Why local elections matter more than the presidency
Why local elections matter more than the presidency
This is US focused but the principle of being involved in local issues is universal to all democracies.
Can I rant for a minute?
Why does every thread about voting devolve into bitching about the flaws of the Electoral College?
Fun fact: the Electoral College only pertains to the Presidency and there’s almost nothing you can do about that directly.
Think local, that’s where you can make a difference. Your local school board has the power to either support students or drive them to suicide. Local races frequently turn on a handful of votes.
So go ahead, sit out the election because the choices for president stink. I humbly submit that your superior moral stance may not be based on very firm principles. That trans kid down the block didn’t need your help anyway. /s
I completely agree. My democratic socialist city council rep was just unseated by less than 500 votes. Now we will be represented by a rich guy whose campaign was pushed through by wealthy businesses, land lords, and developers.
The turnout in the race was 8%. People need to start paying attention to local politics. It matters and you have a much greater say there.
Oh, that sucks, but thank you for sharing the story. It is a very important lesson and the type of situation you describe is very, very common in US local elections.
We get fed hopium stories about how one person can make a difference, but those simplistic stories don't usually explain how one person can make a difference. We only get to see the stories of exceptional leaders who are buoyed up by the invisible efforts of the people who made their own humble difference in their local area.
I happened to be in DC on an unrelated lobbying trip during the Bush II administration on the day they reauthorized the voting rights act in 2006. Jesse Jackson was wandering around doing photo ops as is the norm. What didn't make it on to TV was the veritable army of formidable organizers who themselves were representing their own local constituencies. Mr. Jackson's power and visibility was directly derived from the humble and tireless work of supporters, just like any other political figure.
Yes, absolutely. And I think that makes the important point that in addition to voting, it’s also important to take other political actions. But I think right now many people don’t even know what’s happening locally, so they first need to tune in and start paying attention. Seeing a ballot with names you don’t recognize can be a useful kick in the butt to do some research and talk to your community about what’s going on.
In my friend group we used to do a ballot party where each person would research one issue or candidate and then report back to the group. It was a fun way to lighten the load and get multiple perspectives on what’s going on. Then everyone had babies and it kind of fell apart but maybe I’ll bring it back this fall.
This is a great point to make anytime people talk about being too overwhelmed or disenchanted to vote- try to zoom in on problems you can have an immediate effect on. Also local elections are where third parties can gain footholds. If people are really tired of the two party system local elections are where we start changing the game.
Right? It turns out there are important elections you can actually do something about once a year or more. The hand-waving about the electoral college and FPTP voting is frankly often an excuse to cover ignorance of democratic processes and feelings of helplessness.
I get it, it’s a lot like fighting your way out of a depression, easier said than done. Getting involved has taken me 15 years of false starts and facing up to my own ignorance. But local voting and advocacy is demonstrably effective.
As the parent of "that trans kid down the block," every election is important. Every single one.
I'm concerned that your post might be taken as encouragement to vote locally while abstaining from the presidential vote, which I hope wasn't your goal, because we haven't had a normal presidential election cycle in the last 12 years. Remember True The Vote? Those anti-democracy assholes started actively interfering in elections in 2010, and their ideas, if not their organization, have taken over the entire Republican party.
And we now have a Supreme Court that seems primed to make Donald Trump into a king. It's an existential threat to the entire country at all levels. If he wins, it's quite possible elections at all levels won't matter anymore. Democracy will have been killed.
Think local, but definitely vote national, too. However you feel about Biden (who's easily been the most progressive president of my life if you look at his actual record), fucking vote for him. So my trans kid's health care and rights aren't threatened by the bloated orange shit-gibbon.
I understand you and no, my goal isn't to get people to focus only local. However, I definitely feel the over-emphasis on presidential politics hurts in both areas, local and Federal. The federal situation is very discouraging due to the not-invalid gripes about the electoral college. I really just want to shift the conversation away from the over-emphasis on how our votes are diluted so unfairly at the highest level.
If one spends all their emotional energy arguing about the presidential election, there's little left over for the equally important local issues. In fact, I would argue that the way to directly address the flaws of the electoral college in the long run is to focus on getting more people involved locally. That's how you build a movement. It's a hard pill to swallow, but fixing this crappy situation is a generations-worth of effort.
My intent is a sort of emotional aikido, I guess? Emotions are so high about the presidential and I think the disinformation campaigns exploit that by exhausting people on the big picture issues an individual can do little about.
So I am constantly told that local elections is where real change is possible and regardless of the shit show going on with the presidential elections its super important to vote down ballot. But then I look down ballot and its mostly a bunch of judges and like one department seat that had something to do with water. I look up all the candidates in all the down ballot races and there is zero information about their platform, their policies, how they tend to vote, nothing, no coverage.
