Editorial: If you can’t pick a prez, don’t ignore rest of ballot

Published 1:30 am Tuesday, November 8, 2016

By The Herald Editorial Board

Whether it’s small talk in the grocery store check-out line, late-night talk show host monologues or editorial cartoons the consensus is that Americans have been presented with a lousy choice for the presidential election.

Never mind that many of those same Americans are the ones who helped nominate the two major party candidates; most voters seem more motivated to vote against Republican Donald Trump or Democrat Hillary Clinton than for either.

As an editorial board, we disagreed that there isn’t a clear difference between the two. More than urging for a vote against Trump, we asked our readers to consider what we believe are sound reasons why Clinton would make a good president. Plenty of our readers think otherwise, and we heard from many of them. That’s the beauty of the First Amendment. The point is millions of your fellow Americans do see a clear choice and a reason for enthusiasm.

For those who don’t see an obvious choice and have little interest in the presidential race, you have every right to that viewpoint, too.

But ambivalence about the presidential contest shouldn’t keep you from voting at all today.

In fact, the case can be made that the races and issues down ballot from the presidential race can have a greater influence in your daily life than who sits in the Oval Office.

Along with congressional races for the Senate and House of Representatives, your ballot lists races for the entire slate of state offices — the governor, of course, but also those who oversee schools, public lands, legal issues, state investments and more.

Several initiatives are asking voters to make a significant increase to the state minimum wage and paid sick leave laws; tax carbon emissions and reduce the state sales tax; reform campaign finance and lobbying rules; and give families and police a new tool to remove firearms from those who post a threat to the safety of themselves and others.

And many voters are selecting their representatives in the state House and Senate, races that will determine which party holds the majority in each body as the Legislature considers how to meet a state Supreme Court mandate to fully fund K-12 education and reduce the current over-reliance on local school district levies.

If you want to affect political change that will be most tangible to you, don’t neglect your vote for initiatives and legislative races. While partisanship has often locked up Congress, state legislatures have been more productive. For every law that Congress passes, state legislatures, on average, pass about 75.

It’s why legislatures and initiatives to the people have been more likely than Congress to bring change to a range of laws, including the legalization of medical and recreational marijuana, gun safety measures, education funding and tax issues.

There’s concern that the advanced case of gridlock that afflicts Congress could be spreading to state assemblies; that’s the case laid out by political reporter and author Craig Ferhman in “All Politics is National,” featured on FiveThirtyEight.com.

Ferhman believes that partisanship and the influence of lobbyists are becoming more common in legislatures. He notes that Mylan, the drug manufacturer who jacked up the price of its EpiPen, also increased the number of states it lobbies in to 45 from nine in a four-year span.

Among the causes of statehouse gridlock, Ferhman cites a disinterest and lack of understanding among the public, the decrease in the number of reporters for newspapers and other media covering statehouses and state political stories and the rising stakes in states as political contributors have begun to see a better shot at influencing policy at the state level than at the national level.

It’s time for state residents to make the same realization that lobbyists are.

If you must, skip the presidential race, but study up and make your choices in the other races.

The Herald endorses

A full list of The Herald Editorial Board’s endorsements, with links to each editorial, is available at tinyurl.com/TheHeraldEndorses2016.