A good start for a Monday: I have located our polling place (a little Lutheran church that has hosted voting several times in recent years) and re-reviewed the (few) primary choices. Indiana runs closed primaries, but neither party fielded a whole lot of candidates; the Democrats managed a full slate, while the Republicans skipped a few offices, but neither one offered more than one choice for many offices.
Most of them are unglamorous jobs, like county assessor and clerk of the courts, where there's a lot of actual work and not much shaking hands and making speeches. Only a few are even useful stepping stones to anything bigger; so what you end up with are people who want the job, either in and of itself or to show they're good members of their party, willing to step up, run, and (usually) do the work if they win.
Someone's got to do the dull grunt work of government, and I have made my list and checked it more than twice. I'm going to be interested in turnout numbers; it's not a great predictive metric for the general election this Fall, but it's what we've got. If turnout for the primary is usually high (or low), that'll be a hint what to expect.
Update
1 year ago
4 comments:
I have a friend who's one of the leading caterers in my hometown, so she's the person I ask about the character of the different candidates.
How a person treats the help is a better test of actual character than any ad or statement.
I'm fortunate to live literally across the street from my polling place. I do need to spend a little more time actually looking at who will be on my ballot, although as long as the Dems don't put up candidates that appear to be Mephistopheles (unlikely, since the other guys already have the Devil Incarnate in charge), I'll be voting that way. There are planks in the platforms of both parties I don't agree with, but one party supports Trump, so I will go elsewhere.
I'm mostly done with my biggest election chore...setting up races in our election display software and making sure the AP Election Wire will fill in the data. It's a highly automated task compared to days of old, but still fiddly and detail-oriented, which is why I've been stuck with it for most of my 32 years in TV and 10 years in radio before that.
That is indeed a very good test.
I used to live across the street from the man who was the elected Constable of the County Courts. He was not affiliated with a party I usually voted for, but I knew him to be a decent, quiet, friendly, apparently hardworking guy, who kept his yard mowed and neat, and was kind to animals. I voted for him every year he ran.
We have a pretty standardized corporate solution to track and display voting as results are released, but it's still fiddly, and the online Technology meeting yesterday included the usual reminder that when testing the system, we must be certain the test does not go out on air or online.
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