I live in Corpus Christi, TX. Our mayor and city council are all up for election this fall. The city council consists of 5 members elected by district and 3 “at large” council members elected by voters across the whole city. All 9 of these positions are non-partisan in the sense that candidates to not run as Republicans or Democrats (or any other party). This year, at least, it also seems that the dividing issue is also de facto non-partisan. My assumption is that a lot of “non-partisan” offices tend to be of the type where everyone “knows” this candidate is Republican and that candidate is a Democrat, and vote accordingly. Not here. Here we have a slate of candidates that are in favor of what I’ll call the issue of the day (the Inner Harbor desalination project) and those against it. What’s funny is that there’s a photo of all the in favor candidates on the Facebook pages of some of the prominent community leaders who are against it, and the comments of members of the community are coming from both sides. There are strong pro-MAGA voters who comment that the pro candidates must all be AOC and Chuck Schumer style Democrats. Then there are hard core liberal / progressive voters who say these same pro candidates must be boot licking Trump MAGAts. The same happens on Facebook posts of photos of the anti candidates. It boggles my mind that our local election is going to be an alliance of pro Inner Harbor liberals and MAGAts vs. an alliance of anti Inner Harbor liberals and MAGAts*. Do any of you all have a similar situation with your local politics?
*. FWIW, I’m going to vote for the anti Inner Harbor candidates, despite the fact that some of them are in fact Trump supporters.
That sounds wild. And no, nothing like that here. A few years ago our local (18k population) city council election had a moment where it became a referendum on sanctuary cities.
Complex local issues sometimes remain bipartisan until the conservatives are told how they’re supposed to feel about it. Hence growing support for data centers and the like.
Here in Minneapolis, MN; R vs. D politics don’t apply much in local elections. Mainly because the last avowed Republican elected to any City or (inner) County position was somewhere near to a half-century ago. It’s a solid-blue area.
The local Republican party has become such Trump-worshipers that classical Republicans are being forced out – they are either losing interest in local politics, or are drifting into democratic (DFL) activities. Thus there is no effective Republican party, or candidates, for local issues.
So the action locally is intra-party fights between very left (DSA - Democratic Socialists of America) democrats vs. moderate democrats. Unfortunately, much of this happens in party Conventions or Primary elections, which are low-participation compared to actual elections. Also leaves us with local elected officials who are less concerned about actual local issues (potholes, public safety, property taxes) than with national/foreign policy issues and fighting with the ‘other kind’ of democrats. Yo the detriment of our city, I think.
Probably a hijack, but why are you against the desalination project? The City by the Sea is going to run out of water. If not desalination, then what?
I live in a town of ~5000 an hour east of Austin. We are a bright red county (the former Secretary of Energy lives here). The County Judge (the chief executive of a county’s government in Texas) is a partisan position and has been Republican since the last Democrat switched parties. The County Attorney was also a Democrat until her Republican assistant ran against her. Now her former assistant is the County Attorney (and Republican) and she is the assistant. They just swapped jobs. Both people seem unswayed by partisan politics – the guy just ran as a Republican because he knew that would get him elected. All of the JP’s in our county are Republican. The city council is not partisan. I suspect the mayor is a Democrat, but I haven’t asked her. I do know her personally and I think she’s awesome. I would be disappointed if I learned she was a MAGA.
I’m in favor of desalination. So are most of the anti Inner Harbor people. What I’m against (and what I’d guess the vast majority of the anti voters are against) is dumping the brine in the inner bay, where it’s likely to raise the salinity and levels of other toxins to such a high point that Nueces Bay and Corpus Christi Bay (and possibly as far north as Copano Bay and as far south as Baffin Bay) would likely become major environmental disaster areas. Probably so bad that when people around the world think of major disasters, they would think of Corpus Christi before they think of Chernobyl. We’re for desalination as long as brine is pumped out in to the Gulf of Mexico (though those of us on the liberal side of the alliance are smart enough to stick to referring to it as “the Gulf” when discussing the matter in public). We’re just against a project designed for the benefit of Big Industry rather than for the people of Corpus Christi and the surrounding areas. It turns out a surprising number of MAGA voters become environmentalists when the environment in question is their own back yard.
