"My name is Steve Diamond and I'm running for County Supervisor" are words I never imagined hearing myself utter -- not until a few months ago, anyway. I've thought of myself as an activist, an organizer, a gadfly, a citizen lobbyist. But until recently I'd never entertained the idea of being a politician. Until recently...
Like many in the early wave of Baby Boomers (born in '47) I learned activism in the civil rights and anti-war protests of the '60s and early '70s. Then life intervened and my connection with politics became more distant. And then, as for so many others, everything changed on November 8, 2016.
I was born and raised in New York City. My dad was a lawyer, as was his dad. There was no tradition of public service or of activism in the family that I knew of, except that recently I learned that my great-grandfather was active in the Jewish Labor Movement in the early years of the 20th century. He had emigrated in the 1890s to escape rampant anti-Semitism in his native Romania, and landed in New York's Lower East Side.
Since 2016, I’ve been co-leader of Indivisible Southern Arizona Justice Alliance, which has held demonstrations, done lobbying, and which received a Community Partnership Award in 2018, partly for our work in keeping Pima County immigrant-friendly by denying certain federal grants to the Sheriff’s Department. In that work I feel keenly the connection to my immigrant great-grandfather.
Like him, I've also worked with organized labor. I was fortunate to participate recently in the AFL-CIO program "Path to Power" for developing labor union candidates. (I'm a proud member of the National Writers Union.) I'll have more to say in future diaries about my organized labor activities and connections.
So how did I get here? Why take a different path now? I had some influence. I was talking with people in power at the federal, state, and local levels.
Why change now? I kept feeling that the fundamental values that move me and that I'd been trying to represent -- values like equity, justice, inclusiveness, integrity -- were getting lost in the noise, overwhelmed by the daily kaleidoscope of incidents and issues. I realized that my influence was minuscule compared to the magnitude of the problems we face. I wanted a bigger platform.
Or, as a highly experienced organizer I met the other day put it, "This is the next step in shaping public conversation. Congratulations!"
Pima County, Arizona, contains the city of Tucson (pop. 500K), a number of smaller municipalities, and a whole lot of unincorporated area. It comprises five supervisor districts, each just over 200K in population. Each district elects a supervisor to the Board of Supervisors once every four years, in presidential election years.
The current board has three Democratic and two Republican incumbents. Sometimes one or another of the Dems votes with Republicans, especially when it comes to business as usual overcoming inclusive community values. We need a better majority.
I'm running against one of the Republicans in a district that has been considered so safe for Republicans that no Democrat has even been on the ballot since 1996. I'm wagering a year of my life that 2020 is the year when a blue wave will overcome that advantage.
I'm going to need a lot of help to make that happen.
For you who don't live in Pima County, why should you consider helping? Arizona is deep purple, on the verge of turning blue. After 2020 we may have two Democratic senators for the first time in 50 years. We are likely to claim a Democratic majority in the state House (currently 31-29 Republican) and have a good chance in the state Senate too (currently 17-13 Republican). We are very likely to vote for a Democratic president.
My downballot campaign will help get thousands of Democrats and left-leaning independents to the polls who may not have bothered to vote recently, especially in 2016. I'm going to have labor organizations canvassing for me, party organizations, and activist organizations, as well as my own campaign people.
Please consider donating to my campaign via ActBlue.
Have a look at my website and my Facebook page for more info. You can also follow my campaign on Twitter. And please stay tuned for future diaries about a first-time politician who mistakenly thought he was retired.
Thank you for reading!