can’t explain the national gender pay gap, and I don’t present it as proof of one. It offers a small example of broader judgments about authority, tone, competence, and ownership. The economic data matters because it shows that unequal outcomes don’t end with perception.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, women working full time earned median weekly wages of $1,089 in 2025, compared with $1,326 for men. Women therefore earned about 82 percent of men’s median weekly earnings.

Those numbers don’t mean that every woman performing the same job as a man receives precisely 82 cents for his dollar. Critics correctly note that broad earnings comparisons reflect differences in occupations, hours, seniority, work histories, and other variables. Any honest discussion should acknowledge those factors.

But they don’t make the disparity imaginary.

They invite further questions. Why do women remain concentrated in lower-paying fields? Why do women receive fewer opportunities to advance? Why do they continue to carry a disproportionate share of caregiving responsibilities? Why do disparities persist even among highly educated professionals and managers?

We shouldn’t separate those outcomes from everyday judgments about women’s competence, ambition, tone, and ownership of their work. The interruption, the doubt, the accusation that a woman claimed too much credit, and the expectation that she defend herself without showing frustration all emerge from a broader culture.

Anecdotes help us recognize the pattern. Data helps us measure its consequences.

The same culture that questions how a woman speaks also shapes how the public learns to understand who she is.

The man used to explain me

During my campaign, a handful of critics referred to me as the “female Andrew Yang.” Depending on who said it, the comparison sounded like praise, mockery, or an attempt to place an unfamiliar candidate into a familiar category.

I understood parts of the comparison. Like Yang, I entered a major race without previously holding elected office. I centered my campaign on government performance, technology, and the belief that political systems should deliver measurable results.

But the label also exposed the limits of our political imagination.

When a young woman enters a race with an unconventional résumé, we often look for a man to explain her. We ask whose female version she represents. We compare her ambition to a precedent we already recognize. We treat her candidacy as derivative before considering whether she might stand on her own terms.

Perhaps people called me the female Andrew Yang because our campaigns shared certain characteristics. But perhaps the label also reflected a culture that still struggles to describe an ambitious young woman without placing her in a man’s political lineage.

At some point, though, a woman must stop asking which familiar man makes her legible. She has to enter the arena under her own name.

The woman in the arena

Theodore Roosevelt captured something enduring in his 1910 speech about the person “who is actually in the arena,” the person who acts, struggles, errs, and risks failure while critics remain safely outside.

For the purposes of this essay, I’m making one small editorial adjustment: the credit belongs to the woman in the arena.

The woman whose face, to borrow Roosevelt’s image, carries the dust, sweat, and blood of the effort. The woman who strives, falls short, learns publicly, and risks losing while others explain what she should have done differently.

I don’t invoke that passage to place candidates beyond criticism. The arena doesn’t make a person correct, qualified, or entitled to victory. It does, however, separate scrutiny of someone’s decisions from dismissal of her merely for daring to enter.

I entered. I made mistakes. I faced legitimate questions. I also built something that many observers initially believed I had no right to attempt.

I would rather fail while daring greatly than spend my life among the comfortable voices explaining why another woman should have waited.

But an essay about entering the arena should not end with my own campaign. The more important question is who enters next.

What this means for Washington, D.C.

As I write this, I’m in third place in the mayoral election. I would fail to tell the full story, however, if I ignored the gender and racial dynamics that shaped the race.

I entered as a 31-year-old South Asian immigrant woman with no previous elected experience. Janeese Lewis George entered as a Black woman, a native Washingtonian, and an established elected official with years of experience in District politics. Our candidacies challenged traditional ideas about who gets to pursue executive power, but we did so from different backgrounds and with different relationships to the city’s political establishment.

Had I listened to every voice telling me to wait, I would never have become the first South Asian person in D.C. history to make the mayoral ballot.

That milestone carries a deeper emotional meaning for me than any line on a political résumé. My grandfather received only a seventh-grade education. My grandmother received only a first-grade education. The women who came before me lived within worlds that offered them far fewer choices than the one I inherited. They could not assume access to education, professional authority, public leadership, or the freedom to test the full reach of their ambition.

I don’t share that history to suggest that my candidacy completed some inevitable family journey. Nothing about it was inevitable. That is precisely the point. The opportunities available to one generation can disappear unused if the next generation decides it must first secure everyone else’s permission. I had opportunities my grandparents never received, but I still had to decide whether to use them.

When we reflexively doubt ourselves or dismiss people in our lives who may carry real political significance when they choose to run, we risk more than one person’s ambition. We may close off representation that a family, a community, or a city has never seen before. We may prevent someone from discovering what she can build. And we may erase a piece of history before it can happen.

Running did not entitle me to win. But not running would have guaranteed that none of it happened.

Washingtonians will soon face another chance to enter public life. Advisory Neighborhood Commission seats will appear on the November 3, 2026, ballot. According to the D.C. Board of Elections, the candidate ballot-access period opened on June 12.

ANC commissioners serve two-year terms without salaries. They advocate for neighbors, work with District agencies, testify before the Council, weigh in on development and licensing questions, respond to constituent concerns, and build public records of community service.

ANC service matters beyond the next campaign. Commissioners confront the issues residents use to judge whether government works at all: unsafe intersections, broken sidewalks, sanitation, public safety, recreation, development, and access to city services. The ANC system therefore sits at the intersection of the two arguments that defined my campaign. D.C. needs to cultivate new leaders and public officials who know how to fix the basics at the neighborhood level.

For political outsiders, an ANC seat can build some of the credibility that political institutions otherwise insist they lack. It lets someone demonstrate judgment, develop relationships, and earn a community’s trust before seeking wardwide or citywide office.

But we shouldn’t romanticize unpaid office as an equally accessible political pipeline. Unpaid public service favors people with flexible jobs, financial security, family support, or fewer caregiving responsibilities. Many residents whose perspectives government most needs can’t easily absorb those demands.

We should encourage more women and queer residents to run for ANC while also confronting the inequity of relying on unpaid labor as a primary gateway into political leadership. D.C. shouldn’t expect candidates to navigate that path alone. We need organizations that identify promising residents, teach them how local government works, connect them with experienced mentors, explain campaign finance and ballot access, and remain invested after Election Day.

A real pipeline would treat an unsuccessful first campaign not as a verdict, but as one stage in a longer public-service career.

This work carries additional weight in a city whose residents still lack full voting representation in Congress. Washingtonians already live with fewer formal avenues to national political power than residents of any state. We shouldn’t deepen that democratic deficit by channeling local leadership through networks too narrow for much of the city to enter.

I plan to encourage women across the District to run for ANC seats. I also want to help build a stronger pipeline of queer candidates.

Stevie McCarty, president of the Capital Stonewall Democrats, has shared plans with me to launch an initiative to help more queer Washingtonians run for local office. I intend to support that effort through sustained work. I plan to invest my time and energy in candidate trainings, webinars, and other programs that help queer residents understand the process, build confidence, and prepare to run.

The most powerful evidence of what representation can mean didn’t come from a poll, an endorsement, or a forum stage. It came from the young women I met along the campaign trail.

Several were still in high school. They approached me after events, stopped me at campaign appearances, or sent messages describing what it meant to see someone who looked different from the usual image of a mayoral candidate step forward and run seriously.

Their words carried a weight I didn’t fully understand until I heard them directly.

For me, the campaign involved strategy, scrutiny, sacrifice, and the daily pressure of proving that I belonged. For them, it also represented possibility. They could look at the race and imagine themselves entering public life one day.

I plan to get coffee soon with one of the young women I met during the campaign.

Representation doesn’t only change who holds office; it changes who begins to imagine that office as reachable. That is important work.

Of course, declaring representation as important won’t produce it. Someone must recruit candidates, explain the mechanics, help them assemble a team, connect them with resources, and stand by them when the criticism begins. D.C. needs a durable pipeline of women and queer leaders who can move from neighborhood service to wardwide and citywide leadership.

One of the most persistent criticisms I received involved the scale of my ambition. Some people believed I should have started with an ANC seat or pursued a smaller office before running for mayor. That criticism deserved consideration. Public service at the neighborhood level can provide invaluable experience, and no candidate should dismiss the knowledge gained through years of local work.

But others framed my decision to seek executive office as evidence of excessive ego. One person went so far as to suggest that the ambition itself reflected sociopathy.

That accusation exposed the contradiction at the heart of this essay.

Throughout history, society has tolerated, rewarded, and sometimes glorified men with enormous egos. Men have pursued power, conquered nations, destroyed institutions, and demanded that the world accommodate their ambition. Yet when a woman seeks power because she believes she can improve her community, her confidence can suddenly look suspicious.

Women and queer candidates should not receive a free pass from scrutiny. But neither should ambition itself count against them.

“Run anyway” doesn’t mean run without preparation, knowledge, humility, or respect for the responsibilities of office. It means: study the office. Serve your community. Build expertise. Learn what you don’t know. Assemble a strong team. Listen when people raise legitimate concerns.

Then allow voters, rather than your own fear or someone else’s discomfort, to decide whether you belong.

For many women and queer Washingtonians, that first race may begin with an ANC seat. For others, the right first race may look different.

My argument is not that women deserve less scrutiny. They deserve equal permission to enter the arena, equal room to establish their credibility, and equal standards once they do.

Years before I ran for mayor, I told young women that public office belonged to them too. Late that night in February, when I opened my conversation with Sara and typed that I wanted to run, I finally confronted the harder question: Did I believe that advice applied to me?

I pressed send.

Now, when I think about the young woman staring at her own unfinished message, I know what I want to tell her: prepare seriously, listen carefully, and know the job.

But do not wait for everyone else to agree that you’re ready.

Then press send.

They understood what I would soon learn firsthand. In a political campaign, money unlocks nearly everything. Money allows you to hire staff, communicate with voters, print materials, and, critically, pay petition circulators to help you qualify for the ballot.

My campaign manager, Jason, put it succinctly: If you don’t have institutional backing or a sprawling volunteer network, money becomes the next thing you really need. (Jason comes from the world of finance, so naturally, this diagnosis tracked.)

Unfortunately for me, and I suspect for many first-time candidates and even some elected officials, fundraising felt like one of the cringiest parts of running for office. My team reasonably expected me to sit down, dial the phone, and ask people for money. But the exercise felt deeply unnatural. Did they really expect me to call old friends and distant relatives, some of whom I hadn’t spoken to in more than a decade, pray that they picked up, and then ask them to contribute to my campaign?

Apparently, yes.

I joked with my friends about how refreshing it felt to discover that everyone suddenly responded so wonderfully. Old situationships (yes, they deserve a nod), stale friendships, my parents’ friends, distant cousins, and elementary, middle, and high school teachers all emerged from the depths of my memory to galvanize support and help me run for public office. Every contingency of my life suddenly came together for the campaign.

At the direction of one of my mentors, I made a list of nearly every person I had ever known.

