City council elections in Raleigh have become de facto partisan races. Change the election cycle.

Last year, Raleigh’s City Council chose to move the city’s election from the odd year nonpartisan election cycle to the even year partisan general election cycle. This move was in response to the delay in the national census data.

This decision has turned out to be the most significant one made by that council in its three years in office.

The decision caused a couple of changes to Raleigh’s elections:

▪ It moved our local nonpartisan elections — meaning there is no political party identification by a candidate’s name — to the same ballot with partisan elections that were higher on the ballot, such as the U.S. Senate race and legislative elections this year. Next time, elections for presidential and governor will be at the top of the ballot.

▪ It moved City Council’s place on the ballot from the top to the bottom this year,. making it the last of 30 races to be filled in by most Raleigh voters.

The most important consequence, however, was that now with these nonpartisan elections being thrust into the partisan election cycle, thereby making them de facto partisan races. The Republican and Democratic parties actively endorsed and supported candidates in these races and handed out party endorsement slate cards targeting these nonpartisan races at every polling site. This decision caused many more voters to be confronted with choices for these local offices they knew little or nothing about.

The election for mayor went from approximately 54,500 votes cast in 2019 to 153,400 votes cast this election cycle. So just under two-thirds of the voters in this election theoretically had never voted in Raleigh’s local elections before. Think about that for a moment.

But having this many new Raleigh citizens voting in local elections is good for democracy you say? Not if the voters don’t know who they are voting for, and/or are just looking to their political party endorsement list to determine who they are going to vote for, instead of being truly informed about the candidates and their platforms.

The issues at stake in city elections are not of the traditional partisan kind, but are issues such as growth and development, public safety, transportation, parks and recreation. These are not Democratic or Republican issues, but rather local issues dealing with the nuts and bolts of running a city government.

What we need to understand is that while this scenario now helps one end of the political spectrum, in the future it could help the other end of spectrum. De facto partisan elections that are decided by how liberal of a Democrat or how conservative of a Republican a candidate is are not good for local governance.

Now that the political campaigns are over, we all need to keep in mind the most important thing is what’s best for the citizens of Raleigh — not what’s best for a political party. I believe the way local elections have been conducted up until this election is what is best for the citizens of Raleigh, keeping nonpartisan local elections separate from partisan state and federal elections.

I hope the new council will review this issue, and hear from the public, including community and business leaders. I believe the Raleigh mayor and council positions are too important to be left, quite literally, at the bottom of a long ballot in a partisan election year.