Latest / The Fine Print of Democracy / The Elections Closest to Home Matter Most
Transcript
- Jake: Welcome to the Fine Print of Democracy, a civics podcast that explores the overlooked rules, processes, and institutions that shape American government. I'm Jake, a civics teacher breaking down the ideas behind our system of government and the conversations that help us better understand it. Every Monday I publish an essay exploring a big idea in civics, politics, government, or history. In these episodes, I'll read that week's essay, then continue with margin notes, look at the ideas, stories, and reflections that didn't quite make it into the final draft. Today, the elections closest to home matter most. The elections closest to home matter most, the local races that quietly shape schools, roads, housing, and daily life. Presidential elections get all the headlines. They're bigger, more expensive nationwide, but local elections are where your vote can really have an impact. Presidential elections, even governors' races and Senate races, are important, but the decisions that are made as a result of those elections are bigger, more national, and often more abstract. Local elections, on the other hand, have a direct impact on the daily lives of voters. School boards decide curriculum and funding priorities. City councils make decisions about housing, roads, and zoning laws. County commissioners oversee public health departments, law enforcement budgets, and emergency services. These aren't political debates happening hundreds of thousands of miles away, they are decisions that shape the communities people live in every single day. Despite local elections having a bigger impact on your day to day life, many voters skip, or simply don't know about, voting when there is no presidential election also going on. The local elections don't receive the same attention as national races, but they often have a more direct impact on people's everyday lives. And because fewer people vote in them, each vote carries even more weight. When people complain about the government not getting anything done, many of the examples they give are local, yet their ire is aimed at the president in Congress. You can't blame Congress for your local park not being maintained. You can't yell at the president when the fire department runs out of funding. And that's actually an important part of being an informed voter, knowing which government is responsible for which decisions. We often talk about, quote, the government as though it is one giant institution sitting in Washington, DC. It isn't. The federal government has certain responsibilities. State governments have others. Counties, cities, and school districts have their own responsibilities as well. If you don't know which level of government is actually making a decision, it's pretty difficult to know who to hold accountable for it. That doesn't mean every problem has a simple answer. Sometimes multiple levels of government are involved in the same issue, but knowing where a decision is being made is the first step toward actually doing something about it. If you want to change in your community, you need to know who has the authority to make that change. Local government shapes far more daily life than most people realize. Most people don't think much about city councils, school boards, or county commissions, but they notice the effects of the decisions those groups make. They notice when roads aren't repaired, when schools face budget cuts, when new housing projects are approved or denied, or when parks and public services improve or decline. These aren't distant national debates happening in Washington, DC. They are decisions that directly shape the communities people live in every day. And that's probably part of why local government is so easy to overlook. When government is working the way we expect it to, we don't necessarily notice it. We don't wake up in the morning thinking about the city council because the roads are there, the parks are open, the water is running, and the fire department is available if we need it. Government becomes much more visible when something goes wrong. A road doesn't get repaired, a school loses a program, a development project changes a neighborhood, or a public service gets cut, and suddenly people are paying attention. But those decisions didn't suddenly become important when something went wrong. They were important the entire time. National politics often starts locally. Ballot measures that pass in smaller cities or counties can act as testing grounds for proposed national laws. Candidates with bold policy positions can use local elections to test their messaging and viability as both a candidate and messenger for their policies. If a candidate can't convince their city or district to support their positions, how can they expect to persuade their state or the country to support them in the future? Local office is also where many politicians learn how to actually govern. Running for a school board, city council, county commission, or other local office requires candidates to make an argument to a much smaller group of people and then live with the consequences of the decisions they make. They have to listen to constituents, balance competing priorities, manage limited resources, and defend their decisions to people who live in the same community. Those are skills that don't suddenly become important when someone runs for Congress or governor. They are learned somewhere, and often that somewhere is local government. We've talked about voter turnout in the past, and in local elections, voter turnout is even more important. In a presidential election, millions of people vote. In a local election, one neighborhood can realistically swing the outcome of an election. Local elections happen every year and all year. These are often called off year elections, races that are held when the president is not on the ballot. We're used to elections being held in November, but many states have elections throughout the year. Sometimes these are primary elections to set up the November elections, and sometimes these are the elections. with the winner being decided and taking office. Because these elections are at a different time of the year, people often aren't aware