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| | Show Don’t Tell Politics: A Sam Foster Story
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| | | | Sam Foster, a 24-year-old IT systems engineer and community organizer, came within 87 votes of defeating five-term incumbent Raymond "Thunder" Tumlin in the Marietta, Georgia mayoral race.
The final unofficial results showed Tumlin with 6,762 votes (51.01%) to Foster's 6,675 (48.99%) out of 13,437 total votes cast.
Sam’s mini-movement, centered on intentional urbanism, affordability, and community organizing, showed how campaigns strong on policy, not platitudes, have a long-term future, even in car-dependent suburbs like Marietta, Georgia. |
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I’d heard of Sam Foster, and I’d seen him around town, on his bike and on Instagram. He had a great look. Only a couple distinct outfits (a gray suit for formal occasions; shorts and polo for biking around town), consistent colors (a nice pink sherbet and soft blue), plus relentless posting of Mamdani-style street-level retail politicking.
My wife, Monica, had met him a few weeks earlier at a community organizing event, and she liked him. She asked me to get us a yard sign.
I met him in person the first time when he knocked on my front door in early summer.
I hadn’t gotten the yard sign yet. Mostly because I didn’t think he had a chance in hell to win, and, honestly, I was surprised he was still in the race and assumed he wouldn’t be for long. But it would be good to talk to him anyway. |
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Marietta is 20 miles northwest of Atlanta, in Cobb County, Georgia. It has a population of about sixty thousand residents. The city government manages a $400 million budget and has roughly 800 employees. The 11-county metro Atlanta region as a whole has five million residents, and it’s projected to grow to 8 million by 2050. In 2016, Cobb County turned blue for the first time in a presidential election since 1992; Then, it went blue again in 2020 and 2024. But, before Tuesday, no Democrat had won a statewide race since 2006, and, closer to home, Raymond Stevens “Thunder” Tumlin Jr. won the last mayoral election in 2021 by roughly 25% of the total vote.
Thunder is as “Old Marietta” as it gets.
*
I knew who Thunder was mainly because every year he would come and speak at my kids' schools. No one could ever understand him. He was the literal embodiment of the Peanuts “wah wah wah” voice. Nonetheless, everyone always clapped for the kindly-seeming OM steward, almost like you’d clap for Santa Claus or your old uncle’s hackneyed magic trick. He didn’t seem to be actively harmful, but he wasn’t a dynamic political figure moving the city forward. He was no Mayor Pete. But, though he was a Republican, he also wasn’t Mayor MAGA. More a Mayo Mayor, I guess? But, as even Old Marietta knows, mayo, left out too long, does go bad. And this Mayor had been out a loooong time. *
Sam was born in Michigan, was raised in Connecticut, and moved to Georgia when he was 11. His dad is a MARTA paratransit bus driver, and his mom works for the state Department of Human Services.
He started at Kennesaw State University in 2019, and, a student, he shared an off-campus apartment with roommates and biked to his 30-hour a week job. His political awakening came after his brother, also a KSU student, was hit by a car on Powder Springs Street.
After that, Sam started going to city council and county commission meetings, calling and emailing city leaders about missing sidewalks and crosswalks. Traffic accidents were a policy failure, he said, not an inevitable fact of life.
But, when nothing changed, Sam co-founded A Better Cobb, a nonprofit focused on affordable housing, public transit improvements, and safer streets for pedestrians and cyclists. The group became a hub for younger residents and KSU students frustrated with suburban car dependency and the rising cost of living. An offshoot of that work was the Marietta Bike Social, a free weekly community bike ride that met every Saturday at 10 a.m. in front of Marietta Square Market Food Hall.
The rides helped Sam build community connections and became a weekly object lesson on the need for better cycling infrastructure in Marietta (an early Show, Don’t Tell Politics model). In the summer of 2025, he formally announced his candidacy for mayor.
