With campaign-signs-in-medians season in full bloom across Arlington, one 2024 candidate for local office is standing out from the crowd. And doing so face-first.
Paul Weiss, a former public-school educator who is running as an independent for School Board, is the lone candidate for local office in Arlington this year whose face graces his campaign signs.
“I put my picture out there because of Arlington’s wonderful small-town culture,” Weiss said. He hopes that the public will “place my name with the face of a friendly and informed neighbor whom they may have encountered” across the community.
Using candidate faces on campaign signs in Arlington is uncommon but not unheard of. Another Paul – Clerk of the Arlington Circuit Court Paul Ferguson – said that as a first-time candidate, Weiss might benefit from going that route.
“It is rarely done, so Paul Weiss putting his picture on signs at least gets people talking,” Ferguson said.
Ferguson, however, is not among those who has used his countenance on campaign signs over the nearly three decades he has run for, and won, local office – winning a seat on the County Board in 1995 and being elected clerk in 2007.
Just in his 30th year when first elected to County Board, he thought then that his youthfulness might work against him, and opted not to advertise it too publicly, he said.
On campaign signs and in public appearances, Weiss declares himself a Democrat but he is not one of the two Democratic endorsees for School Board: Zuraya Tapia-Hadley and Kathleen Clark won party backing in the caucus this past spring.
Weiss said he did not run for the endorsement because he was still employed by the county school system at the time.
Weiss, Tapia-Hadley, Clark and independent James “Vell” Rives IV are vying for the two seats that opened up when incumbents Cristina Diaz-Torres and David Priddy opted not to seek second four-year terms on the five-member body.
In Virginia, School Board seats officially are nonpartisan, but political parties can, and often do, endorse candidates. No non-Democrat has been elected to Arlington’ School Board since David Foster’s twin victories of 1999 and 2003.
