Your votes are more important in State and Local elections.
With fewer voters each vote counts more, and the people elected to these “lesser” offices will more directly affect your life.
Guess who turns Washington DC money into real benefits? It’s not your congresswoman — its your state and local officials.
But of course it’s hard to figure out who to vote for, especially in these obscure contests. Here is how I prepare.
Research
- I start with PAC endorsements. Find a couple organizations that matches your politics. If they’re in agreement on a particular race, that saves time for researching the tougher races.
- Endorsements become more important as the races become less known. I’ll use endorsements both as positive and negative indicators, depending upon where it comes from.
- Ballotpedia has some good info — especially links to candidate websites and social media pages. If a candidate can’t be bothered to put up a good website, I can’t take them seriously.
- Local media is critical.
- Even though our newspapers are owned by a conservative magnate, they have some editorial independence and often get candidate interviews that you won’t find elsewhere and provide factual news for provide background you can’t find otherwise.
- Vegas is also blessed with the NVindy so I have some good untainted info. If you don’t have that, maybe you can find a local blog or two?
- As much as I hate Twitter, you may need to use it. Do your research and take a shower.
- For judicial elections, I’ll sometimes ask my lawyer friend for advice. My research usually comes up with an answer that matches his recommendations, but he has had insights that have been helpful.
Tie Breakers
Often you’ll do research and come up with a couple evenly matched candidates. It helps to have a couple heuristics in such circumstances.
- As a State employee, I’ve learned that government is complicated work. So if a challenger can’t make a convincing case for change, I default to the candidate with experience (but I can’t blame you for going otherwise, that’s how I used to vote).
- I’ll admit that I’ve resorted to certain identity characteristics as a final tiebreaker. I hate making this type of a choice, but I’m occasionally forced to give up on judicial races with purposely anodyne candidates (where even the local PACs don’t endorse). At that point I’m wildly betting that one identarian aspect of their upbringing might have been formative to give them better perspective in executing the duties of their office.
Effort
This might sound like a lot. It’s not. I put in about 4 hours on candidate research for primaries and maybe 1 hour on general elections.
To be clear, I come into every election cycle with a relatively blank slate. Even though the governor is my top-level manager as a Executive Branch State worker, I actively avoid the scene. I don’t enjoy politics so I don’t follow the blow-by-blow of partisan politics until its time to perform my civic duty.
Payoff
Every four years we’re inundated with the line “every vote counts”. But it really does for these races.
My county commissioner just won re-election by 350 votes. My assemblyman lost his seat in 2014 by 40 votes.
Not close enough?
A couple years ago, we had a primary for city council that came down to 5 votes between second and third place. A literal handful of different votes and the dude who was creditably accused of sexual harassment would have made it to the general election!
Half a day’s work every two years ain’t much effort to own our democracy. And you might find it surprisingly interesting…even dramatic!
And there’s more! When you consciously research these less known positions (County Recorder, Administrator, Secretary of State, etc) you’ll learn more about your government. It’s a regular civics refresher. And not some abstract textbook assignment — these are real people you’re hiring. You pay their salaries every time you’re levied a sales tax, might as well take some time to know the government that you’ve bought!