So I feel like I believe when people say the down ballot races is where we have a chance to make a difference, but how can I make a difference if I can't even cast an informed vote? Do you have any resources to learn information on these judges?
But then I look down ballot and its mostly a bunch of judges and like one department seat that had something to do with water.
You in Texas too? League of Women Voters, vote411.org, and ballotpedia.org are my first spots to go to find information. When I can't find anything there, then I hit up Google. The reality is, though, that if I have to go to that effort to find out about a candidate, they're probably not going to win anyway. At least where I am, thanks to gerrymandered districts, there are a lot of seats in the legislature where only one of the major parties runs a candidate. So it's really in the primaries for those local positions that my vote has the most impact.
I would need to know your jurisdiction and I won’t ask you to dox yourself. For local judges, some states put out a voter information pamphlet. Your Secretary of State’s website may have resources too.
There are a few websites out there that keep track of rulings. chooseyourjudges.org seems to do a credible job. There are others.
I liked the suggestion in another comment of making research of local candidates a social activity because it is a lot of work. However, once you do identify the right resources for your local situation, it gets easier.
Best of luck! Even a half hours effort is more than most are willing to do.
You know what matters more than both presidential and local elections?
Justice and accountability
Nothing to disagree with there!
A lot of those local elections are going to have to grapple with their alignment with their party platform and the president. Those primaries are mostly this summer. My senator and representatives primary elections are in August.
The current primaries are for the presidential candidates so its the topic at hand, though.
Oh, yes, dealing with the tension between the grassroots and the national party is a real thing to deal with. It may be true that the presidential primary is the only game right now in your jurisdiction, but there are frequently special or other off-cycle local elections, too.
I'd go so far as to say the presidential primaries are pretty pointless this time around, as the contest seems to be already set-up, regardless of primary results. Thanks for your insightful comment.
The topics of conversation on here are naturally going to have a larger scope. And I think the point you're trying to make with your /s would have been better said in the opening paragraph without the sarcasm. It seems you're directing your message at people wanting to sit out the election because of a complaint with the national process, and your point is, go vote anyway because your local elections still matter.
And, judging by the responses you've gotten, I think most people missed the point. Assuming I'm reading you correctly.
Thanks for commenting. I don't think most comments so far have missed my point by much. You certainly seem to 'get it'. I see the comments to this point as more the typical thing of online comments talking past one another.
It's more of a symptom of online discourse. You can't see me, my body language or general demeanor and we don't have to take turns as is polite in real life conversation. You probably don't even know what US state I am in unless you peek at my comment history. Does the presidency matter? God, yes! Is it productive to spend one's limited energy and time arguing about that online. A resounding NO!
As a made-up example, a voter from California talking to a voter in Michigan online may be pretty pointless as their situations and political calculus are very different. Two voters from the same jurisdiction having a meeting of the minds is significantly more effective.
Edit: typos
I don't think there's ever a case where the electoral college itself has ever been the problem. The problem is the same one that plagues local elections but in a different form: there isn't proportional voting.
At the national level, states allocate all of their electors to the candidate that wins the popular vote in that state. If a candidate wins 51% of the state's votes they get 100% of the electors. That has historically been the reason presidents win despite losing the popular vote, not because of the college itself. Even without the college, if states allocated their voting power that way, you'd have the exact same problem.
At the local level the problem is more confined in that an individual can only put all of their influence behind a single candidate. This forces one to choose the least bad option.
The solution at all levels is proportional voting. States should allocate their electors according to the proportion of votes candidate receive. This needs some thought to do because it's impossible to allocate exactly proportionally, but it's a simple problem to address. At least two states do this. For every election I'm aware of where the president won despite losing the popular vote, this would have prevented that.
At all levels, something like ranked choice voting (there are other possibilities) allows voters to support multiple candidates, letting them give the most support for the candidate they genuinely prefer, but giving a hedge to support a candidate they do t love but that's better than their worst candidate. This could be applied on top of a state's system for allocating electors.
This is probably a top 3 priority for creating a workable government instead of this shit show we have now. It's gaining significant reactions with several states using some sort of proportional system, but there's heavy opposition from the current policitians. They know if it gets through, they'll lose their elections, and won't be able to jerk around their constituents. If you're sick of one shit party vs another shit party, do everything you can to support proportional voting at all levels, and to get your state to allocate electors proportionally (not like the NPV pact does).
There are plenty, including myself, that feel the Electoral College is indeed the problem. Proportional allocation would be a step in the right direction, true, but it doesn't address the larger issue that the number of electoral votes a state gets is not equally proportional to its population. This is a big problem.
In 2016, Wyoming cast 255,849 popular votes and California cast 14,181,595. Wyoming has three electoral votes and California has fifty-five votes, meaning Wyoming cast one electoral vote for every 85,283 voters while California cast one electoral vote for every 257,847 voters. In other words, a voter in Wyoming is over three times more influential than a voter in California. It’s worth noting that this statistic considers actual votes cast in 2016, rather than all registered voters. Many voters in large states such as California are dissuaded from voting, as the Electoral College dilutes their votes.
