Partisan Nonsense

Spectator

By Stephen Tuttle | Sept. 28, 2024

According to Ballotpedia, there were 161.4 million registered voters as of the 2022 midterm elections. There are now 30 U.S. states that allow or require people to declare a party preference when registering to vote. In those states, 38.3 percent registered as Democrats, 30.3 percent as Republicans, and 27.7 percent as independent or unaffiliated voters. The remainder registered in one of the many third parties.

The real question here is why any states care about party affiliation—and why any of us care. Our political parties have become little more than anachronistic, money-grubbing insult machines whose only purpose is self-perpetuation.

We should ask ourselves if the parties do anything to help us, our communities, or society in general. True enough there might be somebody who slaps a D or an R after their name who helps, as individuals can, but the parties do little other than beg for money they use to insult each other.

We all like to brag about how we vote for the person and not the party, but it’s at least a partial lie. How do we vote in races in which we’re not that familiar with the candidates? Do we do our research or choose the candidate of our preferred party?

Of course, both parties have official platforms on which they claim to run campaigns, but ignoring them is probably a pretty good idea. The Republicans, fresh from their convention, have a platform that, among other foolishness, says they will “prevent World War III,” bring peace to both Europe and the Middle East, seal the southern border and undertake “the largest deportation program in history,” make college campuses “patriotic again,” and on and on.

The Democrats have their own platform, most of which was designed for a candidate no longer running. They want a federal law legalizing abortion, minimum wage hikes, a $10,000 tax break for first-time home buyers, a two-party solution to the Middle East mess, a 25 percent minimum tax for billionaires, and the closure of most loopholes used by those in the top one percent of income.

As is almost always the case, virtually none of either party’s platform will ever become law because there will never be the votes in Congress, the effort is clearly unconstitutional, and/or the president simply does not have the power to act on his own. For example, Donald Trump says he will reduce energy costs by half, but presidents don’t actually control energy costs, and cutting the cost of anything in half is a bridge way too far. Not to be outdone, Kamala Harris says she’s going to bring food prices down, but it would be fun to hear how she plans on doing that; the price controls at which she has hinted are a terrible idea.

Partisanship, at all levels, has become far more destructive than useful. Leelanau County Supervisor Mike McMillan has the right idea when he suggests all offices from the county level down should be non-partisan.

Most cities have figured out partisan politics is a hindrance, not a help, to doing most anything these days. When that partisanship is attached to specific individuals, it becomes even worse.

Of the 30 biggest cities in the country, only seven still have partisan elections. In Michigan, most city elections, including Traverse City, are non-partisan, as are all village and school district elections. (Ann Arbor is a noteworthy outlier, still holding partisan municipal elections.) Unfortunately, county and township elections are partisan by law, and changing that, as McMillan would like, would require action from a hesitant legislature or a ballot referendum.

There is no legitimate reason for county officials to be from any political party. The old cliché is that streets don’t care who maintains and repairs them, and that applies to virtually every activity undertaken at the county and township levels. It’s a pretty safe bet that at least the county clerks in Michigan’s 83 counties, under enormous pressure and abuse since the 2020 and 2022 elections, would love to be able to say, “Hey, we don’t represent any party, so we don’t officially care who wins no matter how much you whine and complain.”

Clerks, sheriff deputies, register of deeds, drain commissioners, and county commissioners themselves have no need of a party tag to do their work. In fact, there is a pretty strong argument to be made that party labels make every action and every decision more difficult because there is automatic, built-in resistance from across the proverbial aisle.

There are 3,244 counties nationally along with a certain number of so-called county equivalents—boroughs, parishes, and even census areas. There is scant evidence, or none, that partisanship has in any way benefited those areas or the people living there.

Supervisor McMillan is right; if we want more effective local government, a good start would be eliminating partisanship altogether.