You—yes, you—could be in elected office today. The median Defector reader is a smart and good-looking progressive with impeccable taste. What other qualifications do you really need? Had you thrown your hat in ahead of the blue wave, today you could be your state's lieutenant governor. Hell, for that matter, maybe you are your state's lieutenant governor. Have you checked your mail?
Consider the case of Sebastian Matta. Matta is a 19-year-old sophomore at Arizona State University. He has a 3.25 grade-point average, per the New York Times, and he lives at home with his parents. Starting in February, Matta will be the Superior Court Clerk of Maricopa County, which has a geographic area larger than New Jersey and a population larger than Oregon. Matta will lead a department that, according to Phoenix-area CBS affiliate KTVK, processes more than 16,000 documents per day and has an annual budget of $65 million. Matta will be the boss to some 670 veteran professional staff.
"I hope that they realize that I’m just not any 19-year-old," said Matta, hoping to give confidence to the hundreds of people who will soon be working under him in an incredibly complex bureaucracy.
When I was 19 years old, I was also living at home with my parents, while managing college courses and full-time employment. Like Matta, I was also pretty sure that I was "not any 19-year-old." I was going to make movies one day. Also I was going to keep my car on the road. I did not have a checking account or a cell phone. My driver's license was suspended, but still I was driving four hours down the highway every third Friday so that I could spend the occasional weekend with my now-wife. It would never have occurred to me to run for political office. I was afraid of expectations and I was the least organized person on Earth. I quit a promising internship in order to focus on my paying job (book-store barista), then turned down a promotion and a raise at my paying job because I preferred working evening shifts.
Matta told the Times that he hatched his campaign when he was scrolling online for offices he could "hypothetically" run for, and saw that Democrats had not run anyone for Superior Court Clerk since 2018. Later, he was surprised to discover that his campaign was viable, and has been surprised since then that it not only worked, but that he clobbered his Republican opponent, former state senator Jeff Dial.
“It’s certainly been exciting. It’s much more of a bigger result than I expected when I originally won,” Matta told KTVK.
I say this not to imply anything about the seriousness of the new Superior Court Clerk of Maricopa County. Quite the opposite: Matta may in fact be "not any 19-year-old." While I am sure he now has a very demanding job, I admire the hell out of anyone who is politically engaged enough to notice that their party is sandbagging a particular race in their town or county, and has the gumption to throw their name on the ballot. The fact that 740,000 people voted for this 19-year-old supports Matta's calculus: If nothing else, this young man comprehends the local political landscape well enough. When I was his age, I'm not sure I could have named my state's governor. I definitely did not know my county had a clerk.
Disgust with the Republican party swept some even unlikelier candidates than Matta into office. Karl Bickel, the newly elected sheriff of Frederick County, in Maryland, purchased zero campaign advertisements, and went into the final two weeks of October with less than $7,000 in his campaign war-chest. His opponent, a horrible anti-immigration bully named Chuck Jenkins whose out-of-control department ran wild with 287(g) authority, had grown in celebrity as a sneering MAGA-aligned lawman and occasional Fox News guest. Bickel had lost to Jenkins in three straight elections, and it's not clear from the enthusiasm of his campaign that he was even all that serious about winning the job. Bickel won on Tuesday by nearly 20,000 votes, capturing a whopping 58 percent of the electorate.
"Now the real work begins," Bickel said to Bolts Mag, after the election. That is true, both in the sense that Bickel will now perform the duties of Frederick County Sheriff, and in the sense that he appears not to have been doing any of the serious work that you associate with a hard-fought campaign. And here he is.
In Iowa, Eric Armstrong was swept into a state legislative district despite having suspended his campaign back in early September, not because it was hopeless but because he was beset by health problems that made it impossible for him to campaign, let alone hold office. Tuesday Armstrong captured 55 percent of the vote in his district and crushed the Republican challenger.
"Thank you to every voter who placed their confidence in this campaign," Armstrong posted to his campaign website. "I will continue to do my best and be open and upfront about what comes next." He is not even all that happy to have won. His opponent, a sore loser of a former cop named Keith Jones, wants an investigation.
Back in 2017, in the aftermath of Donald Trump's election win over Hilary Clinton, Osita Nwanevu wrote persuasively for Slate that normies—regular left and liberal schmos who do not think of themselves as politicians—should run for office. Don't look around for some slick operator whose campaign you can support, wrote Nwanevu. Replace the worthless hollowed-out lobbyist freaks who treat power in the Democratic party as an entitlement, and then defeat the awful conservative freaks who stand poised to wreck the America you care about.
"You, with the undocumented parents; you, who remembers when your town was a steel town; you, PTA regular; you, professor; you, concerned citizen, should run," wrote Nwanevu. His point wasn't that you could be a U.S. senator; his point was that you could be Superior Court Clerk of Maricopa County, or sheriff, or holding a post in the statehouse. You can take a role in government. You!
He was right as hell! Today, right now, as we sit here, you could be an incoming state delegate. I could be sheriff. Your sweet dipshit son could be preparing to take over your state clerk's office, between class.
