October 2024
Every two years when the primary and general elections roll around I am reminded how way too many decades ago my mother would have me or one of her other children accompany her to the polling place at the local elementary school in our subdivision so that we could see the voting process first hand and hopefully understand how important it was to participate in the process of determining who would assume positions of power over the public agenda and our life in general.
Trust me, it was a lesson learned. Elections were critical then and remain so even more today as we are faced with some basic questions about the future of our representative democracy and how it will survive given some of the players in the political drama unfolding in the country.
As I explained just prior to the August primary vote, traditionally our Voter Guides and endorsements are included with an issue just prior to the election and on our our website (downtownpublications.com). We schedule the Voter Guide to catch those who cast absentee ballots to provide information early in the election cycle.
Counting both primary and general elections, the 2024 November ballot represents the 26th election cycle I have been through. Although this year we have changed how we present our Voter Guide – only online rather than in print – our basic operating system has remained unchanged.
For a small publishing group, the Voter Guide is a major undertaking and consumes considerable time for weeks in advance of you receiving what we are providing. The bulk of this work falls to news editor Lisa Brody and me, whether it is researching and drafting relevant questions we send to candidates, processing responses from those running for office and getting this issue ready to present to you.
Endorsements are another taxing undertaking, serving as the topic of nearly daily conversation weeks in advance of going to press with this issue.
On the local level, Downtown Newsmagazine is the only publication that still hews to the traditional role by providing recommendations on candidates appearing on the ballot, with the exception of the two Detroit daily newspapers.
For the upcoming election, we have reached out to slightly over 50 candidates who will be appearing on the ballot, posing questions on issues we judge to be important, not only from a policy standpoint but also as a key to understanding the logic and general philosophy of candidates seeking your vote.
We use candidate answers to provide you with information in our Voter Guide and as part of our process of determining who we will recommend to voters as ballots are being issued each election. With full recognition that we are just one of many voices offering opinions about candidates, we feel comfortable asserting that we may be the best informed source given the amount of time we spend covering government on an ongoing basis between elections. We attempt to assess who would best represent the local communities if elected. The candidate answers are combined with our knowledge of what is going on in local government and our general knowledge about those seeking office. In some cases we may reach out to the candidates themselves or to trusted members of the community to gather further information.
The end result is what you see on pages 68-69 in our Endnote section where we offer up our thoughts about who we think voters should choose when casting their ballots. In a couple of races candidates failed to return our questionnaires, despite repeated phone calls or emails. In one or two races, candidates actually admitted that they did not understand the questions. In both of these cases, they were not given consideration for an endorsement
Both the endorsements and the candidates’ responses can be found at our website at downtownpublications.com. We generally receive over 25,000 visitors to our website each month. The Voter Guide and endorsements will remain online until the November 5 vote. We will also repeat our endorsement pages in our November issue which comes out October 22, just prior to election day.
On a couple of other election-related notes, there is no doubt that Oakland County continues its drift toward a solid Blue (Democrat) county, including the Birmingham and Bloomfield areas. One need only look at the last several election returns in the category of university regents, which is considered a reliable indicator of the political make-up of an area because those who bother to cast votes in that part of the ballot generally vote their party inclination.
So when you look at our endorsements, our critics will complain that we mostly support Democrats. To address that in advance, elections are always a question of alternatives and many of those running for office this year are incumbent Democrats. We have always felt that there must be a strong reason not to return an incumbent. Secondly, we have found that as years go by, political parties seem to have less influence over who files to run in an election. While we would love to blame the parties for a decline in the calibre of candidates we see for some offices, any Tom, Dick or Sally can join a race. It’s a simple as that.
In terms of the November 5 election, I personally hope that voter turnout improves. For the 2016 presidential election, only 72 percent of registered voters turned out in Oakland County. In the 2020 race, 74.9 percent bothered to vote. Think about it – voting laws that make it easier than ever to cast a ballot have been adopted by state voters, yet 25 percent of those eligible did not participate. Simply inexcusable. If you can’t get to the polling place in person, call your municipal clerk’s office to get a ballot mailed to you, and vote.
David Hohendorf
Publisher
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