“A lot of people ask if I’m crazy,” says the 36-year-old city council candidate I’ve ridden across town to meet. I’m instantly wary: that’s something crazy people say. But Michael Bekesha is observably sane, even if he’s running for a seat on Washington, D.C.’s all-Democrat city council as a Republican.
The 36 year old is a staff attorney at the right-of-center watchdog group Judicial Watch, and he thinks he might be the only living lawyer to have read every last one of Hillary Clinton’s emails. Bekesha also believes that campaigning with an R after his name in a city that voted for Clinton by more than 90 percent in 2016 isn’t a total waste of time. Not even now, in 2018, when the GOP’s brand is more loathsome than ever to D.C.’s dominant demographics.
In what could be a reflection of the times, Bekesha will be the only Republican on the ballot in the federal city this fall.
He’s running because he loves it here, he tells me inside his campaign headquarters at WeWork’s campus in Navy Yard, a revamped neighborhood that is part of Ward 6, where he’s making his bid. He knows D.C. is nowhere near ready to confront its ongoing policing problem and imminent housing crisis, let alone its failing transit infrastructure and corrupt public- school system. The lack of real debate on a uniformly Democratic council—11 Democrats and two independents who vote like them—prevents the city from rigorously considering policy alternatives. Although party lines dissolve at the level of local politics, it’s also where conscientious debate has the most immediate value, he argues.
For example, unlike some other Republicans I know, Bekesha isn’t satisfied to write off the DC Streetcar as a bizarrely misguided boondoggle. Offering city residents a free ride, however snail-like, from their homes in lower-income areas to better, more healthfully stocked big box grocery stores—which is Bekesha’s preferred path for the cable car’s next installment—would pose a clear civic benefit, he explains. The proposal with more support currently, however, would lay tracks in the other direction out to Georgetown, a destination for the type of tourist or shopper who’d typically prefer to pay for a far faster form of transit.
Recent back-to-back favoritism and fraudulent graduation rate inflation scandals tell us D.C.’s public schools need new scrutiny, he adds. “The council provides zero oversight. I think that that’s where the problem stems,” Bekesha says. “There’s no one holding the mayor, the chancellor, the school system accountable.” He’s not sure the council ever even sees the real budget for the D.C. public school system, suggesting there’s a “secret budget” that the public and council aren’t privy to.
Cleaning up corruption is a normal promise from local candidates. Less typical, though, are a couple of the other Bekesha specials. “I like talking about subsidized housing for cops,” he says, for example. “People think that’s not really a ‘Republican issue’—but it’s supporting our police officers and improving public safety and helping grow the community.”
With crime rates and murder rates escalating in D.C., roughly at pace with income disparity, cops can’t afford housing any better than the crooks they commute here to keep in line. Stop and frisk doesn’t work, Bekesha says. But police walking beats in the same neighborhoods they know, love, and live in? It could be the right recipe for peace. “The first time you talk to a cop shouldn’t be when you do something bad, or when something bad happens to you.”
But as he sees it, Bekesha’s fighting for the soul of the party, not just the future of the city.
“For me, Republicanism is community-based,” he says. “Local government is best to help residents in their time of need. And one way we do that is by keeping our streets safe.”
Meanwhile, the debate Washingtonians keep getting stuck on concerns one of the city’s less pressing problems. Incumbent Ward 6 councilman Charles Allen, Bekesha’s opponent, tweeted about it just on Monday: “Let’s make it very clear – more than 700,000 Americans that call DC home deserve full representation in Congress.” Residents, and their local representatives, always make D.C. statehood a matter of partisan politics, Bekesha says, and he parrots the tired talking points:
“The Democrats are trying to sell it as, Two more votes in the Senate! The Republicans in Congress are saying, We don’t want to be more Democratic.
“Let’s stop talking about politics and talk about people. Talk about why we need it, and what the issues are.”
It’s not clear D.C. can even afford statehood. The city gets billions every year from the federal government—billions it couldn’t do without. Plus, taking the criminal justice system local would mean another significant loss of federal money: hundreds upon hundreds of millions. Retrocession—making residential D.C. a county within one of one its neighboring states—isn’t a serious possibility, either. Maryland or Virginia, places with enough problems of their own, would have to meet D.C. at least halfway.
Ward 6 is the second most Republican of the district’s wards, Bekesha says, chipper about the prospect. He tells me the current mayor, Muriel Bowser, beat her top opponent in 2014—Republican David Catania, who ran as an Independent—by just 231 votes there. And the other candidate challenging Bowser, Carol Schwartz, also a Republican running as an independent, received another 1,600 votes. “Combined, two former Republicans beat Muriel Bowser in Ward 6,” he says, doing the math for me. He shows me a color-coded graph on his iPad.
But he rattles off some less promising numbers, too: Of the roughly 76,000 registered voters in Ward 6, 55,000 of them are registered Democrats, a little more than 7,000 are registered Republicans, and 15,000 claim neither party.
“And, why don’t you run as an independent?,” I ask. “Because I’m not one,” he replies.
They might not be Bekesha conservatives, but a lot of Trumpies do live in the newest Ward 6 neighborhoods. The characterless glass box condos in Navy Yard, NoMa, Waterfront, and Capitol Hill—convenient to the federal core and Capitol—are full of political staffers who are also future Bekesha constituents, if he’s right about his “path to victory.” The city’s lone Republican candidate isn’t counting on their votes, though. “The question is whether or not they’re registered to vote here,” he says of the newcomers who’ve settled, for now, in his neighborhood. You’d only register to vote if you planned to stay in Washington indefinitely, or really cared about the consequences of local city politics.
And if you really, really care—like Michael Bekesha—you actually run for office.
