Nonpartisan on the ballot does not mean nonideological in the council chamber

Nobody has ever filled a pothole as a Republican. Nobody has ever collected the trash as a Democrat. I will concede that on the first page and save everybody a letter. There is a great deal of city hall that is just plumbing, and plumbing has no ideology.

But then comes the budget. And the zoning map. And the question of whether the school district teaches a given book to a given age, whether the property tax rate goes up another notch, whether the new development gets a subsidy, whether the library, the police and the parks are funded at the level of last year or a different one. The moment a local body decides how much of your paycheck to take and what to do with it, the plumbing is over and the philosophy has begun.

So when someone tells you that party politics has no place in school board and city council races, and that Republicans who organize for those races are spoiling something pure, I want you to hear what is being asked. The request is not that politics leave local government. It is that one side stop showing up. This post states that claim at its strongest, then answers it in four numbered points.

The claim at its strongest

Here is the opposing argument, in terms its defenders would accept.

"Local government is different," they say. "A school board member does not vote on foreign policy or federal tax law. A city council decides where the stop sign goes. The business of these bodies is practical and shared, and the ballot has no party label for exactly that reason. When national parties come in with slates, money and talking points, they turn a conversation among neighbors into a proxy war. Voters who do not follow politics lose the ability to judge a candidate on competence, because the candidate is wearing a team jersey. It is the nationalization of the local, and it makes everyone angrier. Let local races be local."

That argument is sincere, and a lot of people who make it are good people who are tired of the noise. It has a real point: there is a kind of local politics that should not be fought along national lines, and anyone who has watched a zoning meeting turn into a cable-news segment knows the feeling. I will grant that point at the end. But the claim, as a whole, fails for four reasons.

First, the terms

Two definitions will clear up a lot of confusion. A partisan election puts each candidate's party on the ballot. A nonpartisan election leaves the label off. In most states, many local offices are chosen on nonpartisan ballots, including many school boards, city councils and, in some states, county and judicial offices. The label's absence is a rule about the ballot. It says nothing about what candidates believe, who supports them, or how they will vote once seated.

That is the distinction the claim blurs. "No party on the ballot" is a factual statement about the form of the election. "No ideology in the chamber" is a value claim, and a false one in most places that have ever held a close vote. Keep those two separate and the argument changes shape.

Point one: nonpartisan seats still decide ideological questions

One. A board or council that sets a tax rate is deciding how much of a family's money goes to government. That is not a technical question. It is a question about the size of government, and people have disagreed about it since before the founding.

Two. A school board that picks a curriculum, a reading list, a discipline policy or a rule about what parents are told is deciding what the district will teach and who has the last word over a child. Those are questions about values, authority and the family. Few questions are more ideological.

Three. A council that writes a zoning code is deciding who may build what, where and at what price, which affects housing costs, property rights and the character of a town. Our post on zoning may be the biggest price control you never got to vote on argues that this is one of the largest economic decisions made at any level of government, and it is made by people whose names appear on a ballot without a party.

Four. A body that funds police, sets fees, awards contracts and decides whether to borrow is making choices about order, cost and trust.

The conclusion follows: these are the questions on which Republicans and Democrats, and conservatives and liberals, have different answers. Taking the label off the ballot does not change the answers. It only changes where the voter finds out which answer a candidate holds.

If you doubt it, try an experiment. Watch a contested school budget vote, or a vote on a major development, in a place near you. Do the votes split in a pattern? Do they split the same way again the next month? Votes that fall into a stable pattern are the definition of an ideological division. It does not need a party name to exist.

Point two: the other side already organizes, in the open

The claim assumes that organizing for local races is a Republican innovation. It is not. In many communities, local races have been organized for a long time, by many groups, openly and legally. Unions that represent public employees, advocacy organizations, associations of developers and builders, chambers of commerce, neighborhood groups and civic clubs all endorse candidates, recruit them, pay for mailers and turn out their members. You can find this in the endorsement lists printed in local papers and in the campaign-finance filings that local candidates and committees must submit.

Let me be fair to everybody on this. A teacher has every right to belong to a union and to take an interest in who sits on the school board that sets her working conditions. A builder has every right to care who is on the planning commission. A parent who joins an advocacy group has every right to knock doors. That is the First Amendment doing its job, and I would defend each of them. What I will not accept is the idea that these groups are an expression of civic virtue and that the same effort by Republicans is a violation of it.

Think about the logic. If it is legitimate for one set of organized interests to recruit, endorse and turn out voters in local races, it is legitimate for another. If it is illegitimate, it is illegitimate for all of them. The people who call for restraint in the abstract are, very often, calling for restraint from only one side. That is not a principle. That is a preference wearing a necktie.