By the way, not all states are winner take all. Maine and Nebraska use systems of allocation that can split their electoral votes between candidates.
Edit to add: Here is the real solution to the Electoral College issue. The Interstate National Vote Compact Agreement. Once enough states have passed this law to add up to 270 Electoral votes, then all of those states will allocate all their votes to the winner of the national popular vote.
Under the National Popular Vote law, no voter will have their vote cancelled out at the state-level because their choice differed from majority sentiment in their state. Instead, every voter’s vote will be added directly into the national count for the candidate of their choice. This will ensure that every voter, in every state, will be politically relevant in every presidential election—regardless of where they live.
The National Popular Vote law is a constitutionally conservative, state-based approach that retains the power of the states to control how the President is elected and retains the Electoral College. National Popular Vote has been enacted by 16 states and the District of Columbia, including 4 small states (DE, HI, RI, VT), 9 medium-sized states (CO, CT, MD, MA, MN, NJ, NM, OR, WA), and 3 big states (CA, IL, NY). These jurisdictions have 205 of the 270 electoral votes needed to activate the law.
The bill has also passed one legislative chamber in 8 states with 78 electoral votes (AR, AZ, ME, MI, NC, NV, OK, VA), including the Republican-controlled Arizona House and Oklahoma Senate. It has passed both houses of Maine and Nevada at various times, and is endorsed by 3,705 state legislators.
Part of the problem seems to be that no one seems to know what the electrical college is. The difference in voting power you describe above is not the electoral college. That's that fact that states have disproportionate voting power. The college reflects that, but it's not due to the college. You could have that without the college. Also, that disproportionate power is something to disagree with, but it has not resulted in a president winning an election despite losing the popular vote. You could keep disproportionate power and the college, and if states allocated proportionally, none of the times the US has elected a president who lost the popular vote would have occured. Conversely, if you removed disproportionate power but kept allocating all votes to the pop vote winner in the state, not a single election outcome would have been different. The problem is that states don't allocate proportionally. That's it.
I already said that two states allocate proportionally....
NPV is minor improvement and a terrible approach. States don't have an incentive to allocate their electors to a candidate that wasn't popular in the state. That makes it hard to adopt, and certainly some states will never adopt it. It has gained ground, and maybe it will take effect in the states where it's passed, but I guarantee that as soon as a some states are allocating electors to a candidate that wasn't popular there, they'll repeal it. Conversely, everyone is incentived for their vote to go toward the candidate they actually voted for. Getting states to do that doesn't require buy in from a dozen states like NPV does. It's a state level incentive that achieves everything NPV hopes to achieve, that's far easier to implement, and has the added bonus of not further supporting the shitty two party system.
And how do we move from FPTP and electoral college madness to one of the various proportional strategies?
We have to engage now with the system as it is. Wanking on Lemmy is only so effective.
Dude...
You can't say the presidential election doesn't matter.
I fully agree with the sentiment that not enough people are concerned enough with their local and state elected officials. We get far too caught up in the national news headlines, or the news in states thousands of miles away, now thanks to our increasingly connected lives. The onslaught of media coverage is distracting and dividing. Yeah, 10000% agree with this.
That doesn't mean the commander in chief and leader of our country is irrelevant. It doesn't mean you should "sit it out". It's difficult to leave individuals out of the conversation to keep this civil but we're in a unique time where a twice impeached president who has said and done things that are difficult to defend as "presidential" or even moral is up for election again. This year, I'd argue that the presidential election matters more than your local election.
As for the electoral college, most of the people who have an issue with this lack the understanding of why this was established and how it functions as a tool of a representative democracy. That's not to say it's flawless but it's worked without issue for nearly 250 years. I see it as a very, very low priory of things that need reform.
I'd also submit that people need to be more supportive their local newspapers. Far too many are crumbling and getting bought up by national organizations and tilting the narrative. Read your newspapers - not just the front page of their website, not just their social media posts. Discuss local politics with your friends and neighbors. Ask the newspaper if they could investigate something. We have not held the fourth pillar of democracy to the standards that best interest us. And I'd argue it's because we simply don't care enough about the news than we do entertainment. People are afraid of the real news but there's a lot more to it than drugs and crime.
Pretty sure I didn't say it didn't matter. It's just that your vote and engagement at the local level are more effective than making everything about the presidential contest. I'm attempting to shift the conversation to topics that don't just de-moralize people and enforce the all-too-easy feelings of helplessness that engenders.
It feels good to spend a weekend knocking on doors doing get-out-the-vote efforts for a school board candidate you actually know and support, especially when the race ends up hinging on about 80 votes. Arguing in a circular firing squad about only the presidency just leaves everyone frustrated and no minds are changed.