From Councilwoman to Mayor-Elect, Sandra Vincent’s Inspiring Campaign

By Leah Kincaid, GSU Student Reporter

Mayor-elect Sandra Vincent on Zoom, Dec 3, 2021

MCDONOUGH, GA DEC 3 2021 - With a life dedicated to service, newly elected Mayor of McDonough, Georgia, Sandra Vincent, describes what it took to run her awe-inspiring campaign.

In an online meeting, Vincent discussed her inspiration to seek the city’s highest office, her challenges while running her campaign and her plans for moving forward.

Vincent’s credits her background, growing up in a tight-knit community where everyone looked out for one another, as what showed her the importance of serving others.

“Throughout my younger life there was this training for service,” she said. “I come from people who believe that service is ministry, that’s what I believe and that’s what I do.”

Vincent graduated with a degree in political science from Tuskegee University and has served more than 25 years in local and federal government. For the past 16 years, she has been serving the citizens of McDonough as the 2nd District councilwoman. But, as Vincent’s fourth term was coming to an end, she had an important decision to make about the next phase in her career.

As Vincent thought about what she has accomplished as a councilwoman, she had to choose between retiring or running for the higher office.

“I thought about bowing out gracefully,” she said. “But there were still things that I wanted to do and that I thought needed to be done.”

Vincent said after weighing her options and a great deal of prayer, she finally decided to take the plunge and announce her campaign as, “A Mayor for all of McDonough”.

Like most election campaigns, Vincent’s was met with some unexpected challenges, the foremost being the cost of the campaign.

Vincent wasn’t expecting the cost of a campaign manager and website designer to be so expensive, and she knew it would be very difficult for her to afford or even raise the necessary funds. But even with this challenge, Vincent prevailed.

“I tapped back into my roots,” She said. “Those roots are, making a way out of no way.”

With that Vincent decided to run her own campaign and even described how she stayed up all night building her own website. Though taking on the challenge of doing it all herself was proven difficult, Vincent was committed to her campaign.

“When you’re committed to doing something, you’ve got to be willing to put the work in,” she said. “Sometimes it means you’re going to have to do it yourself.”

Vincent said the challenge of citizen engagement also took her aback. After looking at data that examined demographics and voting rates, she realized that people were not participating in local elections.

“I recognized that the data said that people weren’t voting,” She said. “So, what that meant was I had to wake people up.”

She did this by knocking on residents’ doors and collaborating with other candidates when canvasing in order to get the word out that there was an election. To Vincent, the key to getting citizens involved was helping them know they had the power to be the change they want to see.

For Vincent, the plans for McDonough on her watch come back to her plan of “good governance.”

“I was running off of good governance, that means all of the things we were doing wrong, I wanted to do right,” She said.

Vincent wanted to ensure that despite the differences that the council and mayor may have, they could come together to collaborate on a common set of goals.

“The plan is to take everything that people have said they are going to do and to plot those out under the good governance platform,” she said. “So that we are all coming together on common goals.”

Vincent’s passion and drive to serve others enabled her to overcome the challenges she faced, run an all-inclusive campaign and become the Mayor of McDonough.

For more information on Mayor-Elect Sandra Vincent, visit her Facebook page.