Trump Changed How These Suburbanites Feel About Politics
This story is part of a WNYC multimedia project called The People’s Guide to Power, which came out of the wave of activism that followed the 2016 presidential election. Get a closer look at how government works in our region – and how it doesn’t. See video and hear the stories of people who chose to get involved — some with more luck than others. And learn how you can take some first steps into the fray.
Saily Avelenda, a suburban New Jersey working mom, knows exactly the moment when her relationship to democracy changed.
“You see that counter right there?” she says, pointing to her kitchen. “That's where I cried my eyes out on the first day after the election and that whole night.”
Avelenda spent the next few days joining Facebook groups with others who were feeling the same way.
“And I had vowed to my husband that I never would sit on a couch again and watch anything happen,” she said.
Eight miles away and a few towns over, in Montclair, Elizabeth Juviler, a commercial real estate broker and mom who hasn’t been politically active since her college days, was doing the same thing. But she wanted to get off 'the page,' as she calls it.
“There were lots of people who wanted to get off of Facebook and sort of put the flesh and blood out there,” Juviler said. “So we set up very quickly a meeting at a coffee shop here in Montclair.”
About half of those who showed up formed the the steering committee of NJ 11th for Change, the fastest-growing anti-Trump group in New Jersey.
The steering committee looked for people who had certain skills, such as advertising, finances, technology and project management. Avelenda, 44, was invited because she’s a lawyer. Until that moment, the mother of two who worked for a bank hadn’t ever been politically active.
“I just remember thinking, 'I don’t have any excuses anymore,' ” Avelenda said. “I have a skillset. I have a voice. What’s holding me back from doing anything?”
Avelenda now took it personally — she and the other members of the organization felt a system that could elect Donald Trump was not working for them. Then, the brand-new activists realized that the best chance of results was right in their backyard: their Republican congressman, Rodney Frelinghuysen.
He’s a wealthy heir to a political dynasty that dates back to the American Revolution. Frelinghuysen has represented the New Jersey's 11th Congressional District for 22 years, and never once faced a tough election. The activists discovered he hadn’t held a town hall meeting with constituents in more than three years, and suddenly they had a mission. The idea struck a nerve, and the group grew exponentially.
“It was like holding up a sail on a sailboat in a strong wind,” Juviler said. “And we just moved very quickly because there was a huge force of people.”
By January, the group started holding Fridays with Frelinghuysen, where a couple hundred constituents would visit his district office in Morristown. The Congressman wasn’t ever there, but activists would leave their questions with the staff.
With no response from Frelinghuysen, they escalated their tactics, organizing their own town halls across the district — with an empty chair for their congressman. And they took a bus trip to Washington to meet with him.
Cracks in Frelinghuysen’s invincibility started appearing in the spring along with the crocuses popping up across the Garden State. Frelinghuysen held his own town hall on the telephone, and sounded a bit peevish.
“For people who have jammed our lines and made it difficult for us to meet our constituent needs, it’d be nice for you to back off,” Frelinghuysen said.
Then the newly minted chairman of the powerful House Appropriations Committee made an unforced error. He wrote a handwritten note at the bottom of a fundraising letter to a bank director, singling out one of the bank’s employees as a “ringleader” of the activist group causing him trouble. That ringleader was Saily Avelenda. Confronted by her employer, she resigned from her job. She went public, and much to her surprise, the story went national, prompting an ethics complaint against Frelinghuysen.
“I think this showed a part of him that he'd rather not have exposed," Avalenda said. "And it contradicts a very big piece of his persona, which is this pancake-breakfast-visiting grandpa who shows up in his rumpled khakis.”
Many new groups have formed across the state since the election. In Jersey City, activists are fighting building development by Trump and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Citizen Action, the state’s oldest grassroots political organization, has been growing so much that its executive director, Phyllis Salowe-Kaye, says they can't keep up with the data entry of new members. And in each congressional district represented by a Republican, opposition groups have formed.
“It’s educated women predominantly across the country, and for the most part educated white women,” said Kevin Brown, vice president of 32BJ, the regional chapter of the Service Employees International Union. “For the most part, Donald Trump struck a core in their being that changed what they think about our country and what they think about activism and what they think about their role and their families. And it’s amazing.”
Brown has been involved with progressive politics in New Jersey for 16 years. He says the activism he sees in Republican districts makes him more optimistic than ever that Congress will flip Democratic in 2018.
Frelinghuysen, with his new power as committee chairman, has raised almost a million dollars and hired top-notch political consultant Mike DuHaime. DuHaime says the opposition to Frelinghuysen — and Republican Congressmen nationwide — comes from an energized Democratic base more than a revolt among regular folk who have never been politically active.
“You certainly have some who have a longtime political agenda,” DuHaime said. “They don’t agree with the fact that the congressman is essentially a Republican, despite all the things that he does for New Jersey that many Republicans and Democrats agree with.”
NJ 11th for Change commissioned a poll this summer that found the congressman, who has uniformly won his district by large margins, is now trailing an unnamed Democrat by nine points. The Cook Political Report lists his district as leaning Republican — a downgrade from likely Republican.
The activists formed a super-PAC and raised almost $90,000 to spend on the 2018 election. They plan to fight Frelinghuysen in every town in the district, and they’ve already formed groups in more than 30 of them. Four Democrats have already declared — more opposition than Frelinghuysen has ever faced.
For Saily Avelenda, though, this is less about winning, and more about changing her relationship to political power.
“After the election I realized if I'm going to put my money where my mouth is, then I've got to get up off the couch and move,” Avelenda said.
“I’ll have disappointments with candidates in the future. But It’ll never be because I didn't do anything.”
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