- One week away from "X" day:
Dazed, restless, and only somewhat confused, you can't help but to give yourself over to a sense of impending dread. "I'm really trying my hardest", you sheepishly attempt to reassure yourself. "I'm already doing everything I can to make the most of this... so why the fuck do I feel like this?" These inner doubts linger in your mind as you finish applying the final, thin coat of wheat-paste to your flyer before sliding a brush on top of the page to secure your poster to the cold glass of an abandoned storefront. Despite taking it upon yourself to get dressed in the middle of the night & covering your neighborhood with radical propaganda for almost seven weeks straight, a sinking feeling sits in your stomach and nags at the back of your thoughts: something is telling you that your efforts will just wind up being pointless at the end of all those long days. These stray doubts have soured your normally up-beat mannerisms.
The polls, while not looking too bad for your party, still trails the mayor's party ratings by around 15%. Even though the mayor himself fought tooth and nail to prevent the referendum that created America's largest city in the lower 48 and the most numerous city council anywhere in the country from going to a public vote (mainly fearful of the prospect that his political capital would be shorted in a larger, more ideologically diverse chamber); even going so far as to threaten campaigners such as yourself with legal action when some of you justifiably occupied his office along with some other city council chambers in neighboring suburbs until the "old political guard" agreed to hold the new megacity's elections through proportional representation rather than their own preferred voting system; And yet, somehow, some way, the old boomers and generous businessmen residing out in the boondocks surrounding the city appear poised to reward the mayor with a relatively handsome majority.
Your melancholy thoughts are interrupted by what sounds like an approaching car on the road. You grab your bag full of cans, posters, and other guerilla marketing material & begin walking briskly as you see the car's headlights approaching.
- 2 Days before "X" day:
You find yourself in a rare situation: sitting at the kitchen table with your family, enjoying an afternoon meal. While everyone else is seemingly caught up in the banal normalities of kitchen-table talk, you, on the other hand, have your ears glued on the afternoon's news report blaring in the background on the TV. Suddenly: a news break, then, every muscle in your mind wages a desperate battle with the nerves in your face to suppress any urge of showing signs of disbelief or disgust as the headline you're ingesting audibly smothers your focus on your surroundings:
"BREAKING: RADICAL CANDIDATE CAUGHT VANDALIZING CAMPAIGN OFFICE"
You can't seem to figure out if you're more pissed off by the fact that the report alleges that the aforementioned assailant was only caught after encountering the building's sole on-duty security guard who overheard them knocking over their empty cans (some of which, turned out to be beer and spray paint) or, to be more terrified of the frigid sense of sobriety that pours over you as the suspect's mugshot flashes on the TV screen. It's then, you realize, that not only do you recognize the perp personally, you were also filmed standing side-by-side with the newly minted criminal just a few days ago at a rally meant to elevate your party's political platform... along with your close network of campaigners, which could possibly incriminate your party as a whole.
"What a dumbass.." you utter to yourself under your breath just as your phone's notifications system ignites with activity. Momentary uncertainty gives over to curiosity of the conversation being had as the vibrations become more and more unavoidable, you mother throws you a stray side-eye. With a shallow, subdued sigh, you decide to finally check and see what everyone else is saying about the absolute PR disaster. As you tap into your campaign's encrypted, anonymous groupchat, you more or less feel as if you already know what to expect.
At your time of entry, a link to the news conference gets dropped into the flood of messages bombarding the chatroom. The messages are coming in so swiftly that you don't even have time to decipher if a GIF of someone tying a noose around their neck with dental floss on a ceiling lamp is a satirical take on events or a statement of intent. Several handheld essays appear at once, morbid memes and gifs fly at a mile a minute. You almost close the group chat as someone finally quotes the live feed directly and comments: "Y'all watching this shit man? There's no way in hell Ricky would be this stupid..." Antonio, a tenants right activist and one of the organizers of the policy demo laments.
Your chapter's social media coordinator, Sydney, frantically follows up by chiming in: "He's fucked everything up COMPLETELY! There's no way we can bounce back from this... Like, how do we even start, where do we go from here?"
You attempt to assemble some type of response before your train of thought gets thrown off course by overhearing the sound of the mayor's voice on the TV screen. A third comrade, Latrice, a coworker of yours and a labour organizer of "gig economy" delivery drivers comments almost immediately: "Great, here his ass go..."
The mayor, noticeably smug & satisfied at the golden political opportunity that just fell into his lap, poorly attempts to conceal his glee at the current events. Only managing to paste a plastically-crooked scowl on the smooth, pale, façade that contains his face while his lips are contorted into an unmistakable smirk. As he actively ignores the reporter stationed right in front of him, he instead provides his statement as he glares at every cameraman sheepishly corralled around him:
"Earlier this morning, the Detroit Business Partnership's main field office was vandalized by a thug and vandal connected to the so-called Detroit Democracy & Labor Party. Fortunately, the perpetrator was caught and had his propaganda confiscated by DMPD. There exists no doubt in the minds of my team that this criminal was only a small part of a broader influence campaign with the aim of trying to scare the good people of this city, this new city, into supporting their communist fairy tales! That's why, I'm saying to the good people of Metro Detroit: If you support this party at Friday's upcoming election, I personally promise that on day one as Metro-Mayor, on top of ensuring a compatible business climate for our neighborhood employers and friends in the business community, I will ensure these acts of vandalism are rightly considered felonies in the eyes of the law. This should never be tolerated, and I'm calling on any of those so-called "street leaders" to take some responsibility, and condemn these actions!"
