My passion for history and world affairs started when I was barely in double digits. My interest in electoral politics took decades to catch up. When I first registered to vote, in 1969 or 1970, it was as a member of the D.C. Statehood Party. I was a freshman at Georgetown U., majoring in Arabic and minoring in antiwar activism. In D.C. at that point you couldn’t vote for much. D.C. residents couldn’t even vote for president until 1964, the 23rd Amendment having been ratified in 1961. In 1969, the only municipal office you could vote for was school board.1
The D.C. Statehood Party was the only political party I ever belonged to till January 2017, when, having been back in my home state of Massachusetts for decades, I changed my voter registration from unenrolled to Democrat. More about that below.
My one serious foray into electoral politics between 1969 and 2017 took place in the bicentennial year of 1976, when, temporarily back in Massachusetts, I became a nearly full-time volunteer for the campaign to ratify the state’s Equal Rights Amendment. I didn’t consider registering as a Democrat — in those days equal rights wasn’t a partisan issue. The state ERA passed that November.
When I returned to D.C. the following spring, electoral politics again receded into the background. I immersed myself in grassroots feminism and the lesbian community, learning along the way that there was much more to D.C. than what was covered in the Washington Post and the national press. The invisibility of the real city was not unrelated to demographics: about three-quarters of the residents of “Chocolate City” were Black.2
Grassroots feminist and lesbian activism in those days rarely intersected with electoral politics: feminists in elective office were few, and out lesbians were almost nonexistent.3 My beat was the Women in Print movement: feminist writing, editing, reviewing, bookselling, etc. Once I moved to Martha’s Vineyard in 1985, however, I started voting pretty regularly and even attended town meetings (which, like town elections, are nonpartisan).
All that time I remained unenrolled in any political party. Massachusetts is an open-primary state, and in primaries I always took the Democratic ballot. In general elections, I voted for Democrats not because I was a straight-ticket voter but because the Republicans ranged from mediocre to awful, with “awful” taking the lead as the decades rolled on. The only Republican I ever voted for4 was the former Dukes County clerk of courts, Joe Sollitto, and he’d been in office so long I’m not sure I realized he was a Republican.5
In 2016, I was more involved in electioneering than in any year since 1976. There were no incumbents running for state senator, state representative, Dukes County sheriff, and Dukes County registrar of deeds, which meant there was lots of action in the primary. Since the Massachusetts primary is the day after Labor Day, this meant much campaigning was done over the summer — when about 80 percent of the people on Martha’s Vineyard don’t vote in Massachusetts, never mind in the 9th Congressional District.
To cut through the summer static, I started attending the monthly meetings of the Martha’s Vineyard Democrats whenever any Democratic candidate for office was on the agenda. I met our representative-to-be, Dylan Fernandes, who was about 26 at the time, passing out flyers outside a Dems meeting. I wound up volunteering for his campaign. The League of Women Voters held a forum at the Grange where the five candidates for state senator and the seven candidates for state rep barely fit on the stage.
To make a long story shorter, the national election results were so shocking that I decided to get involved with the local Democratic group. It was electing officers that winter, the current chair decided at the last minute not to run for re-election, and in the scramble to find at least one viable candidate for each of the four offices I agreed to run for secretary. This required switching my registration from unenrolled to Democrat. I did the deed.
My first foray into local party politics did not go well. The new chair and vice chair did not get along, the group suffered as a result, and I bailed halfway through my two-year term. However, longtime local Dems managed to recruit good candidates for chair, vice chair, and treasurer for the 2019 election; they still needed a secretary, so I returned to the fray. This team got us successfully and triumphantly through the 2020 election.
One of the many things I learned during those years was that partisan politics had its limits. All the excellent elected officials, in my state as in the rest of the country, were Democrats — my neck of the woods was particularly blessed in this regard — but plenty of elected Dems were mediocre at best. The more I learned about the state legislature, where Dems had a supermajority in both houses, the more disgusted I became.6 Its leadership, especially in the House, ran a closed shop: to get decent committee assignments, you had to “go along to get along.” The struggle to make progress was heartbreakingly slow, and if you achieved anything, it was usually a fraction of what was required.
