Last month I wrote that I am a teacher and that is not why I am voting for Sean Steele. The piece is still up at lawco.news/article.php?slug=im-a-teacher-that-is-not-why-i-am-voting-for-sean-steele. I meant what I said then. I still share a good deal of Sean’s stated views on education funding, on keeping rural hospitals open, and on treating parents as the people who should decide how their own children are raised. I am also pro-choice. So is he, at least on the days the recording equipment is not running. None of that has changed.
What has changed is that I no longer believe the campaign matches the man. Sean has said, more than once, that he is running a clean race. I went to the Historical society "debate" and later in small group meet he had. I have watched the comment threads and the messages that followed. The conversations were not clean and they were not good-spirited. They were the ordinary kind of local politics: score-settling, selective memory, and the quiet expectation that people who had already decided to support him would keep their mouths shut when the tone turned ugly. It is just disappointing.
The barbershop recording made the disappointment concrete. I do not need Sean to be pro-life. I am not. What I needed was for the public version and the private version to be roughly the same person. The gap between them, however small, was enough. Chase Cummings’ decision to take a private family argument and turn it into campaign material the day before the election was its own kind of confirmation. In a race this small, in a district this quiet, the willingness to use that recording told me more about how both sides intend to operate than any platform ever did. Republicans do not get my vote for the same reason. The chair’s conduct is a stain on what little credibility they held in my mind.
I am not flipping. I am not switching to Chris May. I am not voting. That choice does nothing for the community. It does not send a message anyone in the state will hear. It does nothing except let me keep a private line I drew for myself: I wanted to back something that felt authentic. Sean is not authentic. Chris May, by the company he keeps and the silence he maintains, is not in control of the forces around him either and not an authentic leader.
Whoever wins tomorrow will take the seat. The people who voted for them will not get the version of the candidate they thought they were supporting. That is the lesson of the last week. The next four years will be bumpy. I would rather watch them from the side of the road than pretend I helped put either of these men there.
Thoughts · 6