That remains one of my most practical pieces of advice for first-time candidates: Make the list. Go through your phone, email, social media accounts, former workplaces, school networks, family connections, and every other chapter of your life. Write down the names of people who may donate, volunteer, make an introduction, offer advice, or simply share your campaign with someone else.

But don’t assume traditional call time will work for everyone.

Most people simply don’t answer their phones anymore, especially when they don’t recognize the number. Even people who love you may see an unexpected call and assume you’re about to ask them for something. To be fair, in this case, they would have been correct.

Text messages often worked better. So did voice notes, Instagram direct messages, and personalized emails. At one point, I even started contacting people through Facebook Messenger.

And it worked!

No single platform guarantees better fundraising. The larger lesson involves meeting people where they already communicate. A friend who ignores three phone calls may respond immediately to a thoughtful voice note. A former classmate who rarely checks email may answer an Instagram message. Someone who feels uncomfortable receiving a formal contribution request may respond warmly when you explain, in your own voice, why you decided to run.

Personalization matters. People can tell when they receive a mass message. They can also tell when you take thirty seconds to remember how you know them, acknowledge the years that may have passed, and explain why their support would mean something to you.

As I unwind from the election, I plan to return to each of those messages and thank the people who responded, contributed, shared our work, or offered encouragement. I want to reconnect with them as people, not preserve them as names on a future fundraising list.

And no, I’m not doing that to begin planning my next campaign.

Trust me, that represents the last thing on my mind right now. After the exhaustion and emotional intensity of this race, I don’t want to think about running again. I want to thank people because they answered when I reached into the distant corners of my life and asked them to believe in something with me. That support also carried an emotional weight I didn’t fully understand when the campaign began.

Over the course of the race, I read plenty of painful tweets and messages. Most disappeared into the blur of campaign noise. One of them, however, derailed nearly an entire day.

After our campaign published a hard-hitting tweet, a supporter of Kenyan McDuffie responded with something to the effect of: Stop wasting your friends’ time and money. You aren’t going to win.

The comment hurt more than I expected.

Many of my friends and relatives contributed because they believed in me. Some gave generously even though they didn’t have much money to spare. Others donated their time, professional skills, evenings, and weekends. I understood what those contributions represented, and the suggestion that I somehow wasted them struck directly at one of my deepest fears. Did I ask too much of the people I loved? Did their belief in me become a burden? Did trying only count as worthwhile if we ultimately won?

It took me far too long to understand the answer: No.

Trying represents its own form of courage, especially in a democracy that desperately needs more ordinary people willing to participate. Supporting a candidate also represents a civic act. A person who donates $10, knocks on doors, shares a post, attends a forum, or gives a friend the confidence to keep going has not wasted anything simply because that candidate doesn’t win. That contribution helped place another idea, another voice, and another choice before the public.

Winning matters. Of course it does. Campaigns exist to win elections. But democracy cannot function if we treat every unsuccessful candidacy as foolish, embarrassing, or wasteful. That attitude protects incumbents, insiders, and people who already possess the money and institutional support to appear inevitable. It discourages everyone else from trying.

I want future first-time candidates to remember this when the criticism starts to cut through: You don’t need to feel guilty because people chose to believe in you. Honor their belief. Spend their money carefully. Treat their time with respect. Work as hard as you can. But don’t confuse an uncertain outcome with a wasted effort. Trying remains incredibly valiant. And everyone who helps you try participates in democracy too.

Fundraising consumed much of my time during the campaign’s earliest days. Every hour I spent contacting potential donors meant one less hour meeting voters, developing policy, preparing for forums, or building the campaign itself. Even then, the stakes didn’t fully click for me until several weeks into the race, when our team began debating whether to buy more pole signs, order lawn signs, or put the money toward boosted digital ads.

We constantly faced a choice between this or that. We could afford one tactic, but not all of them. Campaigns that raised far more money rarely confronted those decisions with the same intensity. They could buy the signs and the ads. They could hire the staff and pay the canvassers. Money didn’t guarantee them victory, but it gave them more opportunities to pursue it.

Money also purchased something less tangible but equally consequential: legitimacy. It shaped whether voters, donors, journalists, debate organizers, and political institutions treated a campaign as one worth taking seriously.

The Georgetown University and FOX 5 mayoral debate made that painfully clear.

On March 12, Georgetown and FOX 5 announced that candidates could qualify for the debate through one of three routes: certification in the Fair Elections Program, at least 1,000 campaign donations reflected in the final Office of Campaign Finance filing before the debate, or at least 5 percent support in a qualifying independent public poll.

On its face, that may sound neutral. In practice, the criteria placed traditionally financed candidates in an impossible position.

The most recent reporting deadline for traditionally financed campaigns had already passed on March 10, two days before Georgetown and FOX 5 published the criteria. Our next scheduled filing would not occur until June 10, weeks after the debate. Fair Elections candidates, meanwhile, filed additional reports in April and May. That meant Georgetown could see their current fundraising activity while our public record remained frozen at an earlier stage of the campaign.

The polling pathway offered no meaningful solution. Georgetown would not accept polling commissioned by a candidate, even though we did not have the budget to commission a credible citywide poll in the first place. The only qualifying public poll would not appear until just weeks before Election Day, which exposed a separate problem with the election cycle: For most of the race, candidates, voters, journalists, and debate organizers had almost no reliable public polling through which to measure the field.

In other words, Georgetown published a 1,000-donation requirement after traditionally financed candidates had lost the opportunity to demonstrate that they met it through an official filing. It then offered a polling pathway that candidates could neither initiate themselves nor rely upon existing in time to shape access to the debate.

The organizers invited only three candidates: Gary Goodweather, Kenyan McDuffie, and Janeese Lewis George. They excluded every traditionally financed candidate, including Vincent Orange and me.

By that point, our campaign qualified for the ballot, crossed 1,000 donations, raised tens of thousands of dollars, built a citywide volunteer operation, and generated substantial public engagement. We met the substance of the donation criterion. We simply had no permitted filing window in which to place that achievement into the public record Georgetown chose to recognize.

Once we crossed 1,000 donations, our supporters mobilized. They called and emailed Georgetown and FOX 5. They tweeted at the institutions and commented on posts from GU Politics and FOX 5. They made clear that excluding a ballot-qualified candidate with more than 1,000 donations and visible public support did not merely disadvantage our campaign. It diminished the democratic value of the debate itself.

A stage with only three candidates told voters that the race had already narrowed, even though another formidable candidate had demonstrated meaningful fundraising support, built a citywide following, and met the same ballot-access requirements. The debate did not simply reflect perceptions of viability. By determining whom voters would see, it actively created those perceptions.

Throughout this process, Adrea Turner, Georgetown’s vice president for government relations and community engagement, served as our primary point of contact. Our campaign repeatedly communicated with her as we asked Georgetown to reconsider and explained why the criteria created an impossible barrier for traditionally financed candidates.

Only later did we learn that Turner contributed the maximum allowable Fair Elections donation to Kenyan McDuffie, one of the three candidates Georgetown invited. She previously served in Mayor Bowser’s administration, most recently as chief of staff in the Office of the Deputy Mayor for Planning and Economic Development.

I do not know who made the final decision to exclude us, and I do not claim that her contribution dictated the outcome. But the fact that our primary contact had financially supported an invited candidate created a serious appearance problem, particularly while Georgetown and FOX 5 exercised enormous discretion over which candidates the public would hear from.

When a university and a television station assume that power, transparency cannot be optional. The organizers should disclose relevant financial support for participating candidates, publish their eligibility standards before the applicable campaign-finance deadlines, and design criteria that candidates have a genuine opportunity to meet.

My deepest concern extends beyond our campaign. If a formidable, ballot-qualified candidate can build a citywide following, attract more than 1,000 donations, and still struggle to gain access to a major debate because she lacks institutional backing, what does that say about the choices voters are actually being given?

A democracy should not require newcomers to possess money, longstanding political relationships, or institutional validation before the public receives a meaningful opportunity to hear them. Yet that was the cycle we confronted: Money purchased exposure. Exposure created legitimacy. Legitimacy attracted more money. Candidates without those initial advantages struggled to access the very platforms that could have helped them overcome the disadvantage.

To understand how our campaign ended up on the wrong side of that cycle, you first need to understand D.C.’s public-financing system.

Why D.C. Created Public Financing

In 2017, nine members of the D.C. Council introduced legislation to create a public financing system for local campaigns. The Council passed the Fair Elections Amendment Act in early 2018, and the program launched for the 2020 election cycle.

The idea behind Fair Elections makes intuitive sense. Candidates who agree to lower contribution limits and stricter rules can qualify for public funds by demonstrating support from a required number of D.C. residents. Once a candidate qualifies, the government matches eligible small-dollar contributions and provides a base payment.

The system aims to reward candidates who build broad support among ordinary residents rather than rely primarily on wealthy donors, corporations, political action committees, or personal fortunes. A resident who can afford only $25 should still carry meaningful financial weight in an election. A candidate without a Rolodex full of millionaires should still have a credible path toward public office.

The program also seeks to change how candidates spend their time. Instead of chasing a handful of people who can write large checks, candidates can focus on persuading many residents to contribute smaller amounts. In theory, that approach draws candidates closer to the people they hope to represent.

D.C. pays for the program through a special, non-lapsing Fair Elections Fund. The Council deposits annual appropriations into the fund, along with returned campaign funds and fines collected for violations of the Fair Elections law. Because the money doesn’t disappear at the end of each fiscal year, the fund can accumulate resources for future elections.

That structure also means D.C. doesn’t spend the same amount every year. Spending shifts depending on which offices appear on the ballot and how many candidates qualify. The program distributed roughly $4 million during the 2020 cycle, more than $12 million during the 2022 cycle, and about $2.8 million during the 2024 cycle. By the end of May 2026, the Office of Campaign Finance authorized more than $9 million for candidates participating in the current election cycle.

D.C. didn’t invent this model. New York City has operated a small-dollar matching system since the late 1980s. Following several corruption scandals, New York voters approved a campaign finance board charged with reducing the influence of private money in city elections. Today, New York City matches eligible contributions from residents at an eight-to-one rate. A $25 contribution can generate another $200 in public money for a participating campaign.

Other states and cities have adopted their own versions. Some match small contributions. Some provide candidates with grants. Seattle gives residents democracy vouchers they can assign to participating candidates. The designs vary, but the underlying goal remains consistent: broaden political participation, elevate small donors, and reduce the extent to which access to wealth determines who can credibly run for office.

I support that goal. Public financing can open doors that private fundraising keeps shut. It can encourage candidates from less wealthy communities to run, give residents more influence over campaigns, and help voters hear from a wider range of voices.

But good intentions don’t guarantee good design.

Like many programs in D.C., Fair Elections deserves careful examination. My campaign for mayor revealed that need distinctly. The system promises to level the playing field, but the path toward qualifying can still favor candidates who begin with political networks, experienced fundraisers, institutional support, and long campaign timelines.