the election is even happening. With fewer eligible voters and even fewer actually participating, local elections often have tiny margins determining the outcome of the race. According to Ballotpedia, between 2018 and 2025, there were 660 elections nationwide that were decided by 10 or fewer voters. If you want your vote to have a big impact on the outcome of the race, local elections are your time to shine. Instead of millions of people determining the governor of your state, the final outcome in a school board could come down to just a handful of votes. And even when your individual vote isn't literally the vote that determines the winner, that doesn't make it meaningless. Voting isn't only about being the person who casts the final deciding ballot. It's about being part of the group of people who gets to make the decision in the first place. When fewer people participate, the people who do participate have a larger role in determining what that group looks like and which priorities it represents. There are a number of reasons why these elections see lower turnout. Local elections, like school board, county commission, or city council, don't get the media attention that larger races get. There are fewer debates, fewer TV and radio ads, and less money spent. All of this means that eligible voters are less aware of the issues and candidates in the election. Ballots can be overwhelming when there are a ton of different races, different offices, different ballot measures, bonds, and levies all on one ballot. Add in the fact that local elections can happen at seemingly random times throughout the year. And lower turnout often has less to do with apathy and more to do with voters simply not being informed or reminded. It's hard to participate and vote in elections that you know nothing about. It is easy to interpret low turnout as a lack of interest, but the reasons are often more complicated. Some voters may not care enough to participate, but others may not know an election is taking place, may not understand the responsibilities of the office being contested, or may not feel informed enough about the candidates and issues to make a decision. Participation requires more than simply having access to a ballot. Voters need to know when an election is happening, what is being decided, and who is asking for their vote. This lack of information is particularly significant in local elections. National candidates spend enormous amounts of money making sure voters know their names, positions, and priorities. Local candidates generally have far fewer resources to reach voters. The result is a cycle in which local elections receive less attention. Voters have less information and fewer people participate. Local elections are not as flashy as the national elections. There's not as much money involved. National and even statewide elections get all the headlines. They're more dramatic. It's easier to follow because the candidates have ads and media appearances all over TV and radio. Their faces and names are all over social media. Local elections, on the other hand, don't have as much money, meaning they don't have as many ads. They may not be making media appearances every day, you may not see their face on social media every other post. All this adds up to less awareness of local elections and therefore lower voter turnout. If you think national or statewide elections are all that matter, consider this. Many of the politicians running in those races started out in local office. Local elections shape the future of national politics. President Joe Biden, for example, his first political office was Newcastle County Council in Delaware. President Harry Truman was first elected judge of the Jackson County Court's Eastern District in Missouri, though called the judge, this was an administrative position, responsible for county roads, budgets, and personnel. Local offices can be a springboard to bigger races and offices. Because turnout is lower and impacts are immediate, participation matters more. Many people skip local elections, some don't know they're happening, and others don't feel informed enough to participate. When fewer people vote, each individual vote carries more weight. In local elections, a small group of motivated and passionate voters can swing the outcome of an election. Those decisions don't stay inside city hall meetings, for example, they shape the communities people live in every day. Even if people don't participate, elections still happen. Winners are still decided and decisions are still made. Budgets will still be passed, schools will still be funded or cut, and development projects will still move forward. Choosing not to participate does not remove anyone from the consequences of those decisions. The school board will still adopt its budget, the city council will still vote on development proposals, county officials will still determine how public resources are allocated. Elections do not stop because some eligible voters choose not to participate. They simply proceed with the voters who do participate. That is why participation matters even when the outcome is uncertain. Voting does not guarantee that a candidate will win or that an issue will pass, it guarantees something more fundamental, that you have taken part in the process that determines who will make those decisions and what direction your community will take. If you want something to change in your community, you have to participate. Even just casting a vote is giving you a voice in the decision making process. If you don't vote, you don't get to complain when things aren't going right. Voting is your opportunity to help shape the kind of community you want to live in. If your candidate or issue loses, that's democracy. You still had to say. The outcome of an election is not supposed to be guaranteed simply because you participated. Sometimes the candidate you support loses. Sometimes the issue you care about fails. It doesn't make participation meaningless. And the fight does not necessarily end with the election. There will be another election, another ballot measure, another opportunity to advocate for a different outcome. Local elections are not one time national spectacles that disappear for four years. They are part of an ongoing process through