ETA: The following is based on my personal best guesses. I think a significant number of MAGA will vote anti because a majority of the pro elected officials (and non-incumbent candidates), if forced to disclose party affiliation, would mostly likely to turn out to be Bill Clinton style center left Democrats mixed in with a smattering of George Bush style Republicans. I suspect that the anti elected officials (and non-incumbent candidates) are a mixture of Trump style Republicans and Bernie Sanders / AOC style Democrats. That’s my best guess as to why we have such an odd mixture of local politics this year.
Here in Olympia, Democrats pretty much run the table, but the county sheriff’s office is a weird exception. Our current sheriff, Derek Sanders, is an independent who voted for Trump in 2016 and 2020 but says he wouldn’t have if he’d known how things would turn out, and ran as a progressive and refuses to cooperate with ICE. In 2022 he won against the incumbent sheriff, who was also an independent but was a Republican in all but name and whose brother, a sheriff in a neighboring county, is full maga. This year, Sanders is running for reelection against a Democrat who’s actually to his right politically. Sanders got 70% of the vote in the top-two open primary, so he’s almost certainly going to win.
FTR, Sanders is easily the best sheriff we’ve had in the 22 years I’ve lived here and I even met him at my work once when he was personally canvassing the neighborhood looking for a missing teenager and wanted access to our security cameras. The phone call I had to make to the store manager to tell him the actual county sheriff was here was an awkward one.
I live in the near western suburbs of Chicago. The city, and suburban Cook county, have been staunchly Democratic since I moved here, 37 years ago (and, frankly, for decades before). It was thanks to the Daley Machine for decades, but at this point, it seems to be more due to both (a) a lot of working-class people living in Cook County, and (b) large proportions of Blacks (23%) and Hispanics (26%).
But, what has changed, in the time I’ve been here, have been the “collar counties.” In the past, it had been that the outer western and northern suburbs were more reliably Republican – with the exception of the some of the north shore area (north of the city, along Lake Michigan), which has always had a substantial Jewish population. The western and northern suburbs are typically middle- to upper-middle class, which had, years ago, made them solid Republican voters. What I suspect has happened is that, as the population in those suburbs diversified in recent decades (with people of South Asian and East Asian ancestry, as well as Hispanics), and as the GOP started to lose its mind, the voting patterns shifted. Today, all of the Congressional seats in the collar counties are held by Democrats; Illinois only has three Republican Representatives, and they are all from the rural areas of the state, well outside of Chicago.
Usually there’s no divide at all because they have to pull teeth to get anybody to run for office, let alone two people who could be divided about something. I’m more likely to vote in an election with fewer candidates than offices to fill than one where I have to make a choice (and then if there is a choice to make, sometimes we have elections where nobody campaigns and it’s impossible to find out what you’re even voting for). But last year there was an explicitly MAGA candidate running against the incumbent mayor. Trump won here by 40 points or something, so I was worried* it would work, but the guy barely cleared a third of the vote.
*Not that I like the MAGA thing, but I was more worried because the guy is also rabidly anti-development. Every new business, housing development, etc. had him screaming about how developers were taking “our” land and destroying the community.
In my county, there are very few Democrats. Starting in the mid 1980s, the Democrats even stopped holding primaries for about 30 years. The Democrats now hold primaries again, but their primaries just draw about 20 people.
In general, we get along fine. There are a few twits who profess to hating Democrats, but they are few in number. For the most part, it’s all academic here.
