I'm hardly a typical candidate.

It isn't just differences in background. Many lawyers have run for office and applied their legal education to the smoother running of the complexities of government. Many immigrants from odd backgrounds have run and been insightful leaders. People of many personality types have run and added their leadership styles to the scrum of public debate.

No. What makes me unusual is that I am running as a Republican in an almost exclusively Democratic city.

I am sanguine about my odds (although I would have better odds if I used a different word than "sanguine") but chose to run anyways.

Because my goal is to break up the dysfunctional culture of DC politics and that can be accomplished even if I lost an election. The greatest benefit does not come from sitting in office, it comes from reminding people of what the current system fails to do.

The one-party rule fails to test ideas adversarially. 

So much of truth-seeking in the modern world relies on adversaries arguing with each other. We have two sides in a legal case, not a single inquisitor making decisions based on their own whims. We have the Office of the Devil's Advocate in the Vatican to prevent unwise decisions. Businesses put people on "Red Teams" to break down the ideas of whatever system they want to test.

DC politics is so overwhelmingly dominated by the Democratic Party that two disturbing things have occurred.

DC Council and the Mayor have ceased to assess ideas to the extent needed. This isn't just a disagreement over priorities, it is that so much money and so many rules have been moved around with very little thought. Many of the bills that are the basis for recalling Ward 6 councilmember Charles Allen passed 13-0. Money was allocated to "Violence Interrupters" with virtually no evidence of their efficacy. Money is more easily tracked than the human tragedy of rising crime.

A dissenting voice could have slowed some of the unwise decisions enough for the worst ideas to be reconsidered and rejected.

Secondly, the overwhelming rule by one party means that functional elections have shifted to the primaries and ordinary voters have much less information in a primary race than in a general election. That means small groups of very dedicated voters can have wildly disproportionate effects on who comes into office. We may hope that the dedicated voters are so out of a deep knowledge of the issues and individuals but the reality is that political radicals are almost always more motivated than everyday people trying to get to work and raise a family. 

The shift of electoral power to the primaries caused the outsized power of the Democratic Socialists of America (and as someone born in a Communist country, I recognize them as being as laughably "democratic" as other Socialist parties I lived under) and the freedom of action they had to disrupt the State of the Union speech and various events in DC including at the Wilson building.

The radicalism in Democratic Party politics is a side-effect of their excessive domination of the political environment. Eventually, the human urge to fight re-asserts itself and the party structure is subverted by people who can no longer direct their aggression towards the party's no longer existing rival.

This is not a unique phenomenon in DC. San Francisco is also coping with a similar situation. Nor is this uniquely American. All one-party states eventually descend into paranoia and incompetence (and corruption)

If DC is to have good governance and moderation, it must be in a genuinely multi-party environment.

The odds of winning are low but the odds of reminding people about what one-party rule costs them are good.

There are far more impressive people out there but they aren't running. The little bit I can do is run as a Republican and give people an obvious choice, not an obscured one. 

The DC Democratic Party cannot expel the DSA as long as major figures in the media and DNC continue to back them. The DSA is eating the Democratic Party alive.

Unless there is massive pushback like in San Francisco, that will continue. Massive pushback is simply not what can be expected in ordinary times.

One party politics is essentially insider politics and insider politics has the incentive to corruption, incompetence, and resentment from a population that can no longer judge cause and effect.

What also happens is that such secrecy makes it easy for loathsome groups to spread false claims (Moynihan's observations on the ease of Communist propaganda in the wake of US government lies).

The tactics of the DSA in winning primary elections work because of the lack of scrutiny in a one party system and because there is no internal party discipline (not that there should be). Politics is one of those fields where adversarial truthseeking is essential.

Under normal conditions, if a party advances a policy that is unpopular, the other party will campaign on it and the resulting victories or losses will be information for politicians and policy-makers. If one party hands vital jobs to idiots, the other party can be expected to make a point of it. One party rule short-circuits those self-corrective measures.

The DSA cannot survive if they had to run overtly, instead, their fanatical activism is empowered by the general apathy of the Democratic voting population.

The DSA's devouring of the Democratic Party is the result of the catastrophic success of the party which manages general elections without presenting clear choices.

DC Democrats, if they want a sane city, must tolerate Republican opposition. DSA-leaning Democrats would rather vote moderate Democrat than see a Republican in office. Democratic politicians would have to actually do risk-assessments of general voter views before bowing to the demands of activists.

Interestingly, the DC Home Rule Act actually has a provision for minority party representation that has been re-interpreted to be defunct. That was a wise provision and can be restored.