For a first-time candidate entering a race only months before Election Day, the program can present a cruel contradiction: Public financing may offer the resources you need to compete, but you may need substantial resources before you can qualify for public financing at all.

Traditional Financing Versus Fair Elections

Before continuing, let me explain the two financing paths available to candidates in D.C.

A candidate can choose traditional financing or participate in the Fair Elections Program. Under traditional financing, a mayoral candidate can accept contributions of up to $2,000 from an individual donor. The campaign raises private money, spends what it raises, and receives no public match.

Fair Elections operates differently. A mayoral candidate agrees to accept much smaller contributions, capped at $200 per donor, and to follow stricter rules governing where campaign money can come from. Participating campaigns cannot accept contributions from corporations, businesses, political action committees, political parties, or labor unions.

I genuinely loved that part of the program.

Those restrictions fully aligned with who I am and how I wanted to run. I didn’t want corporate PACs or entrenched political interests financing my campaign. I wanted ordinary residents to power it. Fair Elections promised to give a D.C. resident who contributed $20 more influence, not because that person possessed wealth or political connections, but because the program multiplied their support.

That vision remains deeply compelling to me.

For a mayoral candidate, qualification requires at least 1,000 individual D.C. resident donors and at least $40,000 in eligible small-dollar contributions during the qualifying period. After certification, the District matches qualifying contributions at five times their value. A $20 contribution can generate another $100 in public money. The program also provides participating candidates with a base payment after they satisfy additional requirements.

Public financing can transform a relatively modest pool of private donations into the resources necessary to run a serious citywide campaign. That sounds straightforward. It didn’t feel straightforward from inside a campaign.

Traditional financing offers larger contributions but no multiplier. Fair Elections offers a powerful multiplier, but only after a campaign clears a demanding threshold. The candidate must first find 1,000 D.C. residents, persuade them to donate, raise at least $40,000 from those residents, document every contribution properly, and complete the process within the qualifying window.

In other words, traditional candidates need money. Fair Elections candidates need money, people, organization, and time before the government gives them more money.

That distinction matters because candidates must select a path early, often before they fully understand how much infrastructure each one requires. For an established politician with a donor base, campaign staff, institutional relationships, and months to prepare, Fair Elections can provide an extraordinary advantage. For a first-time candidate entering late, the qualification process can resemble another campaign layered on top of the campaign itself.

My team initially chose Fair Elections because its values matched ours. Then we confronted the clock.

The Clock Strikes Again

In my previous piece, The Hidden Price of Getting on the Ballot, I wrote extensively about how time shaped every part of our race. Time separated us from campaigns that spent months, or even years, preparing. The clock worked against us as we fought for ballot access, and it worked against us again as we tried to qualify for public financing.

Gary Goodweather appears to have become the first first-time candidate without prior elected experience to qualify for public financing in a D.C. mayoral race. His achievement deserves recognition. It also raises an important point: Reaching that milestone required a long runway.

Gary registered his campaign in February 2025, nearly sixteen months before Election Day. By contrast, I filed on February 13, with only four months remaining before the election. Our next mandatory Fair Elections financial report fell due on March 10, and the qualifying period closed on March 18. To receive matching funds, we needed to document at least $40,000 in qualified small-dollar contributions from 1,000 D.C. residents by the end of that period.

That gave us roughly a month.

During those few weeks, we were also launching the campaign, introducing me to voters, building a team, collecting ballot signatures, developing policy, responding to press, and creating the basic systems necessary to operate a citywide race. We were not simply fundraising. We were trying to construct the entire campaign at the same time.

On paper, the Fair Elections threshold demonstrates broad community support. In practice, reaching it demands time, organization, staff, volunteers, and often money that a first-time candidate may not yet possess. I heard that Gary spent months approaching residents on the street and asking them to contribute even a few dollars so his campaign could reach the required number of donors.

Transparently, we did the same.

One night, my data director Glenn and I canvassed Trade (yes, Trade), asking strangers to pitch in a few dollars so someone from their community could run for public office. Glenn approached people with the kind of confidence I hadn’t yet developed. I followed behind him, explained the campaign, and made the ask. I’m telling you: This process strips you of nearly every remaining ounce of shame and hardens you like no other.

At one point, we even contacted a local fundraising firm, hoping that spending money might help us make more money. Yes, that represents an entirely real corner of the Democratic campaign world. Campaigns can pay consultants for fundraising strategy, purchase phone and email lists, and gain access to networks of potential donors. In theory, those investments help candidates reach more people, raise more money, and build the infrastructure necessary to keep raising it.

But the proposition felt circular. We needed money to hire people who might help us raise the money we already lacked. All of this felt profoundly dizzying to me as a first-time candidate. The firm could help us develop lists and make donor contact, but no firm could manufacture the one resource we needed most: time. Even the best list requires someone to call through it. Even the strongest fundraising strategy requires weeks or months to build relationships, follow up, and convert interest into contributions.

Once again, the clock controlled the campaign.

When we did not meet the Fair Elections threshold, the Office of Campaign Finance required us to wind down our Fair Elections committee and continue under the traditional campaign-finance system. That meant closing one committee structure, opening another, adjusting to different contribution limits and reporting requirements, and moving forward without public matching funds.

The consequences extended beyond the money itself. Some debate organizers later relied on financing status, fundraising reports, or criteria that favored publicly financed candidates. Our transition into the traditional system placed us on a different reporting calendar and, in some cases, left organizers looking at outdated information about our fundraising. Failing to qualify did not merely determine how much money we could spend. It also shaped which political platforms treated us as eligible or viable.

I’m not prepared to prescribe a full set of reforms to the Fair Elections Program yet. This campaign ended only recently, and I need more time to unwind from the race, review the data, speak with other candidates, and think carefully about the policy implications of what we experienced. But I can say this much now: Prospective candidates need to understand that public financing requires time. There are deadlines, donor thresholds, documentation requirements, contribution rules, and a demanding qualification process that can shape the entire race before many voters even know the race has started.

Anyone considering a run should review the D.C. Board of Elections candidate resources and the Office of Campaign Finance’s Fair Elections guidance before announcing. Build every qualifying, filing, petition, and reporting deadline into the campaign plan, then assign someone to track those dates closely. Missing one window can affect far more than fundraising. It can determine how much staff you can hire, how often you can communicate with voters, whether institutions treat your campaign as viable, and how many strategic options remain available later in the race.

I expect to return to the question of reform after I have more time to reflect. For now, my goal involves making the hurdles visible so the next first-time candidate does not discover them only after the clock has already started working against them.

The Machinery Behind the Money

Fundraising also required us to choose the machinery through which the money would travel.

When we launched, nearly every Democratic campaign I encountered used ActBlue. So we used ActBlue too. I didn’t conduct a lengthy comparison of fundraising platforms, transaction fees, donor-data policies, fraud controls, or compliance tools. I saw the platform Democrats appeared to use and followed the existing path.

That may sound careless. It also reflects how first-time campaigns make many decisions. You enter the race at full speed, discover that you need a donation page immediately, and choose the tool everyone around you already recognizes. Only later do you learn how much the platform matters: how quickly it transfers money, what fees it charges, what information it collects, how easily the campaign can retrieve its records, and what safeguards it uses to verify contributions.

Later, my now-friend Stevie McCarty, president of the Capital Stonewall Democrats, introduced me to GoodChange, another fundraising platform built for Democratic and progressive campaigns. Until then, I didn’t even realize campaigns had meaningful alternatives. I also learned surprisingly late that campaigns could accept cash donations.

That discovery opened another dimension of the fundraising system (one that we did not leverage). An online donation creates a digital trail. A cash contribution demands careful documentation, accurate reporting, and trust among the candidate, campaign staff, donor, and government auditor.

The 2026 Ward 1 race showed what can happen when that process breaks down. The D.C. Office of Campaign Finance revoked Jackie Reyes-Yanes’s certification in the Fair Elections Program after auditors identified 13 people listed as cash contributors who denied making the contributions attributed to them. Reyes-Yanes denied wrongdoing, but the case illustrated the extraordinary consequences that can follow when a campaign cannot verify the donations it reports.

Those allegations deserve investigation and due process. But they also expose a pressure embedded in the system. When a contribution doesn’t merely add $20 or $50 to a campaign account, but also helps a candidate reach a donor threshold and unlock taxpayer-funded matching dollars, every donation carries multiplied value. The pressure to reach the threshold can become immense.

That pressure does not excuse dishonesty. It does, however, show why public financing requires rigorous verification, clear training, and meaningful safeguards, particularly around cash. A program that distributes public money must protect taxpayers and honest candidates from fabricated, misattributed, or improperly documented contributions. The desperation to raise money can push people toward steep and irreversible mistakes.

For first-time candidates, the lesson extends beyond choosing ActBlue, GoodChange, or any other platform. Ask questions before the campaign begins. Compare transaction fees and payout schedules. Understand who owns the donor data. Learn how refunds, recurring contributions, chargebacks, and cash donations work. Know what records the Office of Campaign Finance may require. Make sure your treasurer can verify every dollar.

The fundraising platform may look like a simple button on your website. It forms part of your campaign’s financial and ethical infrastructure.

My Most Urgent Advice

This leads to perhaps my most urgent piece of advice for anyone considering a run for public office in D.C.: Give yourself enough time to meet the Fair Elections threshold and qualify for matching funds.

You have almost no other viable option.

Without public financing, a first-time candidate must compete against opponents who can enter the most expensive months of the race with more than a million dollars in taxpayer-funded campaign money already in the bank. That advantage touches everything. It pays for staff, mail, television, digital advertising, polling, canvassers, consultants, and the repeated voter contact that often determines whether residents remember your name by Election Day.

In the 2026 mayoral race, Janeese Lewis George and Kenyan McDuffie each announced fundraising totals that reached well into the millions. Those figures sounded like evidence of overwhelming private support, but most of that money didn’t come directly from donors.

By March, Lewis George received nearly $1.59 million in public matching funds, along with an $80,000 base payment. McDuffie received roughly $1.43 million in matching funds, also accompanied by an $80,000 base payment. The eligible private contributions that generated those matches totaled only a fraction of the numbers that appeared in headlines.

That distinction matters.

A headline declaring that a candidate “raised $1.6 million” leaves many readers with the impression that donors independently contributed $1.6 million to that campaign. In reality, taxpayers supplied most of it through the Fair Elections Program. The candidate successfully raised the qualifying private contributions, and the government multiplied them.

The media often reported the combined total without clearly separating private donations from public funds. I consider that a meaningful reporting failure. The public deserved to know not only how much money each campaign controlled, but also where that money came from. Public financing should amplify genuine grassroots support. It shouldn’t allow a relatively modest amount of private fundraising to create the public impression that a candidate independently attracted millions of dollars from voters.

For candidates who fail to qualify, the resulting disparity feels brutal. You don’t simply compete against someone who raised more money than you. You compete against someone whose fundraising the government multiplied five times, while every dollar you raise remains exactly one dollar.

