Partisan party endorsements in non-partisan municipal elections: unfair advantage?

Do partisan party endorsements help or hurt in non-partisan local elections?

An old Chinese saying states” may you live in interesting times”.

One situation that I find interesting is the recent trend of political parties forcing their way into influencing one of the last places that should not be influenced by partisan party politics–Town and city non-partisan local elections.

We see this happening at the national level and now we see it at our local level.

This election cycle, the Warren County Republican Party decided that it needed to endorse several candidates for the Town Council in a non-partisan race. In the wisdom of our Virginia forefathers, it was decided that the need for local partisan Town elections in small communities was unnecessary due to the local issues that the governing bodies would be dealing with over time. Most of these issues would be dealing with providing for the basic services for the community of water, sanitation, police protection, public works and in some cases power distribution. Many of the national issues never come into play at the local level.

Does partisan party endorsements help or hurt in local town elections is the question?

In the case of our upcoming Front Royal town elections for Council, I feel endorsements hurt our community by creating a clear disadvantage for candidates running as a non-partisan and Federal government employees running as candidates for offices in a non-partisan local election.

The Hatch Act was put into place to allow federal government employees to be able to run for non-partisan offices. A drawback of having partisan endorsements in a non-partisan election is that our federally employed citizens running for office cannot accept financial campaign support directly from a party. This does not hold true for other endorsed candidates. Failure to comply with this restriction could result in the loss of their job.

This restriction could reduce the pool of quality federal employed citizens living in our community who might be interested in running for an elected office.

This party endorsement could go to a less-qualified candidate who many citizens might elect by following only the party endorsement.

Other quality non-partisan candidates are at a disadvantage of having to compete financially for raising campaign funds against the party providing financial support to these endorsed candidates. This could result in the endorsed candidates being more loyal to the party over what is good for our community.

They say that change is inevitable, however, I hope that the sanctity of the non-partisan elections will return without the need of the political parties feeling moved to endorse partisan candidates in a non-partisan election.

Let’s go back and pick the best woman or man who can do the best job of making our community great again.

Michael Graham
Front Royal