Daily Herald Opinion: When ‘local politics’ becomes something else: Can we find a way to stop the trend toward partisan influence in local races?
A famous old saw in political analysis declares that “all politics is local.”
Perhaps that is so. But traditionally, people seeking public offices for community, school board and other local offices in Illinois have run on the ideal that not all politics has to be politics. That is, that campaigns for local leadership positions don’t have to be — indeed should not be — governed by the tribal divisions that separate voters into polemic factions when selecting higher-level officials.
Sadly, as Russell Lissau showed Sunday in a review of trends in campaigns for municipal and school board offices on Tuesday’s suburban ballots, that ideal is being sorely tested. Republican and Democratic partisans are getting ever more deeply involved — financially and otherwise — in races that are supposed to be free of partisan rancor.
Melissa Mouritsen, a political science professor at the College of DuPage, compared the trend to the blind allegiance that diehard sports fans often show toward “their” teams.
“I root for my team no matter what, because it is my team and your team is terrible,” Mouritsen told Lissau, later adding more ominously, “We used to ask the question, ‘Is there a Republican or Democrat way to picking up the trash?’ But now we are saying, ‘How can we afford to let the other party pollute our government with their poisonous ideas?’”
The impact of this shift is troubling enough just in terms of what it says about the deepening political and cultural rifts in our society at large. In addition, though, it also is felt in a very real way at the boards on which our neighbors and friends serve. Men and women who once ran for office as private individuals and worked together as a village board, city council or school board team first and a party representative not at all now find themselves often running against each other not just as individuals who may sometimes agree and sometimes disagree on specific issues but as representatives of broader ideologies.
Candidates may claim to eschew party loyalties, but the funding and campaign support they receive from one organization or another surely intensifies their divisions — sometimes all but openly as candidates form into slates built around party ideals, a practice that can only build personal and political tensions into relationships when the election dust settles and board members find themselves having to work together to develop programs and solve problems.
“It brings unnecessary angst, drama and dysfunction to local government,” said Kevin Coyne, DuPage County Republican Party Chair.
Even so, Coyne, a former Naperville City Council member who founded a political action committee that supports dozens of suburban candidates, acknowledged that it’s “very tough” these days for candidates at the local level to build a campaign without help from a major political party that can provide diverse publicity resources and volunteers for door-to-door canvassing.
Evidence of that difficulty is amply shown on Coyne’s own former municipal-leadership turf. Whereas he backed three candidates in the current campaign for the Naperville City Council, Democratic forces Bill Foster and Lauren Underwood put congressional-level muscle behind four others, in addition to backing certain candidates for the city’s park board.
Now that the partisan genie is so openly out of the bottle, it is difficult to conceive a means of getting it back where it belongs. Can a local candidate actually resist seeking one party’s support if his or her opponents are getting it from another? Can we expect parties to resist putting their influence behind school or municipal candidates who represent their values?
As a practical matter, perhaps not. As a matter of what’s in the best interest of our schools and our local governments, we surely must do more to find a way to overcome these temptations — and the incursions they are making.