When thinking about democratic socialist India Walton’s loss in the Buffalo mayor’s race this past fall, it’s hard not to first think about the never-ending injustice of being poor.

Consider: incumbent Byron Brown — Walton’s opponent and improbable write-in candidate, after he lost a Democratic primary in a city where its winner is virtually elected mayor by default — has one of the country’s more shocking records. Brown has recklessly run the city’s finances into the ground. He utterly failed to tackle Buffalo’s pervasive poverty. He did little to nothing about its growing lead problem, and he has presided over such pervasive corruption, including several scandals linked directly to him, that the FBI was investigating his entourage even as the race was going on, including a raid on one of his offices.

Yet as soon as Brown lost the primary, all the misdeeds he’d committed while actually in power over the past fifteen years took a back seat. Brown successfully turned the election debate to focus on the petty personal mistakes of Walton, a woman who became a working mother as a teen before becoming a nurse: she was charged with $295 worth of food stamp fraud in 2003; she owed $749 in back taxes in 2004; she was stopped for driving with a suspended license; she visited her cousin before he went to jail; she failed to show up for a court summons sent to the wrong address; she wrote a rude Facebook post; and her car was towed in October 2021 over unpaid parking tickets.