The best politics is local

In the coming years, will low-income Americans earn a higher minimum wage? Can the public pensions issue be resolved without leaving retirees financially insecure? How will funding be allocated to public universities or for child-care assistance or mental health care? Will poor people have access to health insurance?

We have entered the long season of presidential campaigning, of constant media coverage and hour upon hour of prime-time debates. But the above questions are not primarily for those seeking the highest office in the land. They are a sampling of the many pressing issues in which it is lower offices that have most of the power—issues unlikely to turn on who occupies the White House.

The presidency, however, gets the vast majority of the public’s attention. Many Americans lack the time or interest to get much deeper into politics than the top national stories, the most famous names, the race on every voter’s ballot. The media landscape is dominated by this same top-down perspective, from cable news to the web. And even those who follow politics closely tend to have a romanticized, inflated sense of the White House and its power. When it comes to domestic affairs, unless there’s a Supreme Court vacancy to fill, that power is sharply limited.