When Public Financing Meets Outside Money

Money has shaped politics for as long as democracy has required people to campaign, organize, and communicate with the public. In the United States, increasingly expensive elections drew candidates toward wealthy donors, corporations, political organizations, and professional fundraising networks. Reform efforts followed, including restrictions on corporate contributions, the post-Watergate creation of contribution limits and disclosure requirements, public financing for presidential elections, and the establishment of the Federal Election Commission.

Later court decisions changed the landscape again. Buckley v. Valeo treated political spending as a form of protected expression, while Citizens United v. FEC allowed corporations and unions to spend unlimited amounts on independent political advocacy. Related rulings helped create the modern super PAC and independent expenditure system, through which organizations can raise and spend enormous sums to influence elections as long as they do not legally coordinate with candidates. Public financing emerged, in part, as an effort to counterbalance that influence by giving small donors more power and candidates another path to viability.

That context made what happened during the D.C. mayoral race deeply unsettling to me.

The two leading publicly financed candidates benefited from major outside spending. Safe & Affordable DC, a labor-backed independent expenditure committee, spent heavily on advertising against Kenyan McDuffie and circulated messaging favorable to Janeese Lewis George. Opportunity DC endorsed McDuffie, and its independent expenditure committee spent money supporting him. Other outside organizations also entered the race with attack ads and political messaging.

These groups could raise and spend sums far beyond what an individual could contribute directly to a publicly financed candidate. So while the candidates themselves operated under strict contribution limits and received millions in taxpayer-funded matching dollars, outside groups could simultaneously spend enormous amounts trying to shape the same election.

During the campaign, I questioned whether candidates should benefit from both public financing and this level of outside spending. I received significant pushback from supporters of Lewis George, some of whom argued that union-backed spending should be viewed differently because unions represent workers rather than corporations or wealthy individuals. They are right that the sources are different, and that distinction matters. Workers should be able to organize, pool their resources, and participate meaningfully in elections. Collective political action gives working people a way to counterbalance the far greater financial power held by corporations, developers, executives, and wealthy individuals.

My concern was not that workers contributed. It was the structure through which large amounts of money entered the race.

Safe & Affordable DC brought together union-backed resources to support messaging favorable to Lewis George and oppose McDuffie. On the other side, McDuffie drew substantial support from D.C.’s business community, including developers, executives, and business owners. Opportunity DC, an independent expenditure committee funded by business interests and major developers, endorsed him and spent heavily attacking Lewis George.

Those two sources of support should not be treated as morally or politically identical. Union money represents workers acting collectively. Corporate and developer-backed spending often represents people and entities that already possess considerable economic power and may have direct financial interests in the decisions made by the next mayor. That deserves particularly serious scrutiny.

McDuffie’s official campaign could not accept direct corporate contributions under Fair Elections. But that restriction did not prevent business leaders and developers from contributing as individuals, nor did it prevent a business-backed independent expenditure committee from spending large sums to advance his candidacy. The formal separation between a campaign and an IEC does not erase the political benefit a candidate receives when an outside organization spends hundreds of thousands of dollars supporting him or attacking his principal opponent.

At the same time, I remain uncomfortable with the IEC model even when the underlying money comes from workers. Independent expenditure committees and super PAC-style organizations can spend far beyond what ordinary residents can contribute directly. They can dominate advertising, amplify one candidate, and bury another, all while operating outside the candidate’s official campaign account.

The transparency problem becomes even greater when money passes through nonprofits that do not disclose their original donors. In those cases, voters may know the name of the organization purchasing an advertisement but remain unable to identify the people or interests that supplied the money behind it.

That opacity represents the real danger of dark money. Voters can see the message without knowing whose financial interests helped place it before them. So my criticism is not evenly distributed, because the sources of the money are not equivalent. Corporate and developer-backed outside spending raises a deeper concern about concentrated economic power influencing the government officials who regulate development, award contracts, approve subsidies, and shape the city’s economy. But both sides of the race demonstrated how outside organizations can overwhelm the limits and intentions of a public-financing system.

Public financing restricts the money flowing directly into a campaign. It does not necessarily restrict the financial ecosystem operating around that campaign. In 2026, that meant one leading candidate benefited from an organized labor infrastructure, while the other benefited from a network of developers, executives, business leaders, and pro-business political organizations. Newcomers like me entered the race with neither.

I am not yet prepared to propose the precise policy solution. Independent expenditures raise difficult constitutional and enforcement questions, and I want more time to examine the data and consider the consequences of any reform. But the contradiction deserves scrutiny. A system designed to reduce the influence of big money should not ignore the influence of big money simply because it travels through a legally separate organization.

For first-time candidates, the practical lesson remains stark. Your opponents’ official campaign accounts may tell only part of the financial story. Before entering a race, research not only what the candidates have raised, but also which unions, businesses, advocacy organizations, nonprofits, and independent expenditure committees may spend money around them.

You may not simply compete against another person’s campaign account. You may compete against the accumulated power of industries, institutions, political organizations, and relationships built over many years.

What Our Money Actually Purchased

Before I explain where our money went, I need to acknowledge the enormous amount of volunteer labor that shaped our success. Reyhan, Alanna, Eric, Caroline, Jason, Payton, Glenn, Justin, Nikita, Peter, and many others donated nights, weekends, professional expertise, emotional energy, and countless hours to this campaign.

I count myself extraordinarily lucky. Most first-time candidates cannot summon that level of volunteer engagement, and without it, our campaign could never have operated at the scale that it did.

Take Caroline’s contribution as one example. As my senior advisor and communications lead, she regularly prepared me for television interviews, candidate forums, press calls, and difficult questions. She helped sharpen my message, anticipate attacks, rehearse answers, and review my performance afterward.

A reputable political consulting firm could easily charge between $30,000 and $60,000 for that level of campaign-long communications strategy and repeated media training. Caroline donated all of it.

And she represents only one person on a much larger volunteer team. Eric drafted and refined policy. Jason managed campaign strategy and finances. Glenn built our data operation. Payton handled advance work and outreach. Others contributed legal guidance, design, video production, field organizing, research, scheduling, and technology.

Campaign-finance reports capture the dollars a campaign spends. They cannot fully capture the professional labor, personal relationships, and human generosity that keep an underfunded campaign alive.

Even with an almost entirely volunteer-led senior team, however, campaigns still require a significant amount of cash. We spent roughly $15,000 on petition circulators, another substantial amount on signs, door hangers, and printed materials, and thousands more on voter data, fundraising tools, digital advertising, events, software, compliance, and payment-processing fees.

Those expenses rarely arrive as one dramatic bill. A campaign bleeds money through dozens of smaller decisions: another print order, another software subscription, a permit, a banner, a batch of palm cards, or a last-minute purchase that suddenly feels essential. Each expense may seem manageable on its own. Together, they quickly consume tens of thousands of dollars.

Money also determined whether we could protect the progress we already made. As I wrote in The Hidden Price of Getting on the Ballot, qualifying for the ballot required thousands of signatures, paid petition circulators, voter-file analysis, and an enormous amount of volunteer labor. But the expense did not necessarily end once we submitted our petitions. When another campaign challenged them, we suddenly needed to defend our place on the ballot too.

A well-funded campaign could hire election lawyers, data specialists, and additional staff to manage that process. We couldn’t simply write a large check and hand the problem to a firm. Our team reviewed records, studied the rules, coordinated our response, and relied heavily on the expertise and generosity of people willing to help us.

The cost never disappeared. We simply paid it through time, stress, and volunteer labor rather than a traditional legal invoice.

That pattern repeated throughout the campaign. When we couldn’t afford to purchase established infrastructure, our team built it. Instead of hiring an expensive field firm to manage petition collection, we directly recruited circulators, paid them by the hour, coordinated their routes, monitored their progress, and checked the quality of their work ourselves. We saved money, but someone still needed to absorb every hour of management that a professional firm would normally provide.

When a campaign cannot purchase infrastructure, its people must become the infrastructure.

Our campaign often avoided writing a check only because someone we loved absorbed the cost in another form. A consultant’s invoice became a volunteer’s evening. A field contract became hours of staff coordination. A legal bill became frantic research. The expense never disappeared. It simply moved from the campaign’s bank account onto the backs of the people around us.

Scarcity Forced Us to Get Creative

Because we didn’t have millions of dollars to blow, we kept ourselves on a strict budget. Trust me, I didn’t always enjoy that discipline.

Throughout the campaign, I felt restless and, at times, left out. I wanted more signs. I wanted more hats, more T-shirts, more buttons, and more of the physical markers that make a campaign look visible, established, and everywhere at once. Every time I saw another candidate’s signs blanket a neighborhood or watched their supporters show up in matching campaign gear, I wanted to order more of our own.

The contrast extended beyond signs and campaign merchandise. Other campaigns could afford go-go bands, large cookouts, giant banners, and trucks that drove through the city with megaphones blaring a candidate’s name. We saw those things and, of course, sometimes wished we could do them too. I would have loved to hire a band for one of our events.

Instead, we relied on the talent already present in our community. One friend, Ryan, volunteered their time as a stand-up comic. Caitlin (or CATA), a phenomenal DJ, performed at one of our events. Supporters, like Maggie, hosted our events in their exceptionally cool office space so we wouldn’t have to pay a venue fee. We built gatherings around what people could contribute rather than what we could afford to purchase.

That became another recurring lesson of the race: When we couldn’t buy the atmosphere, entertainment, visibility, or polish that larger campaigns could, we asked ourselves what we could create instead.

My team kept me grounded. They reminded me where we needed to spend, where we couldn’t afford to spend, and which purchases might make me feel better without meaningfully improving our chances of reaching voters. That restraint mattered because scarcity forced us to become more creative. We couldn’t simply purchase a conventional campaign operation, so we built one differently. We relied on humor, social media, earned press, unconventional events, volunteer talent, and ideas that could travel farther than our dollars. Scarcity pushed us to innovate because we had no other option.

Our digital reach offered perhaps the clearest example of what creativity could accomplish without a massive budget. We generated millions of impressions, built an audience, attracted more than 1,000 donors, and reached residents far beyond the people we could meet in person. We did much of that through a distinct voice, quick responses to the news, humor, strong videos, and a team willing to experiment.

But digital attention and paid political reach do not carry equal value. An Instagram impression does not guarantee that a registered D.C. voter saw the post, remembered the candidate, or cast a ballot. A viral video cannot replace a piece of mail delivered directly to a likely voter, an organizer knocking on the same door more than once, or weeks of television advertising that makes a candidate’s name unavoidable.

Social media helped us become visible. Money would have helped us convert that visibility into a more disciplined voter-contact program. That distinction matters because people often treat online engagement as though it erased our financial disadvantage. It didn’t. Our creativity stretched every dollar and allowed us to compete far beyond what our bank account suggested. But creativity could not purchase the targeting, repetition, and scale that millions of dollars provide.

