One evening last week, as City Council President Wanda Williams was walking from city hall to a meeting on parking at the Crowne Plaza hotel, she crossed paths with a young man wearing a button-down shirt and tie and towing a skateboard. Dylan-goateed, his eyes behind aviator sunglasses, the man hoisted a sign with a handwritten message for the parking system operators: “Extortion of working people and earned labor hours?” it read. “G.T.F.O.!”
“What’s G.T.F.O. stand for?” Williams asked him.
“Get the fuck out,” he said mildly.
“Oh!” Williams replied.
The young man was Chris Siennick, a 25-year-old Midtown resident who is running a write-in campaign this fall for a four-year council seat. Though it is only a week away, the race for council has barely made a headline since May, when the solidly Democratic Harrisburg electorate sent four picks on from the primary to a presumed easy victory in the general. Siennick, as a write-in, will come before voters for the first time Nov. 3, with a platform utterly unlike any of his contenders. He is running on what he describes as a “socialist-pirate-green” ticket, with legislative goals that include legalizing marijuana, creating free municipal wireless Internet, and acquiring a 3-D printer for shared use by the Harrisburg citizenry.
Write-in campaigns can marshal significant support—in the 2013 mayoral race, a write-in bid by Aaron Johnson, the city’s public works director, came away with 18 percent of the vote—but they face considerable obstacles. To boost his chances, Siennick, who announced his candidacy in April, is asking supporters to vote for him and no one else. In an at-large election, such a tactic would reduce his opponents’ tallies, making it easier for him to rank among the top three vote-getters. The goal, as he explained during an appearance on The Voice 17104, a local community radio station, is “to level the playing field with the party machine.”
Siennick’s parents moved to central Pennsylvania in 1993. He spent his late childhood and adolescence in Linglestown, before moving to Harrisburg five years ago. When he was 16, his father—a “little bit of a Tea Party kind of guy” whose politics are nothing like his son’s—was deployed to Iraq. “I thought it was a bunch of bogus that we were going out to the Middle East, and I didn’t want my dad to be at risk for something that was illegitimate,” Siennick said. He started listening to political punk rock songs, like Anti-Flag’s “Die For Your Government” (“You’ve gotta die, gotta die, gotta die for your government? Die for your country? That’s shit!”). He got involved in the protest movement, showing up on the Capitol steps on Wednesdays to demonstrate against the war, and started a local chapter of Students for a Democratic Society, a reincarnation of the 1960s leftist group.
Studying the war and the country’s military spending led Siennick to the tenets of anarchism and socialism. Like Bernie Sanders, the presidential candidate with whom he most closely aligns, he thinks it high time that “socialism” cease to be a dirty word. (“If you’re catching on, the cold war is over,” his platform statement says.) The socialist component of his platform is about access to resources. The 3-D printer, he said, should be available for use “like a public library,” and could be housed in an abandoned property repurposed as a “shared community entity.” Public Internet “would eliminate all the cost on the consumer. Like, wipe it away.” He also supports paid maternity leave, free health care and free education, because they “should be our rights as part of the richest country in the world.”
In his campaign materials, Siennick projects an insurrectionist look—in the banner photo on his campaign Facebook page, he is flanked by one woman holding a bazooka and another wielding swords. But in conversation, he is temperate and thoughtful. (In this way, he resembles the Pirate Party, which, underneath the swashbuckling label, promotes democratic participation and open access to technology and information.) This is true even when he is discussing things you might expect him to be resentful about, like his arrest last spring after an altercation late one night with two state troopers downtown. The police claimed he spat on them and tried to avoid arrest; Siennick, who was riding his skateboard the wrong way on 2nd Street, says they told him to leave the road and used a homophobic slur. After a violent arrest, during which he says he was tased, pepper sprayed and kicked in the face, the troopers charged him with 14 crimes, including two felonies. Unable to post the $250,000 bail, he spent three weeks in Dauphin County prison. (The district attorney’s office, after viewing video footage of the arrest, withdrew the charges and asked the state police to investigate the officers.)
One of Siennick’s campaign goals is to create a civilian review board to oversee complaints against officers. But he is not anti-police; he told me Harrisburg has “some really exceptional officers,” and that he wants cops to be there when people need help. While he was in prison, he saw people he “definitely wouldn’t want on the street,” he said. “I was in there with, like, heroin dealers and murderers. Really bad people.” At the same time, he met decent people who had been overwhelmed by difficult circumstances, like being unable to pay child support. He felt that, in general, the legal system could benefit from greater oversight and transparency. “There are some bad police officers,” he said. “Those are the ones that need to get taken out, so we can have a feeling of security and normalcy.”
Siennick lives in the realm of big ideas. Alongside the concrete items in his platform are things like “eliminate racism” and “abolish property.” (The latter, he says, is primarily about reclaiming swaths of unused land for community use.) He does not always couple these goals with a clear grasp of the particulars. Regarding public Internet, for instance, he pointed to the taxpayer-owned network in Chattanooga, Tenn., which he observed was funded with a federal grant. That’s true—but the city also chipped in by borrowing $220 million, and it charges customers $70 a month. He told me that Mayor Eric Papenfuse’s vision was “a little bit focused on Midtown,” but then cited, as his only examples, “putting parking meters along 3rd Street” (they predate the mayor) and the Front Street repaving (a PennDOT project). He opposes the new parking system for having private operators “not interested in making the city a better place so much as lining their own pockets”—which might be true, in a rough way, though Siennick did not seem aware that the city receives far more of the system’s proceeds (around $5 million each year) than the private managers (about one-tenth of that).
But a generous view of Siennick’s campaign would observe that, more than any other candidate, he has sought to insert a national conversation about race, poverty, inequality and disillusionment into a decidedly local race. “[R]est assured,” his platform statement says, “if you are poor, broke, working, renting, have a mortgage, bored, desperate, cold, or hungry I will never cease to force the issue.” The statement is addressed to the “peoples and townsfolk of Harrisburg City” and signed in “love and rage.” The Democratic presumptives have experience Siennick undeniably lacks, on school board (Destini Hodges), in city government (Cornelius Johnson), in government relations (Westburn Majors) and on council (Jeff Baltimore). Siennick has something their campaigns lack, too—a righteous fury.
