Green Party hopeful forced off ballot in Dist. 21
Tom Wakely is a true believer.
He's an unabashed Democratic Socialist who loves Bernie Sanders and emphatically supports Medicare for All, a ban on fracking, a universal basic income and the legalization of marijuana.
Wakely approaches politics as a crusade. That's his appeal.
This white-bearded maverick helped César Chávez organize grape boycotts in Texas in the 1970s, became a Unitarian Universalist minister in the 1980s and ran a jazz club in Mexico in the 2000s. Over the past several years, he and his wife have used their white-brick North Side home as a hospice for military veterans.
Wakely does not, however, contain even a single molecule of practical political savvy. And that's his weakness.
Up until Wednesday, Wakely planned to be the Green Party candidate for U.S. District 21, the third wheel in what's shaping up to be a competitive race between Republican incumbent Chip Roy and former Democratic state Sen. Wendy Davis.
Those plans came to a swift end, however, when an appellate court panel ruled that
Wakely and two other Green Party candidates (U.S. Senate nominee David Collins and Railroad Commission hopeful Katija “Kat” Gruene) did not qualify to be on the November ballot.
The Green nominees failed to comply with a 2019 state law requiring candidates nominated at conventions (rather than primaries) to either submit a filing fee or a petition. For Wakely, the filing fee would have been $3,125.
“I guess if we had a million dollars and a bunch of lawyers, we could probably do something (to challenge the ruling),” Wakely said. “I think, at least for this time, a progressive voice in this race is over and done with.”
The lawsuit was filed by Davis, MJ Hegar and Chrysta Castañeda, three Democratic underdogs hoping to pull off November upsets.
Wakely and his fellow Greens stood in the way of that mission, partly because of the possibility that they could siphon some votes away, but also because their messaging would chip away at the Democrats' progressive credentials.
For example, while Wakely supports Medicare for All, Davis has taken a more moderate stance: calling for the addition of a public option to the Affordable Care Act and for Medicaid expansion in Texas.
When it comes to the lawsuit, there were no bad guys.
The Green candidates simply didn't have the money for the filing fees or the campaign infrastructure to collect enough petition signatures.
The Democratic candidates used the law to do what candidates are supposed to do: increase their chances of winning.
Wakely, however, questions the premise that his departure from the race will help Davis.
“People that would have voted for me are not going to vote for Wendy Davis,” he said. “They just won't vote.”
Wakely, 67, will never win an election. He'll never even get close. He has never demonstrated any ability to raise money or build the kind of organization that creates a successful campaign.
Nonetheless, he's a valuable footnote in the ever-evolving story of San Antonio politics.
His 2016 campaign attracted three young Bernie-ite progressives who carried the campaign into U.S. District 21's traditionally conservative suburban and North San Antonio areas.
Immediately after that race ended, John Courage, a local Democrat with his own history of failed long-shot bids, recruited that trio of Wakely staffers and built his 2017 District 9 City Council campaign around them.
By winning in what had long been the city's most conservative district, Courage demonstrated that generational political change is happening right before our eyes.
In 2018, we got further evidence, with Austin tech entrepreneur Joseph Koper losing by a margin of only 2.6 percentage points to Roy in U.S. District 21 and Beto O'rourke taking Ted Cruz to the wire in an epic battle for the U.S. Senate.
Wakely didn't lead this change. But he was a vessel for it. He gave the Bernie wing of the Democratic Party a San Antonio focus for its energy in 2016.
His limitations were easier to see in 2018, when he threw himself into a nine-candidate Democratic primary field for governor and finished seventh, with 3.4 percent of the vote.
That's why Wakely went Green this year. It meant having a clear field to a party nomination.
Along the way, Wakely dismissed both the Democratic and Republican nominees as “millionaire corporate lawyers.”
That kind of rhetoric did little to endear him to his old Democratic allies. These days, when Democratic Party leaders think of him at all, they tend to think of him as a nuisance.
But there needs to be a place in politics for an earnest, impassioned, undisciplined nuisance who doesn't sugarcoat anything; who tries to keep the other players honest. That's Tom Wakely.