Local Elections Matter (9/3/23)
Welcome back! We hope everyone found a moment during our two-week break to spend time doing what you love and time with the important people in your life. We are back and heading into the homestretch before the November 7th election. With about eight weeks to go and tens of thousands of postcards to write, texts to send, and calls to make, we need to hit the ground running to help Democrats win in 2023 and set the stage for a successful 2024.
We are writing for candidates running for school board in Virginia, county legislature, and Town Supervisor on Long Island, and we’ll be writing shortly for school board in Bucks County, PA. These are all local elections and we have chosen to write for them because we know that Local Elections Matter!
Read on for some of the reasons why we believe that local elections are so important and are focusing our postcard efforts on them in 2023.
Local elections include candidates running for positions like city council, school board, county legislature, town supervisor, county commissioner, and judges. These elections determine policies on issues like education funding, transportation infrastructure, zoning regulations, healthcare access, and, in Suffolk County, water quality and safety. These policies affect a community's daily life.
For a disturbing example of why “Local Elections Matter,” look no further than the Pennridge School Board in Bucks County, an hour outside of Philadelphia. Pennridge is a purple suburban district, not some deep red bastion of MAGA, but in 2021, in a low turnout ”off year” election, Moms For Liberty candidates won a majority of seats on the Pennridge School Board. (If you are not familiar with Moms For Liberty, which has been labeled a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, read here.)
The new right-wing school board hired Jordan Adams, a graduate and former employee of the ultra-conservative Hillsdale College, to create a new curriculum for the Pennridge schools. Despite the fact that Adams had no prior experience developing curriculum and the Pennridge School Board is his company’s first client, he has already been paid thousands of dollars to revamp the curriculum by eliminating much of the 19th Century from the U.S. History curriculum, among other questionable decisions. Any argument that Adams is not a right-wing ideologue was put to rest when he addressed the Moms For Liberty convention in Philadelphia earlier this summer.
Members of Markers For Democracy watched the live stream of last week’s Pennridge School Board meeting in horror. Before the meeting even started, Moms For Liberty allies put out a call for people to come to the meeting to clap for their chosen board members. But the vast majority of the parents who spoke at the meeting were appalled that this right-wing propaganda was going to be taught to their children in the public schools. Some parents said that they would opt their kids out. Their frustration was palpable. It was a stark reminder that if Democrats don’t come out to vote in “off-year” local elections, right-wing groups like Moms For Liberty can take advantage of the low turnout, win elections, and then foist their extreme views and curriculum onto school districts. (The Pennridge School Board has also banned books like Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” and the popular young adult novel “The Perks of Being a Wallflower".)
If the Pennridge School Board is the most extreme current example of why #LocalElectionsMatter, it is far from the only one. In Suffolk County, Republicans flipped the Suffolk County Legislature in 2021 and the Republican majority in the county legislature refused to put a referendum on the ballot this November which would have brought much-needed funding for clean and safe water in Suffolk because they wanted to keep Democratic turnout low so they could retain their majority.
Research has shown that the impact of postcard campaigns can be greater in smaller, “quieter” elections than in “noisier” elections like those for statewide or national office where voters receive constant reminders from the media and elsewhere about the election. We will continue to write for larger campaigns for statewide office, Congressional and Senate races, and ballot referenda. But we have intentionally chosen postcard campaigns this cycle for local races where we think our postcards can have the greatest impact. We hope you will join us at Postcards For Democracy.