I don't want your money, I want something far more valuable... Plus, why I'm running as a write-in candidate now

As a woodworker, I have found that I have gravitated more towards doing my projects in a minimalist manner. I like stripping things down to their essence and creating pieces by using a minimum of stuff like glue or nails and screws. I like to see how things fit together without using those things. 

This mindset caught me while thinking about my campaign, and the fact that I have to get an ungodly number of signatures just to get on the ballot (500 valid ones, to be exact). Perhaps it makes sense to you that you need 10X the number of signatures to get on the ballot to become a Dayton City Commissioner than it does to be a commissioner for all of Montgomery County, but it doesn't to me. 

And it doesn't surprise me either, and that's because the Dayton Commission seeks to make it difficult because they don't want the competition. I, however, am after more competition in this race, and one of the foundational things that's different about my candidacy is that I don't think I'm the best person for the job. I think you are. The real kicker, though, is that I don't think the job should exist - or at least I want to hear your opinion on that topic during this campaign. 

And I want more competition because I want us to have a system where all residents of Dayton get to vote on all items that come before the city. So I'm running on a platform of trying to create a more participatory way for your voices to be heard not only during election season, but year-round. And that's why the commission will never support my candidacy: because I think that all of us can do a better job at governing than the five of them ever could.

Here's what I'm running on: I want Dayton to (again) be known for creating a model of local government for others to follow, like we did when we became the first large city to adopt the city manager form of government. Similarly, the Dayton Peace Accords showed the world a model for peace negotiations... why can't we become the model for the world on how participatory democracy can work in the 21st Century? 

I'll tell you why: it's our current commissioners. Like they did with the peace accords, Dayton commissioners have unfortunately chosen to try and cherry pick things that they had absolutely nothing to do with and then claim those achievements as their own while refusing to do the real work of turning Dayton into a real human rights city; one that cares about the human rights of every individual, including our rights to help feed the hungry, which our commissioners (bewilderingly) want to criminalize. 

So, while I no longer want your signatures, and I don't want your money (other than however much it costs you to vote, which could involve gas if you're not voting from home - find out your options here). What do I want, then?

After stripping it away, I realized that it's your time and your vote that I'm after, not your money. You can send a check to the campaign if you want, but it's only going to go to help feed the small team of people who are helping me run for mayor so I can thank them for their hard work. 

So if you want to buy them pizza (and probably some alcohol), then sure, send me some money. 

Otherwise, I could choose to go after money and signatures if I wanted to, but they won't help me win this campaign, because the people I'm going after as voters (often) don't have much of either to spare. They, too, are juggling a lot of things, and politics isn't something they can afford to spend money on. But they might have a little time, and to me that's far more valuable.

Time is all I really have to devote to this race. Unlike some commissioners (or others running), I don't have a cushy full-time job that affords me the opportunity to leave the house a lot to campaign, and my wife and I are married, in part, because we're such great caretakers for each other... she helps me with my mental health challenges, and I help her with her physical ones, and vice versa. She helps me a lot with physical problems I have too, but none rise to the level of a disability. 

My bipolar 1 does, however, rise to the level of a disability, and it eats a lot of time as well. Between caring for each other and my many part-time jobs (currently teaching history and political science at Sinclair, serving a housing manager for international students attending Sinclair, and running our urban homestead), I don't have the time required to waste time getting everyone's signatures so I can be listed on the ballot. But as a write-in candidate, if you want to vote for me, all you have to do now is vote for "Archie Magee" - spelled that exact same way.

Back when I worked as a teacher at the Dayton Regional STEM School I ran for Xenia School Board, in part, so that I could help get rid of a toxic superintendent who was running schools in my hometown. This was a person whom students, the members of the teacher union, parents, and community members there all confiding in me about during my campaign to explain that they were destroying the district. It was all too familiar to me, having just come out of a toxic situation at the STEM school on the winning side, I wanted to help ensure that others who faced a similar situation in my community didn't have to go through the things I did to get an education or teach their students. What were they doing wrong? In short, they were creating a toxic working environment, and everyone in the community was suffering because of it. That superintendent resigned before I entered office, and I went on to become VP of Xenia Community Schools and did things that helped ensure the people who came after me would have better tools to deal with future similar challenges, and part of that was re-writing a superintendent evaluation tool that hadn't changed in two decades. 

And that's what I do best: go in, identify challenges, and make structure changes so that those challenges will be minimized (or eliminated) in the future. That's what I want to do here in Dayton, too.

Traumatic experiences can do (at least) one of two things, and sometimes they can do both. They can permanently damage us to a point where we never allow ourselves to crawl back out of the hole they put us in, or they can make us stronger. Sometimes it takes a while to know which kind of experience it will be. But that one definitely made me stronger. Here's how:

• It gave me my first hospitalization for mania, which is what actually traumatized me about the experience (and for the record I now text the person who was my boss then on occasion and have a professional working relationship with him now that I'm a CCP instructor who teaches in Dayton Public Schools, where he is now superintendent, so I have to work together with him, and we're both professionals about it, so I have nothing bad to say of his most recent stint as Superintendent, and don't know enough about who he is now 10+ years later to know what changes our shared events had on both of us). That said, I did write about him in my book, and you're welcome to find out more about my mental health journey and his role in it and how I crawled back out of that hole by checking it out. It's available for free here: https://gemcitydudeistpriest.com/secretbipolarbookpromo;
• It helped me realize that unions are a necessary thing, and I have since been a member of Dayton Public Schools' teacher union, and if it were legal I would help start a union at Sinclair, but unfortunately in Ohio it's not legal for adjunct faculty members to form unions;
• It taught me that an organization's leadership is incredibly important.
  

Finally, while I haven't explained it much, I'm a Dudeist, which means that I follow a religion based entirely on the movie The Big Lebowski. Sure, it's a bit of a joke religion (aren't they all though?), but it's a religion nonetheless. I actually started/incorporated a local chapter of it that is recognized by the State of Ohio as a 501c3, and we use that to do good Dudeist works in our neighborhood, which is why I'm proud to say that my treasurer is also a good friend who lives next door to us.

And why would having a Dudeist be good for Dayton, you ask? Well, it wouldn't be. It wouldn't be good or bad, because it's just a religion. And in America we (currently) aren't legally required to mix our politics with religion. But if you're asking why I would be good (and relating it to Dudeism), then I would say that Dudeists will almost always use the easiest route possible towards the achievement of our goals. It bills itself, in fact, as the world's slowest-growing religion for a reason... whether it's getting into office or lighting a J, we don't hurry for many things. 

My goal, however, is to become Mayor of Dayton, and I can do that as a write-in candidate easier than I can through collecting unnecessary signatures, which represent just one more hoop to jump through in order to get people to remember how to spell your name. Mine is pretty easy. It's "Archie Magee." I've had a lot of other names in the past and I go by other ones myself now, some self-applied and others not. I got married recently, though, and changed my last name to hers as a result (because fuck the patriarchy), and now I go by Archie Magee.

So if you like what you're reading stick around and I'll share more of my thoughts, but I won't be playing the unnecessary-collecting-of-signatures game anymore, especially since every time I go in they say I did things right and then they email me to say I did them wrong.

So, I'm done playing their games. They're not the gateway to power. You are, and the more time you spend reading my words and thoughts and telling me how you want Dayton to look if/when I get into office, the better, so let's just cut out the unnecessary steps of this race and actually focus on the important part: your ideas. 

Please drop them below or email them to me!

Abide,

Archie Magee, write-in candidate for Dayton Mayor, 2025

Message brought to you by Friends of Gem City Dudeist Priest Archie Magee