*
Out on my porch, he asked me what I’d like to see from the next mayor. I said I had no idea. It hadn’t occurred to me that I could ask to see anything. My main experience of the Marietta powers-that-be was that they're incredibly plodding and resistant to doing much of anything for anyone not in the Old Marietta inner circle. When people I knew raised traffic considerations, ideas for zoning adjustments, or even just questions about why things were how they were, the City Council seemed to hide behind the shield of boringness, keeping their actual decision-making private. Once, for example, I asked our City Council member about how we might get better sidewalks (the sidewalks in metro Atlanta have been installed seemingly based on a Hans Arp-style chance-based method of composition, as if someone dropped yarrow sticks on the map and remained dedicated to that aleatory process from conception to construction to completion). My Council Member told me that it would cost millions of dollars and years to just even get a small street widening in a rarely used neighborhood because of all the different considerations. “Most people don’t understand,” he said. It’s all very complicated, you see. Sam laughed at that example — “yup” — and then he asked me the same question in a different way: What do I care about?
Well, I said, I do care about walking. I like walking places, even as a Dada conceptual experiment. I care about biking. I wish I could bike more and drive less. Sam nodded. I kept going. I care about people, not financial institutions, owning houses. I care about schools. I care about the police not killing people. I care about clean energy and the polluter pays principle. I care about a lot, it turns out, but I didn’t think the mayor or Marietta itself could do anything about the things I cared about.
Sam said as a systems engineer, he was trained to analyze complex problems and implement the most efficient solutions. His theory of change was that incremental urbanism, community organizing, and data-driven policy could win out, even in traditionally conservative suburbs like Marietta. If people could see how urbanism and affordability actually worked in practice, rather than just in theory, then they’d fund it. He subscribed, I realized, to a “show, don’t tell” brand of politics. I liked that. The public transit referendum was a good example. In 2024 , Cobb County voters rejected a 30-year, 1% sales tax increase for public transit. Sam said it failed because voters “were asked to give money for things they’ve never seen.” His proposed solution: implement small-scale pilot projects like expanded rapid bus service to demonstrate this type of project’s value before pursuing major funding initiatives.
Show results on street-level, everyday issues, and then scale up. Less preachy, more practical. What a concept! The next day, Sam’s sign was in our yard. |
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| | I made voter-outreach calls for the public service commission race, and I found that people knew Sam, and they were interested in his campaign, but they had questions. They had concerns.
Mostly, they did not think a 24-year-old would be able to run the City of Marietta, which was confusing to think that a 78-year-old who sounds like a Peanuts character could, but putting that aside, I did also think, well, who is supposed to run things? Who is qualified? Who do we trust to make decisions?
Because the people who have been doing it, in the larger world, have not been doing a good job. When people abuse power or simply make mistakes with power, they should have that power taken away by the people who allocate power, which, supposedly, is us? The voters? Right? That’s how it’s supposed to work?
* Sam’s volunteer base was made up largely of A Better Cobb colleagues and community ride participants. The campaign knocked on more than 14,000 doors, building support through direct voter contact, rather than traditional media spending. The campaign was also great at social, using TikTok and Instagram to reach younger voters with content that mixed political messaging with lifestyle content, featuring Sam biking around Marietta, taking public transit, talking with people, answering their questions. He was also really good on Reddit.
In September, he reported nearly $43,000 raised with $27,000 cash on hand, compared to Tumlin's $8,550 raised with $3,500 remaining. This fundraising came from more than 500 small donors.
It was that kind of campaign, and its success summoned the ancient spirit of the Marietta Country Club. Tumlin’s campaign got a last-second cash infusion, and we started getting hilarious home mailers with pictures of Bernie, Mamdani, and, between them, Sam. I also started to see the same talking points parroted over and over on local Facebook pages, and those same kinds of talking points from people around town. Sam wanted to “turn Marietta into Atlanta,” and he “didn’t grow up here.” It was a last-second propaganda campaign, which, conversely, made me even more hopeful that Sam could actually win. *
Monica and I arrived at the election night watch party just after the polls had closed. People chatted, ate Caribbean food from the buffet. Up on a screen at the front of the lounge, early results started to trickle in from the statewide races. The DSA candidate for Atlanta City Council, Kelsea Bond, was ahead, the Public Service Commission looked like the Democrats were going to win in a rout.
Then, the early vote returns for the mayor’s race blinked onto the screen. They showed Sam down by a single vote.
I started to get texts from friends: “ Is he actually going to pull this off?” |
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| | Interlude: Flip the Sixth |
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Monica and I had been at the watch party for Jon Ossoff’s first campaign, the original “Flip the Sixth,” in 2017. It was excruciating.
