Dani Howell
Template:TOCnestleft Dani Howell is a Columbus Ohio activist.
Taking over Franklin County Democratic Party
Columbus Democratic Socialists of America is proud to support 16(!) candidates for Franklin County Democratic Party Central Committee who are running with #RepYourBlock2020. Come out to support them as they fight to put local power back in the hands of their neighbors, ward by ward! All donations are welcome and split equitably among the candidates.
This is the perfect opportunity to meet the Central Committee member running in your neighborhood. The candidates in attendance are Sarah Legeza, Andrej Rotter, Mary Louise Hawkins, Marla Davis, Aly Stein, and Dani Howell.
“Like, what did I expect?”
“I was 18 when Obama won, a freshman in college, and it felt like we had changed the world. It felt like we were unstoppable,” said Dani Howell, a 29-year-old copywriter in Columbus and member of Columbus Democratic Socialists of America. “But it became clear that one person wasn’t going to change anything. And then I became apathetic and stopped caring altogether. And the more stuff we found out later—like how it was Obama’s administration that put some of these kids in cages, and the drone strikes he was ordering, and everything else—it’s really frustrating. But I’m also mad at myself. Like, what did I expect?”
We’ve been building this movement to exist outside of electoral politics. This campaign is one fight for us, but the bigger battles for social change will go on regardless of what happens with Bernie,” she said. “That’s why we should focus on local politics anyway. It doesn’t matter who the president is; we need to build local organizations that have a longer-lasting impact than electing one president. To me, these housing ordinance fights in Columbus are just as important as Medicare for All, because it’s an issue we see affecting peoples’ lives here every single day.”
When she and her peers do engage politically, Howell said, it’s from the bottom up. This is so counterintuitive as to seem insane: Even as Sanders, a committed ideologue and the leader of the DSA movement, established himself over the past year as a frontrunner for the Democratic nomination, Howell and her friends in the DSA grew all the more fixated on local projects, including a losing city council race and, more recently, Morgan Harper’s long-shot congressional bid.[1]