Young Political Activist Finds Meaning In Campaigning On Nantucket And Beyond

For 13 hours on Tuesday, Kevin Serrano stood - and by the end he was sitting - outside the Nantucket High School holding a sign for Craig Swallow, the progressive candidate challenging Nantucket’s longtime Congressional representative Bill Keating from the left.

When the polls closed, Serrano, who is 21 years old, went inside and waited another hour for the results to be announced. Aside from the election workers and a pair of journalists, Serrano was the only person who waited while the votes were counted.

Swallow ultimately only won a little over 20 percent of the vote, but that did nothing to dampen Serrano’s spirits. He was just as animated half an hour after the results were announced, still sitting inside the high school explaining his reasons for supporting Swallow, as he had been on the side of the road during the day.

“I just really believe in [Swallow],” Serrano said. “I really believe that the policies he stands for are pretty much everything that speaks to me.”

Serrano took one five-minute break to go to the bathroom on Tuesday. Other than that, he spent the entire day on the side of the road by the Nantucket High School, even after the rain started. At one point, an election worker brought him chips and a cookie. That was all he ate during the day.

Six months ago, Serrano, by his own admission, paid little attention to state and national politics.

“The only people that in my mind mattered were presidents,” Serrano said. “To me, that was really the extent of it. I didn't realize that there was so much weight that the House and the Senate carried.”

Five days ago, he was dedicating a good portion of his weekend to stumping at the landfill for a little-known Congressional candidate with essentially zero chance of winning.

What happened?

Often, the most politically involved members of Nantucket’s community are older and white. Serrano, a young man whose parents immigrated to Nantucket from El Salvador, stands out among them. He graduated from Nantucket High School in 2023, and is currently studying remotely for his computer science degree from Cape Cod Community College while working as a tech specialist for the Nantucket Public Schools.

“They don't understand the importance of [politics], and not only that, they feel like there really isn't any trust in government,” Serrano said of his peers. “A lot of their priorities don’t really involve politics, even though they should understand that it does play a lot into what they do.”

Serrano says that many of his peers prefer not to talk about politics. Instead, he says, they view politics as “almost cringe.”

But Serrano did a lot more than just talk about politics or vote.

He has spent this election season campaigning for Swallow at a furious pace. He attended community events, posted on social media, and knocked on over 600 doors, which single-handedly accounts for over 6 percent of the inhabited properties on the island.

“Kevin [Serrano] was energetic and always willing to go the extra mile for the campaign on the island,” local political strategist Clay Evans, who worked with Serrano on Swallow’s campaign, told the Current. “[Serrano] definitely has a bright future in front of him in politics.”

But Swallow’s campaign isn’t the only one Serrano has been involved with this year. He is also a candidate outreach manager for the popular Instagram creator Stocking the Capitol. In his role, Serrano reaches out to Congressional candidates across the state and the country, asking them to “take the pledge” and promise to forgo corporate political action committee money and stocks, restrict the ability for politicians to become lobbyists, and overturn the Citizens United Supreme Court decision that allowed unlimited corporate spending on elections in the United States.

He said that most of the candidates in Massachusetts who have taken the Stocking the Capitol pledge did so after he reached out, including Congressional candidates Swallow, Jeromie Whalen, Tram Nguyen, Jamie Belsito, Jason Poulos, and Dan Koh—the last of whom won his primary Tuesday, all but guaranteeing his election to the House of Representatives in November.

He has even called candidates from other states, including democratic socialist Darializa Avila Chevalier, who ultimately took the pledge and went on to score an upset victory over incumbent Adriano Espaillat in New York’s 13th Congressional district.

Serrano can’t directly take credit for all of those pledges. Some of the candidates would likely have taken the pledge regardless of his involvement: Stocking the Capitol has become a relatively influential figure in the emerging world of short-form video political influencers. Others, though, may have been inspired by Serrano’s efforts.

Serrano first became involved with local politics while operating cameras at local government meetings for Nantucket Community Television.

“Kevin [Serrano] was one of the bright stars of our student filmmakers program when I arrived,” Nantucket Community Television station manager Charles Douglas, who supervised Serrano during his time broadcasting sports games and government meetings with the station, said. “He did such a great job that we hired him to support our government services department where he regularly broadcast Planning Board and School Committee meetings…I have every confidence that he will make a positive difference in the years to come.”

But it was Stocking the Capitol that sparked Serrano’s interest in state and national politics.

“He was really the one thing that got me into politics,” Serrano said.

Now, Serrano comes across as something of a political junkie. Sitting inside the Nantucket High School well after the polls had closed, he rattled off obscure political candidates and his opinions on them without hesitation. Mariah Lancaster, who dropped out of the race for Massachusetts’ 6th Congressional district and endorsed Tram Nguyen? Should have gotten behind Jamie Belsito instead. Andrea James, the progressive independent challenging Maura Healey for governor this fall? He’ll probably vote for her. Joe Tache, the socialist running for Senate in Massachusetts? Serrano doesn’t trust him.

At one point, when the Associated Press called the Democratic Senate primary for Ed Markey, the progressive who defeated moderate Seth Moulton Tuesday, Serrano jumped up from his seat and pumped his fist.

“Let’s go!” he said.

Stocking the Capitol is a project run by a young Davidson College graduate named Nico Agosta. Agosta, who has 481,000 followers on Instagram, routinely racks up hundreds of thousands of views on his short-form social media videos, where he advocates for financial transparency in politics and pushes politicians to divest from stock accounts.

Agosta is best known for his videos where he “grades” politicians on financial transparency and their views on money in politics. Swallow received a 94.8 percent grade from Agosta, good for an A. Keating received an F.

To date, Agosta has received little attention from the mainstream press. But with around 1 million followers across his social media profiles, his de facto endorsement of Swallow, which received over 150,000 views on Instagram, might be one of the most important recommendations Swallow received.

Serrano is representative of a certain type of young progressive voter who is active on social media and supports the sort of left-wing primary challengers who would have usually been considered irrelevant longshots just 10 years ago. That perception, however, is changing. This year, those progressives have scored several notable wins across the country, and come close in a number of other races. Chevalier is one example. Others include New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani, Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed and Congressional candidates Will Lawrence and Donovan McKinney, Florida gubernatorial candidate Angie Nixon, and Chevalier’s fellow New York Congressional candidates Brad Lander and Claire Valdez.

Serrano thinks that content creators like Stocking the Capitol and progressive outsiders like Swallow could be the key to unlocking the voters who have powered these victories.

“Stocking the Capitol opens a doorway for people to understand, okay, you don't need to understand how Congress works, how the House works, how the things are running right now,” he said. “All you need to know is all these people, these candidates, or people in government, they raise money, and here is where the money is coming from. For me, that was the entryway into politics.”