On Nov. 11, 2018, Darcel Elliott’s mother died in a residential care facility in Thousand Oaks.

Four years earlier, Debra Marie Copeland Elliott had a massive heart attack. She had refused to sign a do not resuscitate order and lived the next four years on a ventilator.

Elliott visited her mother most days of the week.

“I had to be with my mom and take care of her,” Elliott said. “I was her main caretaker. And I had been that my whole life up until that point.”

The death felt sudden, but not sudden at all. Debra Marie’s quality of life had been poor, but she vociferously clung to life. When the day finally came, Elliott believed her mother knew.

She told Elliott to “keep all of my fuzzy socks.” The two had traded fuzzy socks as gifts over the years.

And Debra Marie told her daughter that she was proud of her. Elliott held her mother’s hand when she died at 11:30 p.m.

The next morning at 9 a.m. Elliott was back to work for Santa Barbara County, on a conference call.

That was Elliott. The death of her mom, the most treasured and beloved person in her life, was placed in a compartment of her soul, separate from the rest of her world.

That’s how she lived her entire life.

But Elliott’s mother’s death triggered an awakening, one that would take a few years to steep, but eventually culminate in her finding her identity, independence and newfound sense of purpose.

The death also forced her to take stock of her professional life and recognize how her identity was wrapped up in another influential person in her life, her boss, Das Williams, the then-First District Santa Barbara County Supervisor.

Debra Marie died three days before Elliott turned 32 years old. Up until that point, she had been everything to her mother.

“We were very close, but not healthy close, very co-dependent,” Elliott said. “My mom was bipolar, alcoholic and addicted to opioids. She told me everything.”

She recalls her mother giving her money so that she could go to a neighbor’s house in Santa Maria and buy the painkiller Vicodin. Debra Marie would spend days in a row in bed but then be up and animated the rest of the week. Their relationship was up and down.

“She would hit me, throw things at me if I was too loud when she was sleeping,” Elliott said.

At age 9, she was already cooking dinner for her dad and herself. She did grocery shopping. 

“My mom was both the monster I needed protection from and my protector,” Elliott said. “She would get really mad at me and then love me so much, and I felt so comforted by that cycle.”

But they also had great times.

They would go to the beach. Her mom took her to the Santa Maria Speedway. They went to the Santa Barbara County Fair and the Strawberry Festival together. They watched football together on Sundays.

“I had fun with her,” she said. “We played games.”

Elliott also had to watch her parents fight. Their relationship was rocky, and Elliott often found herself in the middle.

“I would stand in between them to protect my mom,” Elliott said, “because my dad would never hurt me.”

“My dad went to jail for breaking my mom’s jaw when I was 5,” Elliott said.

She was ashamed of her home life and never invited friends over.

“I wanted everyone to think I was normal,” Elliott said.

Children in abusive homes often have two routes to take: repeat their parents’ mistakes, or go in the opposite direction.

“I just chose the path of ‘I am going to be hyper-responsible and take care of everything,'” Elliott said.

Even amid the dysfunctional relationship, her mom always told her she was going to be special.

How She Started

Elliott graduated with a degree in history from UCSB. She wanted to be a high school teacher. When she was a senior, she got involved in UCSB’s Planned Parenthood student group. It was her first taste of political organizing.

She organized a protest against anti-Planned Parenthood demonstrators who were displaying large images of fetuses in the middle of the Arbor. Elliott’s group raised $1,000 from spare change students gave as they walked by.

In 2008 she phone banked in support of Hannah-Beth Jackson as a part of Planned Parenthood. She had an early love for Jackson, who spoke in one of her women’s studies classes at UCSB. Elliott was so in awe of Jackson that she listed her as a “hero” on her MySpace page. Eventually she interned with Jackson, while she was working as a manager at Albertsons in Goleta. Eventually she was hired by Jackson in her candidacy against Tony Strickland.

From there she was hired as a paid canvasser for Helene Schneider’s campaign for mayor in 2009. She also worked with former councilmembers Grant House and Bendy White, and candidate Dianne Channing’s campaigns for City Council. She then worked as a field organizer for Williams’ first campaign for Assembly in the 2010 Primary. 

