Today, voter turnout for local and state elections is paltry, and turn-out off-year elections is abysmal. An army of national mia, however, has descend in Virginia and New Jersey and even in upstate New York, to cover the races not for the benefit of local and state residents, but for the impact it will have on the balance of power in Washington. Even conservative, states-rights orient politicos understand that all local politics is national. (The revealing contrast is the high turnout for national elections recent mobile phone number data in Europe and the low turnout for elections to the European parliament owing to the different balance of power between the center and its conferal parts in Europe.) Power resides in Washington, not in states, cities, or communities, because Washington’s potential reach into every state and locality is extensive. Even those who want to invert this balance of power have been compell to concentrate their attention and energies to the Feral City.
Politics is no longer local because
the return to turn-out is minimal at the state and local levels. In the 19th century, local party workers toil to get the vote out because there were patronage jobs to be earn if their candidate won. Parades, torch-light processions, rallies, barbeques, banners, buttons, and insignia got people work up and ready to go to polling booths. Contrast this level of enthusiasm for a 22 year old voter in Virginia who had vot for Obama last year. “Politics is boring,” he said. “I know Obama is making changes, but it clean email takes so long to make things happen.” And that is why he is probably not going out to vote next Tuesday.
The lesson to be learn in next week’s
A contests is not what they will prict about the future, which will beElvin Lim is Assistant Professor of Government at Wesleyan University and author of The Anti-intellectual Presidency, which draws on interviews with more than 40 presidential speechwriters to investigate this relen use of social media tless qualitative decline, over the course of 200 years, in our presidents’ ability to communicate with the public. He also blogs at www.elvinlim.com. In the article below he looks at Sarah Palin. See his previous OUPblogs here.