Back then, old Georgia political hands told me there were simply too many Republicans in Georgia. Voting for a Democrat, they said, was like cheering for Alabama, or converting to Catholicism. Not just disloyal, unnatural. Politics was inheritance. And yet . . . For a while that night in 2017, I sat next to Rembert Browne, who’d gone to school with Ossoff. Rembert was repeating variations of, almost to himself, “Oh my God. Oh my God. This could actually happen. ” It was a massive feeling, like a planet returning to its proper orbit. A national, international, galactic thing. It didn’t, of course, happen. Ossoff secured a run-off, but he eventually lost to Karen Handel. The foundation from that losing campaign did eventually help Flip the Sixth for Lucy McBath in 2018, and it helped turn Jon Ossoff into Senator Jon Ossoff in 2020. |
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| | | | Back at the election night watch party at the Caribbean iLounge, there was just a glimmer of that galactic shift feeling.
“Oh my God. Oh my God,” I said, echoing Rembert. “This could actually happen.”
If elected, Sam would become Marietta’s youngest mayor, and its first Black mayor.
Oh my God. The results still just showed that one vote difference, while other results from around the country came in. Democrats and progressives were winning all over.
But then I saw the door to the campaign room crack open, and I spied a hand going to a forehead. A nod and a frown. A drink. Sam’s campaign manager stepped out and shook my hand.
“We lost,” he said. “A hundred votes.” Later we found out it was actually 87 votes. An 87-vote margin out of 13,437 total votes cast. |
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Progressive campaigns in Georgia and around the country can and should study this model: door-knocking over advertising, show-don't-tell policy demonstrations, social media that mixes political content with lifestyle authenticity, and incremental urbanism that connects kitchen-table economics to infrastructure investment.
Sam lost, but the foundation is here. The organizing infrastructure exists. The message clearly resonates. And the margin was 87 votes. Sam himself will only be 28 in 2029, so he’ll likely be first in name-recognition and campaign infrastructure. But before that, he has plans.
He this on Instagram yesterday:
”We may not have won this election, but we are not done fighting for progress. Thank you to everyone who put their heart into this movement.
See you at the next city council meeting at 7PM on November 12th.
205 Lawrence Street, Marietta, GA 30060”
And he sent his supporters a note: “If you want to stay connected so we can keep building a Marietta for Everyone, join us here.”
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| | | Bonus: The Marietta Country Club Theory of Governance |
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A friend of mine who's been around Marietta for a long time said to me once, "You know how the city's decisions get made, don't you?" I said I did not. "Well," he said, "there's the Marietta Country Club, and there's a bunch of lawyers and their wives at the Marietta Country Club on a Tuesday night for steak and cocktails.
“The lawyers have their drinks and the wives have their drinks, and as they eat their steaks, the wives all talk about the problems they see in town and the conversation gets louder and louder, and by the time the dessert comes, one of the wives turns to her husband and says, 'Can't you do anything about this?!' The husband nods, and the next day he goes into his office and gets on the phone to the mayor and he says, 'My wife, you know, . . .'"
This was how, my friend said, Marietta stopped MARTA from coming into Cobb County back in the 1990s. Over dinner at The Marietta Country Club, they had heard that people from Atlanta were going to come in on these MARTA trains. They were going to fan out across the city, steal all the TVs, and then take them back downtown on these MARTA trains. They were going to take the MARTA train in from downtown Atlanta, steal all the large-screen 50-pound 1990s TVs from the historic homes of Marietta and then take them on the train back to the stolen TV Depot that they apparently had in Atlanta and sell all of the TVs! For drugs! If the MARTA came to Marietta, there would be no way to stop them! MARTA was the first step on the path to a TV-less Marietta and "MY GOD CAN'T YOU DO SOMETHING ABOUT THIS??! IT MUST BE STOPPED!"
Yes, dear.
But now, in 2025, once the Marietta Country Club had been alerted that this Sam Foster kid did, in fact, have a chance to beat dear old Thunder, maybe even a very real chance, the OM supper club turned to their dining partners and said, "Can't you do something about this?"
A scratch of the chin. Hmmm. Could they? Still? |
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| *NB: Ignore all typos in this email since The Singularity is near-ish |
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