Reflections on My Congressional Races

• OPINION by TRACY MITRANO –

In July of 2017 I began to explore a run for congressional district NY-23. Geographically the size of New Jersey and encompassing eleven counties (two partially, Ontario and Tioga), NY-23 runs from the suburbs of Binghamton to the shores of Lake Erie, from route 86 to areas that touch interstate 90. The Cooke Report denotes it is a R+6, meaning that on average the Republican candidate wins by 6 points.  I knew it would be an uphill battle, but in the aftermath of the Trump administration, and with a Trump sycophant representing the district, I threw my hat into the ring. I promised to run twice, both 2018 and 2020, in the belief that the second election would result in a Democratic president with coattails to Congress, just like 2008. I was right on the first point, but not on the second. I underestimated the Trump effect that changed American politics. This article is the condensed retelling of my experience.

Twelve of us vied for the Democratic nomination in 2018. Chastened by the staying power of Trump in this district and exhausted by the tireless antics of his failed administration, it is now difficult to remember the excitement we felt in getting involved in the primary race. Whatever our differences in personality, background experience, or policies, we were united with only one exception— a town supervisor— in being non-politicians who previously never held elected office. We wanted to make a difference! Our schedule was relentless in a large district. Various Democratic committees and regional leagues of women voters sponsored events that had us going for months. By the time we got to petitioning, we could all recite everyone else’s stump speech. Only five of us made it to ballot, and absentee ballots decided a slim 223 voter difference by the end over the July 4th holiday in 2018. Looking back on three and half years, it was unquestionably the most fun of the entire experience.  

Intellectually I was prepared for defeat by November of that year, but emotionally not. I had it in mind that 2020 would resemble 2008 when the Obama election swept a Democratic, Eric Massa, into Congress from this district. Once I won the primary, I prepared myself for the long game. Momentum built throughout the general election, however, to the point where hope against hope, by election eve I considered the possibility that lightening might strike. Alas, it was not meant to be. Bringing down the margin by half—from 16 in 2016 to 8 in 2018—was sufficient consolation for me to shake the sand from my sandals and get back into the game. I had learned so much I was eager to engage those lessons in a second chance.  

The first lesson was a clear-eyed understanding of my opponent’s playbook; create a straw man and then throw out a million dollars attacking it. Not so much at play in the 2012 election, the first of the reconfigured NY-23rd district against Nate Shinogawa, by 2014 Reed perfected it against Martha Robertson. Self-inflicted flaws (not living in the district) of the 2016 Democratic candidate, John Plumb, easily combined with the Trump wave that crashed this district. Trump won by 15 points and the Democrat lost by 16. If I could get out ahead of the straw man, I believed we had a good chance of steering moderate Republicans and at least 40% of unaffiliated voters towards our ticket by November 2020. I began that effort by moving for three months to the county where we lost the most: Chautauqua. “You just won 5,000 votes,” Eric Massa would say to me in the spring of 2019 when I ran into him at the birthday party of a mutual friend, “just by showing up.”  

And show up I did, first in the western part of the district, where I revived my own western New York roots with chicken wings and Friday fish fries, and then back into the other parts in the center (Allegany, Steuben, and Yates), saving the east for the fall. With wonderful volunteers and a good primary campaign manager, we came up with a strategy for 2020, hired more staff, reworked the campaign web site, raised money, met with the editors of some of the most influential news outlets in the district, and, most important, set a schedule for a series of five-day, five town meetings on relevant topics such as health care, infrastructure, and the environment. By January of 2020 I was again in the west talking about pre-existing conditions and affordable health care. We even organized an effort where two doctors paid a charity to extinguish the medical debt of the most impoverished people in the district in the name of our campaign to kick the series off. Noticing once again as I had in the 2018 that the media in this district is a tough nut to crack (largely for the failure to do investigative journalism), that event did not make such a splash. 

The people who came out to talk about their troubles with health care encouraged us. Many were not Democrats. Our plan was working. I was a real person. They had legitimate concerns that as their representative I promised to fix. We would build on that momentum throughout the race.

Until Covid hit. 

It was the middle of March and we were halfway through a second tour. The subject was the “squeezing of the middle class,” one into which we could fit many issues, such as educational debt, the 2017 tax cut give away to the 1%, and the lack of infrastructure that held the farmers and working-class back. If people would just take a few minutes to think through how our Tea Party representative failed to bring the district what it needed to revive economically— affordable health care, good education, transportation, and the internet—we could avoid the straw man and talk about real issues with people. 

