Sixth: who are your friends? So all of this is going on, and in the meantime, the people who have been elected want to keep their jobs--they want to get re-elected--and they want to move up the ladder, because almost everyone wants a promotion from time to time. While they are elected, most of the time when they hear from constituents it is complaints. Why is there a traffic problem you haven't solved, why aren't you protecting the trees, why did you let a teacher say that thing, why does my gas cost so much, why does crime exist, why are my taxes so high, why aren't you fixing x, y, or z? That's 98% (that's not a scientific number, but it's a damn good guess) of what you hear from consituents. So you need people who build you back up, who tell you how great you are, who tell you you are doing great work. So politians find themselves surrounded by people who tell them how great they are. Remember, they all started with a healthy sense of ego, so...
And you have "friends" in politics, as long as you want the same thing they want. So if you can help Representative X, then he/she will like you, and will try to help you as well. There is soooo much of that. All of these folks interact on a lot of local, regional, and even state and national levels, and if you are helping them, they will help you. Some of that comes from the person who is best at imagining new and different solutions, some of that is who has the power of the purse, and lots of that is who can make a call on your behalf to the loyal group of teammates they have who can help advance your interests. So more loyalty. BUT--as much as that peer, or near peer, of yours likes you when you can help them, the person who helps them the most is the most important to them.
So if you want the support of the local sheriff, but your opponent's close confidant works in the process of allocating the budget for the local sheriff, how much does the local sheriff want to support you? But it's not just the local sheriff, it the people in the industries that you regulate, and the people who make money from the roads you build, and the people whose businesses will boom if their part of town gets a facelift--there are lots of people who want their politicians to deliver for them, and will support people they think will do that. And they aren't bad people, they are just self-interested...like all of us.
I already replied and expanded on #1-5 and wanted to hit on this. The part that I
emphasized is SO TRUE. My dad was on City Council when I was young and he always said that if you showed up for a meeting and there were 50 people in the room, they were absolutely, positively NOT there to tell Council what a great job they were doing.
People expect things to work and be done correctly (as they see it). They don't show up to say
@SFBadger96 is doing a great job when things are working and being done correctly (as they see it) because that IS their expectation. They only show up when things aren't working or aren't being done correctly (as they see it) and then it tends to be "
@SFBadger96 is a dirty, rotten, corrupt 'politician' who isn't doing things right."
The above paragraph is WAY more important than it may seem. It seems that a huge percentage of people genuinely believe that their way is the right way and that anyone who disagrees doesn't just have an alternative vision, they are corrupt, evil, etc.
A couple of hot-button issues we've had locally lately:
Deer! We have LOTS of deer in my town. People who oppose culling the herd will tell you that they aren't infringing on our space, we are on theirs but what that ignores is that we chased out all of their predators. Sure, 200 years ago there weren't many people here so the deer had free run but back then there were bears and wolves and whatnot. We chased off all the bears and most of the wolves so now the local deer herd is enormous.
Council heard from drivers who had hit deer, gardeners who lost their labor to the deer, and people opposed to hunting, etc. For whatever reason it struck me that almost nobody was middle-of-the-road on the deer issue. Basically everyone fell into one of two camps, either:
- "There are too many f*$king deer, get sharpshooters in here and cull the herd, what are you waiting for?" or
- "OMG you can't kill Bambi and if you allow bow hunting in the City there will be arrows flying all over the place and people will die."
After extensive research Council was 6-1 in favor of Bow Hunting. In a misguided effort to appease the one they put so many restrictions on it that it is more-or-less pointless. They passed an Ordinance that allows Bow Hunting but only by hunters who have previously bagged at least five deer with a bow and on locations permitted by the Police Department with sufficient acreage, etc, etc.
Before this passed we had literally hundreds of people show up at Meetings decrying the horror of what Council was considering. These people said truly vile things about the Council members. They accused them of everything from corruption to not doing "the right thing" to endangering the children.
Then, after Council passed the Ordinance allowing Deer Hunting, the people opposed to it circulated referendum petitions to stop it. Ohio has a fairly high bar for referendum, you need signatures of 10% of the voters in the most recent governor election. They actually got the necessary signatures but then the election came and the bow hunting was supported by the voters by around a 2:1 margin.
This touches on
@SFBadger96 's point about the stop sign. The people who DO NOT want deer hunting are clearly a minority as they lost the election badly, but they are a VERY VOCAL minority. Frequently a vocal minority will get their way despite the majority being against what they want simply because, as he pointed out, the majority don't care much.
Second recent local hot-button issue, LGBTQ:
So the City Council passed a pro-LGBTQ Ordinance. I'm sure it would be considered mild by the standards of
@SFBadger96 's area but here in suburban and definitively red Ohio it definitely irked some people. So a local group held a big rally in opposition and they got a boatload of people to attend their rally. They also attempted a referendum but they apparently didn't understand the concept of "qualified electors".
Let me explain this:
I mentioned the successful effort to get a referendum of the Bow Hunting issue on the ballot. In that case, looking at the petitions you could tell that they had worked door-to-door to get their signatures because most of them were sequential addresses. In the case of the effort to get the LGBTQ ordinance on the ballot they got all their signatures at their rally but the rally was advertised all over NE Ohio and attended by people from all over NE Ohio so the signatures were from all over, some were even out-of-state. They had lots of signatures but they fell comically short of the number of "qualified elector signatures" because qualified electors are those who:
- Are registered voters, and
- Are registered to vote IN the district (in this case the City).
So their petition got rejected due to the lack of sufficient valid signatures. Then they wined and cried that they were being treated unfairly and threatened to sue and on on on.
