THE JACKSON ADVOCATE
BEN JEALOUS was in a hurry. It was a Sunday morning in early June and he had just addressed a few thousand Bernie Sanders followers at the People’s Summit, a Chicago gathering of lefty organizers. It had been a long weekend of workshops and plenaries and the odd dance party, and Jealous, who is running for governor of Maryland, had helped close it out, speaking on a panel on electoral politics titled “Beyond Neo-Liberalism and Trumpism.” For three days organizers had tallied their victories and studied their setbacks, in an effort to understand where the Sanders-inspired movement was headed. In candidates like Jealous, they seemed to have an answer—the revolution was moving down the ballot.
Jealous had other things on his mind as he rushed to the airport. The next day, his parents would celebrate the 50th anniversary of Loving v. Virginia, the Supreme Court decision that struck down interracial marriage bans, by renewing their vows at a Baltimore church. But his path to the convention-center taxi stand was blocked by one supporter after another. A twentysomething in a T-shirt that read, “Fuck it, I guess I’m a Democratic Socialist,” wanted a photo. A woman wanted to pass along a book from the author Naomi Klein. A nurse from California just kept saying, “You’re going to win! You’re going to win!”
The 44-year-old is a difficult man to miss, towering and heavyset with short black hair and a thick goatee peppered with flecks of gray. He is rarely seen in public without suspenders, leaving you with the sense that you are talking to not just the youngest-ever ex-president of the NAACP, but also a lumberjack. In crowds, Jealous doesn’t walk so much as he parts the waters, like a boulder breaking up a rushing stream.
Finally, he had shed the friendly organizers and the photo-seekers and the man who wanted to have “a couple-minute conversation” about universal basic income. He walked off an escalator, short of breath and sweating a little, into a white-linoleum-floored foyer somewhere in the bowels of the largest convention center in the country. “I don’t know where the fuck we are,” he said. “Do you?”
It is a familiar sentiment these days. The 2016 election has thrown the Democratic Party and the political left into a series of struggles over the path forward. These fights—to obstruct or to compromise, to clean house or keep their leadership—are infused with a sense of foreboding about what three (or seven) more years in Donald Trump’s America might bring.
Jealous approaches this moment of reckoning from a different direction than many of his Democratic peers, one that almost sounds like optimism. Even after their strong showing in November, Democrats face steep odds of breaking Republicans’ grip on Congress, but Jealous’ race is emblematic of an opportunity outside Washington: In 2018, 13 states that Barack Obama carried twice have Republican governors who are retiring or up for reelection. Winning governors’ mansions, Jealous says, is “the only way to move our families forward.”
His campaign is a product of two spectacular failures—the failure of then-Democratic Lt. Gov. Anthony Brown to win a slam-dunk gubernatorial race in 2014 against Republican real estate developer Larry Hogan, and the failure of Hillary Clinton to win a slam-dunk race against another Republican real estate developer two years later. Without Clinton’s loss, the appetite for a Democratic Party reset would be considerably weaker; without several cycles of down-ballot losses, there wouldn’t be many
