As the nominations were rolling in at last week’s Ellenville-Wawarsing Democratic Caucus, a surprising candidate emerged — well-known area Republican Paul Tuzzolino. The idea to nominate him came from a group of Democratic voters who saw him as their ideal candidate for the town’s Democratic Party line. But a quick vote by other caucus members squashed the nomination attempt (See the story at the following link). And the votes rolled in for more established area Democrats. Strangely enough, earlier this year Tuzzolino lost the Republican Party line to a more conservative candidate, but he won the Conservative Party line, despite being more of a moderate.

This isn’t unique to Wawarsing. Most of our judicial candidates run on all party lines each year — Republican, Conservative, Democratic, and sometimes even the Working Families line. In fact, some candidates freely jump from party to party if they lose one nomination. Take the 2021 supervisor race in Rochester, where former Democrat and town councilmember Bea Haugen-Depuy ran against incumbent Mike Baden on the Republican and Conservative lines after losing the Democratic Primary nomination. The same happened in Marbletown in 2021 after the local Democratic Party opted to not endorse Supervisor Rich Parete. So he just switched to the Republican Party. Even on the state level, former Senator Mike Martucci used to be a Democrat.

In the national political arena, parties are starkly divided. They have a set platform, and each national candidate is expected to endorse that platform. In a way, it makes voting much easier. If you know the platform, you know (theoretically) what the candidate stands for and how they will vote on key national issues. But that simply doesn’t translate to local politics. And it doesn’t matter. The big national issues can’t be resolved at the hyper local level anyway. There is no mechanism for a town supervisor, for example, to ban abortion within its boundaries or fund border walls or change healthcare rules. Those type of issues are all handled at a higher level of government, and state law would supersede town law, anyway.

So what does this mean for the local political landscape? It means we have to be even more vigilant, even more observant of what our local politicians are doing and what they stand for. Party lines at the local level don’t say much about who the candidate really is or what they stand for. So instead we have to actually hear them out, as individuals, despite what their national party parrots.

Labels, and the assumptions that go along with them, just don’t fit at the local level. Take this newspaper as another example. We will never endorse a candidate or party, though we may endorse a concept or an approach. Despite this, we have sometimes been labeled as a “left-leaning” paper, primarily because of the Letters to the Editor that readers send in and we publish. However, more often than not, we just run what we get. In reality, we have writers and contributors of all stripes and backgrounds. Even those of us on staff have widely differing opinions (which can sometimes lead to rather lively debates during our editorial meetings). Still, we unite around our shared goal of informing our readers about what’s going on in their neighborhoods. That’s how we need to view local politicians. What is their focus? What are their shared goals for this community?

In an ideal local political landscape, maybe we wouldn’t even have party affiliations. It could just be tiered voting. The most votes, regardless of party, wins. That’s actually not a foreign concept. Some New Jersey towns do this for their municipal elections, like the township of Vernon, NJ, over the border in Sussex County. They have no party lines, just candidate names, and sometimes a slogan, like “I Like Ike.”

Ultimately, we have to do a little more work in choosing who we elect locally. We have to get to know the person, look beyond the party label, and see what they are willing to do to improve, or maintain, the towns we live in. And that means our area politicians might have to work a little harder to get their messages to the masses.

So when November rolls around, instead of blindly voting along Row A or Row B, let’s take stock of all that we’ve read about and all that we’ve heard from our local political candidates, and vote for the person best suited for the job.