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Georgetown University’s Newspaper of Record since 1920

The Hoya

Georgetown University’s Newspaper of Record since 1920

The Hoya

Davis Defeated in Newark

FILE PHOTO: AMY LEE/THE HOYA
Rashawn Davis (COL ‘14) was the youngest candidate to run for Newark City Council, earning 5.87 percent of the vote.
FILE PHOTO: AMY LEE/THE HOYA Rashawn Davis (COL ‘14) was the youngest candidate to run for Newark City Council, earning 5.87 percent of the vote.
FILE PHOTO: AMY LEE/THE HOYA Rashawn Davis (COL ‘14) was the youngest candidate to run for Newark City Council, earning 5.87 percent of the vote.
FILE PHOTO: AMY LEE/THE HOYA
Rashawn Davis (COL ‘14) was the youngest candidate to run for Newark City Council, earning 5.87 percent of the vote.

At age 21, Rashawn Davis (COL ’14) was the youngest candidate in the race for the West Ward of Newark City Council on Tuesday, joining seven other candidates vying for two-term Councilman Ron Rice’s spot.

On Election Day, May 13, Davis earned 5.87 percent of the vote with 37 out of 39 precincts counted, placing him sixth out of the eight total candidates.

Since no one candidate won over 50 percent of the vote, Patricia Bradford and Joseph McCallum, who won 21.25 percent and 25.84 of the vote respectively will meet in a run-off election June 10.

Davis said that he was initially motivated to run by a desire to help, citing his hometown’s $90 million deficit and laying off 150 uniformed police officers, but was surprised to see his campaign grow at the rate that it did.

“I think initially when we started this, I wanted just to be sort of a voice to add to the conversation. I don’t think we necessarily knew it would grow into this,” Davis said.

Born and raised in Newark, N.J., in 2009 Davis was accepted into the New Jersey Scholars, a competitive, free summer program for rising high-school seniors in the state, making him the only African-American student in his class of scholars and the first student from Newark public schools to be accepted in decades. He also served on the Newark Youth Council and volunteered on President Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign.

At Georgetown, Davis majored in government with a concentration in justice and peace studies and served as the vice president of the university’s NAACP chapter.

Before the election, Davis said that his young age could be an asset toward his campaign because it would better allow him to bring a new perspective to a city council containing members who have been in place for over a decade.

“If you look at our leadership, a lot of people who are leading have been leading for 20, 30 years … so we need a new generation of leaders,” Davis said. “I think the reality is that with the millennial generation, there comes a sense of innovation and a sense of new and fresh ideas.”

However, with youth also came a lack of experience, name recognition and funding.

“We just don’t have as many of the networks as someone who is 40 or 50 years old, so I think what you have to do is sort of be innovative in how we kind of circumvent those problems,” Davis said.

Georgetown government professor Hans Noel agreed.

“Politics is about alliances and being in the right faction and connecting people, and having a support team and so forth, and you take time to build that, and it’s hard to build that when you’re also getting an education three hours away,” Noel said.

Davis added that his young age allowed him to make better use of social media, a tool he relied heavily upon to spread information about his campaign.

“A lot of other candidates didn’t know how to use social media like that,” Davis said.

Running on a platform of fresh change for Newark, Davis proposed starting a mentoring program, creating more block associations to encourage neighbors to join together, and launching a “city hall on wheels” initiative, an idea borrowed from Boston in which city hall officials would drive to different neighborhoods in a truck, thus promoting increased communication between city hall officials and Newark residents.

According to Noel, Davis’ loss should not be attributed to his age, but rather to his position as a challenger to the long-standing social structure in Newark city politics.

“It takes time to break in to shake things up and that, more than age, is the challenge,” Noel said.

Davis experienced this opposition to change and innovation firsthand, notably through the vandalization of his property and the property of his staff.

“People tearing down your signs, and vandalizing some of your property. … You just kind of got to learn … that’s what happens when you try to make serious change,” Davis said.

Noel compared Davis to former Newark councilman and mayor and current New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, a young, energetic politician known for positively using social media and introducing changes to the city.

“I think there are a lot of parallels between the Cory Booker story and the Davis story in that he too wants to make some changes … and that’s a hard thing to do, to come from the outside and try to make changes, for anyone,” Noel said.

Julie Hutchinson, a student in Georgetown’s Semester in Washington program who worked in Newark City Hall with a prisoner re-entry program, said that she thought Cory Booker’s term as mayor has paved the way for more young people to enter politics.

“I think it’s really special to see young people want to invest in the future of Newark again, and I think that that in large part was due to the way Cory Booker ran Newark,” Hutchinson said.

She added that, even though Davis lost the election, it has benefitted his political career to increase his name recognition.

“For Rashawn Davis to run, in a lot of ways, is going to be incredibly important even though he didn’t win, because I think it’s going to show that there is just a lot of incredibly competent people coming out of Newark who are just really proud to be from the city,” Hutchinson said.

After graduation, Davis plans to work at the American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey before attempting to run again for city council in 2018.

Public policy professor William Gormley, whom Davis cited as one of his favorite professors, has high hopes for Davis’ future political career.

“I think that Rashawn has a great future in politics if he persists. … A lot of very famous politician have lost big races early in their careers: Barack Obama, Jeb Bush, Bill Clinton — they bounced back and I think Rashawn can too,” Gormley said.

Tuesday also saw Ras Baraka, a strong critic of Booker, elected mayor of Newark in a race against Shavar Jeffries.

Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly stated that Rashawn Davis was accepted to the Harvard Kennedy School.  He was accepted to a program at the Kennedy School, not to the school.

 

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