Joe Biden Can’t Pave Your Potholes

To Save America, Save Your City First

Image created by Midjourney

Less than 1/10th of a percent of voters decided the future of America’s tenth largest city.¹ 

In the 2022 mayoral election in Austin, only 52% of the city’s nearly 800,000 registered voters cast ballots.. Because none of the six candidates achieved a majority, a subsequent runoff election was held between the top two, Celia Israel—a self-described “left-handed liberal lesbian Latina,” and Kirk Watson—a former Austin mayor and state senator who wanted to get “back to basics.” 

On a balmy, overcast December day, fewer than 18% of voters turned up at the polls to elect the Mayor of Austin. In the first election, more than 122,000 people voted for Celia Israel, a plurality, but in the runoff, only 114,000 people voted in total.

Nearly 66,000 people who voted for Ms. Israel in November failed to show up in the December runoff. In a city of one million people, Celia Israel lost the mayoral race by less than 1,000 votes.

Compare Austin’s mayoral election to the presidential election of 2020, when 71% of Austinites turned out to vote, decisively for Joe Biden. 

The example of Austin is top-of-mind because I live here, but the pattern is similar in cities across the country. Local elections, especially runoffs or those held in off-years, don’t attract nearly the same turnout as presidential elections.

So what?

Against a backdrop of foreign wars, a border crisis, persistent inflation, and the never-ending how-is-this-not-satire government-shutdown circus in Congress,² local elections can seem like small beer. But as important as all those issues are, if you take a step back, how many of them have a direct impact on your day-to-day life?

President Biden has the power to launch a nuclear warhead, but he can’t find you childcare, or dispatch an ambulance, or cut your property taxes, or make it easier to build more housing. He can’t pick up the trash on your street or lower your utility bill. He can’t solve your city’s homelessness problem or make the buses run on time. 

Joe Biden can’t pave your potholes.

Perhaps these issues seem trivial in the face of global catastrophes, but when you’re faced with real life-and-death emergencies—well, suddenly what’s important seems a little closer to home. Shouldn’t more people care about who we put in charge of the vital city functions that impact our everyday lives? Yet most of us focus more on elections where our vote is a rounding error and ignore the local races where, as Austin’s example shows, every vote counts. 

It’s not simply a turnout issue—fully 25% of the voters in Austin’s November election left the choice for mayor blank—enough to have given one candidate a majority in the first round. Meanwhile, only 0.3% skipped voting for governor. If high-profile, big-money candidates Beto O’Rourke and Greg Abbott hadn’t been on the ballot, total turnout would have been even lower.

This suggests that information is the problem—specifically, a lack of it. 

On my ballot for the November 8th election, I had 51 different choices to make—everything from governor to school board to county judges to several bond measures. Even with twenty-two of those races uncontested (mostly judges³), voters still had to know something about nearly 80 different candidates or positions in order to make an informed choice. 

Who has the time to become an informed voter?

What happens to a society when most people sit out the local elections that most meaningfully impact their day-to-day lives, when most people don’t feel informed about or engaged in their local communities, when people only have enough cognitive bandwidth to focus on the national news?

I have to imagine that it starts to look a lot like our dysfunctional national politics and “pernicious polarization”—in other words, not great. History shows that prolonged periods of national polarization can lead to a degradation of democratic institutions, discrediting of the electoral process, and rising authoritarianism. These are not the political conditions for long-term human flourishing.

Last week I wrote that cities must say “yes” to people. My hypothesis is that the reverse is also true. If we wish to fix the dysfunction in Washington, we must first say “yes” to the cities and towns we call home. Voting in local elections is just one way to engage—and probably the easiest. 

Getting informed is a much heavier lift. Here are some ideas for how to get started:

• Read local news. Subscribe to your local paper, if it still exists. In many cities, online-only news sources are filling the void (the Austin Monitor is a personal favorite). Axios has local coverage in many cities, but Google “your city” plus “local news” and see what comes up.

• Learn how your local government works. If you’re in Austin, apply to the ATXelerator program. If you’re in the Big Apple, check out Maximum New York. If you live somewhere else, start by reading your city’s website and charter.

• Get involved in your community. Finding a cause that matters to you is a great way not only to find commonality with your fellow citizens but to learn from more informed folks. In Austin, I’ve volunteered with my neighborhood association, a grassroots urbanist group, the parks foundation, and a local high school—and I am more connected and informed as a result.

• Register to vote. Just do it.

If more of us exercise the atrophying muscle of local democracy, if more of us inform ourselves and engage with our neighbors and communities, then perhaps we’ll relearn how to solve shared problems rather than problematizing each other. And if we rediscover the better angels of our nature, perhaps we’ll start to demand the same of our elected officials at all levels of government, too. 

Getting more people on the bus of local democracy is the first step to keeping the wheels from coming off the national fleet. Joe Biden can’t pave your potholes—you’ve got to go to City Hall for that.

1. An astute reader pointed out that an earlier version of this article included data that only reflected the portion of the vote from Travis County—my mistake! I have since updated the figures to reflect the date from all three counties that Austin spans, Travis, Williamson, and Hays. Thank you, astute reader, for the feedback!

2. I’m reminded of the Jack Nicholson line from Mars Attacks!: “I want the people to know that they still have two out of three branches of the government working for them, and that ain't bad.”

3. Which raises a wholly separate question: why are we still electing partisan judges to ostensibly nonpartisan roles?