which communities decide what they want to look like, how they should grow, and what priorities they should have. The people elected to local office make decisions that affect schools, roads, housing, public safety, and countless other parts of daily life. Because turnout is often low, a relatively small number of voters can have an outsized influence on who makes those decisions and what priorities those officials bring to office. National elections may shape the direction of the country, but local elections shape the communities people actually live in every day. If you want a voice in what your community looks like, how it grows, and what it prioritizes, you have to participate in the elections closest to home. Writing always means making choices. Every essay leaves a few thoughts in the margins, ideas that didn't quite fit, stories that deserved a little more room, or questions worth exploring a little further. So let's spend a few minutes there. Welcome to Margin Notes, where we go beyond the finished essay and take a closer look at the ideas behind it. There's something I've been thinking about since I finished writing this essay. I think most of us understand, at least in theory, that local elections matter. If you ask someone, do you think your school board is important, they'd probably say yes. If you ask, do you think your city council makes important decisions? Again, probably yes. And if you ask, do you think you should vote in local elections? Most people would probably say yes. And yet, we still have incredibly low participation in many of these elections. So there's a disconnect there that I find really interesting. It's not necessarily that people have decided local government doesn't matter. I think sometimes it's that we built a political culture that tells people which elections are supposed to matter. The presidential election gets months or sometimes years of attention. We talk about it constantly. We know the candidates, we know the polls, we know who's winning and who's losing. Then the local elections come around and maybe you get a pamphlet in the mail and think, I guess there's an election. That's a strange way to organize a democracy. And I don't mean that as a criticism of individual voters, I think it's much bigger than that. We have created an entire political and media ecosystem around national elections. There are television networks, newspapers, websites, podcasts, social media accounts, campaign organizations, polling companies, political consultants, and fundraising operations all built around national politics. There isn't really an equivalent ecosystem for your local school board. And that creates a problem that I don't think we talk about enough. Attention is not the same thing as importance. The things we hear about the most feel important because we're constantly being reminded that they're important. But your city council doesn't stop making decisions just because CNN isn't covering the meeting. Your school board doesn't stop deciding how to spend money because nobody on cable news is talking about it. Your county commission doesn't stop affecting your community because its meetings aren't trending on social media. In some ways, local government has almost the opposite problem from national government. National politics can feel like it's everywhere. Local politics can feel like it's nowhere. And I think that's part of why the responsibility gets pushed back onto voters. If nobody's going to spend millions of dollars making sure you know who the school board candidates are, then someone has to seek out that information themselves. And that's harder. It's also less convenient. If I want to know what the presidential candidates believe, I can find that information in about 30 seconds on the internet. If I want to know what two people running for my local school board believe about curriculum, however, school funding, transportation, or district priorities, I might have to actually look. I might have to read their websites, find an interview, attend a candidate forum, or read the voters' pamphlet. That's more work, and I think that's one of the uncomfortable truths about local democracy. Sometimes participating requires us to be intentional. The information isn't always going to find us. But I actually think there's something valuable about that too, because it means local elections can force us to become more familiar with the place where we actually live. You start paying attention to your school district. You learn what your city council actually controls. You start understanding why a particular road project is taking so long. You learn what your county government does. You discover that issues you've been complaining about is actually a local decision, not a federal one. And suddenly government becomes a little less abstract. That's probably one of my favorite things about local politics. You can actually see it. You can drive past the new development. You can see the road that got repaired. You can walk through the park. You can go to the school board meeting. You can read the city council agenda. You can see the effects of budget decisions. You can actually connect a political decision to the place where you live. That's harder to do with national politics. And that matters because one of the biggest problems with American political culture is that politics can become incredibly abstract. We talk about quote the economy, we talk about education or or or public structure, we talk about infrastructure, we talk about housing. But those things are not actually abstract. They're roads, they're schools, they're houses, they're the police officers and firefighters, the parks, our water system, they're the things we interact with every day. Local government is where those abstract political arguments become tangible. And maybe that's another reason local elections deserve more attention. They they remind us that politics isn't about Politicians, it's about places, it's about people. There's another thing I wanted to come back to from the essay, and that's the idea that you don't necessarily have to win to participate meaningfully in democracy. I think we've gotten very accustomed to thinking about politics in terms of winning and losing. Your team won, their team lost, your