Our town voted a few years ago to change from a Faulkner Act (council-manager) government to a Mayor-Council model. We’re in a red pocket of New Jersey so the majority of candidates and voters are Republicans, but party affiliation isn’t used in local elections. You’d think this would be better, but it isn’t. The local factions revolve around local cults of personality and end up being de facto parties. Our last mayor defied this model by dissociating from all of the local factions. Our current mayor is a MAGA lunatic with no qualifications for the office whatsoever, which became immediately apparent when he took office and now even the local MAGA people hate him. The only real issue of substance is paying for the sewer system which was installed 20 years ago to accommodate our local resort (Mountain Creek - infamously previously known as Action Park). The reason that’s an issue is that we are still paying for it in our taxes even though less than 2% of the residents are connected to it (most people have septic tanks and wells). The rest of the local political activity revolves around feuds between the aforementioned cults of personality. At one point I was seriously considering running for the town council, but after seeing how quickly people can become pariahs I decided it wasn’t for me.
I live in Mississippi. There is a default assumption that black people are Democrats and white people are Republicans, although college towns like the one where I live have a fair number of white Democrats as well. What this means, in practice, is that there are a fair number of Democrats who hold conservative-or-just-plain-weird beliefs (e.g., the longtime chair of our county Democratic party just kind of assumed that the proper role of women in the party was hosting social events) but identify as Democrats because they happen to be black. There are also a fair number of white people who call themselves Republicans, and sometimes hold public office as Republicans, but are basically middle-of-the-road pragmatists, and back when we used to have ballot measures that were decided by referendum, they often voted for the “liberal” policy choice once the labels were off. (The True Believers in the state legislature accordingly took this option off the table.)
It’s also fairly common for people to run for, and often win, local offices like mayor or city councilperson as independents, either because their politics are “wrong” for their race or because the place where they live is effectively a one-party town and they want to challenge an incumbent.
It’s complicated. It’s a less conservative state, in practice, than most people think, although it’s still really conservative in some ways, especially at the state-legislature level.
Here in Lawrence KS we have a city commission/city manager form of government. There are five city commission seats, three are up for election every two years. Top two vote getters get a 4 year term, third place gets a 2 year term. City commission candidates do not run as members of a political party. City manager is not an elected or term-limited position, they are chosen by the city commission. We do have a mayor, who is one of the city commissioners, but it is largely a ceremonial title.
In Missouri right now, the issue thaat’s completel;y scrambled party lines is data centers. We have drill-baby-drill MAGAts lined up shoulder to shoulder with tree-hugging Democratic Socialists opposing them entirely, while liberal-but-not-“progressive” Democrats are joining with the business wing of the Republican party to try and come up with a way to limit data centers to areas where the infrastructure can handle them and the local population won’t be too concerned.
One thing everyone is united on, the people proposing data centers are sneaky bastards who need to be controlled.
Here in Dallas, we’ve got a similar set up to Corpus, in that our city council positions are non-partisan, although the only at-large member we have is the mayor. And we’ve got a Council-Manager style government as well, so the mayor is more of a ceremonial figurehead and the only at-large council member.
Politics wise, most politicians are more or less Democrat in terms of their affiliation, but the real divide isn’t what party they identify with, it’s what part of town they represent. The city is surprisingly segregated, and that segregation is both racial and economic. The city’s about 28% white, 22% black and 42% hispanic. But for some reason, historical I’m guessing, the power blocs seem to be the white, wealthy northern districts set against the black, impoverished southern districts, with the predominantly Hispanic West Dallas districts doing their own thing.
Issues wise, it tends to come down to business friendly policies being championed by the norther districts against more city services/social programs in the south.
That’s pretty much the divide that we have here in Corpus Christi, only the issue is desalination (although data centers are a close second). I’ve never seen anything like it, even as recently as the local elections from 2 years ago. I’m betting that turnout, due to the hotly contested local races, is going to be higher than usual, likely even higher than in presidential election years.
The mayor of my city ousted a a Republican incumbent and it has been a shit show, because he’s an activist with no interest or understanding on how to run a city. His entire sensibility is that we were this backward racist city that he and only he (a middle aged white guy) can bring to enlightenment.
So despite having the patina of progressivism, it feels like the second coming of DOGE, where a bunch of good programs, that the current administration won’t or can’t understand, are being put on the chopping block mostly out of spite for the previous Mayor.
