Make Local Elections Important Again

Life is messy and often overlaps. This means there are many more cross-coalitions at state and local levels, which facilitates the ability of those who disagree to still coexist peacefully and join together for their mutual benefit.

Come election day, most attention is on national races. Vote, the political rhetoric implores, because the cost of losing control of Congress or the White House is too great.

The federal government has become the nation’s primary political problem solver. Increasingly, members of both parties look not to federalist solutions that can be found in state or local levels, but to Congress and the White House for succor.

This amplifies not only the importance of federal elections (as opposed to down ballot races) but impregnates the subtext of election rhetoric with potent emotions.

Elections carry incredibly high stakes: losing control of political power means losing access to the tools that ensure one’s constituents are taken care of and that the loyalty of those who helped secure electoral victory is rewarded. An election loss has not only ideological consequences — public policy becomes guided by an opposing vein of thought –but practical ones as well: the inability to win perhaps means the loss of donors and voters, making it even more difficult to win in future.