We proved that an underfunded campaign can break through. We also learned how difficult it becomes to turn a breakthrough into votes without enough money to follow it. Someone on Twitter recently suggested comparing how much each mayoral candidate spent with how many votes that candidate received. That calculation offers another way to understand what our campaign accomplished.

At the time of this writing, we are approaching 5,000 votes after raising and spending roughly $65,000. That comes to about $13 for every vote we received.

The comparison will become even more revealing once final vote totals and campaign expenditures become available for every candidate. Several campaigns operated with more than $1 million, supported in large part by taxpayer-funded matching dollars. Some also benefited from independent expenditures and institutional networks that amplified their reach beyond what appeared in their own campaign accounts.

Our campaign had none of that. No PAC funded us. No super PAC spent money on our behalf. No corporation, special interest, or entrenched political organization financed our message. The money came from people who believed in me and wanted to give voters another choice.

With that relatively small budget, we still reached millions of people online, built a citywide volunteer operation, earned substantial media coverage, qualified for the ballot, and persuaded nearly 5,000 residents to vote for us. We stretched every dollar far beyond what a conventional campaign budget might suggest.

That doesn’t prove that spending alone would have delivered victory. Money can never guarantee an election result. But our cost per vote offers powerful evidence that additional resources could have materially expanded our support. We already demonstrated the ability to attract attention and convert some of that attention into votes. More money would have allowed us to repeat the message, reach likely voters directly, hire organizers, send mail, advertise consistently, and follow up with residents who encountered us only once.

The campaign didn’t lack appeal. It lacked the money required to carry that appeal to enough voters, often enough, before Election Day.

I don’t want to romanticize scarcity. More money would have allowed us to communicate with more voters, hire more staff, and relieve enormous pressure from our volunteers. But limited resources also forced us to question every expense and distinguish between what a campaign traditionally buys and what our campaign actually needed.

This experience taught me another lesson: Find the absolute best team possible. A good team doesn’t simply execute the candidate’s ideas. A good team keeps the candidate grounded and protects the campaign from the chaos that inevitably arrives when emotions run high. As the candidate, people expect you to appear in a million places at once. You move from interviews to forums, donor calls, community events, policy meetings, and internal decisions, often without enough time to process what just happened before the next demand arrives.

Under those conditions, your mind won’t always work as clearly as you want it to. Excitement can distort judgment. Anxiety can make every missed opportunity feel catastrophic. Comparison can convince you that you need to copy whatever another campaign just purchased.

You don’t have much room for error. That’s where an excellent team proves its value.

Good people tell you no when you need to hear it. They absorb some of the pressure, challenge impulsive decisions, and remind you of the strategy when the noise of the campaign threatens to overwhelm it. That represents one of the greatest benefits of spending real time, before the campaign reaches full speed, thinking carefully about whom you want beside you. Choose people whose judgment you trust, especially in moments of stress when you may not be able to fully trust your own.

My advice here remains simple: First-time candidates should identify the superstars already present in their lives.

Think beyond job titles. Pay attention to the talents your friends reveal, the problems they solve naturally, and the skills they may never advertise. The person who organizes every group trip may make an exceptional advance director. The friend who always knows how to sharpen an argument may thrive in communications. The type-A friend with a spreadsheet for every facet of life may transform your data operation.

Then ask them for help.

That ask may feel difficult, especially when you already feel as though you have asked everyone you know for money, time, introductions, and patience. Make it anyway. Give people a clear role, explain why their talent matters, and invite them to build something meaningful alongside you. Their contributions may determine whether your campaign survives.

Lessons for First-Time Candidates

Looking back, several lessons stand out for anyone considering a first run for office in D.C.

1. Start far earlier than you think you need to.
Time affects nearly every part of a campaign: ballot access, fundraising, public financing, staffing, debate invitations, voter contact, and media coverage. A late start does not make a campaign impossible, but it makes every other task more expensive and more difficult.

2. Study the election and Fair Elections calendars before you announce.
We filed on February 13. Our next mandatory Fair Elections report fell due March 10, and the qualifying period closed March 18. That left us roughly a month to document $40,000 from at least 1,000 qualified D.C. resident contributors while simultaneously launching the campaign and fighting for ballot access. Review the D.C. Board of Elections resources for election and petition deadlines, and consult the Office of Campaign Finance for Fair Elections qualification, committee, and reporting rules. Build every date into your campaign plan before announcing, then assign someone to track it closely.

3. Understand what happens if you do not qualify.
Missing the Fair Elections threshold does not simply mean losing access to matching funds. Your campaign may need to wind down its Fair Elections committee, continue through the traditional financing system, adjust to new contribution limits and reporting requirements, and operate on a different public disclosure calendar. That transition can also affect how outside institutions interpret your fundraising and viability.

4. Make the fundraising list immediately.
Go through your phone, email, social media accounts, schools, workplaces, family connections, and every other chapter of your life. Do not limit the list to people you think will write large checks. A small donation, an introduction, a volunteer hour, or a shared post can all move the campaign forward.

5. Meet people where they already communicate.
Traditional call time may not work for everyone. Use texts, voice notes, Instagram messages, personalized emails, and even Facebook Messenger. A personal request in the right format will often work better than a formal pitch delivered through the wrong channel.

6. Choose your fundraising and compliance systems carefully.
Compare platforms, processing fees, payout schedules, donor-data access, refund rules, recurring contributions, and verification tools. Understand how cash donations work and what records the Office of Campaign Finance requires. Every contribution must remain traceable and defensible.

7. Budget for ballot access and ballot defense.
The expense does not necessarily end once you collect and submit enough signatures. A challenge can suddenly require legal guidance, voter-file analysis, document review, and significant staff time. Protecting your place on the ballot can demand nearly as much energy as earning it.

8. Remember that saving money does not eliminate the cost.
When you cannot afford a consultant, lawyer, field firm, or communications shop, someone on your team must absorb that work. A campaign may avoid an invoice only because a volunteer gives up nights, weekends, and professional labor. Plan for that burden and do not take it for granted.

9. Build the strongest team you can find.
Look beyond formal résumés and job titles. The friend who organizes every group trip may excel at advance work. The person who loves spreadsheets may transform your data operation. The sharpest writer in your life may become an exceptional communications advisor. Ask talented people to take on clear roles, then trust their judgment.

10. Keep your own real-time records.
Do not assume public campaign-finance reports will show your current fundraising total or donor count. Maintain updated internal records and save proof. You may need to demonstrate your campaign’s strength to debate organizers, reporters, endorsing organizations, or other institutions before the next public filing appears.

11. Contact debate and forum organizers early.
Making the ballot does not guarantee access to the stage. Identify likely hosts months in advance, ask for the inclusion criteria in writing, and follow up consistently. Do not assume organizers understand your financing structure, filing calendar, or current level of support.

12. Research the outside money surrounding the race.
A candidate’s official campaign account may tell only part of the story. Identify the unions, corporations, developers, advocacy organizations, nonprofits, independent expenditure committees, and other political groups likely to spend around the candidates. You may compete not only against another campaign, but also against an entire financial and institutional ecosystem.

13. Distinguish digital attention from voter contact.
A viral post or millions of impressions can create visibility, but online engagement does not automatically translate into votes. You still need the resources to identify likely voters, reach them repeatedly, send mail, knock on doors, advertise, and follow up before Election Day.

14. Track what each dollar actually accomplishes.
Fundraising totals alone do not tell the full story. Pay attention to how much you spend per voter reached, donor acquired, signature collected, and vote earned. A smaller campaign can compete remarkably well when it spends strategically, but efficiency cannot fully replace scale.

15. Treat every contribution with care.
People do not give only money. They give trust, time, professional expertise, and emotional support. Spend carefully, communicate honestly, and thank people meaningfully. Their support does not become a waste simply because the outcome remains uncertain.

16. Do not confuse limited resources with limited potential.
Money can amplify a campaign, but it does not create talent, courage, ideas, discipline, or authenticity. A small budget may constrain your reach, but it does not determine the value of what you bring to the race.

17. Never let anyone convince you that trying was foolish.
Winning matters, but democracy also depends on people willing to challenge entrenched systems, offer voters another choice, and make institutions defend the way they operate. Trying remains valiant, and everyone who helps you try participates in democracy too.

Know the Hurdles. Run Anyway.

At the time of writing this piece, our campaign is approaching 5,000 votes on a budget of roughly $65,000. We entered four months before Election Day, missed the public-financing threshold, relied almost entirely on volunteers, and made painful choices about every dollar we spent. And yet thousands of residents chose us.

That result does not erase the barriers I have described throughout this essay. Money and institutional support shape who gets seen, who gets heard, and who gets treated as viable. They can determine whether a candidate reaches the debate stage, qualifies for public financing, hires professional staff, or communicates with voters often enough to break through.

But those barriers cannot become a reason for ordinary people to stop trying.

In fact, that would be the worst possible lesson to draw. Our political systems become more insular when capable newcomers decide the process is too confusing, too expensive, or too tilted toward people who already possess money and connections. The city loses ideas, talent, and leadership every time someone concludes that public office belongs to somebody else.

The hurdles are real, but knowing about them can give future candidates an advantage (which is why I continue to pour into this Substack!). Study the deadlines before announcing. Understand the financing options. Build the fundraising list early. Budget for ballot access. Research the institutions that control debates and endorsements. Learn which political organizations may spend around the race. Assemble a team you trust before the pressure begins.

Knowledge will not eliminate every obstacle, but it can keep those obstacles from surprising you when the stakes are highest.

Money matters. Institutional backing matters. Time matters. But none of them should determine who feels entitled to participate in democracy. My hope is that more ordinary people will choose to run anyway, armed with a clearer understanding of the process and greater confidence in their ability to navigate it. The city we love will become a world-class city only when more of its people believe they have the right to help lead it.

(Yes, Jason dual-hatted both roles. That should give you some sense of how lean our operation was.)

At the time, the petitions looked like simple paperwork. Fill the sheets, gather 2,000 signatures from registered DC democrats and submit them before the deadline. Get your name on the ballot, campaign, and hopefully win.

I had no idea the stack of paper in front of us represented far more than 2,000 simple conversations with voters. It represented money we had not raised, petitioners we had not hired, technology we had not built, voter data we had not reviewed and election lawyers we did not yet know we would need.

It was our first gate in our journey as first-timers campaigning for DC mayor.

My friends and supporters know that I love to write. For more than a decade, I have maintained a Medium blog where I have written mostly personal essays. A few weeks before Election Day, I decided to start a Substack. I knew that after the election, regardless of the result, I wanted an outlet where I could share my unfiltered thoughts about the election process in D.C.

I got into this race because I was fed up with the political establishment’s failure to deliver on basic city services. We are a city that is deeply engaged in federal politics, yet often seems apathetic about what is happening at the local level.

For my first Substack post, I want to return to that stack of petitions and explain what it really takes to get your name on the ballot in D.C.

