Your Friendly Neighborhood Revolution

State and local governments will be a major focus of our work at The Renovator, and we hope that you will take a deep dive into your own state’s government and how it works.

The north side of 4400 Baltimore Ave, Philadelphia, via Wikimedia Commons

Confession time: When I started designing curriculum about local government, I didn’t actually know much at all about local government.

It was 2020, a year most of us would rather forget. Until a few months earlier, I had been teaching Greek, Latin, and classical history to college students. An organization in New Jersey called The Citizens Campaign was looking for someone to work on curriculum tools and advise teachers. I applied and got the job.

The mission of The Citizens Campaign is to empower regular people to develop their own policy solutions to problems in their communities, working with local government officials to get them adopted into law. Harry Pozycki, the group’s founder and chairman, told me that his part-time job in college working at a juvenile detention center had so outraged him that he decided to go to law school and figure out how to change policies that were ruining kids’ lives. He took on all kinds of political roles – he helped run a U.S. Senate campaign, but he also served at the state, county, and local levels. And he wanted to share what he learned with others, especially the people who often get overlooked by politicians: those in poor, working class, and marginalized urban communities.

At the time, we were all getting a sort of horror-show crash course in local politics, because our states and cities and institutions were making up their own rules to try to deal with the pandemic.

Pandemic Politics

I saw this local scale of pandemic response myself at the elementary school closest to my home, outside Philadelphia.

For months, the school displayed St. Patrick’s Day decorations because that’s when schools closed – not because of fearmongering or because there was a new virus out there called covid-19 or because the president told them so, but because two parents of kids in our district had been exposed to people with covid, and school leaders didn’t want it to spread to more families. But that was just our district making its own decisions: the next county over had already closed a few schools the week before because of possible exposures, while other counties stayed open.

The day after our district closed schools, the governor stepped in to close schools across the state, and told schools they wouldn’t be penalized if they couldn’t meet state requirements to offer a certain number of school days for the year, or couldn’t comply with state testing requirements. He allowed (and encouraged) them to continue providing free school meals, by handing out food outside the building. It was clear that not every district or county had the same resources: Our district already happened to have laptops for students to hand out to use for remote instruction, because it’s in a wealthy county that produces a lot of property taxes that fund the schools. But other districts in the Philadelphia area couldn’t afford them before and certainly couldn’t get them now, so students were told just to do homework on their own.

I see people all the time saying that they don’t follow politics, or that they’re apolitical. Sometimes they say that they feel that way because they think politics doesn’t affect them. But I can’t understand how anyone can think that after what we experienced in 2020. Pandemic restrictions affected every aspect of our public lives, and came from every level and area of government. Pennsylvania’s governor ordered businesses to close, including restaurants and bars, and later closed day care centers as well, by claiming emergency powers. Philadelphia’s City Council declared a moratorium on evictions, so that sheriffs could no longer evict renters based on a landlord’s filing in housing court. The mayor set up a small business relief fund. Our regional transit agency and our city’s homeless shelters implemented new cleaning protocols, and then public transit all but shut down. Our city’s district attorney held hearings to have most inmates released from city jails and instructed the city’s police force to stop arresting drug users and nonviolent offenders. Our county board of commissioners set up a mobile testing site. Our city manager closed playgrounds. But other states and cities handled the situation very differently. Schools closed in different places at different times, depending on the spread of the virus and the politics of state and local governments. New Jersey’s governor suspended jury trials. In general, states with Republican governors and legislatures implemented fewer restrictions, both for political and practical reasons (in more rural areas, for instance, the virus spread later and more slowly).

At The Citizens Campaign, I learned, Harry and the team had jumped into action to help New Jerseyans stay safe during the pandemic in their own ways. They connected trusted church and community leaders with contact tracing efforts by public health officials. They helped to get informational materials translated into Spanish and other languages. They worked with local governments and organizations to make and hand out quarantine kits. Part of my job was turning The Citizens Campaign’s training manual into an online course that teachers could use while they were stuck teaching virtually.

Amidst all of this, Joe Biden was running for president to unseat the incumbent Donald Trump. Trump put his name on stimulus checks (even though that meant people waited longer to receive them) and fought publicly with the CDC and Anthony Fauci, while Biden promised that if he were president, he would “follow the science.” We doomscrolled and texted and watched on TV, and wondered what to do.

