Local Dems debate more than presidential politics on Super Tuesday – Beaumont Enterprise

Jefferson County Democrats have a crowded ballot for Super Tuesday — and not just for president.

The race to replace two-term local party chairman Cade Bernsen, who resigned a few months ago, has drawn three candidates. That’s the most since 1986, when three candidates appeared on the ballot and a fourth was a write-in. Additionally, in 1992, one candidate appeared on the ballot and three were write-ins.

Most years, the competition for party chairman draws a single candidate.

No surprise, this will not be like most years. Polling, high voter turnout in Iowa and New Hampshire, and the sudden influx of big-spending presidential contenders point to a lot of interest in the Super Tuesday Democratic and Republican primaries. Texas and 13 other states will vote on March 3.

Early voting begins this Tuesday locally.

While the balloting on the Democratic side will be dominated by presidential politics, the unusually competitive race for local chair reflects the same desire to find a leader who best reflects what the party stands for and where it is headed.

All three candidates, while they have volunteered in various public service roles, are relative newcomers to the formal party machine.

Ava Graves, 63, one of the three candidates and is currently is serving as interim party chair. She won the seat over another March primary candidate, Joseph Trahan, 23, by one vote in an election by precinct chairs. Also running is Port Arthur native Paul Martin, an active member of the Triangle Caucus and other community groups.

Graves, who was born in Nashville, moved to Beaumont 11 years ago with her husband, a United Methodist pastor. She is a hospice chaplain.

As a way to make friends when she first moved here, she volunteered in Beaumont with former Houston Mayor Bill White’s campaign for Texas governor. She said she quickly became known as someone who “gets things done” and was connected with a few high-profile mentors who appointed her to several boards and commissions.

“There were community leaders I think that saw things that I wasn’t really keying in myself and placed me in these position where I had an opportunity to learn our city in a very unique way,” she said.

That brought her to be the campaign manager for former Beaumont councilman Bill Sam and, later, a precinct chair after realizing she lived in a precinct with a significant number of registered voters but very few who actually cast a ballot.

“When Cade stepped down, I was nominated to be party chair,” she said. “I was elected party chair and here we are.”

On the night precinct chairs voted for Bernsen’s replacement, Graves was asked whether she planned to run for the seat again.

Responding to rumors that she said she would not, she recently recalled her comments that night: “Tonight I’m here to fill an immediate need. That’s what we’re focusing on tonight.”

After a few months in the office and a growing feeling that the party has made great strides in her short term, she decided another turnover would make it even more challenging to build momentum and chose to run for the seat.

Trahan is looking for a rematch, this time with all of the county’s Democratic voters, instead of just the precinct chairs.

The Beaumont native says he’s been interested in politics since eighth grade, when he would watch CNN and Fox News to get both sides of an issue before making a decision.

“I got really excited when President Barack Obama first ran,” he said. “That piqued my interest, and he inspired me to want to be part of that process.”

Trahan went to Austin to earn a degree at the University of Texas but decided to come back to Beaumont upon graduation in part at the urging of Nick Lampson. The former congressman said the county needs more people to come back and lead because of a gap between the more seasoned members of the party and people looking to represent a new generation.

“I asked myself, how can I leave a community that’s given so much to my family over the years, that’s given so much to me? We need people who are from here that have skin in the game and know the community,” Trahan said.

In speaking about his decision to run, Trahan acknowledges that he’s young. But he also points out a number of other party chairs, including Lampson, who were first elected while still in their 20s.

In response to accusations that he simply wants to use this position as a springboard for others, he said that if elected, he would like to keep the seat for at least two terms, which he feels is enough time to implement his vision and set a good foundation that will endure regardless of who fills that seat.

“Even if I were to run for a higher office in the future, I would have to be able to point to my success in previously held elected office,” he said. “If anything, I have more of a motivation to see the party succeed.”

The third candidate, 40-year-old Paul Martin, is another Jefferson County native. He grew up in Port Acres.

After graduating from Thomas Jefferson High School, attending college and working for a call center in Nederland, he decided to enter the U.S. Air Force, where he worked as a paralegal for 10 years before coming back to Beaumont.

Like many of Beaumont’s youth who leave, he said he spent some time thinking he was going to “dust off this town and never see it again.” Traveling with the military, however, helped him realize Beaumont is more similar to other towns than many residents expect.

“And there’s no place like home,” he said.

Martin said he’s always been politically aware, but he got more involved when Donald Trump was running for president.

“There were a lot of points where we as a nation should have stood up and said, ‘This is enough,’” he said. “Going from hearing the State of the Union where Obama spoke wonderfully to seeing these Trump rallies, something had to be done. We have to be active in politics. It has to be continuous. It can’t be every two years.”

When Bernsen resigned, Martin made a Facebook group to ask his friends who they thought should run for party chair.

“Everyone was like, ‘You, duh,’” he said, realizing then that the experiences he’s had working with the Triangle Caucus and various other organizations and boards gives him the experience necessary to run for the chair position and help spread a large progressive presence in Southeast Texas.

“In the Triangle Caucus, part of our role is to educate and encourage people to run,” he said. “I was already doing that stuff and inviting elected officials to come into our meetings and talk about their position and how politics work. Party chair would be an extension of the work I was already doing.”

Despite their varied paths to get to this race, all three candidates have stressed that reinvigorating the base and finding new voters is one of their top priorities.

The education about what the party stands for that comes with bringing in new members will be vital in correcting a major change that longtime Jefferson County Democratic Party member and county commissioner Michael Shane Sinegal said he’s noticed over the past several years.

He said the party’s been increasingly reactive to the growth of the Tea Party and the broader local GOP instead of being proactive and spreading its own message.

“I think the Tea Party started the movement to make us look like baby-killing hypocrites,” he said. “We get ahead of that by educating what this party stands for and identifying leaders who stand for that. Sometimes you play defense, sometimes you play offense.”

To get the party back on track, Sinegal said he wants to see a leader who’s willing to undertake that task, but also understand the history of the party, the leaders still serving today and the amount of work it took to see just an “ounce of change” that’s been accomplished in the past few years.

“This party needs to come together because we’re under attack,” he said. “We’ve been under attack for the last four or five years. It’s not a quiet, cold war attack either. I think it’s time we fight back.”

kaitlin.bain@beaumontenterprise.com

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