A culture of passing petitions.

One of the things that's been very striking from my campaign has been how the old political machine people have a culture of passing petitions to gather signatures so that people can become candidates.

Overall, the city I live in has an absolutely absurd amount of signatures that a person needs to get for them to get on the ballot, so it's a challenge for any challenger, but an incumbent knows the ropes and has the money and the bodies to do it pretty easily, especially if they're from neighborhoods with petition-passing culture; people know the drill, they get a clipboard, and they run around and snag signatures from friends and family and people they know in the neighborhood, or even people they bump into.

This has been something that I've been thinking about, and then the other week, I ran into a (white) (progressive) woman who I know from the neighborhood, and she was in the bar with a(n older) (white) (male) friend of hers from a different neighborhood, but one with a similar petition-passing culture among the born-and-bred residents there.

So, I was telling them about my thoughts on this, and how younger gentrifiers who think of themselves as progressives just don't have that same level of familiarity with the culture and even the process, and the one guy who she knows who I had just met totally agreed.

And, he told me about the time that he went to this one wake in the family of someone running for judge, and one of the family members had a clipboard and was going up the line of the people waiting to pay their respects at the casket.