Harrison’s longshot Senate bid bears fruit
While we all stayed away from lettuce last month during the Cyclospora recall, Rashida Harrison had her backup plan.
She simply picked some from her Groesbeck neighborhood backyard.
The 46-year-old mother likes getting her hands into the dirt and watching, slowly, as the fruits of her labor appear.
“My little gardening projects still feel slightly miraculous,” Harrison said.
In a way, her little tomatoes or exploding patches of basil aren’t much different than her run for the state Senate.
When Detroit-based political consultant Edmund Rushton approached her about running in the open district made up of Lansing’s Eastside and points east and north, Harrison took it as a joke.
The feminist scholar and assistant professor at James Madison College thought about legislative politics here and there. She knew some people.
As Harrison earned her doctorate in African American and African Studies at MSU, she planted roots in Lansing after moving from New York in 2003 for graduate school.
She volunteered through the local Zonta International chapter. Ran some youth community programs out of Pattengill. Trained for a half marathon with a Playmakers running group.
But the Michigan Senate? For this daughter of a poor family from South Bronx? She didn’t have any political connections. Where would she even begin?
“It felt so out of reach,” Harrison said.
Yet, planting that first seed only meant paying a $100 filing fee. She could do that, and on March 31, she did.
From there, Harrison started showing up for every event she could – oftentimes, her 7-year-old in tow.
Governor Gretchen Whitmer’s political action committee (PAC) meeting. A progressive meetup group called “Blue Brigade.” Wherever she went, she met other new faces to politics.
“That was helpful, reassuring,” she said. “I was like, ‘OK. I’m not the only one out here.’”
Quite the opposite. A sociologist by training, Harrison listened to people. She watched what was going on around her.
This wasn’t just people Lansing or other professional Black women, either. Whether it was Michigan State’s campus, Clinton County or Shiawassee, she was hearing similar sentiments. People were thinking like her.
“I had someone tell me, ‘I used to consider myself a moderate Democrat, but apparently now I’m a progressive, right?’” Harrison said.
The issues that typically would put her in the “progressive bucket” — universal healthcare or universal childcare, were not ideals held by her, a Black feminist . . . but by a lot of people.
Harrison isn’t independently wealthy. She raised a modest $16,000 for her campaign. There were no mailers. She didn’t have an army of volunteers. She and her team knocked doors, but admittedly “not as many as we should have.”
What she did have was the progressive movement sweeping through Michigan and the country.
“I knew a lot of young people working on Will (Lawrence’s) campaign, and they’d tell me, ‘I was knocking and then someone asked me about the Senate race, and I told them about you,” Harrison said.
As it turned out, progressive U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed won Ingham County with 59% of the vote. He won Clinton County, too.
Word of mouth spread like wildfire.
Harrison was the progressive candidate in the 28th Senate District in a field of three other choices.
“I say progressive plus,” she said. “When I am faced with a challenge, I think about what group of people have had the least access, have been the most marginalized when it comes to the issue.”
Harrison’s $100 filing fee had grown into something life-changing.
With her professorship at Michigan State ending this year, she’d been looking toward advocacy work and smaller consulting jobs in 2027. Instead, the longshot candidate found herself headed somewhere she once considered out of reach.
Like those tomatoes sprouting in her backyard, Harrison said, it all feels “slightly miraculous.”