(You all know how the story ends. I made the ballot. In fact, I became the first South Asian American in D.C. mayoral history to do so! But the road there was rough. And I’m glad you’re here reading my lessons learned.)

Looking back, I wish I had known far more about the written and unwritten rules involved in running through that first gate. I hope this and my subsequent posts help the next batch of newcomers navigate the complexity of campaigning. I see this as one of the basics of good government. The rules of our democracy should be clear, accessible, and understandable to ordinary people, not treated as insider knowledge available only to those who already know how the system works.

The Reform That Created a New Gate

Before I explain how our campaign made the ballot, it is worth understanding why nominating petitions exist in the first place.

For much of early American history, there was no single government-printed ballot resembling the one we use today. Political parties commonly printed and distributed their own ballots. Elections could be public, chaotic and vulnerable to intimidation, bribery and control by party machines.

In the late nineteenth century, reformers began adopting what became known as the Australian ballot: a government-printed ballot listing the eligible candidates, marked privately by the voter.

It was an enormous democratic advancement. It made voting more secret, orderly and independent. But it also created a new problem.

Once the government began printing the ballot, the government also had to decide whose names deserved to appear on it.

That is where ballot-access rules and nominating petitions enter the story. Petitions became a threshold test. Before the government would print your name, you had to demonstrate that some meaningful number of voters wanted you there.

This basic idea is reasonable. Candidates should have to demonstrate some minimum level of public support, and ballots should not become impossibly crowded with people who are not seriously seeking office. Fair!

But the historical irony is difficult to miss: A reform designed to weaken political machines created a new gate, one that political professionals are often far better equipped to navigate than ordinary people entering politics for the first time.

In theory, nominating petitions test whether a candidate has support. In practice, they can also become a test of whether a candidate has money, trained field staff, reliable voter data, experienced election lawyers and enough insider knowledge to understand the many ways a signature can be invalidated.

That distinction matters. A test of public support is democratic. A test of whether you already possess the machinery of a professional political campaign is something else entirely.

A Campaign Run by Friends and Neighbors

As many of you know, my campaign was almost entirely volunteer-led by my community. We had only one true political operative on our campaign team, Caroline (to whom I am forever indebted). The rest of us had virtually no professional political experience.

(To be transparent, I had run for student body president in college and spent three months as a field organizer in Los Angeles. But that is very different from building an entire career in politics.)

We were learning nearly every part of the process in real time.

I was the long-shot candidate, and I knew this from the start and even until the very end.

Some people suggested that I should have started with a Council seat or another local office, built political relationships over several years and worked my way up. I understand that advice. Time in politics can help a candidate develop trust, raise money, build an organization and create the relationships that make every part of a campaign easier.

But I also do not believe democracy is best served by requiring everyone to become a career legislator before they are considered qualified to lead.

Government benefits when people enter public service from different directions. We need elected officials with legislative experience, but we also need people who have managed organizations, built technology, worked in the private sector, led community movements and solved problems outside government. A healthy democracy should make room for people with different professional experiences and different ways of seeing the city.

That is part of why I am writing this Substack. People who come from outside politics should not have to spend years inside the political class simply to learn how the process works. They should have access to the information that allows them to compete, organize and make their voices heard.

At the same time, I came away from this race with a much deeper appreciation for the value of starting early.

Time does not guarantee electoral success. At the time I am writing this, I am separated by only a small number of votes from Gary Goodweather, who had been campaigning for roughly fifteen months before Election Day.

What time does provide is capacity.

It gives a candidate more opportunities to meet residents, attend community meetings, raise money, recruit volunteers and explain what they believe. It allows relationships to develop before you need to ask someone for a signature, a donation, an endorsement or a vote. It gives a campaign room to make mistakes when those mistakes are still recoverable.

Our lean team accomplished an extraordinary amount in approximately four months. We developed serious policy ideas, built technology prototypes, raised money from 1000 donors, created a citywide field operation and earned a place on the ballot.

I am proud of what we did. But I can also be honest that more time would have helped us significantly.

That is not because a longer campaign would automatically have changed the result. It is because organizing is cumulative. Every conversation, volunteer, donor and relationship becomes part of the infrastructure that allows the next conversation to happen more easily.

For first-time candidates, the lesson is not that you must spend your life climbing a political ladder before seeking meaningful office. It is that entering from outside politics makes the early work even more important.

You do not need to become a career politician. But you do need enough time to build political power.

Our First Mistake: Losing a Week

The first mistake we made was sitting on those petitions.

We should have immediately distributed them to every supporter volunteer willing to help. We should have asked people to collect signatures in their apartment buildings, workplaces, offices, social circles and communities.

Instead, we waited an entire week, telling ourselves we needed to focus on our comms, our policy positions, debate prep, etc.

That was precious time. The deadline to collect and submit 2,000 valid signatures was only about four weeks after I filed. By losing the first week, largely because we underestimated how difficult the process would be, we left ourselves with only about three weeks to get it done.

The first lesson is simple: the moment you receive your petitions, the clock is already working against you.

Collecting Signatures Is a True Field Operation

Once we understood the scale of the challenge, petition collection became an all-out field operation. We organized weekend sprints. We invited supporters to meet us early for coffee, handed out petition sheets and walked volunteers through exactly what we needed.

Every signer had to be a registered D.C. Democrat. Every entry had to be clear and legible. The information needed to match what the Board of Elections had on file. The circulator had to personally witness the signature and correctly complete the required affidavit on every petition sheet.

My field director, Reyhan, meticulously prepared instructions for our volunteers. We tried to make the process as straightforward as possible.

But once we started standing outside on sidewalks, at farmers markets and in other public spaces, clipboards in hand, something became immediately clear: getting 2,000 valid signatures was going to be much harder than we had imagined.

The first challenge was simply getting people to stop.

We quickly learned that collecting signatures was much easier when we tag-teamed the process. I would stand alongside Reyhan and Jason. One of them would call out to a passerby and say something like, “Hey, my friend is running for mayor. Do you want to talk to her?” Then they would point to me. We tried variations of our hook.

Some worked and some flopped. Successful hooks pushed the person to look over, realize that the actual candidate was standing there with a clipboard, and stop to chat. It was far more effective than approaching people cold. The personal introduction broke through the awkwardness and gave people a reason to pause.

Once they stopped, I could explain why I was running, answer their questions and ask directly for their signature.

The Supreme Court has recognized petition circulation as a form of protected political expression, describing it as an interactive conversation about political change. That language can sound abstract until you have stood on a sidewalk with a clipboard. Every signature began with a meaningful, and sometimes strange (I’ll save those stories for later), human interaction. We were introducing a candidacy, explaining why I was running and asking someone to affirm that voters deserved the opportunity to consider me.

Petition collection became one of our campaign’s earliest forms of voter contact. But it was slow. Every valid signature could require conversations with several people who were not registered Democrats, were not registered at their current addresses, did not know their registration status or simply did not have time to stop.

A campaign cannot treat the collection of 2,000 valid signatures as a casual volunteer activity. It requires daily goals, assigned locations, trained circulators, volunteer management, quality control and real-time tracking.

In other words, it requires a true field operation and any first-time candidate must treat it as such.

What the Petition Drive Actually Looked Like

It is difficult to convey how consuming this process became.

For several weekends, our core volunteers dedicated eight- to ten-hour days almost entirely to collecting signatures. We would arrive in the morning with stacks of petitions and clipboards, spend the day rotating through sidewalks, farmers markets, neighborhood events and busy commercial corridors, and return at night to count and review what we had collected.

Once we hired paid petitioners, the operation expanded considerably. Our circulators were out across the city from early morning until late at night as we raced toward a safe number of signatures before the deadline. At times, it felt like the operation was running nearly around the clock.

But the work required much more than putting people outside with clipboards. Every day, someone (in our case, Reyhan and Jason) had to assign locations, distribute petition sheets, answer questions from circulators, move people when a location was unproductive, collect completed sheets, review the entries, track hourly performance and determine how many more signatures we still needed.

There were also basic physical and operational challenges. Petitioners needed enough forms, working pens, and clear instructions. Weather could derail an otherwise productive day. Petition sheets had to be protected from rain, kept legible and returned without being lost or damaged.

The work was exhausting. Our campaign team was spending entire weekends collecting petitions while also trying to raise money, respond to press, develop policy, recruit volunteers and build the rest of a citywide mayoral campaign. Because the deadline was fixed, there was no opportunity to pause when people became tired.

The closer we came to the filing date, the more the petition drive consumed everything else. Every hour spent on signatures was an hour we were not refining our message or raising the money we would need for the election itself.

That is another hidden cost of ballot access. It does not merely require labor and money. It temporarily takes over the campaign. You must account and prepare for this fully.

Location Strategy Matters

Where you collect signatures matters just as much as how many hours you spend collecting them.

During the petition phase, the goal was not to canvass every part of the city evenly. That kind of citywide engagement would become incredibly important later in the election. But when the immediate objective was gathering enough valid signatures before a fixed deadline, we needed to focus on high-density, high-traffic locations where our petitioners could get the most value from every hour in the field.

Places like Dupont Circle and the Mount Pleasant Farmers Market were especially productive because they brought large numbers of D.C. residents into a relatively concentrated outdoor space. Farmers markets, neighborhood festivals and busy commercial corridors gave petitioners the opportunity to approach many people without spending most of the day walking between doors.

Future candidates should begin by making a calendar of farmers markets, outdoor community gatherings and high-foot-traffic events taking place throughout the petition period. They should also build a week-by-week list of DC Democratic Party events, political forums, club meetings and candidate gatherings.

When a Democratic organization is hosting an event, the people attending are far more likely to meet the party-registration requirement than a random group of pedestrians on a downtown sidewalk. Be present at those events. Stand outside the entrance when appropriate. Ask the organizers for permission to circulate inside. Bring enough petition sheets, pens and trained circulators to take advantage of the concentration of eligible voters.

A crowded place is not automatically a productive place. Many of the people walking through downtown D.C. work here but live in Maryland or Virginia. Tourist destinations may be busy but produce almost no eligible signers. Even among D.C. residents, only registered Democrats could sign my petitions.

The ideal location was not simply somewhere busy. It was somewhere with a high concentration of registered D.C. Democrats who had enough time and willingness to stop.

The petition phase requires a different form of field strategy from the persuasion and turnout phases of a campaign. At this stage, efficiency matters more than geographic coverage.

Once ballot access is secured, the campaign can and should broaden its operation to every ward and every community. But before your name is on the ballot, your first responsibility is making sure voters will have the opportunity to choose you at all.

Two Thousand Signatures Does Not Mean Two Thousand Signatures

The most important word in the requirement is not “2,000.” It is “valid.”

People frequently told us with complete confidence that they were registered D.C. Democrats, only for us to discover later that they were registered as independents, registered at an old address, inactive or not registered at all.

Others gave us incomplete addresses. Some handwriting was impossible to read. Some people signed more than once because they did not remember having signed previously.

