Yard signs

Finding your cadence

Although we’re told that local elections have the greatest impact on our lives, younger generations are slower to put down roots—often because of a job market increasingly demanding graduate education, exploding rent prices, and delayed home ownership. It can feel like voting in local elections is fruitless, especially given the time it takes to research candidates with little to no online presence, and trying to calculate how their relatively smaller roles will affect the local political landscape.

I’ve felt disconnected from municipal elections for most of my life for this reason, but recently, I decided to dive in and try anyway. I recently shook the hand of John Chaimanis while he was campaigning in Newton. He’s running for a local city councilor position against incumbent Joshua Krintzman. I felt daunted needing to brush up on local issues and arrive at a conclusion, but I committed to it—and it wasn’t as hard as I thought. In a nutshell:

  • John Chaimanis is, to me, the “voice of cautious change”. In brief, he advocates for a slower approach to expanding development in Newton.
  • Joshua Krintzman, in my own words, is the “incumbent advocating for controlled growth”. His platform and record focus on expanding development, green energy, and process.

Although Krintzman probably aligns more closely with my values at a glance, John Chaimanis took a few minutes out of his day to stop and chat with me on the sidewalk on my morning walk. I need to keep researching before I make a final decision, but it made me pause and reflect on the fact that both of these gentlemen walk the same neighborhoods I do, and have a vision for them that I can advocate for—it’s as easy as checking my voter registration and sending a ballot in. There’s really no reason not to do it.

Applying these lessons

Here’s the advice I’d like to pass on, having motivated myself recently to participate more regularly in these local elections:

  1. Find your local signalers: Seemingly every area has that one house loaded with yard signs for school committee members and town councilors; take advantage of them to get a feel for the different upcoming elections at a glance. Or, in the absence of one high-profile collection of signs, just noticing the ones common in town can clue you in. Take those moments to align yourself.
  2. Find candidates’ websites: Every candidate spins a website up these days, whether it’s a personal portfolio, a one-pager, or a campaign HQ. Look them up, find their site, and get a feel for what they’re about.
  3. Ignore the culture war: Don’t try to align every candidate with the “red team” or “blue team”. Local candidates often reflect smaller sub-coalitions within parties, and this is far more granular than two parties trying to win 350 million individual people over. You’re looking for zoning and fiscal policy highlights, not ideological purity tests from the national stage.
  4. Commit to making an impact: Local candidates often struggle to motivate turnout; most people don’t know or don’t care about who gets elected to the positions around them. Your choice doesn’t need to be perfect or surgical, it just needs to be reasonably informed and intentional.

It’s one of those things that’s always within grasp, you just need to decide to reach for it one time to get a feel for it forever. Check your registration today!