The Long Count

Every now and then, a post on Nithya Raman slides into my timeline. For days now, I have watched the gap between her and Pratt steadily narrow. I want to believe that she will beat him.

I wrote about Nithya Raman in May, the week she filed. I called the second act script-less. I left her in the air, attacked as a backstabber, called the next Mamdani, mid-reach for a mayoral candidacy. I did not know how it would end. I still do not, technically. As I write this she has not officially passed him. The ballots are still being counted and the process takes its time.

Watching the results play out in real time felt oddly familiar. Victory claimed before it was his. The slow, heavy catching up Nithya is doing. I wanted to believe in it in 2024 with Harris. I really hope Raman makes it where Harris could not.

I am thinking of another brown woman today. Someone I know who is building something the world has not noticed yet, in a marketplace that rewards connections and privilege she did not inherit. She is not waiting to be noticed. She is pragmatic about the hours it takes, and she puts them in. Watching her, I am thinking of myself too: the years of pouring thoughts into the void, of putting one foot in front of the other without looking back, of building an online presence that might finally answer the call of the search gods. The labor is invisible. The results mask the slog.

None of us know how this ends. What I know is the work, relentless, often heavier than what the people we are measured against seem to carry. I think about my children, about what they will remember. Their mother leaning into the desk, eyes fixed on the glowing screen, fingers typing, the clutter all around her.

Will Nithya win?

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