At one moment in my campaign, I started talking to a group of voters about gravitational waves. This met with the disinterest and incomprehension I should’ve expected, given I was running for municipal office. My point—that political cluelessness about new technologies will lead to bad decisions at any level of government—didn’t get across.
The day after the election, we were off to the Midwest to look at colleges. I was pleased by the Joe and Rika Mansueto Library at the University of Chicago. Its spaceship-like glass exterior, a tour guide pointed out, had been used for the headquarters of the Erudite faction in the movie Divergent. That was a group that would’ve appreciated my gravitational-wave pitch.
Meanwhile, I kept an eye on my vote count, unofficial numbers rising as mail-in ballots arrived and officials sorted through write-in votes, including various capitalizations, truncations or misspellings of my name. As of two days after the election, the following had been recorded for the two three-year seats open on the Wyckoff, NJ, Township Committee, where two Republican incumbents had been listed on the ballot:
REP - PETER J. MELCHIONNE 4,333
REP - ROGER J. LANE 4,310
Kenneth Silber 126
KENNETH SILBER 62
KENNETH SIBLER 7
SILBER 6
Brian Scanlan 4
KEN SILBER 4
BETH SPAROZIC 4
BRIAN SCANLON 2
Brian Hubert 2
Joe Rogovich 2
KENETH SILBER 2
BRIAN J HUBERT 2
ANYONE ELSE 2
BRIAN ZIVKOVICH 2
KENNETH SILBERT 2
Then there were various people who got only one vote each, including Kenneth Silver, KENNETH SELBER, KENNITH SILBER, and the standalone, celebrity-like KENNETH. Overall, more than 200 people voted for me, or tried to, and many also voted for me for a one-year unexpired term (I’d asked people to write me in for both). A few people also voted for me in races where I wasn’t running, such as for Board of Education or County Surrogate.
I’d never thought I could win. My goal had been to get into the hundreds, raising awareness of the need for Democrats and others to end our town’s series of uncontested races. The next decision is whether I’ll seek to get on the ballot for 2027, when two more Township Committee seats will be open. Whether I’m one of them or not, someone needs to run.
The blue wave hit other towns in Bergen County this year. Democrats won in neighboring Waldwick, and unofficial results gave a Democrat a slight edge in the mayoral race of nearby Ramsey. New Jersey will have only one Republican in its 12-member congressional delegation. There was a time when Republicans, often of moderate inclinations, dominated politics in Bergen County and statewide. Now, the GOP politicos in a town like Wyckoff might have extra motivation to stay in their seats, as their wider prospects fade.
It’ll surprise no regular reader that I’m pleased by the electoral results nationwide. Still, I think, a great deal of damage caused by the second Trump administration will be hard to undo. Getting back to gravitational waves, consider this New York Times article about a top astrophysicist, Kelly Holley-Bockelmann, who moved to the Netherlands amid administration efforts to pull out of the planned Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA), a spaceborne gravitational-wave detector central to her work. As the article notes:
“Scientists hoped it could detect signals from the universe’s earliest moments, beyond the reach of any telescope. In work for similar missions, American scientists had invented technology behind the camera sensors, lasers and satellites the country and its military came to depend on. The project was meant to be a collaboration between the United States and Europe, but the United States had fallen behind because of staffing and budget shortfalls at NASA. Trump had repeatedly tried to eliminate funding for the program, and Europe was making contingency plans to save the mission rather than cede a new frontier of physics and a generation of scientific advances to a similar project from China.”
Brain drains, once they’ve happened, are difficult to reverse. The new Congress and future administrations will have to try, though. The blue wave at least makes that effort possible.
—Follow Kenneth Silber on Substack & Bluesky.