Communities drive change

People didn’t want to get sick or to get their families sick, but they also didn’t want to go broke or be cut off from society. They didn’t want to expose anyone to a potentially fatal virus, but they didn’t want their businesses to go under. They wanted to know where the sick people were so that they could avoid them, and that’s not something that individuals can research for themselves – it’s public health information that can only be shared by the institutions that use our tax money to serve us. For all these reasons, people were looking to governors, mayors, and school superintendents and asking: How can we keep ourselves safe, and what are you going to do to help us? They started demanding answers.

That was the moment I began working at The Citizens Campaign and learning about the surprising impact each of us can have if we focus on making change on the state or local level. “Think Globally, Act Locally” is a cliché for a good reason.

Harry pointed out to me that while progressives were trying to get their colleagues in Congress to see the value of the Green New Deal, individual cities in New Jersey had already put in place clean energy bills, tree canopy plans, sewer and water management projects, single-use plastic bans, and environmental protections that would make people in those cities safer and healthier. And once one city had done it, it made other cities more likely to steal those good ideas.

It makes sense that real change is possible on the local level, in a way that national politics doesn’t allow. Local officials don’t spend the majority of their time on media appearances or fundraising, as national politicians do, and it’s easier to get time with them. Plus, a smaller number of people can have a bigger impact. A group of seniors with asthma caused by pollution might not move Congress, but they sure can move a city council. A federal bill to ban pesticides won’t go far, but state or city parks can stop using them, or replace lawns with native plants and rain gardens. A group of school kids might not get to present their civic action project about school lunches to the U.S. Secretary of Education. But if they get in front of their school board, they can make things happen. And if things don’t happen, they know where to go to ask for follow-up. Local governments are easier to hold accountable.

In his book Politics is for Power, Tufts University political scientist Eitan Hersh urges us to stop treating politics as a spectacle that we watch on TV and talk about with our friends, as if it were a sport and we were rooting from home for our favorite team. Politics, Hersh argues, is about engaging with other people, forming or joining groups with a common goal, and taking action together. In the age of the internet and social media, it’s possible to find others far away who share your interests or want solutions to the same problems as you do, and to organize with them. But for the most part, forming or joining groups in your own home community is the easiest and most powerful option. After all, you already have so much in common – most obviously, the physical spaces you share, the playgrounds and parks and plazas, the air and water in those spaces, the electric and phone lines overhead, and the roads that connect them. When an emergency like a hurricane or a fire or a pandemic hits, you are all affected together. Instead of each of you fending for yourself after that emergency, it’s a lot more efficient to throw your lot in together—which also makes it a lot easier to deal with the terror and trauma of the emergency, because you’re not facing it alone.

Where Power Lives

Local officials have power over important things in our daily lives, but a lot of people don’t even make it to the bottom of the ballot to vote for state and local races in elections—which means that if you do, your vote has more power. In fact, people pay so little attention to these races that a person (even you) can just decide to file to run for office, or even get a few friends to write their name in, and end up in power more easily than you might expect. (Another hot tip about voting in local races: If you vote by mail, you can look up each candidate online with the ballot in front of you, so you don’t have to memorize them all.)

At The Citizens Campaign, we taught people to focus on moving policy proposals through four “power centers” of local government, where decisions are made about new laws:

1. The executive branch, which can include a mayor, city council, county council, and/or board of commissioners, depending on where you live

2. The school board

3. Local political party committees (Democrats, Republicans, and any other local parties)

4. The planning board, which establishes the master plan for building and infrastructure (including zoning laws and new development)

In Philadelphia, we just got another lesson in local government because a labor union of city workers went on strike. This union includes sanitation workers, public pool staff and lifeguards, librarians, construction workers and road repair crews, public health and community clinic workers, 911 emergency line operators, and others. And when trash collection, libraries, and public pools shut down in July in a heat wave, you really notice! (Seriously, it was a dumpster fire—I think there was literally a dumpster fire one night.)

