Baltimore Election Result:
David Harding

Nov 14, 2016

David Harding, a working class candidate for Baltimore City Council, got 1288 votes, or about 8% of all the votes cast in his district, in the recent election.

Harding was the only other candidate on the ballot running against the current representative. So some of his votes were simply against her.

But David’s vote was still significant. Some people knew him from his years of activity in the 1960s and early ’70s in the Steelworkers Union at Sparrows Point, or because of his participation in the civil rights and anti-war movements. Other people know him from his activity as a unionist at the State of Maryland including in AFSCME.

In his campaign, Harding said the crisis faced by working people in Baltimore has been created by big banks, corporations and developers, and made worse by the policies of the Baltimore City government. The city government has taken money away from the schools, water and sewage systems, roads and public housing in order to give hundreds of millions of dollars of tax breaks and other subsidies to big developers, corporations and banks.

Harding said the wealth of the city should be used to meet the needs of working people; that if jobless people in the city were hired and trained to repair and replace deteriorating services and low-cost housing, then unemployment and poverty could be reduced. But, he said, the way wealth in Baltimore and the rest of the country is used cannot be changed by an election. A massive and organized fight by the working class is needed. He asked those who agreed with this to vote for him.

The fact that hundreds of people in his council district voted for Harding shows that these arguments touched people.