As this election cycle finally comes to a close, all eyes inside the Beltway will no doubt be glued to their phones watching “the most important seat on the battlefield,” as Paul Strauss put it: the shadow senator of the D.C.

Strauss was joking, although he takes his (unpaid) job as one of Washington’s two shadow senators very seriously. As a shadow senator, he is an elected official charged with advocating for DC statehood, a position he has held since 1997.

“They don’t really take you seriously in the Senate until you’ve been there a few decades,” said Strauss, who will be the next candidate up for election in 2026. “I was sent there to do a job that is taking longer than I expected. “I would… but I’m not going to give up.”

For new DC residents, and even some older ones, filling out their ballots can feel confusingly repetitive. In addition to voting for D.C. delegate to the House of Representatives (a position Eleanor Holmes Norton has held since 1991), she also was asked to choose a “United States Senator” and a “United States Representative” this year.

These positions make up D.C.’s shadow delegation, which began in 1990 with the express goal of pushing for statehood and, if Congress grants it, establishing an actual congressional delegation. It is a process that some territories used before becoming states, like Tennessee and Alaska. Currently, Puerto Rico also has a shadow delegation.

While Norton and other delegates have limited power in Congress, shadow senators and representatives have none, as they are not official members. They don’t get an office there, committee seats, access to the floor, or any votes.

On Tuesday, Democrat Ankit Jain will likely be chosen to join Strauss as DC’s other shadow senator, alongside incumbent shadow Rep. Oye Owolewa. About 90 percent of D.C. votes Democratic in most years, and Jain and Owolewa’s Republican opponents do not actually support statehood, which would make their ex officio positions on the D.C. statehood commission, at the very least, uncomfortable. The delegation shares an office in City Hall along with one full-time staff member and a handful of part-time assistants.

Jain, a voting rights attorney with FairVote, likened the position to being “DC’s elected lobbyists for our issues before the US Senate.”

“This position is basically our primary advocate for DC statehood and against efforts by Congress to repeal our local laws and meddle in our local affairs,” Jain said.

Jain is running for a seat held by Michael Donald Brown, who decided not to run for re-election after criticism for not doing more to stop Congress from overriding changes to D.C. penal code in 2023. While D.C. has its own mayor and city council who write laws, Congress has 30 to 60 days to review a law and can block it through a joint resolution signed by the president.

To local control advocates like Strauss and Jain, such congressional “oversight” feels like open contempt for the ideals of democracy.

“I truly believe in the power of democracy to solve this country’s problems,” Jain said. “The same democratic rights that every American citizen has…all of us here in DC are denied those rights.”

The 2023 incident especially bothered Jain. D.C. advocates made principled arguments, he said, about how unfair it was to people who live thousands of miles from Washington to overturn the decision of the district’s elected representatives. But that didn’t sway Republicans in Congress, who in their eyes were more interested in scoring political points against supposedly soft-on-crime liberals, or against Democrats in swing districts who feared such attacks could hurt them.

“I think realistically, members of Congress are less moved by that kind of (principled) argument than they are by… ‘What would it say about me to vote for (DC)?’” Jain said.

If elected, Jain said he would take a more pragmatic and strategic approach to convince Congress to stay out of D.C.’s internal affairs.

But that job has become more difficult over the years, Strauss said, as politics has become more polarized. “Before there was much more mutual respect on the part of both parties. When I first got there in the ’90s, even Republican senators were always willing to meet with you in person,” he said. “A very conservative guy, Sam Brownback from Kansas, for example, used to chair the D.C. subcommittee (of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee), but he always made sure that if there was an issue about D.C. or a hearing that I had the opportunity to participate… even when we didn’t agree.”

When Republicans are in power these days, Strauss said, the job is more defensive in nature (trying to convince them not to roll back D.C.’s autonomy) than offensive, i.e., winning statehood.

“Sometimes you become proactive. “Sometimes you react to decisions made by people who live in other places but feel like they can control the District of Columbia, which in some ways is their destiny,” Strauss said. “It becomes a challenge in those environments.”