Where are your signs?

In the months since I declared my candidacy for Kenmore City Council, I’ve met with a number Councilmembers (both from Kenmore and elsewhere) to talk about the “best practices” of political campaigns. The advice has been that I should be printing “lit” (literature) to both mail and hand-deliver to members of the community, and maybe putting up some yard signs to help with name recognition. I was told that a campaign with a primary, such as mine, should clock in at $8-12k.

Let’s back up a minute. I grew up in a household that washed plastic bags for reuse, mended everything to extend the life as long as possible, and shopped secondhand religiously. One of the hardest things I’ve done is clean out my in-laws’ house, since every tiny thing that was remotely still functional was something that I felt ethically bound to find a home for and save from the landfill. It was, honestly, exhausting. As cute as my logo would look on a yard sign, the idea of having unrecyclable plastic signs manufactured for a small bonus of name recognition, and then landfilling them after the election, was unworkable for me. I think about my decisions not in terms of the short-term benefit but in terms of the long-term consequences, and where there are times that it is very hard to avoid plastic waste, this isn’t one of them.

The idea that I should print “lit” and mail was equally as complicated. In addition to a steadfast '“waste not want not” attitude, my mother made her career in advertising as a graphic designer. As a child people would ask what my parents did for a living. My dad is a teacher, I’d say, and my mom “makes junk mail.” She was never happy with this answer, but in my young mind it was the truth - she made things to send to people’s homes that they didn’t want and would immediately end up in the trash or recycle. She, I was certain, made junk mail. Preparing to launch a campaign, I was told that I needed to send junk mail to members of my community, too. In the non-digital world that I grew up in print mailers were the resource that we had. In a digital world, though, we have the ability to reach voters in ways that are less wasteful and more impactful.

I decided to run for City Council after witnessing a consistent disconnect between the virtues that our elected leaders extol and their actions. They say that they value housing affordability and vote for policies to make it more expensive. They say that they value diversity and racial justice and perpetuate exclusionary practices. They say that they value the environment and litter our city with plastic waste for the sake of “name recognition”. When is enough actually enough?

My opponents both have signs around town. I do not, and I will not. I know how things have been done in the past and what conventional campaign wisdom says. But I also know that we live in a world that is increasingly digital with a rapidly changing climate. Mailers are not as efficient as they were 20 years ago (when you see up to 10,000 ads per day, you don’t have time for one more, even if it’s mailed), and we cannot afford additional plastic production and waste. I’m running for office because I believe that we need to change our actions and our thinking, not because I believe we need to preserve the status quo. Other countries have started to question the amount of waste elections generate - we should be doing the same.