We could win Congress, and then lay the foundation to make the 23rd district attractive to investment. Over a hundred people showed up in Olean, including a high school teacher who brought his senior class. A Republican state representative came to an auditorium event in Wellsville, and at the end he came up to introduce himself and we laughed a bit as we “elbow shook.” The next night we hosted fifty people in the library public room in Bath. But by then the concern over the epidemic was growing more prominent. It was March 13.  As I drove home to Penn Yan, I decided to take our show online for the remainder of those five-city themed events.  

I might as well have been driving into a brick wall. Sure, I continued to raise money. For a time, we created a well-attended online series in which we discussed agricultural issues, local economies, and the environment. When George Floyd died and the Black Lives Matter movement revived, I showed up at almost every single march in his name throughout the district. I gave an important address on race relations in Watkins Glen. We sought local leaders of the Black communities to form an affinity group. I spoke in Black Churches. Meaningful in its own right, these efforts were nonetheless meaningless against the most significant aspect of our strategy: to get me out into public so that my opponent would have a hard time demonizing me. Because no matter how successful we were at keeping pace with the pandemic, the restrictions it placed on us blocked our ability to effectively be out in public to win the hearts that would get us the votes.

By the end of August, with Biden and Harris installed for the Democrats, we commenced our most complex poll. After Labor Day, we bored over the promising results. Only seven points separated me from Reed. Even better, his numbers were falling below the critical 50% mark for an incumbent. Moreover, Covid-19 restrictions were lifting, especially in the Finger Lakes, so I began to get out—first closer to home and then all over the district—with events carefully choreographed for masks, outdoors, and socially distanced.  We got up on T.V. three weeks earlier than in 2018. We had the best direct mail media on the Democratic side of the fence.  Curiously enough, my opponent seemed strangely silent. Even better, regional press outlets left ridiculous press releases from his campaign alleging obvious lies about my campaign largely unattended. For a few days in September I began to feel real hope.  

And then came the “defund the police” onslaught. “You look like El Chapo,” remarked one of my supporters. “Do you really want to defund the police?” asked one of my stepsons, a deputy sheriff. No matter what we tried, we could not push it back. I held a press conference. We wrote a cease-and-desist letter, first to Reed’s campaign and then to the media that hosted the content. I pleaded with our contractors for T.V. and direct mail to change up our message to specifically address his blitz. To no avail. I also did not have a national Democratic Party able or willing to blow it back. Looking back on the “defund the police” Republican attack on Democratic congressional candidates, Sheri Bustos—former head of the 2020 Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC)—asked a Republican pollster at a December 15, 2020 Cornell University Institute on Politics and Global Affairs event,“Why did you see it, and we didn’t?” Really? I knew the damage the minute I heard the ad in mid-September. No one should need a pollster to understand the threat. No wonder by October I began to feel so frustrated, and so hopeless.  

In the end, I was right on one point—and the more important one—that a Democrat would take the White House in 2020. But not on the second. Trump won by 15 points. And with coattails to boot. I lost by 16 points to the incumbent. As cause, symptom, accelerant, Trump was the difference between now and 2008.  Whether the people in this district will ever get what they need: affordable health care, education without debt, infrastructure; and what they reasonably want: economic opportunity, a fair shake at life, freedom from want that bequeaths liberty however one personally wants to define it, remains to be seen. I would not bet on our 10-year incumbent unless and until he shakes himself truly free of his obstructionist Tea Party proclivities, something he may in fact be trying to do if he is at all sincere about the real meaning of the “Problem-Solvers Caucus.” But let us remember true bipartisanship begins at home. The straw man approach and the fearmongering it instills in voters may win elections but does not garner respect. And there, Reed fails miserably, no matter how much he plays instrumentally to his audience.  

I am already on the road to returning to the work from which I came, and continue to love: teaching young adults, helping them to learn to think so they can go on to graduate or professional school or get good jobs in the workplace; and helping colleges and universities with curriculum that addresses contemporary challenges in cybersecurity and information science. I kept my promise to run twice, and I am keeping it in defeat to not run again. Still, one piece of advice: everyone should run for office! It not only teaches you a lot about yourself, but about what is promising and what still ails us in our democratic republic.  

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