Russell Arben Fox: Mayor, council elections should be partisan

The Kansas Senate recently approved a bill that, if it becomes law, would move city and school board elections from the spring to the fall in odd-numbered years. That would be a good change, I think.

But lawmakers dropped a provision in the bill that would have made the elections partisan. That move was, I think, unfortunate – and the mayoral race in Wichita proves why.

The problem isn’t the mayoral primary winners. Jeff Longwell and Sam Williams are both successful businessmen and committed public servants, with long records of civic involvement.

But unless their respective campaigns over the next five weeks genuinely surprise us, revealing as-yet-unnoticed philosophical and policy differences between these two gentlemen, it is also probably fair to say that Longwell and Williams do not, in themselves, represent a particularly broad range of options or interests when it comes to questions about how our city is to be led.

I wonder just how engaging this race would be if we’d ended up with two finalists for mayor who more obviously embodied the concerns, experiences and aspirations of voters from Wichita’s poorer, or more diverse, or younger neighborhoods.

This is where parties come in. Everybody claims to hate partisanship. But parties are one of the few successful ways we have to actually organize and bring into the democratic process the huge range of attitudes and perspectives contained among the American people.

You may not like the candidates the Republican or Democratic parties present, and you may not care for the track record or agree with the platform of either party. But it remains a fact that when candidates are identified as “conservative Republicans” or “liberal Democrats” or some other combination thereof, it gives us information about which we can make real choices.

Nonpartisanship, with its focus on straightforward issues of management, surely has its place in some elections – such as for school board members, when the responsibilities of those elected are usually narrowly defined. Perhaps some truly small towns are well-served by nonpartisan elections also.

But a city the size of Wichita? Where we can easily see – as we look from west to east, north to south – numerous pockets of genuine racial, cultural and ideological difference?

No electoral system could ever perfectly capture all those diverse agendas, especially when voter turnout among those populations differs so widely. But political parties – by organizing different economic, ethnic and social factions and establishing distinct sets of policy ideas – would at least serve as a vehicle for some of those agendas, and the candidates who reflect them, to make it on to the final ballot.

Parties always carry with them the fear of the influence of large financial interests. Wanting to protect the small range of powers available to cities from broad ideological conflicts is a valid desire. But when you consider that money already clearly talks in even supposedly nonpartisan elections (Longwell and Williams each spent more on their campaigns than all eight other candidates combined), expressing fears about political action committees and big donors seems naive.

Wichita is a large, complex, diverse city. Cities like ours need parties, for all their flaws, to be able to give everyone, even those perpetually in the minority, a consistent political voice. They also likely would give voters electoral contests that are much more exciting.

This story was originally published March 5, 2015 at 6:01 PM.