India Walton Lost, but She Started Something That Could Last
India Walton did not prevail in the Buffalo mayoral race. (Nathan Peraccini)
The people and energy her campaign inspired aren’t going away.
They say you always remember your first.
Alexandria Silverstor was 3 years old when she came from southern Sudan to Buffalo, the only home she knows. She’s 19 now, and less than a week before Election Day she was in front of a polling site on the hard West Side of the city raising her voice for India Walton, exuberant. It was her first campaign, the first “job” she’s ever loved, she said, the first bright moment of political possibility in a city where too many for too long have been counted out or contained.
On November 2, Walton didn’t succeed in becoming “the first socialist mayor of a major American city in 100 years”—an idea that was wildly oversold by the progressive press nationally and used as a cudgel locally by Mayor Byron Brown, the putative victor in the mayor’s race, who ran as a write-in candidate after suffering a stunning loss to Walton in the Democratic primary last June. What Walton did was galvanize a new electoral coalition in the city—across colors, ethnicities, generations, neighborhoods, classes. It wasn’t enough to win, and her official campaign organization was raggedy, but at the watch party, even as the outcome of the vote became clear, Alexandria and other young folk who’d been working with the independent group Our City Action Buffalo, making calls and knocking on doors, talking about the state of things with their neighbors, were dancing. They’d tasted the joy of politics, and they aren’t going away.
We won’t know the actual numbers for the mayor’s race for some time. Officially, Walton got 41.2 percent of the vote to Write-In’s 58.8 percent. Four other candidates besides Brown had put themselves forward as write-ins, and the hand count separating valid votes from others—those marked incorrectly as well as familiar protest-cum-joke votes for Mickey Mouse, Buffalo Bills quarterback Josh Allen, and the like—won’t be reported until all the mail-in, absentee, military, and provisional ballots are also counted. There is no mathematical possibility, though, for Walton to prevail. (The fringe write-in candidates are no more likely to be a factor than the Bills QB, whose name, linked with that of his favorite wide receiver, has adorned Allen/Diggs yard signs posted around the city by football fans.) Although she did not formally concede to Write-In on Tuesday night—someone, after all, should respect the process—Walton identified herself to supporters as no longer a candidate but part of their collective next struggle for the city’s future after what she called “the beginning of the beginning.”
Time and space are too short for a comprehensive analysis of what happened and what’s next, but a few contradictions are notable.
Byron Brown may have captured his fifth term as mayor, but he did so with no vision for the future and surprisingly little touting of his achievements after 16 years in office. Having lost the primary, he presented himself first as a whiner, then as an entitled special pleader, suing to try to force the Board of Elections to violate its own rules and put him on the ballot, before settling into his ultimate role as fearmonger.
Danger, danger! became the through-line of his message, whether propounded by his official campaign or by the Republican Party, which endorsed him, or by groups that sprouted up to make expensive media buys on his behalf. His television ads were designed to scare public workers into believing that Walton would fire them, and to scare other Buffalonians into believing that their safety was at stake. At their last debate, he called her an “apologist for criminals.” In other public remarks, he spoke so persistently of Walton with a bullhorn that it became ridiculous even to call it code: Here was a loudmouth, angry Black woman out to rob the store—a sentiment condensed by a reactionary Black columnist who called Walton a “hood rat” in a Black paper, The Buffalo Criterion. On Halloween, the local radio broadcast of the Bills game was peppered with spooky ads made by a political action group warning that a dangerous socialist loomed to put the city at risk. The Buffalo News endorsed Brown, calling Walton “dangerously inexperienced,” a “threat” who was “driven by grievances”; only the steady hand of Brown could move the city “safely forward.” Commenters to the newspaper’s online editions throughout the campaign chucked polite racism for full-on screeds against Walton as a welfare queen and grifter, and outside election sites some voters, white and Black, spoke with equal admiration for Donald Trump, the January 6 ruffians, and Byron Brown.
The scare campaign, and the mayor’s formidable machinery to energize the right, had intended consequences for Brown, even as it sent a message that should give no comfort to his more liberal voters, some of whom had supported Walton in the primary only to tell canvassers they were too anxious now. In other races in Erie County, the emboldened right flung ‘socialist’ as an epithet at Democrats who had never embraced the label. They welded the Democratic candidate for sheriff, another Black woman, former deputy police commissioner Kim Beaty, to the slogan “defund the police.” It was a lie and she’s trailing—no minor matter considering the county jail has been rife with scandal and violence, including the death of 32 inmates since 2005. Beyond those particulars, the Brown alliance’s message prompts a deeper question: If the city is indeed so precarious, so capable of being destroyed by a newcomer advocating participatory democracy and pledging accountability and shared progress, then what kind of foundation has the mayor built over 16 years?