And here is the practical result when one side organizes and the other stays home: the organized side wins by default, in races that decide the budget and the curriculum, on turnout so low that a few hundred votes can settle it. Republicans who answer the call to stay out of local races are not preserving purity. They are leaving the field. If you want to understand what it takes to run, our playbook A Playbook for Running for School Board, From Filing Date to Election Day and the companion how to win a school board seat when nobody else is paying attention spell it out.

Point three: the history of nonpartisan elections points the other way

The claim treats nonpartisan local elections as ancient, the natural state of civic life, now under assault by modern partisans. The history is more interesting.

Nonpartisan municipal elections spread in the early 1900s as part of the Progressive Era reform movement. Reformers were fighting the big-city political machines, organizations that controlled jobs, contracts and votes in many American cities. Their remedies included the city manager form of government, at-large elections, civil service rules and nonpartisan ballots, all aimed at weakening the machine's hold. The idea was that a city ought to be run by competent administrators, the way a business is run, and that party labels were how machines kept control.

Whatever you think of that program, it was itself an ideological project. The Progressives had a theory of government: that expert administration should replace political bargaining, and that the public interest was a matter for managers. That theory was contested at the time and it is contested now. A nonpartisan ballot, in other words, was the product of one side of an argument, and it carried that side's assumptions into the structure of local government.

There is also a consequence the reformers may not have intended. Remove the party label and the voter loses the shortcut that tells him roughly where a candidate stands. The shortcut does not vanish. Other cues fill the gap: a familiar name, an occupation on the ballot, a yard sign, a newspaper endorsement, a mailer, a list of backers. In a low-turnout race the groups that can afford those cues have an advantage. Which means the nonpartisan ballot, taken alone, does not remove the influence of organized interests. It just makes them harder for the average voter to see.

The broader story in How Republicans Pick Nominees from Party Bosses to Primaries and Caucuses tells the same tale about party primaries: American reform movements have always carried a view of who ought to hold power, and the debate about the structure of elections has never been purely technical.

Point four: the real remedy is disclosure, not silence

If the worry is that voters cannot tell who is behind a candidate, the answer is to tell them. That is the heart of the matter and it is the place where the critics and I can agree.

I would propose the following standard for any campaign in a nonpartisan race, Republican or otherwise:

1. Say what you believe. Publish a plain statement of your positions on taxes, spending and the issues the body decides. Answer the candidate questionnaires from local groups and papers, and post your answers.
2. Say who is backing you. List your endorsements and your donors where the law requires, and in the places it does not require, do it anyway.
3. File on time. Local campaign-finance reports are public records. Read the other side's reports, and make sure yours are clean. Our post on how to read a campaign finance report the way an auditor would shows how.
4. Own your party, if you have one. If you are a Republican running in a nonpartisan race and you are comfortable saying so, say so. If you choose not to lead with it, do not hide it from someone who asks.
5. Keep the meetings open. Attend and insist on public notice, public agendas and public minutes. Our toolkit on open meetings and public records, a citizen's toolkit for any local government covers the laws that make this possible.

Notice what that standard does not do. It does not require anyone to stay out of the race. It does not ask any group to dim its voice. It gives voters the information that a party label used to supply, which is exactly what the critics say they want. A voter who knows who a candidate is, what that candidate believes and who is paying for the signs can judge the candidate on the merits. The remedy for hidden influence is light.

Where the critics have a point

I promised to grant it, so here it is. National fights can poison local races. A candidate for the water board who is asked about a national issue he will never vote on has been dragged into the wrong argument. A neighbor who is a perfectly good school board member can be turned into a villain by a national controversy that has little to do with the board's agenda. There is something to the plea that a town should be able to disagree about parking without a cable-news graphic.

The right response is discipline, not abstention. Keep the campaign on the agenda of the body you are running for. Talk about the budget the board will vote on, the schools the district will run and the rules the council will write. Treat opponents as neighbors, and keep national slogans out of the fight when they do not belong. A Republican who runs a clean, local, specific campaign does more for the idea of nonpartisan government than one who stays home. And the party's own structure, from the precinct up, as described in The Republican Party org chart, from your precinct to the RNC, is a resource for recruiting such candidates and training them, not a reason to stay away from the ballot.

The bottom line

• "Nonpartisan" describes the ballot. It does not describe the budget, the curriculum or the zoning code, all of which divide voters along ideological lines.
• Other groups already organize in local races, openly and legally. Asking Republicans alone to sit out is not neutrality. It is a request to concede.
• Nonpartisan elections came from the Progressive Era, which was itself an ideological project. The label's absence does not remove influence. It only hides it from the average voter.
• The remedy is disclosure: say what you believe, say who backs you, file your reports and keep the meetings open.
• If you care about your schools and your town, look at the next local ballot, find the races nobody is contesting and consider running, or recruiting someone who will.