“That campaign is the one that shaped every single thing I have done politically since,” Elliott said. “It was the time of our lives and how I got known for my ability to recruit volunteers, especially after I recruited nearly 100 people to canvass for Das during the primary election, vote-by-mail, get-out-of-the-vote weekend, which I called May Madness, at Oak Park in Santa Barbara.”

She is most proud of her work in Cuyama, a rural area at the edge of Santa Barbara County.

“I have always been very open that Cuyama is my favorite community that we represented on the Board of Supervisors,” Elliott said.

In the Assembly, she and Williams worked with the community on groundwater issues.

“We developed very close relationships with some of the strongest community advocates and fought alongside them against two of the largest agricultural companies in the country,” she said.

Darcel and Das

Das Williams never met Darcel Elliott’s mom. She didn’t want to blend the private and the public.

The two met in 2008, when Elliott was working for Hannah-Beth Jackson, who was running for state senate.

“I listened to her communication skills with people,” Williams said. “Despite her youth at the time, she had these amazing communications skills. I knew this is someone who is going to be an amazing community organizer.”

They became inseparable. She worked for Williams as a field representative and eventually district director when he was in the state assembly. She became his chief of staff for two terms as a county supervisor. Of dozens of employees, Elliott is the only one who stayed with him for the entirety of his political career.

She mastered his voice and understood him well enough that she didn’t even have to check in with him before responding to constituents on his behalf. He trusted her to take the lead.

“The staff that you choose and the staff that work for you is even more important than the elected officials’ skills, themselves,” Williams said.

Working for an elected official is a job most people can’t understand in the abstract. The elected officials’ needs come first, and they have to be available 24/7 to help with constituent service and media responses. It’s easy to lose identity to the elected and get caught up in the allure of serving in the position.

It was a role Elliott was experienced with.

“I don’t think it’s about any specific qualities,” Elliott said. “It’s more that growing up with my mom I had to be the caretaker and it made me drawn to a position where you have to put someone else before you.”

She said working in politics is a career where you are encouraged to put others first.

“It can be a dangerous spiral if you don’t figure out how to put boundaries at some point,” Elliott said.

Williams said the two have been “so close.”

“I think of it as a sibling relationship,” Williams said. “She’s the sister I never had.”

To the extent that Williams’ career ascended, it was Elliott behind the scenes who helped to make it happen, and who was his trusted confidant. But for Elliott, although she didn’t really realize it at the time, the relationship was in some ways similar to her mother’s. Like for her mother, she did everything for Williams.

“My whole life I felt, and I still struggle with this, the only reason people like me is because of what I do for them,” Elliott said.

It was also something she experienced in her personal relationships.

“I have been desperate for love and affection because I was not getting it reliably,” Elliott said. “The relationships I have had have been unhealthy because of that.”

Her mother’s death plunged her into the deep end of the pool of evaluating her life. But it was just the most traumatic event of several around that time. There had been the Thomas Fire and the debris. Her father, William Lloyd Elliott, died four months after her mother, at the age of 82.

Three days before Debra Marie died, Elliott lost her bid for election to the Santa Barbara City College board of trustees. And her mother died three days before her 32nd birthday. Also, around that time she had to get a restraining order against an older man who had been following her and acting physically inappropriate.

Elliott around this time realized that she needed to pull away slightly from her professional life and discover her own identity. Williams agreed.

“If you can imagine if your sister was your righthand person at work for many, many years, that creates a strong closeness, but it also creates a need for your little sister to have her own life,” Williams said.

Elliott slowly reduced the number of public events that she attended. She remained on staff, but didn’t feel the need to go everywhere Williams went. Williams started to show up at more events unstaffed, talking off the cuff, sometimes without strong talking points.

While many factors contributed to Williams’ loss in his bid for a third term, there’s no doubt Elliott’s skills mattered.

“Darcel has been a huge part of my success,” Williams said.

