OPINION: This Far, and No Further

For Matt Rowe, the Ward 1 candidate endorsed by the Fredericksburg Democratic Committee, childhood lessons are leading him to take a stand.

By Matt Rowe
GUEST OPINION WRITER

I was bullied in high school. It took many different forms, but the most common was having my things stolen. A notable example was my prized Five Star First Gear zipper binder that I used to store the vast majority of my schoolwork. It became a target for bullies to hide and then pretend they had nothing to do with its disappearance.

The most memorable instance of bullying I have been thinking about a lot recently involved exclusion bullying. Exclusion bullying occurs when someone is repeatedly and purposely isolated and excluded. At the end of ninth grade, I decided to run for class president for the tenth-grade year. Another kid I was friends with also wanted to be class president. He told me that everyone would stop talking to me if I ran against him, and that is exactly what happened.

History does not always exactly repeat itself, but it often rhymes. I now find myself in a situation where, much like the youth of today, I am dealing with the online version of bullying. Cyberbullies seeking to eliminate the endorsements made by the Fredericksburg Democratic Committee against candidates of their choosing have waged a malicious and deceitful campaign against my character. The conflict stems from a deliberate misinterpretation concerning a particular 2024 guidance issued by the Office of Special Counsel regarding the Hatch Act.

The Hatch Act has historically allowed federal employees to seek elected office as long as the contest was completely nonpartisan, meaning all candidates were required to run as independents. Exceptions have been made for some localities near Washington, D.C., because of the high number of federal employees living there. In those localities, federal employees can run as independents in partisan elections where nominated Democrats or Republicans may also be running. Fredericksburg is not one of those localities. This is likely because we do not have partisan elections in the city, so there was no need to put us on the exempted list.

The 2024 guidance states that a nonpartisan election can suddenly become partisan under certain circumstances. The most obvious of these is if a major party endorses candidates in that election. The cyberbullies suspiciously neglect to mention that there is a second part to this guidance. It states partisanship applies “not only to candidates who have received the formal endorsement of a major political party, but also to candidates who act in concert with a major political party.” This is what they deliberately omit. If any candidate in the election satisfies either point, then the election is no longer non-partisan.

I am a Democrat. I always have been. My political career began as an organizer for Duke’s of Hazzard star Ben “Cooter” Jones’s quixotic congressional campaign in 2002, then as a member of my local Democratic committee, later being elected to the Democratic Party of Virginia State Central Committee in 2012, and then becoming chair of my congressional district Democratic committee in 2017. I have been a delegate to the Democratic National Convention three times and served as an elector in the Electoral College representing the Commonwealth of Virginia in 2020. According to the OSC opinion, my candidacy alone would preclude any federal employee from participating in this race because of my partisan identity. I simply cannot, and will not, hide my partisan affiliation.

“But the potholes aren’t Democratic or Republican, they’re just potholes,” you’ll hear. Potholes, which really serve as a symbol for any local concern, do belong to someone. They are barriers to someone’s happiness. Potholes can take on an identity. Not everyone’s potholes are the same. A pothole could be the red tape a business must go through to open. A pothole could be a community’s struggle to get the proper resources for their schools. A pothole could be a young couple’s inability to find affordable housing in an overpriced market with limited supply. I will care about a Democratic pothole because I respect that person’s experience. I will care about a Republican pothole because I respect that person’s experience. I will do my job and serve my constituents to the best of my ability regardless of what they look like, who they love, how they vote, or how long they have lived here.

You are told that bullies act out of insecurity. I suspect the bullying I am experiencing now is the result of the local Republican Committee’s insecurity about its place here in Fredericksburg. Fredericksburg is nearly a two-to-one Democratic city. Republicans are envious of the power that the Democratic endorsement holds. They are willing to go to any length and concoct any story to make the Democratic endorsements go away. In true bully fashion, they would seek to destroy something because if they cannot have it, then no one can.

My experiences with bullying probably contributed to my propensity for conflict avoidance. I listened to my parents when they told me to “ignore the bully.” But ignoring a bully just makes them try harder. You become a challenge. They know nothing else but to try to hurt you. They will not stop until they succeed. One of the most recent escalations in this case involved a post by the “Fredericksburg GOP Chair” on Facebook listing my donors, calling me a “mob boss,” and telling his supporters to “let all these people know” that they supported someone “trying to eliminate a minority veteran from running against him.” Donors that include my 75-year-old mother who is fighting cancer.

Old habits are hard to break, but I understand that sometimes you must accept conflict. You must stand up to the bully and say, “This far, and no further.”

What I want most of all is a fair race with all of the candidates who qualified for the ballot, regardless of their background, experience, or partisan identity. The fact remains that my presence in this race could mean that a particular candidate may not be able to continue. While the keyboard warriors are seeking to have the endorsements removed, doing so would not solve the problem of a potential Hatch Act violation by one of my opponents. The only way to solve that dilemma is for me to step out of the race. That is not going to happen. I am also proud to have earned the endorsement of the local Democratic Committee, and I will be keeping it.

In response, the local Republican Committee made a retaliatory endorsement in a different city council race to specifically cause trouble for a federal employee running in that ward. It is ironic that they’ve cried foul over the plight of their preferred federal employee candidate while the President and his Republican enablers work to gut the federal workforce and ham-handedly eliminate the jobs of thousands of hard-working Virginians. In fact, the case could be made that such purposeful political hostage-taking by the local Republican Committee to supposedly protect my opponent itself makes this election partisan.

While the local Republican Committee may see all of this as justification for political hostage-taking, my belief is that enough people will recognize it for what it is. The bullies are insecure. They are driven solely by fear and pettiness. That is all they have to work with, and we can expect no different. I will not give in to their malice. I will continue my fight in my own way. If you ignore the bullies, they will try harder to hurt you. If you let them hurt you, they will learn they can hurt you and they will do it again. In this case, this is as far as they will go and they will go no further.

So, about that high school election. How did everything turn out? I stuck with it. I endured the social exclusion. I figured out how to win. I realized that the bully was not very popular with the girls in my class, so I reached out to them and secured their votes. With their backing, I became the tenth-grade class president. After the election, the bully accepted defeat and the social exclusion waned. He grew up, and I grew up as well. I see him from time to time, and we are friends. Life is about learning. Your past, with all of its ups and downs, successes and difficulties, guides your present.

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