People out of state wonder why blue Massachusetts so often elects Republican governors. Thing is, those Republican governors — Sargent, Weld, Romney (yeah, that Romney), Baker — are often more moderate/liberal than the Democratic House leadership.7
After six years I’d had enough. The several state Democratic conventions I attended as a delegate were all bread & circus, designed to give the rank-and-file the illusion of inclusion. If you looked closely, you could almost see the strings being pulled. A few years ago, the state party decided that any state committee member who’d served 20 years, i.e., been elected to five four-year terms, would become a life member, thus freeing up their seat for a newcomer. Did they never consider term limits, or making the election process more accessible?
Even more sobering, I watched some of my local colleagues become as anti-transparent as the Democratic legislative leadership. Some big “D” Democrats, it seemed, were deeply skeptical of small “d” democracy.
Democrats two and three decades younger than I are working to change this. I wish them well! I’ll stay registered as a Democrat, and I’ll continue to support good Democratic candidates, but I’m done with the Democratic Party.
NOTES
The situation improved when in 1971 Congress created the position of nonvoting delegate, then again in 1974 when D.C. finally got the right to elect its mayor and city council. D.C. still doesn’t have home rule and probably won’t as long as Republicans have any say in the matter. D.C. license plates say END TAXATION WITHOUT REPRESENTATION.
Rampant gentrification has changed this: in 2020, the official Black population was 41 percent of the total, whites were 38 percent, and the Hispanic/Latino percentage was up to 11 percent. Does this increase D.C.’s chances of eventually becoming a state? Doubtful as long as the GOP has anything to say about it: in 2020, 92 percent of D.C. voters went for Biden-Harris.
Elaine Noble was the first out lesbian elected to the Massachusetts legislature. She served two terms, 1975–1979. I got to meet both her and Barney Frank, who was then in the state legislature too, while holding a VOTE YES ON QUESTION #1 sign at a Back Bay polling place in November 1976.
More than once I’ve been heard to say that Bill Clinton was the only Republican I ever voted for, but this is about 75% snark. By the time he left office, I disliked Bill intensely. My big regret is that this caused me to write off Hillary in 2008, though I might well have supported Barack Obama anyway. By 2015 I had come around.
This was Joe Sollitto, who retired in 2018 after serving more than 40 years in the job. Having grown up on the Vineyard, he was an old-style Republican, like the ones I knew of growing up.
Progressive Democrats of Massachusetts issued a great report on this in November 2021: “The Massachusetts Legislature: Democracy in Decline.”
It’s probably a low blow to mention it, but Louise Day Hicks, leader and frequent public face of the 1960s & 1970s anti-school-busing movement in Boston, was a Democrat.
Am grateful you shared your political journey and am triply thankful for the numbered notes. Those unfamiliar w/Bay State politics may recoil in shock when reading Mass R-Governors tended to be more moderate to more liberal to the white beards running the State House. A double serving of ~truth~ is always in all ways a tasty dish. (BTW: was going to include every known reference to the Commonwealth, but then realized it might confuse some.)
Have made my position on politics clear many times. It's the last filter, if at all, by which I arrive at a position or conclusion. Yet in the majority of my extended family, it is the first and has been since JFK ran for Senate. Have not been jaded by the current state of politics whether in America or globally. Still hold it is noble service at any level as it was first intended by the Ancient Greeks. Democracy is by design messy as is anything with so many having their say.
Messy is far preferable to the obvious alternative, power by might and/or deceit. Do cringe when pols (inc. O) reframe politics as a contact sport or invoke knives and gunfights. They haven't been in a knife or gunfight.
No forced geographic region, am aware is so different politically within the grouping than the Cape, the Vineyard, and Nantucket. Yet it's their own geography that sets them apart from one another. Said another way, O and his family would be far more comfortable on the Vineyard and better received.
Again, thanks for bringing me home w/your storytelling involving MA.
When you do this kind of stuff, you never know how much difference you've made. Yes, frustrating in all the ways you describe, Susanna, but it *is* democracy and does matter. Not implied criticism for your rational decision to drop out—your choice.