Blood Thick – By Sharon N Simon
Blood Thick Thick Enough
In the constituency of St Paul, the UPP is hedging bets that a candidate’s maternal lineage can do what party momentum could not. A veteran political scientist is not so sure.
When the United Progressive Party moved to replace Wayne Marsh with Frantz DeFreitas in St Paul, it was not simply substituting one candidate for another. It was making an argument — that bloodline carries ballots, that a mother’s name can move a constituency, that ancestry is a form of political capital.
Bertrand Joseph, a political scientist who has observed Antiguan elections for decades, has heard that argument before. He does not find it persuasive.
“Politics,” Joseph says, “is thicker than blood.”
It is a deliberate inversion of the familiar proverb, and Joseph means it precisely. He describes, with the practiced calm of someone who has lived the lesson, the particular experience of canvassing among relatives — people who offered warm apologies over Sunday lunch and then walked into the voting booth and supported his opponent without hesitation. In these islands, he argues, political identity is not merely an opinion held loosely. It is a culture. A formation. A loyalty that, in many cases, predates the current candidate and will outlast them.
The UPP’s calculation in St Paul rests on the assumption that voters will recognize DeFreitas through his maternal connection to the constituency and respond accordingly. Joseph’s counter is blunt: the voting booth does not behave like a family reunion.
“You can have every relative in the constituency on your side at the dinner table. Come Election Day, politics wins.” says Joseph.
The timing compounds the difficulty. Following the 2023 general election, the UPP found itself closer to power than it had been in years. That proximity generated momentum. By most accounts, that momentum has since stalled. The party has not converted the energy of near-victory into the sustained, ground-level infrastructure that competitive constituencies demand.
Joseph identifies a specific gap. The UPP, he argues, has mastered the aesthetics of modern political communication — the social media presence, the polished visuals, the digital fluency that signals a party operating in the current era. What it has underinvested in is what he calls “hand-to-hand combat”: the door-to-door canvassing, the block-by-block organizing, the patient, unglamorous work of persuasion at close range.
The distinction matters in a place like St Paul. Garrison constituencies — those strongholds where political loyalty is not merely habitual but structural, baked into community identity across generations — do not yield to surnames. They yield, when they yield at all, to presence. To persist. To the accumulated weight of showing up, repeatedly, over time.
Digital reach creates the illusion of proximity. A well-produced video, a trending post, a candidate who performs well on a screen — these things register. But Joseph’s argument is that they register differently than a knock on a door, a conversation on a step, a presence that a voter can place in physical space. In a tight constituency race, that difference can be decisive.
The UPP is not without a path in S. Paul. DeFreitas brings name recognition that a cold introduction could not provide. The constituency is not impenetrable. But the party will need to move beyond the logic that lineage is leverage — and toward the less romantic, more reliable work of organizing from the ground up.
As Joseph frames it, a candidate’s family tree is only as strong as the political soil it is planted in. In St Paul, that soil has belonged to someone else for a long time.
Claiming it will require more than a familiar last name. It will require a shovel.
