DSA Flomentum

[Editor’s note: As of publication, the Sacramento Mayor’s race remains undecided, with final ballots still being counted.]

It was April of 2023, and the mood was electric outside of Sacramento City Hall. I had received the text several days before. Flo was running and I and a few others were tasked with not letting the secret out. As far as most people knew, it was just an announcement by an important organizer and community member in the Sacramento Area.

Dr. Flojaune "Flo" Cofer announced her candidacy for mayor eighteen months ago, to a crowd of over one hundred supporters. She has been pushing hard ever since with a growing community of volunteers and supporters—people excited at the idea of a candidate that represents them, who actually addresses the problems, rather than just restating the problem with a noncommittal “and I’ll do something about that.” A mayor who knows the importance of listening and collaborating.

Many had implored her to run over the years.  Due to her executive leadership abilities she was eminently qualified. And she had the perfect disposition to engage meaningfully, including with communities that don’t look like her but are similarly frustrated with City leadership.

Dr. Flo has been in community for over two decades. In various spaces, she has consistently engaged robustly in advocacy and equity work, beginning while working as an epidemiologist, helping craft healthcare policy for the state of California, and nationally with Obamacare. As she has stated, "I began my career at the California Department of Public Health, where I built a statewide coalition that decreased infant mortality by 14% across the state. I worked successfully to expand women's health coverage under Obamacare with no copays."

Fact-based approach

Having that fact-based approach is exactly what she will bring to the mayorship of Sacramento. She doesn’t accept that the status quo is the best way to do things. Just because it’s been done forever, doesn’t mean it’s the most effective way to do things. Thus she is open to new ideas, new modes of operating that shake up the status quo and that are based in evidence. At multiple forums she articulated a similar sentiment toward all policy areas as she did in a campaign video discussing homelessness:   The numbers show that we're moving in the wrong direction on this issue, and I plan to take a different approach, that is preventative, people-oriented, and based on data and recommendations from experts in the field."

Inherent to how she works and how she will govern is her experience as an epidemiologist following the data:  if the data doesn’t support the policy, then the policy needs to be changed. And she has the requisite willingness to engage with the data and the humility that is necessary to go where it leads, rather than trying to justify an endpoint that has already been decided on.

This position requires a necessity to listen and know what you don’t know, but also a willingness to ask people who do know and engage meaningfully with the public, respecting their time and input. Previous mayors have given lip service to public participation and always made it more difficult rather than more engaging to make comments. They would allude to “checks and balances” without any enforcement mechanisms to ensure the council would take advantage of the community input and advice offered by community members. Flo wants to see those mechanisms in place to ensure community input is respected and always at the forefront of engagement in new policy, rather than an afterthought or a box to check.

From the other side of the dais

Flo truly knows what the community has been requesting as far as genuine engagement, because she has been on the other side of the dais. She has served on committees for years and seen recommendations disregarded by the council after community members had invested days and weeks of their lives into the research and outreach done. This is exemplified nowhere better than in her dressing down of the sitting mayor while she was Chair of the Measure U committee. 

Included in this election process were dozens of forums and debates. Every time, community members appreciated her holistic sense of what is happening and how she would like to see it addressed. Her analyses of the varied issues affecting Sacramento shone through, especially because the alternative being offered was the status quo sentiment merely reframing the problem rather than offering solutions.

DSA Sacramento members joined a wide swath of communities from all types of backgrounds, from all over the city, and even from elsewhere in the country in supporting Flo. They canvassed, phone banked, text banked, threw house parties, threw fundraising events, held forums, and donated. The campaign saw nearly seventy thousand doors knocked, including over eight thousand two hundred the weekend before election day; one hundred fifty thousand calls, including twenty thousand the weekend before election day; three hundred thousand texts, and nearly one hundred house parties. There were hundreds of community events with neighbors to talk about her, her platform, and what they needed to see in a mayor. The campaign saw nearly four hundred volunteers over the course of the eighteen months. And donations rolled in to the tune of over $800,000.

The results for the Sacramento mayoral race as of November 19th, 2024

Waiting for the final count

Currently (11/21), she is down 49.14% to 50.86%. However, the late votes aren’t all in and they have been breaking for her. Each tranche, counted twice a week, has seen her receiving more votes than her rival, Assemblymember Kevin McCarty. The process at this point is similar to the primary, where she was down 47% to 53%. When all primary votes were in and counted, their percentage share of votes had swapped to 58% for her and 42% for him. Now we wait for the final count.