Perennial Candidates or Hope Springs Eternal

As of today, I’ll be posting weekly here on Substack. Earlier posts will remain at Just Another Day In DC, at least for now. If you click on the red “Subscribe now” button, future posts should come straight to your email inbox. Bear with me as I transition to 21st century technology.

When I was a kid growing up in Atlanta, the name Wyman C. Lowe seemed to be on the ballot in every election.  He first ran for Congress in 1946 and kept putting his name on the ballot for various federal and state offices in practically every election cycle well until the mid 1980s. And he lost — every single time. It's hard to fathom what makes one so persistently hopeful in the face of constant rejection -- although thank goodness for that. Lowe was an unrepentant racist and anti-Semite and apparently did not have a winning message even when such views might have been welcome.

All of this is a long wind up to the current day political aspirations of Rodney "Red" Grant, a comic, actor, writer, and producer, who recently announced that he would be running for DC Council At-Large. His signs are cropping up around town, some nine months ahead of the November election. While the stakes in the election are high nationally with both the presidency and balance of power in Congress up for grabs, locally, it's going to be a bit of a snoozer with the only seats up for grabs being nonvoting delegate of the U.S. House of Representatives, shadow senators and representatives (more on that when I write at some point about D.C. statehood), and two at-large seats on the Council.

But back to Grant who ran for DC mayor in 2022 as an independent, garnering 14.9 percent of the vote against incumbent Muriel Bowser.  His platform from back then seems pretty mom and apple pie -- less crime, better schools, more support for small business.  But it's not clear to me who his constituency, particularly that this time, he's running as a Democrat and will face incumbent Robert White in the primary. I've yet to see a sign for White, although some yards are still sporting signs from his 2022 mayoral run and someone knocked on our door last week collecting signatures to get him on the ballot.  But we'll see how the race shapes up:  the deadline to file is March 6 and the Democratic primary is June 4.  

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