Stale Bread: Joy in Hopeless Elections
Watching election results roll in is like eating a stale loaf of bread with a couple raisins hidden here and there in the dough. Most of it is unremarkable, but whenever you find a raisin, it feels like the world might be changing forever. It does not much matter if you like its taste or not; at least it has flavor. By the end of the loaf, you feel a little crappy. You think to yourself: “let’s do this again in two years.”
This November in particular seemed to hinge on a couple key races, while everything else felt like the stale filler content of little significance. But what is it actually like to run a campaign that looks hopeless from the start? Millions of voters who know their votes will get swallowed up into the uninteresting starch around them cast their votes anyway. Maybe those votes will have a little more flavor than expected.
In Alabama’s 2nd Congressional District, Phyllis Harvey-Hall ran for the House against a fellow small-business owner. Her opponent, Barry Moore, had taken a hardline position in support of the overturning of Roe v. Wade, on which Harvey-Hall felt it was critical to push back. She had previously lost while running for the same seat to Moore in 2020 by nearly 40 points, and there were not any signs that the district’s electorate had changed substantially since. She ran anyway, reminding her district on her website that, “…the district is not a monolithic area, we are not a monolithic people.”
By midday on November 9, results in AL-2 had been counted. Harvey-Hall had lost by 40 points, garnering 29.1% of the district’s vote. It may not have been the electoral raisin that people around the country would pay attention to, but over 50,000 residents of AL-2 had come back for seconds. Whether they felt represented, indignant, or truly hopeful for the results, 29.1% of voters threw their ballot towards a campaign that had meant something to them. The only public comment from Harvey-Hall on November 9 directly addressed the political minority with which she had resonated: “I will not go quietly, and I hope you will not either. Let’s stay engaged.”
Meanwhile, the Wisconsin State Assembly map was stuffed with bland races in horribly gerrymandered districts; electoral boundaries arc, cutoff, and bleed into each other to create what can only be described as an oddly confusing puzzle on the back of a cereal box.
In the 99th assembly district in the state, Marquette University student Alec Dahms ran as the first Democratic candidate for the district in a decade. Dahms is in his third year at Marquette studying political science, and his campaign was heavily involved in a network of long-shot races for the Democratic party around Wisconsin. He lost his race, but his campaign’s Facebook page still stands today, unchanged since his post late on November 8. Like Harvey-Hall, Dahms was proud of the perspective his campaign voiced, reminding his district that the last time a Democrat ran for the seat, they received “…23% of the vote. …We made it to 30% tonight.”
The voters who support candidates despite their electoral impossibilities are fascinating emblems of humanity’s persistence towards representation, connection, and validation. They might not love the taste of the bread, but they find triumph in the part they played in its baking.
Imagining one of these voters is an exercise in finding happiness on election day. A young woman living in South Dakota, for example, may have voted for the first time this year. Maybe her name is Olive, and she just turned 18 in October this year. After her mom got home from work, the two of them would walk a few streets over to the middle school Olive had attended. She had not been back since 8th grade, but the school always hosts her town’s polling place.
Even though polls would not close for another few hours, Olive had a pretty good idea of who was going to win her district’s House seat. She and her family live in rural South Dakota; a family just like hers lives in L.A. Theirs is a House district that news sources will feel confident in calling 30 minutes after polls close.
But Olive does not care much that she already knows who will end up representing her in Congress. She still gets excited when she picks up the flimsy pen attached to the voting booth by an aluminum chain. Maybe holding that pen makes her feel socially effective, maybe she sees voting as a rite of passage, or maybe she does not know exactly why she is standing there, but Olive chose to show up anyway. Along with millions of other voters in districts and states with unsurprising results, Olive found her own raisin in the bread.