“I know Barbara pretty well and worked with her over the last few years on the committee,” said Kelleigh McKenzie, chair of the Ulster County Democratic Committee until the November 5 election. “I’m very excited about the new team. I think they’re terrific. And my hope is that they build on what we’ve created and go from there.”
Plugged-in Democrats gathered around a spread of fancy meats and cheeses at a fundraiser at the James Cox Gallery in Woodstock on Thursday, October 10. They listened to Barbara Graves-Poller, the newly elected chair of the Ulster County Democratic Committee, deliver prepared remarks broadcast over a large television screen. Webcasting from an accent chair somewhere on the European continent, Graves-Poller, whose day job is chief legal counsel for the City of Kingston, laid out the historical timeline of inequality which has bedeviled the lives of American women from this country’s inception.
“When Amy [Fradon] first reached out to me about tonight’s event and its theme I couldn’t help but think back to when I was a first-year law student,” recalled Graves-Poller, “and the first time I’d heard the term ‘coverture.’ And I knew about gender discrimination at that point, but I had no idea how far the system of laws went that completely obliterated a woman’s independent legal existence.”
Treating a woman as something closer to livestock than a human being, coverture entirely disregarded any desire a woman might entertain if it contradicted the wishes of men in her life.
“When a girl was born,” said Graves-Poller, “her existence belonged to her father. Upon marriage, her civil legal existence dissolved into that of her husband’s.”
Graves-Poller pointed out a few of the mile markers passed by women on the road to equality in New York since then. Some married women were first allowed to own property in 1848. Women were granted the right to vote in New York in 1918. As recently as 1962, Graves-Poller noted, women could still legally be denied a credit card. Owing to the deficiencies presumed of the gender, it was assumed a woman’s financial decisions could only ever prove irresponsible. The co-signature of a man was required to ensure a bank wouldn’t be left on the hook.
“We are not going back”
Things have come a long way in Ulster County, where it’s no secret that Ulster County politics has become a girls’ club, with the top jobs of county executive, county comptroller, a state assemblyperson and a state senator all held by women. In Albany, the governor and attorney general are women, as are 50 assemblymembers and 18 state senators.
“So when I think about breaking the glass ceiling and what it means at this moment,” said Graves-Poller, herself a black woman, “it means that we are ready with a woman of color at the top of our ticket to put the final nail in the coffin of a system that was designed to perpetuate women’s subordination. We are not going back. It’s not just a campaign slogan. We are not going back to back alley abortions and workplace discrimination.”
Graves-Poller’s message acknowledges the hard reality that her party is running a female, multi-racial presidential candidate in a country which has never yet in the 235 years of its existence elected a woman as president — and a person of a skin color other than white once. And he was a man.
Of course, the victory of Kamala Harris is by no means a sure thing.
Expanding leadership
Reached for interview by phone while preparing for the Get Out the Vote canvases, outgoing chair of the UCDC Kelleigh McKenzie painted the price of defeat in stark terms.
“If we end up with a Republican presidency,” said McKenzie, “in my view then fascism is here.”
McKenzie predicts that won’t happen.
“I think we will win in November,” she said. “And by the way, I think it’ll be a landslide.”
When she offered herself for the job of county chair of the party four years ago, McKenzie was chair of the bylaws committee which rewrote the county party rules. She had a vision, she said, of what party infrastructure in the county should look like, and how it could provide more opportunities for leadership.
“We expanded the leadership structure,” said McKenzie. “We included a lot more elected vice-chairs that chaired new standing committees.”
A representative decision-making process is more cumbersome, McKenzie admits, when compared to the more nimble top-down style of organizational structure she refers to as the command-and-control model.
“Where you have registered Democrats across the county elect their representatives to serve on the committees, and the committees are making the decision, you get better outcomes and you get more buy-in,” she said. “It’s harder to execute than a command-and-control model. But I believe it’s worth it.”
Tough, but sweet
Reaching the end of what she had hoped to accomplish in the time frame she set for herself, McKenzie tapped Graves-Poller as her replacement. Graves-Poller initially declined.
“It can be difficult to find somebody to take the job, “McKenzie said. “It’s a ton of work and responsibility, and you’re not getting paid. You have to have a fire in your belly about it.”
Eventually Graves-Poller, who was serving as ethics chair for the county committee, relented and offered herself for the position.
At the gallery fundraiser, co-chair of the Woodstock Democrats Amy Fradon, also vice-chair for the county voter outreach committee, explained the importance of Graves-Poller’s selection.
“We want to be psyched and have people involved because this is our civics pathway. I think Barbara’s going to be really effective in bringing new people to the fold,” said Fradon.
“She’s so sweet. Tough, but sweet. People do better when they feel safe.”
Graves-Poller inherits a 328-member operation representing 164 election districts with 39 vacancies to fill, 13 of them in Kingston. Committees tackle such enterprises as voter outreach, diversity and party-building, communications, campaign support and fundraising.
In presidential election years, more voters tend to turn out, and in Ulster County in 2020 voters gave the Democratic candidate a 20,000-vote plurality.
Winning the congressional races
McKenzie intends to push to get out the vote all the way to election day.
“New York 18 and New York 19 — Ryan versus Esposito and Riley versus Molinaro — are two swing congressional districts that run right through Ulster County,” says McKenzie. “We want to punch above our weight, and over perform and turn out in record numbers to help make up for some of the other rural counties that may not get a great turnout to make sure that our candidates win in those districts.”
If the Democrats can get their candidates elected, McKenzie predicts a sea change in how the party will approach elections going forward. “This is an opportunity for the next cohort, with Barbara Graves-Poller at the helm,” she said, “to start to envision how the party operates and what the party’s purpose is when it’s not to get a candidate to run against the Republican in November.”
McKenzie anticipates that the county will continue its years-long leftward drift, with elections decided at Democratic primaries. But she sees her job right now as making sure with education and outreach “that every last Democrat is voting” on November 5.
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