“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.