In 2016 she was diagnosed with major depressive disorder. In 2018 she was diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder. A few years later, she was diagnosed with hyperthyroidism and then rheumatoid arthritis, an autoimmune syndrome where her system attacks her joints.

Her mother treated her illnesses with alcohol and pills.

Darcel found powerlifting and then CrossFit (she can back squat 225 pounds, deadlift 285 and bench press 135.) The workouts have been saviors. Her father used to call her “fat” when she was growing up, but Elliott these days is confident, and she is committed to breaking the cycle, and has a nutrition coach.

“I didn’t want to end up like my mom,” Elliott said. “I had to take my health seriously.”

Elliott had always been all-in with Das. She traveled with him to Sacramento, and during his campaigns she would go off of state payroll to run his campaigns. She did so when Williams defeated Laura Capps in 2020 for re-election to the First District Santa Barbara County Supervisor’s seat.

Elliott also shifted some of her time and attention to the Santa Barbara County Democratic Party, where she served as chair, elected in 2021. She began to focus less on Williams professionally, and more on building Democratic power in the North County and boosting other Democratic candidates.

After defeating Capps, the Williams team felt confident. Perhaps too confident. Elliott focused on herself, her health, her workouts, finding her own identity, and opted not to go off the county payroll to work on his campaign last year against Carpinteria’s Roy Lee.

“Both she and I started off with the ‘do everything all the time’ way of political organizing, but I have long realized that if that is all I know how to do and all Darcel knows how to do it will ruin her life and my life to do,” Williams said. “For her, having a life where she can have her own life and be healthy is really about sustainability.”

But a little less of Elliott didn’t really help Williams. Going into his campaign, most political observers believed he had zero chance of losing. But the stench of cannabis lingered in the air in the Carpinteria Valley and haunted his political campaign.

Capps had laid the blueprint for how to beat Williams, even though she lost by 1,500 votes. Lee’s campaign team followed it, and coupled with Williams’ lackluster campaign, Williams lost to Lee.

Elliott said she was in on every conversation Williams had with anyone on cannabis for at least the first few years.

“I think our first draft of the cannabis ordinance was good,” Elliott said. “I know for a fact that it took some points from the industry and some points from opponents. I know for a fact that no one got 100% of what they wanted from that ordinance.”

There were many other successes for Elliott. She, Williams and dozens of activists helped pass state legislation to create the Isla Vista Community Services District, and funding to sustain it.

She also worked on many campaigns, including those for Monique Limón for assembly campaign, Capps for school board, and Jeannette Sanchez-Palacios campaign for Ventura City Council.

What’s Next?

The loss to Lee devastated Elliott. She did not see it coming. Like what she experienced with her mother, the end of her time in office appeared sudden, but not sudden at all.

She had slowly been separating herself from policy and focusing more on personal identity.

“Maybe I don’t have to kill myself all the time working all the time to make people love me and appreciate me,” Elliott said. “Like maybe I can be my own person and take care of myself and be my own thing.”

After her mother died, Elliott went on a cross-country road trip, by herself, to visit the birthplace of her mother in Tewksbury, Massachusetts. She visited the hospital where she was born and scattered some of her mother’s ashes.

Elliott officially left office as Chief of Staff at 11:59 a.m. on Jan. 6. She is unsure of her next move. She plans to take a few months off and re-evaluate, while continuing to focus on her identity and the path that serves herself, rather than others.

“I am just finally living my life for myself,” Elliott said.

The transition has been happening over a series of years. She no longer needs to compartmentalize her life. She said Williams was always supportive of her, and gave her more freedom than a lot of other elected officials gave their staff. But it’s a new day.

“This year is actually the first year I am actually living for myself,” Elliott said in a 2023 interview with Noozhawk. “It’s been a long process to get to that point. I don’t feel like I need to have someone I am wrapping all of my actions around.”

Wherever she goes, she’ll carry the memories of time with Williams and the love of her mother with her.

She still has the bag of fuzzy socks. And she started crocheting, an activity her mother enjoyed. Her mother had a quilt that she started, but didn’t finish, before she died.

“I took out her yarn, and I am going to finish her blanket,” Elliott said.