None of this necessarily involved bad intent. Most of these were ordinary mistakes made by residents who wanted to help. But a signature that looks perfectly legitimate can still be invalidated.

That is why a serious campaign cannot aim for exactly 2,000 signatures. You need an enormous cushion.

Before filing, our team reviewed our sheets and removed several that contained questionable handwriting or other concerns. We did not submit everything we had collected merely to inflate our number.

That internal review was essential. But we still learned that volunteer enthusiasm is not a substitute for a formal validation operation.

Validation Is Its Own Difficult Task

Collecting the signatures is only the first half of the job. The next step is reviewing every line against the voter file.

Is the signer registered? Are they registered as a Democrat? Does the address match? Is the name legible? Is there a date? Did the circulator complete the affidavit properly?

Over the course of the campaign, we prided ourselves on being tech-forward. Our team vibe-coded early prototypes of a modern 311 app, a government-performance dashboard and a small-business concierge.

We did not build those prototypes to show off our development chops. Quite frankly, with tools like Lovable, more people than ever can turn an idea into an early product. What we wanted to demonstrate was our creativity, our willingness to do the work and our belief that government should move beyond talking about problems and begin testing actual solutions.

I remain incredibly proud of our team for doing that.

One of the most important tools we built, however, was never intended for public release. Our data director, Glenn, created an internal petition-validation application using the voter file our campaign purchased from the D.C. Democratic Party (yes, add that to your list of expenses).

As each petition sheet came back, our team could enter a signer’s information and compare it against the voter file. We checked the person’s name, address and party registration. If we could not locate the signer, if the address did not match or if the voter was not registered as a Democrat, we treated the signature as potentially invalid.

The application allowed us to turn what otherwise would have been a sprawling manual review into a more organized validation process. But it also revealed just how quickly the numbers could shrink.

A person might sincerely believe they were registered as a Democrat, only for the voter file to show them as unaffiliated. A longtime D.C. resident might still be registered at an old address. A signer’s handwriting might be difficult enough to read that we could not confidently locate them in the database.

If we could not validate a signature, we generally did not count on it surviving a challenge.

That is one reason we estimated that we had collected more than 4,500 signatures across our paper and digital petition efforts. We knew that a meaningful number would not survive our own internal review, much less scrutiny from a challenger or the Board of Elections.

We ultimately submitted fewer paper signatures than the total number we believed we had collected because we removed sheets and entries that appeared questionable. Collecting far above the legal minimum was not an effort to inflate our support. It was the only responsible way to create a cushion against voter-file discrepancies, incomplete information and technical errors.

For a volunteer-led campaign, this was a major undertaking. We were simultaneously launching a mayoral campaign, raising money, attending events, developing policy, recruiting volunteers and attempting to validate thousands of petition entries.

In retrospect, validation should have begun the same day collection began. Every petition sheet should have been checked as soon as it came back rather than allowing questionable signatures or incomplete sheets to accumulate. Once again, time is everything.

What the Voter File Revealed

The validation process also revealed a larger problem: many ordinary Washingtonians do not know their own voter-registration status.

People had moved and updated their driver’s licenses but not their voter registrations. Some believed they were Democrats when the voter file showed no party affiliation. Others thought that voting in a previous Democratic primary meant they were permanently registered as Democrats.

But the mismatch between what people believed and what appeared in the voter file raised a broader question for me: Why do so many Washingtonians choose not to formally affiliate with the Democratic Party at all?

D.C. is overwhelmingly Democratic, but that does not necessarily mean residents feel meaningfully connected to the local Democratic Party as an institution. Many people, particularly transplants, arrive in Washington deeply engaged in national politics but disconnected from the city’s local political structures.

There may also be a deeper historical explanation for some of that disconnection. D.C.’s modern system of elected local government is younger than many people realize. Congress passed the Home Rule Act in 1973, and Washingtonians elected their mayor and Council the following year. Many residents alive today were born before D.C. voters had the power to elect the local government we now take for granted.

Our democracy is therefore both intensely local and structurally incomplete. We elect a mayor and Council, but Congress retains extraordinary authority over the laws and budgets those officials produce. We participate in presidential elections, but we still have no voting senators and no voting member of the House.

When your vote is already treated as less consequential at the federal level, it is not difficult to understand why some residents might become alienated from the political process more broadly.

That history may help explain one of the contradictions I encountered while petitioning. Washington is filled with people who care passionately about democracy, yet many remain disconnected from the local political system through which their votes can have the most immediate impact.

That is not the entire explanation, of course. It would be a mistake to apply the experience of newer residents to native Washingtonians, many of whom have spent generations organizing for home rule, statehood and meaningful local representation.

It would also be too simple to assume that every unaffiliated voter is disengaged. Some residents make a deliberate choice not to join any political party. Still, the pattern is worth examining.

Party Affiliation Is a Strategic Decision

There is also a basic strategic reality that may be obvious to people who have spent years around D.C. politics, but should not be assumed in a guide meant for first-time candidates.

More than three-quarters of registered D.C. voters are Democrats. That means the choice of whether to run as a Democrat, an independent or under another party label is not merely philosophical. It determines which voters can participate in choosing you and, in many races, whether you have a realistic path to office at all.

For most citywide and ward-level offices, the Democratic primary frequently functions as the decisive election. A candidate who runs as an independent may avoid the Democratic primary, but must then compete in a general election in which the overwhelming majority of registered voters identify as Democrats.

There is an important exception for the two at-large Council seats elected during the same cycle, because D.C. law prevents one political party from holding both seats. That creates a distinct path for independent and minor-party candidates seeking the non-Democratic seat.

For most other first-time candidates, party affiliation is one of the earliest and most consequential decisions they will make. You must ask not only, “Which political identity best reflects my values?” but also, “Who will be eligible to sign my petitions, vote in my primary and determine whether I reach the general election?”

D.C. voters attempted to change part of this structure through Initiative 83. In 2024, voters approved ranked-choice voting and a provision allowing unaffiliated voters to select a party primary in which to participate. But implementation remained dependent on the required funding being included in an approved budget.

There is an irony in the history of Initiative 83. Its supporters first had to collect tens of thousands of signatures simply to give voters the opportunity to decide whether D.C. should broaden participation in its elections. Voters then approved the measure, including expanded primary access for unaffiliated residents, but implementation of that access still depended on clearing another governmental hurdle.

At nearly every stage, participation in D.C. democracy seems to require passing through another gate.

For a first-time candidate, this is not an abstract debate. Party affiliation determines your petition universe, your primary electorate and the voters you will be able to reach during one of the most consequential stages of the election.

For the city, it raises a larger question: What does meaningful political participation look like in a jurisdiction where one party dominates, unaffiliated voters constitute a significant share of the electorate and the primary often functions as the real election?

Candidates need to understand the system as it currently exists. But D.C. should also continue asking whether that system gives all politically engaged residents a meaningful way to participate.

When Petitioning Becomes a Payroll Operation

Eventually, we had to confront the mathematical reality of the situation. A small group of volunteers, even very committed volunteers, could not reliably produce the volume we needed in the time remaining.

We began contacting professional field-strategy firms that specialized in nominating petitions. For future candidates, these firms are not difficult to find. You can quite literally search online for field-strategy firms that handle ballot-access or nominating-petition campaigns.

What is much harder to stomach is the cost.

The quotes we received were north of $40,000. For an established campaign with institutional backing and Fair Elections matching funds (more on this later!) that might be treated as a routine ballot-access expense. For a first-time candidate building an operation from scratch, it was an unreasonable cost.

We had barely entered the race and were already being told that simply securing a place on the ballot could cost tens of thousands of dollars.

It was actually the founder of one of these field-strategy firms who advised us not to hire his company. Instead, he suggested that we build the operation ourselves by directly hiring petition circulators as employees. That advice was generous, and I’m thankful for his honesty. It changed the trajectory of our petition effort.

Full credit belongs to Reyhan and Jason, who built the operation from the ground up. They wrote job postings, advertised the positions online, interviewed applicants, handled the employment logistics and assembled a cohort of circulators who could begin collecting signatures across the city.

We paid our petitioners $30 an hour. We chose an hourly wage because we wanted to attract serious applicants and compensate people fairly for work that is physically demanding, repetitive and often uncomfortable. Petitioners spend hours standing outside, approaching strangers, explaining complicated eligibility requirements and absorbing rejection after rejection.

Paying a higher wage, however, did not automatically guarantee higher-quality work. Some petitioners were phenomenal. They were diligent, productive and careful about following the rules. Others took advantage of the hourly structure, producing very few signatures relative to the time they reported or returning sheets that required significant review.

We learned quickly that good pay must be paired with good management. That meant setting expectations, monitoring productivity, reviewing petition sheets daily and identifying which circulators were producing both volume and quality.

Even with our difficulties, I am very glad we chose to pay petitioners fairly and build the team ourselves. We created a real field operation for significantly less than the professional firms had quoted us, and we gave people paid campaign experience in the process.

But the episode exposed another barrier to entry. Before a candidate can buy an advertisement, hire senior staff or communicate with most voters, they may already need to raise tens of thousands of dollars simply to secure ballot access.

We often talk about campaign fundraising as though it is primarily about buying television advertisements or sending mailers. But early campaign money determines whether a candidate can hire petitioners, access voter data, retain legal counsel and build the basic operation necessary to get on the ballot at all.

Before voters ever have the chance to decide whether they support you, fundraising may determine whether they will ever see your name.

Political Power Is Organized Capacity

Building our petition operation from scratch also changed how I think about the word “establishment.”

We often use that term to describe elected officials, longtime consultants, major donors and party insiders. But political power in D.C. extends beyond the traditional political class. It also resides in institutions that can organize people, communicate with them quickly and mobilize them toward a shared objective.

That includes organized labor, advocacy organizations, ideological groups, political clubs and longstanding civic networks.

This is not an attack on unions or organized political movements. Quite the opposite. Their effectiveness demonstrates one of the most fundamental truths about democracy: political power is the capacity to organize people and move them toward change.

A union may have thousands of members, established leadership, political committees and communication systems capable of quickly distributing an endorsement, fundraising appeal or volunteer request. Ideological membership organizations may have listservs, recurring meetings, experienced organizers and members already trained to canvass, petition and turn out voters.

There is nothing inherently wrong with any of that. This is what successful political organization looks like.

But the contrast matters.

A candidate who enters a race with the backing of one or more organized institutions does not begin with only their own name and a stack of petitions. They may begin with trusted validators, mailing lists, donors, volunteers, lawyers, experienced organizers and people who already understand how to gather signatures and turn out voters.

Our campaign had to build much of that infrastructure from scratch while the election clock was already running.

That is the real value of institutional backing. It is not merely the appearance of an endorsement logo on a campaign website. It is access to an established system of relationships through which people can be contacted, persuaded and mobilized.

This also raises a difficult question about the future of D.C.’s Democratic Party.

