Saint Paulitics

This will likely have been posted on either the day of or day after the Saint Paul Ward 4 Special Election. The result of this election will matter, there are real distinctions between each of the candidates. Also there are a range of ongoing issues in Saint Paul whose trajectories will only be changed so much based on whether one person is in a city council seat versus another. Other people have better covered these candidates. Other people have better unpacked the myriad issues that need to be tackled with various degrees of urgency.

What I want to dip into is less about any particular fight or campaign, and more so about what tools I believe need to be upgraded in Saint Paul politics. Not that no one is doing certain things; Instead that we need lots more of certain things.

Currently I feel like there are two things that are the primary focus in local politics: electoral campaigns & issue advocacy. Both of these are important and understandable foci for many on the left-progressive spectrum. However I think the last few years of political cycles have shown that there are significant limitations on these efforts being the bulk of the work, specifically I think there is a pattern where the left-progressive flank is able to win elections with a broad voter base, but then must constantly fight rearguard actions in every community and city council meeting. These rearguard fights are inevitable to some degree, but are always going to be more difficult because of various cohorts of local cranks who possess too much money and time to pursue whatever zip code level conspiracy theory is currently lighting up their social media consumption. This leads to the local cranks being able to present themselves as far more robust than their actual numbers. It also means that any decent-to-good local elected is also spending way too much time trying to shore up support rather than pursuing more ambitious ideas. And so issue advocacy becomes the things that eats up everyone's time. Lining up enough people with spare time to show up at a council hearing and hope that enough pressure can be applied to just come up even.

What's needed is to get more people involved, a lot more. Thankfully I think it's quite clear that the numbers exist. There have been enough city-wide and ward election results to show that there is a confident left-progressive bloc of people in the Saintly City. The question is how to get them involved. If electoral campaigns and advocacy were the routes to get lots more people involved then we would have already seen the effect.

I believe above all other things the one arena that has the potential to bring lots more people into organized involvement: ballot initiatives.

Saint Paul has ridiculously low thresholds for citizens to put things on the ballot. Ballot initiatives make for clear issues that cut past partisan divide or candidate association. Ballot initiatives create a concrete process whereby organizers must go out and engage in tons of their neighbors, and twice over; once to get it on the ballot, then again to win it in November.

There's plenty more that needs to happen beyond just running ballot initiatives to build a strong political infrastructure in Saint Paul, however I think it is a necessary foundation for many other efforts to become more plausible. I hope that in the next couple years any group that wishes to move things in a better direction in Saint Paul will find an issue that is deeply felt and widely felt, and run it as a ballot initiative. I hope multiple groups run initiatives at the same time.

Let a thousand flowers bloom.