In addition, our state legislature in Pennsylvania recently cut off funding for our regional transit agency, which means that my neighbors and I might not be able to ride a train into the city anymore, including a ton of people who use the train to commute to work. For reasons like this, the state level of politics is also a lot more important than most of us give it credit for. Prisons, DMVs, schools, courts, roads, transportation, energy from oil or natural gas or renewables, cannabis legalization, maternity and medical leave policies, food stamps, health insurance, state universities and community colleges—state governments make a lot of the decisions about how those things work.

State governments also control how elections work, from the kind of ballots we use and the times when we can register to vote, to implementing new and improved systems like ranked choice voting. For that reason, state governments will be a major focus of our work at The Renovator, where we’re interested in how we can make democracies more responsive and accessible to voters. And we hope that you will take a deep dive into your own state’s government and how it works, because every state is a little different, and there are opportunities for participation and renovation everywhere.

These powers of state and local government are all part of the design of our Constitution. We call the U.S. government the “federal” government because our Constitution is an example of a “federal” system. That means that it’s not one single state, but a group of distinct (but United) states. The word comes from the Latin word foedus, a treaty or agreement of partnership between cities or states (I used to be a Latin professor, I can’t resist). The federal government makes decisions on the national level about federal taxes, wars, and other policies, while other questions, like agricultural policy, need to be tailored more closely at the local level, so they are left up to the states.

In the Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the Constitution, we find the 10th Amendment: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” The states have power to make their own decisions about a lot of things.

A lot of the time, when Congress creates a new program, states decide how to put it into action. One huge example of this is Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act, which most of us call Obamacare. Medicaid is health insurance paid for by the government (i.e. by taxpayers), for people who wouldn’t be able to afford health insurance otherwise. This is a public good that we all chip in for: If these people didn’t have insurance to pay for healthcare, it would make them a lot sicker and would also make health care more expensive for the rest of us. Each state provides Medicaid to its own residents, using some state money but mostly federal money to pay for it. Obamacare made more people eligible for Medicaid in 2014, and promised more federal money to each state to pay for it. Republican governors in 10 states, however, did not accept that expansion or the money, leaving people to pay for their own health insurance (or, in many cases, not). The budget bill narrowly and hastily passed by Congress on July 3 of this year, among many other components, reduces the amount that states can pay to doctors and hospitals through Medicaid, cuts funding for hospitals that serve mostly patients on Medicaid, and requires states to get a lot more paperwork every year from patients. We’ll see how the states respond and adapt, if these changes are implemented in 2026.

The Renovator

All these revelations have helped to bring me to my own work with The Renovator. It may be hard to believe, but there are places in our country where democracy is getting stronger and working better than before. That’s not happening at the national level (yet!), but some states and cities are getting it done, and they’ll be an important model for other states and cities to follow. States can act as laboratories of democracy: We can try out 50 different systems of self-government, and adapt them to different populations.

Renovator founder Danielle Allen wrote in 2024 that we need a supermajority of Americans committed to constitutional democracy, even if we differ on other views. We are closer to that supermajority than you might think. Many state ballot initiatives moving in a more democratic direction have passed recently, like Florida’s 2018 ballot initiative to restore voting rights to those who have completed felony conviction, approved by 65% of voters in the state. “Look at these decisions and you'll see American supermajorities voting over and over again for fairness, inclusion and the person getting the short end of the stick. This is not only a cross-ideological supermajority in the making; it's one with good, salt-of-the-earth values,” she wrote.

Our work at The Renovator is to help shine a spotlight on actual, positive change. It’ll be a refreshing break from doomscrolling and dumpster fires, but more important, it’ll be a set of blueprints you can follow in your own community.

In this “Democracy 101” column, I’ll be breaking down the big questions and basic principles underneath it all, even—or especially—when I realize that I don’t know the answer yet myself. My goal is to provide facts, simple explanations, basic contexts, and links where you can learn more, without editorializing. If your response to a news story is “wait…what?” “why?” or “since when?,” you’re in the right place.

Read more:

Harry’s book! Citizen Power: A Citizen Leadership Manual

From the Thurgood Marshall Institute, “Leave No Power on the Table: Your Guide to Local Elections”

From Lee Drutman at Vox in 2018, “America has local political institutions but nationalized politics. This is a problem.” - laying out a history of how state and local politics have gotten less and less impactful in American democracy