[Op-Ed By Yossi Gestetner]

A candidate I worked for in recent weeks lost his bid this week Tuesday in a 2-1 defeat

The campaign was for a mayor seat of a village that is smaller than three-square-miles and has approximately 10,000 registered voters, some of them not even living in that village anymore. The contest was between the Deputy Mayor of the last eight years who ran on the Democratic and other lines, versus the person who was mayor until eight years ago who ran on the Republican line. I worked for the former Mayor.

“The other side” successfully detached the deputy mayor from the current administration which has almost doubled tax in the past eight years, wasted a $6.2 million surplus they inherited, and quadrupled the village debt in the past eight years, while not even using the money for valuable infrastructure.

The voting blocks in that village are mostly minority groups, such as Jewish voters, African Americans, Haitian, etcetera, and the Deputy Mayor being from the Haitian community and my candidate being from the African American community. All this means that sighting facts in your PR work can largely fall on deaf ears because people in these communities to a big extent tend to go with “their own” candidate (across racial lines), regardless how good or bad their own or other candidates really is. In addition, in some communities most voters will follow what leaders were told to advise the voters to do, while the voters will not even asking why or how the leaders came to the conclusion that they came to, thus giving blindly one candidate hundreds of votes despite that candidate’s involvements in the recent troubles of voters’ lives.

Then there is the issue of finance. One cannot win a campaign on the cheap side, as it was the case with my candidate who was vastly outspent. In addition, a candidate cannot hedge his bets on one popular figure of a specific community hoping that this person will deliver 75% votes needed to win. This is actually a thing which I tried telling to others in the campaign but to no avail.

At any rate, I have learned more than what I have written here, in a campaign which saw my candidate getting only 1,019 votes to his opponent’s 2,236 votes. I am looking forward to do work for other campaigns in the future. It’s work that I love doing, and I do it with passion.

p.s During this election season (and during the primary), I also did a lot of PR work for a Town Supervisor here in this NY area, who won comfortably the primary on both major party lines, and won now in November the general election against his opponent who ran on a popular third-party line. However, in the Supervisor contest, while playing a bigger role of the PR work targeting one community, I was just a small part of a big apparatus, so I doubt my PR work played a role in the outcome of the election. But hey, earning a few bucks on a job you love doing, always feels good.

NOTE: The views expressed here are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent or reflect the views of YWN.

To contact the writer send an email to [email protected]

(Yossi Gestetner – YWN)