candidate won, their candidate lost. And obviously, elections have winners and losers, that's unavoidable, but I if the only reason you participate is because you expect your side to win, democracy is going to be a pretty frustrating experience. You're going to lose sometimes. A lot, probably. And that's not a failure of democracy. It's democracy working exactly as it's supposed to. I I actually think local elections make this easier to understand because you're going to keep living with the people who disagree with you. If your school board candidate loses, the school district doesn't disappear. If your city council candidate loses, the city doesn't disappear. ballot measure you support fails, you still live in the community. You still have to figure out what happens next. And that's a really important part of democratic participation. The election is not the end of the conversation. Sometimes it's the beginning of the next conversation. You can organize, you can advocate, attend meetings, you can talk to elected officials, you can support another candidate, you can try again. And that's especially important locally because local government is much more accessible than most people even realize. You don't need to get invited onto a cable news program to talk to your city councilor. You don't need a national political organization to make your case to a school board. You don't need to become a famous political commentator to have an opinion about how your community should spend its money. you can just show up. And honestly, I think showing up is one of the most underrated forms of political participation. Voting is important, that's the entire point of the essay, but but voting isn't the only thing you can do. And and local government gives you opportunities to participate that national government simply can't. You can attend the meeting, you can submit a public comment, you can email the official, you can talk to your neighbors, you can volunteer, you can run for office, you can organize around an issue, you can pay attention. Sure, you can do all those things nationally, but locally they're easier and right in front of you. That that last one I just mentioned there might sound almost laughably simple, but I think it's actually pretty important. Paying attention is political participation. Not because merely knowing what's happening changes the outcome, but because you can't participate in something you aren't paying attention to. There's one more thing worth talking about here. local politics can be incredibly frustrating. Sometimes it feels slow. Sometimes decisions seem obvious to you and inexplicable to someone else. Sometimes watch a city council meeting and you think to yourself, how are we still talking about this? Sometimes you vote for someone, then they make a decision you don't like, and sometimes the people you elect disappoint you. Honestly, that's part of democracy too. I think we sometimes expect democracy to feel satisfied. We expect our vote to produce a result. We expect elected officials to listen, the government to solve the problem we care about. But Democracy isn't designed to guarantee satisfaction. It's designed to give people a mechanism for participating in these decisions that they don't all agree about. That's obviously a much less exciting definition, but it's probably a more accurate one. And local government makes that especially obvious because you can see the disagreement happening right in front of you. You can go to a media and hear people who want completely different things for the same community. One person wants more housing, another wants less development. One person wants the school district to spend more money on a particular program and and and another thinks the district is already spending too much. One person may want the city to invest in a new project while another wants the money spent somewhere else. And there isn't always a solution where everybody walks away happy. As great as that would be. Sometimes the government has to choose. That's politics. And that's why participation matters. If decisions have to be made, whether you participate or not, I know I'd rather participate and I'd rather have people participate. I'd rather have people learn what their local government does, understand the choices being made, vote for the candidates they think will represent them, and then continue participating, even when the outcome doesn't go their way. Because the alternative isn't some neutral political space where nothing happens. The alternative is letting the people who do participate make all the decisions. And that's probably the part of this essay that I feel most strongly about. You don't have to be a political expert to participate in local government. You don't have to know every candidate. You don't have to understand every ordinance. You don't have to have an opinion about every issue. You don't even have to be particularly interested in politics. But if you care about where you live, it's worth paying attention to the people making decisions about it. Because those decisions aren't happening somewhere else, they're happening here. And that's really what I mean when I say local elections matter. Not that they're secretly more important than presidential elections, not that national politics don't matter. They obviously do, but democracy is happening much closer to home than we sometimes even realize. And if we're serious about participating in a democracy, we shouldn't only show up when everyone else is watching. We should show up for the elections that don't make national headlines. The candidates whose names we might not recognize and the decisions that might never make the evening news. Because those elections still determine something. They determine who gets to make decisions about the place where you live. And sometimes that's the politics that matter most. Every idea has more than one side, every decision has more than one perspective, and every conversation leaves us with more to consider. Understanding democracy means being willing to keep asking questions. Remember, civics is something you keep learning, not something you finish. There's always another rule, institution, or piece of history to understand. Thanks for listening to the fine print of democracy.