A sarcastic smack-of-the teeth escapes your lips.. You ponder on what to say back to the group chat. Finally, an idea dawns on you. You excuse yourself at the table, head towards your car, and start typing as you close the front door behind you, ignoring inquiries on where your going and with whom.
- 2:40 A.M. Election Day
You've probably suffered from the worst sleep of your entire life tonight. The anxiety of knowing the outcome of todays results prevented you from being able to close your eyes for more than five minutes. Instead, you coped to your precarious condition by pacing back & forth in your bedroom and occasionally send out texts to the other campaigners in a futile attempt to see everyone's head's at for the night. Almost everyone you contact is going through the exact same thing, some are a bit more smug based on anecdotal experiences they've had while campaigning on the last few doorsteps. Others, wallow neck-deep in thoughts of existential dread, bordering on suicidal ideation simply based on the prospect of a mayoral landslide.
Attempting to decompress, you decide to take a walk. Between the drags of your joint and your steady paces on the sidewalk, your mind starts thinking about the polls again. Now curious, you decide to stalk polls on social media one last time to see where the party really stands. As hard as you scroll on your feed, you never seem to stumble upon any sense of calm. One local poll has the mayor 20 points ahead, another has the same 15 point lead you saw a week ago. Curiously though, a poll from a national agency puts your gang of upstart radicals only 7 points behind the mayor's empty suits and corner-office clout chasers. Every single one of the polls has a relatively high margin of error, potentially making them all inaccurate, due to uncertainty surrounding the youth vote and the fact that no municipal government had ever ran an election based on proportional representation in American history up until this point.
Not knowing how to make heads or tails of the polls and unsatisfied with what you find, you decide to walk back home to try and fall asleep one more time.
- 8:20 P.M. Later that day
It's about an hour and some change until every voting precinct across the city closes, for the first time since the election campaign began, you actually feel at some sort of ease with yourself. Uncertain if it's more of a "whatever happens, happens" resignation or perhaps the first expression of genuine hopefulness, while sitting on one of the few comfortable benches at city hall, watching the ballots being counted up by hundreds of volunteers, the seemingly perpetual pit in your stomach suddenly isn't there anymore. You text the group chat for one last time:
"Alright, it's been real y'all. Hopefully this shit shakes out in our favor."
Your cautious optimism only manages to garner up a couple of likes. You don't mind too much since all the other candidates are focused on their own races. With your mind at rest, you lean against the brick wall behind you and decide to power nap until the final poll drops.
- 9:53 P.M. 7 minutes until the exit poll drops
You're jolted awake by a shake of your shoulder from your mother. "It's almost time baby, wake up." Post-sleep disorientation almost seems to shave nearly 3 minutes off of the wait time until you finally manage to become fully aware of the gravity of your current situation. One of the precinct captains makes the rounds, when they come up to you, they tell you the news that you're waiting for: "We just got our last ballots, the count should be done in 50 minutes".
After thanking them for their time, you take a deep breath and reassure yourself: "Alright, this is it. No looking back now".
A set of large TV's have been wheeled into the counting room while you slept. They're all tuned into the same channel in order to amplify the sound to subdue the confused chatter of the ballot counters and campaigners. Talk on the TV by an anchorman visually coated in a layer of sweat and petroleum jelly drones on about the "historicity" of tonight's events: An unprecedented 145 seats up for grabs, the largest generation gap between candidates of any local election in American history, stocks of local Fortune 500s taking a tumble due to the uncertainty of it all.... the regular showmanship you'd expect for an election like this.
The interesting bit of the broadcast comes from the joint exit poll, waved around in the anchorman's hands erratically to distract from it's carrying envelope's slight dampness and wrinkles. You've heard among your fellow campaigners that it was supposedly gonna be conducted by all of the city's news organizations, large and small, and that reporters would stand outside of key precincts all day just to collect the appropriate information needed to assemble it, but you had no idea of what the scale of the exit poll would actually be until tonight.. The reporter briskly mentions the sample size: (100,000) before moving on to some more sensationalism. "Ain't no disputing that......." you calculate to yourself as the clock winds down. If those numbers are true, it'd make the exit poll far more accurate than the 500-odd sample sized polls that you've seeing throughout the campaign.
Before the show really gets on the road, you open up youtube, frantically type in "Black Label election-sesh" in the search bar, and tune into the live feed. By this time, 30 seconds separates you and your fellow comrades from knowing how exactly your city's gonna be shaped for the future to come. The panelists for Black Label Detroit are completely oblivious to the feed's audio issues and instead their collective focus is fixated on the org's cheap projector casting the night's results onto the nearest wall of their cramped office space. The countdown slowly ticks down from 10 seconds, the closer it gets to zero, the more your anxiety builds again & reaches a fever pitch. 5..4...3..2..1..
It finally happens, the newscaster breaks open the envelope containing the exit poll & tries desperately not to trip over his own words as he reads out the results:
[FLESH OUT EXIT POLL]
It's in that moment that it feels as if the shouts of you, your family, and your fellow campaigners could be strong enough to cave the roof in. Exhilaration, excitement, and a raw sense of divine wonder permeates the tears rolling down your cheeks and soak into the clothes of your nearest loved ones.
"There's no way... ain't no way that this is actually real" your disbelief is shared by the correspondents of Black Label Detroit, who, have seemed to solve their audio issues only by screaming expletives towards the mayor, his party, and their mothers all the while blasting celebratory instrumentals. You would tune into the group chat right now to see what they had to say about all of this, but, again, you already know what to expect.
You try to reel back from getting too overly excited, while you know that you and the party can expect a good night, there's still the matter of winning your race that you have to worry about. [COMPLETE]
[FLESH OUT RACE]\
[INCORPORATE BLD COVERAGE/WRAP UP]
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