Organizations on the ideological left have invested heavily in the patient work of building membership, political education and organizing capacity. They have developed structures through which their supporters can act together. Candidates aligned with those structures benefit from years of organizing that began long before any individual election.

More moderate, pragmatic or institutionally unaffiliated Democrats often do not have an equivalent organizing ecosystem. They may represent a substantial share of public opinion, but diffuse agreement is not the same thing as organized political power.

A thousand residents who quietly share similar views are less electorally powerful than one hundred people who attend meetings, join a listserv, knock on doors and act in coordination.

That is not a complaint about the people who organized more effectively. It is a lesson for those of us who have not.

If we want a Democratic Party in D.C. that is focused on execution, pragmatism, honesty and measurable results, those values must be supported by more than individual candidates appearing every four years. They need communities, institutions and durable organizing structures behind them. Local organizations such as DC YIMBYs and DMV New Liberals appear to be trying to fill this void. My biggest piece of advice to these groups is simple: To influence future elections, you must build highly engaged volunteer networks willing to put boots on the ground.

That may be one of my most important reflections from this campaign. A message can resonate with many people and still lose to a group with the discipline and infrastructure to act collectively. It’s not rocket science.

Political power does not simply belong to the people with the most popular position. It belongs to the people who organize.

And the consequences of entering a race without that organized capacity became even clearer after we submitted our petitions.

Making the Ballot Was Not the End

We submitted our nominating petitions on March 18. Three days later, they were posted for public inspection.

During the challenge period, another candidate for mayor, Hope Solomon, filed a challenge contesting more than 2,000 of our signatures.

Submitting the petitions had not brought the relief I expected. Instead, the experience quickly became one of the most frightening periods of the campaign.

The challenger arrived with an attorney, J.P. Szymkowicz, who was himself running for D.C. attorney general.

I walked into the initial proceeding with one of my closest friends. My friend was an attorney, but was not barred in the District. We understood that D.C.’s ballot-access process had previously allowed candidates to receive help from attorneys who were not members of the D.C. Bar, in part because election challenges move quickly and formal representation can be prohibitively expensive.

The difference in resources and presentation was immediately apparent. The challenger had arrived with an experienced political attorney. I had arrived with a close friend who was helping me navigate a process neither of us had expected to face.

It felt like an intimidation tactic. Whether or not that was the stated intention, the message I received was clear: defending my place on the ballot could become an expensive legal fight, and the other side was prepared to make it one.

When I began inquiring about hiring election counsel, I was quoted more than $50,000 for representation. That figure was, quite frankly, ridiculous.

We were a first-time, volunteer-led campaign still trying to raise enough money to introduce ourselves to voters. Now we were confronting the possibility that defending signatures we had already spent weeks and thousands of dollars collecting could require another $50,000 in legal fees.

Think about what that means for democracy.

A candidate can gather thousands of signatures, hire and manage petitioners, validate the submissions and demonstrate real public support, only to face a legal challenge that may cost more to defend than the entire petition operation itself.

The right to appear on the ballot should not depend on whether a candidate can immediately produce $50,000 for an attorney.

The challenge process serves a legitimate purpose. Campaigns should be able to flag petitions that do not comply with the law, and the Board of Elections must protect the integrity of the ballot.

But there is a difference between protecting electoral integrity and using the complexity and expense of the legal process to overwhelm a less-resourced opponent.

For candidates backed by the political establishment, an election lawyer may already be part of the operation. For an outsider campaign, one legal challenge can become an existential threat.

That was the moment I most clearly understood that ballot access is not only about collecting signatures. It is also about whether you can afford to defend them.

The Lawyer I Did Not Know I Needed

In retrospect, I should have lined up an attorney admitted to practice in D.C. at the very beginning of my campaign. That is advice I would now give to any first-time candidate.

Do not wait until your petitions are challenged to begin looking for election counsel. Identify someone early who understands the Board of Elections, the petition-challenge process and the extraordinarily compressed timelines involved.

But at the beginning of our campaign, that was not even on my radar. We had limited resources and an entirely volunteer-led team. Every dollar was already being stretched across petition collection, payroll, voter data, communications and the basic costs of launching a citywide campaign.

Retaining an election attorney before we knew whether a challenge would even be filed did not seem realistic. Then the challenge arrived, and suddenly legal representation was not optional.

We got extraordinarily lucky.

Through my involvement with DC YIMBYs, I had become connected to people who were deeply engaged in local elections and election law. That community eventually introduced me to Joe Bishop-Henchman, who stepped in to help us defend our petitions and navigate a process that could easily have removed me from the ballot.

Joe helped us examine the contested signatures, respond to the challenge and make our case before the Board. Without that support, I do not know what would have happened.

But luck is not a campaign strategy.

Not every first-time candidate happens to meet an experienced election attorney at exactly the moment they need one. Not every community activist has access to a network that can mobilize legal help on short notice. And most campaigns cannot absorb legal quotes exceeding $50,000 simply to defend signatures they have already spent significant time and money collecting.

That is why my heart broke when I saw that Markus Batchelor’s nominating petitions had been challenged and that he was ultimately denied ballot access.

Markus was not someone who had wandered casually into this election process. He is a leader and an activist who has invested substantial time and resources serving the District. He had done the work of launching a candidacy and collecting petitions, yet voters never had the opportunity to consider him on the ballot.

Some people will argue that this is precisely why the challenge process exists. Rules are rules, and candidates must demonstrate that they have met the legal threshold. I understand that argument.

But after living through the process, I think we must also ask whether the consequences are proportional to the mistakes involved.

The difference between appearing on the ballot and disappearing from the election can come down to a relatively small number of signatures. It can turn on an outdated address, a voter who mistakenly believed they were registered as a Democrat, difficult handwriting, an incomplete date or a technical defect on a petition sheet.

These distinctions may be legally meaningful. But when they result in the complete removal of a credible community candidate, we should not pretend the democratic implications are insignificant.

A challenge can serve the legitimate purpose of protecting election integrity. It can also function as a political weapon, forcing an opposing candidate to spend precious time and money defending ballot access rather than speaking to voters.

The answer is not to abandon all petition review. But we should examine whether candidates have sufficient opportunities to cure ordinary mistakes, whether the legal process is accessible without tens of thousands of dollars, and whether the threshold and challenge rules are actually measuring community support rather than technical sophistication.

A candidate who falls just short after gathering thousands of signatures has still demonstrated something meaningful: real people wanted that candidate to run.

Our system should take that democratic expression seriously.

Defending Every Line

Suddenly, our volunteer campaign was no longer simply running for mayor. We were defending our right to appear on the ballot through an expedited legal process.

The initial review left us above the required number, but with a much smaller cushion than we had expected. Our senior staff, namely my Policy Director, Eric (much more on his contributions to come) and pro-bono attorney had to identify individual signatures that could be clarified or cured, including signatures rejected because of dates, addresses and other technical issues.

This is another part of ballot access that first-time candidates may not anticipate. You do not merely collect and submit petitions. You must be prepared to defend them, line by line, on extremely short notice.

The process involved conferences, legal briefs, voter-file reviews and a formal hearing before the Board of Elections. I was placed under oath and questioned about how our campaign recruited and trained petition circulators, how we supervised them and how we reviewed the petition sheets we ultimately submitted.

In the end, the Board determined that we had 2,278 valid signatures, 278 more than required. The challenge was rejected, and I was granted ballot access.

But even then, the decision was appealed.

Ballot access became a weeks-long legal and operational battle that consumed time, money and attention during one of the shortest mayoral campaigns in D.C. history. When the Board announced their decision to keep me on the ballot, it was the first time I had cried during the campaign.

What I Would Tell Another First-Time Candidate

If I were advising another first-time candidate, especially one without the support of the political establishment, I would tell them this:

• Start collecting the moment petitions become available. Recruit and train circulators before filing, not afterward. Distribute petitions widely to trusted supporters from day one.

• Create a calendar of farmers markets, Democratic events, forums and high-traffic neighborhood gatherings before the petition period begins. Focus first on high-density locations where you are most likely to encounter eligible voters.

• Set daily and weekly signature goals based on expected valid signatures, not merely raw signatures. Assume that a meaningful percentage will be invalidated.

• Begin validating every sheet as soon as it is returned. Use the official voter file and retain people who understand how to review it.

• Create written instructions for every volunteer and paid circulator. Number every petition sheet and track who has it. Review the work of each new paid petitioner after their first shift. Develop a code of ethics and petitioner handbook that explicitly states your expectations and DC Election laws.

• Track both quantity and quality. Do not allow someone to work for several days before determining whether their signatures are usable.

• Keep the candidate in the field strategically. The candidate’s presence can dramatically improve the likelihood that people will stop, listen and sign.

• Separate collection from validation. The people gathering signatures should not be solely responsible for judging whether their own work is valid.

• Remove questionable sheets rather than hoping they survive a challenge. Budget for paid petitioners, voter data, payroll administration and election counsel before spending heavily on advertising.

• Identify an attorney admitted to practice in D.C. before petitions are circulated. Understand what representation may cost, and preserve every record that attorney might later need.

• Preserve your training materials, employment records, sheet logs and validation notes in case the petitions are challenged. Prepare for a legal challenge even when you believe your petition is strong.

• And collect far more signatures than you think you need.

The Larger Democratic Question

I understand why ballot-access rules exist. There should be some threshold demonstrating that a candidate has meaningful public support.

But after going through this process, I am no longer convinced that the system measures only public support. It also measures whether you entered the race early enough, whether you had enough money before becoming widely known, whether you had access to experienced political professionals and whether you understood rules that are obvious to insiders but invisible to ordinary residents.

That has consequences for who runs.

An incumbent or political insider often begins with a donor network, voter data, experienced staff, election lawyers and supporters who have circulated petitions before. A first-time candidate begins with a stack of paper and the assumption that 2,000 signatures means finding 2,000 people willing to sign.

Those are not remotely the same starting conditions.

The modern ballot was created to make elections fairer. It weakened the ability of political machines to control how people voted. But by transferring control of the ballot to the government, it also created a new gate around who could appear on it.

That doesn’t necessarily mean the reform was wrong.

The work of democracy is not merely creating rules and assuming they will remain fair forever. It is periodically examining who those rules help, who they burden and whether they continue to serve their original purpose.

When Jason and I walked out of the Board of Elections carrying that stack of petitions, I thought we had been handed an administrative task. In reality, BOE gave us a test of whether our campaign had enough time, money, technology, labor, legal support, organized capacity and good fortune to earn the right to be considered by voters.

Thankfully, we passed that test.

Our democracy is stronger when ordinary people with good ideas can jump into the arena. That requires lowering barriers to entry and democratizing the information that insiders already possess.

A stack of petitions should test whether people want a candidate on the ballot. It should not test whether that candidate already has the infrastructure of the political establishment.

So, what do you think?

How should D.C. improve its ballot-access process? What would make it more accessible without sacrificing election integrity? And what advice would you give to a first-time candidate trying to make their voice heard in our democracy?

Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

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