To recall what we presumably learned in college if not in high school, the American political system is federal in nature: our federal government exercises certain powers and provides for certain individual rights, and our state governments exercise other powers and provide certain individual rights.
The foundations of those two types of powers differ, however, with significant consequences for our lives.
The federal government, we recall, is one of delegated powers, entitled to exercise only those powers that the U.S. Constitution has delegated or granted to it. If we ask whether the federal government has power X or provides for individual right Y, the default answer is no, unless warrant can be found for that power or individual right in the U.S. Constitution.
There used to be arguments over whether that warrant must be stated explicitly in the black-letter text of the Constitution, or whether it can be inferred as implicit in a particular black-letter clause. For the most part, that issue was settled in support of implicit powers and rights, though controversies still arise.
By contrast, state governments have what is called the police power, a concept that certainly includes law enforcement in the narrow sense but also a much broader range of powers. The police powers of the states are the powers they possess to enact legislation to protect the health, safety, welfare, and morals of their populations.
From the federal standpoint, if we ask whether the states have power X, the default answer is yes, unless there is a prohibition on it to be found explicitly or implicitly in the black-letter text of the federal constitution.
For example, Roe v. Wade (1973) established that there was a fundamental individual right in the U.S. Constitution that blocked attempts by state governments to use their police powers to regulate or limit abortion in certain ways. With the overturning of Roe in the 2022 Dobbs decision, validating the claim that there was no such individual right that controlled state abortion policies, states became free again to use their police powers to regulate and limit abortion (how far remains to be seen).
My general point here is that outside of questions of war and peace and macro-economic stability, the overwhelming number of issues that affect people are at the local level, handled by local and state governments under their police powers.
The Levin Center, whose official mission is to strengthen democracy, notes that “With all eyes on the presidential election, it’s easy to forget that there are a host of other offices on the ballot. While the federal government dominates the news, the average citizen is much more likely to interact with state and local government on a regular basis.”
Consequently, while not politically “sexy” in the sense of drawing substantial media coverage, elections to state and local offices matter.
Now, a state political “trifecta” is the term observers use for unified government. It exists when a single political party has majority control in both houses of the state legislature along with control of the governor’s office. According to the helpful folks at Ballotpedia, since 1992 Iowa has had ten years of Republican and four years of Democratic trifectas; the other years were divided government.
Significantly, the last year of the Democratic trifectas was 2010, and Republicans have held a trifecta from 2017 to the present. The fact that Republicans currently control the state Senate with a 34-16 majority (one Republican seat is currently vacant) and the state House with a 64-36 majority is highly significant for the exercise of those police powers. Iowa’s controversial fetal-heartbeat law is an example.
Accepting the premise that state and local elections matter, my point about voting is that significant numbers of voters across the country who cast a ballot in a presidential race often leave the voting booth without casting a ballot for candidates in those state and local elections.
Political analysts call this phenomenon “roll-off,” something to which Iowa elections are not immune. By my own calculations, based upon election results from the New York Times, Iowans in 2020 cast a total of 1,690,871 votes for president.
In the Iowa U.S. Senate race that year (Ernst vs. Greenfield), Iowans cast a total of 1,670,617 votes—20,254 fewer votes than they cast for president. In the four Iowa U.S. House districts, Iowans cast a total of 1,637,050 votes—53,821 fewer votes than they cast for president.
Now, at the state-legislature level, there were 125 elections in 2020: all 100 state House districts, and 25 of the 50 state Senate districts. I have not been able to find the micro-level data that would tell us the roll-off from the total 2020 Iowa vote for president. We know, however, that voters often just skip marking their ballot for races when the names are not familiar to them.
Don’t fail to exercise your right to vote at any electoral level. Voting takes work to know who the candidates are, but that is a price of citizenship.
Pay it.
