Tomorrow, the first Tuesday of November, November 7, the United States will hold elections at the federal, state, and local levels. Much attention gets paid to state and national elections. That’s where the most conspicuous power in the country ultimately lies — at the state and federal level. It’s also the stuff that gets covered in state and national media, so ambitious people interested in entering politics tend to gravitate to those races.

This piece looks at local elections.

THE BIG STORY

The Importance of Local Elections

Or how I came to love political decentralization

When U.S. voters turn out on Tuesday to cast their votes, the outcome of those elections will be covered in national and regional media. Who’s the new senator? Did that tight governor’s race fall to the Democrats or the Republicans? What about the state senate contest?

Media tends to assign great significance to these races, and not without reason. Controlling the House and the Senate makes a big difference. The party or idea that dominates Congress can end up impacting every American. Same with the Presidency, and — to a certain extent — state legislatures and governorships (with some variety from state to state).

It’s more difficult to assign a value to local elections. Many people take these for granted. But city alders can wield a surprising amount of power and influence, as can local town representatives.

Media is like many other industries in that a person has so many hours in a day, and can only cover so many things. Forced to choose between writing a story that will be read by everyone in a state, and possibly by people outside a state (a senate election) or one that a mere thousands of people will see or care about, a journalist will pick the first every time. This is one of the ways in which the business model of journalism skews heavily toward describing a world where power is centralized.

But in the United States, political power is decentralized — practically speaking, far moreso than many people realize. This is because while in other countries, taxes are raised and collected at the national level and then distributed locally, in the U.S., income tax provides revenue to the federal government (and some states, such as Connecticut, my home state), sales and other forms of tax fund state governments, and property taxes fund local towns and cities.

Let’s use my home town of Branford (population 28,000) as an example. The town budget is around $120,000,000, the bulk of which goes to education ($61 million), law enforcement, the fire department, and town employees. Much of the remainder goes into infrastructure such as buildings or local roads, or maintenance projects. Sometimes the town bonds out bigger projects, and when it can secure state or federal money for very big projects (such as a new school), it does so.

Still, on a practical day to day level, Branford taxes pay for Branford town services. If residents want more services, taxes need to go up. If residents feel that enough money has been allocated to services but that the people overseeing those resources are incompetent or insufficiently motivated, they can vote in new representatives or a new executive (in my town, “selectmen” — the first selectman is basically a mayor).

Is the system perfect? No. There have been conspicuous examples of corruption that I’ve seen in my lifetime. But the mechanism to punish conspicuous corruption — regular elections — does a good job of keeping those people out of government, or booting them out when they make their way in.

To a far greater degree than at the national level, though, there are local checks against misusing tax money or using it inefficiently. The city council or representative town meeting or whatever system is in use in a locality typically votes to approve the town or city budget. Before that, each line of the budget gets presented in public, and the public has the opportunity to go line by line through it to ask what the hundreds or thousands or (occasionally) millions of dollars are to be spent on. It’s possible to be corrupt, to sneak some inappropriate or conflicted cash to a buddy or family member through the process, but it is very, very difficult.

Disclosure of conflicts of interest: I am a representative in Branford, and am running for re-election (wish me luck tomorrow).

One of the truly undervalued things that’s different about local politics from state or national politics is that — and I can’t emphasize this enough — a local politician can feasibly knock every door in their district. My district of about 3000 voters — mostly democrat, with some republicans and independents — is fully knock-able. And a characteristic of modern politics is that one is supposed to invest one’s time solely in turning out members of one’s own party. But ideology is loose in America today; there are issues that cross party lines. Worse, because of social media and bad state actors interested in sowing division and strife in the U.S., people are more isolated from each other than at any point in the past. There is a basic utility to reaching out across party lines to say hello to voters, whether they agree with your politics or not.

From this perspective, the local politician is the very front line of democracy. The media likes to write about generals and big national movements, and this dominates news cycles. But when independents are left to themselves, when people out of power don’t feel represented, anger can fester and lead to alienation. Democracy — representative democracy, full or true democracy, any sort — requires that everyone feel enfranchised and bought into the system.

When local elections get captured by partisan interests, or are left adrift, people can take rights or privileges for granted. They can come to forget the purpose of democratic politics, which is both to advance their interests in a narrow sense, and also to ensure peace, and good relations between neighbors — to represent a constituency fully, to give people a voice. In a fully centralized system, such as those provided by monarchies and dictatorships, it is impossible to have one’s voice heard, which leads to social pressure building up over time until violence becomes inevitable. This is not our way.

And it’s in a voter’s interest. The last election for my seat was decided by 100 votes. A person can exert a little bit of effort and organize 100 people for the purpose of getting me elected, or not — understanding that I’ll be voting on the future of Branford education, and Branford law enforcement, and Branford infrastructure. That’s a pretty good ROI for someone who lives in Branford, who might read a lot about trends affecting the country, but whose life is actually mostly impacted by what happens in this community, at a local level.

So get out and vote tomorrow!

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