Why Voting in Local Elections Matters More Than You Think

Most voters who turn out for presidential elections do not turn out for local ones. The drop-off is enormous — turnout in off-year local elections is often a fifth of what it is in presidential years, and turnout in primary-only local races can be lower than five percent of eligible voters. The same person who waits two hours in line to vote for president routinely skips the school board election that decides what their children will be taught for the next four years.

The pattern is understandable. Local elections get little coverage, the candidates are unfamiliar, and the offices sound minor. But the offices, by almost any honest accounting, decide more about everyday life than the federal offices that get the attention. The mismatch between where voters spend their attention and where decisions actually get made is one of the more consequential structural features of American civic life.

What local offices actually decide

A local election typically chooses members of a city council, a school board, a mayor, and sometimes a county commissioner, sheriff, prosecutor, and various other local officials. These offices make most of the decisions that affect daily life in a way federal offices do not.

The city council decides zoning — what can be built where, how housing density is regulated, where commercial and residential areas are drawn. The council decides the local budget, including police funding, fire department staffing, road maintenance, and parks. The council passes ordinances on everything from short-term rentals to noise restrictions to plastic bag rules. Each of these decisions has a more direct effect on the resident’s daily life than almost anything Congress will pass in the same year.

The school board sets curriculum, hires and fires the superintendent, manages the school budget, decides on bond measures for school construction, and adjudicates the dozens of policy disputes that shape what local schools actually do. The board has direct authority over the education of every child in the district. A school board with a four-vote majority can change the experience of public education for a generation of students in that district.

The mayor — depending on the city — controls the executive branch of city government, supervises departments, manages the relationship with the city council, represents the city to state and federal agencies, and shapes the priorities of the entire local government. A capable mayor can transform the operational capacity of a city. An incapable one can degrade it.

Local prosecutors and sheriffs make enforcement decisions that affect thousands of people each year. Decisions about which cases to prosecute, which to plea-bargain, which to drop, which crimes to prioritize, and which to deprioritize are local decisions, made by elected officials, and they shape how the criminal justice system actually operates in the community.

Why the leverage is so high

The mathematics of local elections produces enormous leverage per vote. A city council seat might be decided by 5,000 voters. A school board seat might be decided by 3,000 voters. In a presidential election in a non-competitive state, the marginal voter has effectively zero influence on the outcome. In a local race with a small electorate, the marginal voter is one of a few thousand, and the influence per vote is several orders of magnitude higher.

The same logic applies to working on a local campaign. A volunteer who makes calls or knocks on doors for a presidential campaign is one of millions of similar volunteers; their marginal contribution is small. A volunteer who does the same work for a school board race is one of perhaps a dozen volunteers, and their contribution can meaningfully affect the outcome. Local political engagement has high returns per hour of effort, and the engagement directly translates to influence over decisions that affect the engaged voter’s life.

The same logic applies to candidacy. A serious candidate for federal office needs millions of dollars, a national team, and years of preparation. A serious candidate for local office can run a viable campaign with a few thousand dollars, a dozen volunteers, and a few months of preparation. The barriers to entry at the local level are low enough that ordinary residents can credibly contest seats, which means local races are decided by candidates with direct community ties rather than by professional politicians from somewhere else.

Why local races get so little coverage

The structural reasons for low local-race coverage are well understood. Local newspapers have shrunk or disappeared in most of the country, and the journalism that used to cover school board meetings, city council sessions, and zoning hearings has largely vanished. The remaining local outlets cover sports and weather more reliably than they cover local government. The result is that voters have little information about local races even when they want it.

The shrinking of local journalism has tracked the broader collapse of the local news business model. Newspaper advertising revenue has fallen by roughly eighty percent since 2000. Local outlets cannot fund the kind of beat reporting that used to be standard. The candidates for local office are now mostly unknown to most voters, not because they are obscure, but because no one is producing the journalism that would make them known.

A side effect of this collapse is that local elections have become more partisan, even when the offices themselves are nominally nonpartisan. Voters who lack information about the actual candidates fall back on partisan cues, and party labels — when they appear on the ballot — have become much stronger predictors of how voters cast their ballots in local races than they used to be. The local race that used to be decided by knowledge of the candidate is now often decided by party identity, which is a poor proxy for local governing capacity.

How to actually inform yourself

A voter who wants to vote informatively in local elections has to invest more effort than a voter who only votes in presidential elections. The information is harder to find, and the time required to absorb it is higher relative to the visibility of the race.

A practical approach starts with the official ballot, downloadable from most county election offices in the weeks before an election. The ballot lists every race and every measure. For each race, search the candidates’ names along with the office. Most candidates have campaign websites with their priorities, and most counties publish a voter guide that summarizes each candidate’s position.

For school board races, the most informative sources are usually meeting minutes from the existing school board and statements from the candidates about specific policy questions. School board races have specific stakes that are visible from how the board has been operating; a voter can usually identify the main current debates within a few hours of reading.

For city council races, the existing council’s votes and the candidates’ stated positions on the major current issues — zoning, budget, public safety — are usually enough to differentiate candidates. The information is dense but findable. The investment of two or three hours of preparation before a local election produces vastly better-informed votes than no preparation at all.

The cumulative effect of local engagement

Voters who turn out reliably for local elections produce different outcomes than voters who skip them. The composition of local government is determined by the small fraction of the eligible population that actually shows up. When that fraction is unrepresentative of the broader community, the resulting government is unrepresentative as well.

The pattern in most American cities is that the small fraction of voters who consistently turn out for local races is older, wealthier, and more homogeneous than the broader population. The result is local government that overrepresents the interests of that subset and underrepresents the interests of the residents who do not show up. The mismatch shows up in zoning decisions that favor existing homeowners over future renters, in school board decisions that favor existing curricula over reform, and in budget decisions that favor existing service patterns over new ones.

A voter who turns out for local elections — even just the routine ones, in normal years — is contributing to the composition of the small group whose preferences determine local outcomes. The contribution is, in expected-value terms, much larger than the same voter’s contribution to federal elections in non-competitive states. Local engagement is one of the higher-leverage civic activities available in modern American politics, and it remains underused precisely because the structural incentives — coverage, attention, drama — favor federal elections instead.

A reasonable habit

A reasonable civic habit is to treat local elections the way most people treat presidential elections: as the default thing you show up for, not the exception. The bar for engagement is lower in absolute terms (less preparation needed for a local race than for a national one, because there are fewer candidates and offices), even if the relative effort is higher (because the information is harder to find).

A voter who builds the habit of voting in every local election, and spending two hours of preparation before each one, will over time influence local government in ways that are visible in their own community. The neighborhoods where local turnout is high produce different governments than the neighborhoods where it is low. The composition of those governments shapes everything from the schools your kids attend to the rules about what your neighbors can build next door. The leverage is real, and the engagement is mostly a matter of building the habit. The information is findable. The races are decidable by the people who show up. The people who show up are, in most American jurisdictions, a remarkably small share of those who could.