Previous AMP University articles have stressed the importance of taking part in local politics because of the direct effect it has on your life, and the proportionate power your voice can have in a political landscape where you are one voice out of thousands as opposed to millions.
Local politics, however, is infamously much more difficult to learn about than politics at higher levels. In the information age, it is practically impossible to avoid hearing about whatever the President has done today, whatever Congress is voting on and whatever decision the Supreme Court has made. Even if you avoid the news, everyone around you is likely to discuss it in one way or another. Yet even if you just go down to the level of state politics, the information quickly starts to dry up. It’s still there, but it’s less likely to find you without you looking for it.
As important as it is, you’re almost never going to hear about local politics unless you go search it out, and that makes it all the harder to realize just how important it is. To help solve that problem, here is a guide to getting into local politics.
Megan Prettyman is a teacher at Little Rock West High School of Innovation. She has been teaching Civics for the last five years and helped the Little Rock School District rewrite its Civics curriculum. She is very passionate about and active in local politics, and helping others get involved is a big part of what she does as a teacher. “The first part of being engaged is making sure that you’re registered and looking up what is on your ballot,” Prettyman said, and the best place to look for both of those is VoterView, a website run by the Arkansas Secretary of State. They have the most accurate and up-to-date information on voter registration and all you need to do to check is insert your legal name and birthday. It will tell you what address you are registered under, give a list of polling locations you can go to, and give you a sample ballot for upcoming elections, if applicable. All you need to do is check regularly, and you’ll never be surprised about an upcoming election or what’s on the ballot. Two other useful resources are TurboVote, which can help your register to vote, check your registration, and will send you reminders for elections, and Ballotpedia, which is more useful for national and state elections, but will also include interviews with local candidates when possible.
Knowing that there is an election and the names on the ballot will do you little good, however, if you don’t have any idea what those names stand for. Simply voting for whoever has an R or a D next their name is unwise, and not every position is partisan. It may very well be that the candidate who does not represent your political party may actually be a better fit for the job, and the candidate from your party might not always be someone you feel comfortable voting for. Finding these things out is going to take more work than it would at a higher level, but luckily, a higher level is actually where you’ll want to get started. Do some research on candidates at the state or national level, e.g., Chris Jones or Sarah Huckabee Sanders in their campaigns for governor, and find one that you feel is worth supporting.
“A lot of those [national or state level] positions start campaigning more aggressively, earlier,” Prettyman said. “You’ve got to look at what city you’re in, because certain cities are going to have more of a presence than others. Northwest Arkansas usually has a pretty strong base, and all of those national candidates and a lot of state level candidates are going to have a campaign office.” Figuring out where the closest campaign office is takes only a quick online search of, for example, “Arkansas Republican governor nominee.” There is also a Republican and Democrat party headquarters for almost every county, and those work just as well. “Most of those have standard hours and you can just show up. You don’t have to tell anyone you’re coming. If it’s in their open hours, just show up and say ‘I want to get involved.’” They will be glad to have you and they will have something for you to do, whether it’s volunteering or just putting a sign in your yard.
“If I have to give the biggest piece of advice for someone who wants to get involved in local politics,” Prettyman continuted, “it is: show up to one volunteer event, and you will get marked on the list of people who have volunteered before. They will come to you.” If all you really want is information on who to vote for, the same principle applies. “If you are out on the internet, once you start googling, you are going to start getting those targeted ads, and you’d be surprised how quickly you get that information.” Social media is another excellent place to find info. “If you’re in Pulaski County, you can follow the Pulaski County Democrats or Republicans on Facebook and they send out a lot of really good information.”
Groups like these regularly post information on candidates, volunteer opportunities, fundraising events, rallies and more. There are many organizations that are deeply involved in local politics, and getting into contact with them will go a long way toward getting you properly involved and informed. From there, it’s just a matter of finding the ways in which you feel comfortable helping, like phone-banking, canvassing or hand-writing postcards. Pre-COVID, these volunteer events would often involve sitting in an office with other volunteers, but now, much of it is done by individuals in their own homes.
“The other big thing is not just registering yourself, but making sure that everyone you know who is eligible is registered to vote. Arkansas has one of the lowest voter turnouts in the country,” she said, with a usual turnout of between 30-40%. “The biggest takeaway when I am teaching Civics is: I don’t know what your political beliefs are. What I believe is that the key to a healthy democracy is having people who are engaged and want to vote.” At the most basic level, that can mean following local political organizations and checking every couple of months to see what elections are coming up. Keeping up with what’s going on isn’t difficult to do, but it does require an intentional effort. Staying informed is good, making donations is better, and volunteering is best. Starting your involvement is the hardest part, those organizations will come to you with information and opportunities. After that, you can be involved as frequently or infrequently as you like. It doesn’t have to be all or nothing; whether you volunteer every week or once every couple of months, your support will be valuable and appreciated.
All of this is well and good for partisan positions, but the candidates for some positions, like judges and school board members, are not allowed to run in affiliation with political parties. As a result, it can be even harder to find enough information that you feel comfortable voting for one of the candidates, without so much as an R or a D to help you figure out where you should start looking. Prettyman explained that she has friends and family who are lawyers, and they can often provide firsthand information on who a candidate for judge is and what they are like, or you can look at their past legal decisions. Of course, these options are not very useful to most people, who do not personally know many lawyers or have the training necessary to interpret a legal decision. Those are good options, but there are plenty of other ways for you to figure out which candidate you should support.
“On their websites,” Prettyman explained, “often, even though they are nonpartisan, the way they will frame what issues they’re running on I can usually tell ‘you’re going to agree more with my beliefs’ or ‘I think you’re more suited to this job.’ It takes a lot more time to figure out, but the biggest one for me is finding people who I know from other interactions… getting those personal recommendations, who is endorsing them, what they are saying in that endorsement.”
This is where your experience with other areas of local politics will come in handy. As you keep an eye on the news and local goings-on, you should over time begin to form an idea of who is who and what figures you feel like you can trust and respect. When looking at a candidate for judge, try to find who, if anyone, has endorsed them.
“Even if it’s not partisan,” she continued, “you find that there are still people who are going to endorse judges that are technically part of nonpartisan groups, but if you are paying close enough attention you can say ‘oh, this person got an endorsement from this group of realtors, and this group of realtors in the past has endorsed xyz thing that I agree with or don’t agree with.” That can be very helpful for informing you on whether a candidate aligns with your beliefs.
Prettyman recounted a story of how a school board member that she had previously worked with and respected gave an impassioned endorsement of a particular candidate, and that endorsement paired with the reasoning given was enough to earn her vote.
School board elections are similar. One particularly good source is the teacher’s union, which has a robust and in-depth process for deciding who they will endorse. For just about anything that gets on the ballot, there will be some organization supporting or opposing it that will tell you why they support or oppose it. Failing all of that, spend some time combing through the candidate’s website and figuring out as much as you can. They might speak in coded, nonpartisan language, Prettyman explained, but if you’re looking closely and have seen how other candidates talk, you can probably figure out what that coded language really means.
“Once you get involved in local politics you’ll start making friends who are involved, and a lot of it is just having those conversations with people who are also trying to pay attention. Nobody is going to be perfect; I don’t know everything, a lot of people I’ve talked to, even those who are really plugged-in, also don’t know everything. But you take what little you know, work it with what other people know, and you will get to a point where you have a really good picture going into election day.”
From there, you can be a source of information for others who want to get involved and be informed. Democracy is born at the grassroots, and bit by bit, you can help it grow stronger.
READ ALSO: AMP University: Dry Counties and Blue Laws, Part Two