Lessons from Middletown
To the Times:
Losing stinks. Losing an election is particularly hard for even the most confident and sure person, and makes you look at the hard truth that you were not the favorite and not the first choice of the community. But what if losing is actually winning?
Those of you in and around Middletown may have noticed something different in the township this election season. A new crop of orange and blue signs with the word “Independent” across them everywhere you turned. Two Independent candidates appeared on the ballot for Middletown Council this November: A.G. Ciavarelli (for At-Large) and Bibianna Dussling (for District 3). Ultimately, Bibianna (who was endorsed by the Republican Party but retained her Independent registration and ran her own campaign independent of the party) was successful. A.G. was not. Or was he?
Bibianna won in a District 3 landslide (951 votes to her competitor’s 657). A.G. also ran a strong race and garnered over 1,000 votes, but did not come in the top two for the At-Large seats. A loss, right? Maybe not: let’s unpack some of those numbers. About 6,000 people cast their ballots in Middletown. Already, this means that an Independent candidate, without the backing of any party and on his first run at elected office, garnered approximately 17% of the participating votes.
Look closer at the numbers and you see something else: A.G. Ciavarelli, the Independent candidate for the At-Large position, appears to have taken equally from both party’s candidates. The difference between the two Republicans running for Township Council At-Large was 347 votes. The difference between the two Democratic candidates was slightly less at 341 votes. Presumably, those votes went to the Independent and show that the Independent siphoned off votes from both parties equally (on top of presumably bringing in new voters to the polls that were energized by an Independent campaign) to help reach the 17% total of participating votes.
So, why did all those people not vote for the two legacy parties and decide to look way down the ballot on the far right-hand side to vote for an Independent? We can’t know for everyone but we know that many voted for both Independents due to a palpable frustration with the two parties and the twoparty system. Perhaps the parties have gone too far off course? If all politics used to be local, it’s possible that that paradigm could have flipped and now the opposite is true. All politics is now national. And as national politics roils in Washington, and the two legacy parties continue their fight-to-thedeath, all-out partisan war, a nice pragmatic Independent candidate could be just what people are looking for.
So, back to the loss that is a win. A.G. Ciavarelli garnered approximately 17% of participating votes in the Middletown election. A third party taking 1-2% of the votes in an election is the definition of a spoiler: 17% is the beginning of a movement. Realistically, getting Independents elected is not a one-election or even a two election process. Of course the immediate goal here was to get Independent voices onto Middletown’s Council, but the other goal is to show the community that running Independents is possible. By running serious and respectable campaigns in Middletown, we have shown that the Independent movement is a viable and desirable option for our local elections. Future Independent candidates in Middletown and beyond will now have these campaigns to build on and we intend to share our experiences with them.
Independent candidates in local elections and Independent leaders in local governments offer real accountability outside of our broken two-party system. They are beholden only to the voters and not to a political party. It’s hard to argue with someone who just wants to represent the people of the local community and no one else. As national politics descends into tribal factions and ever more polarizing, us-versus-them chaos, look for more Independent candidates in your local races. We’ll be backing them and so should you.