The Nationalization of Elections Is Anti-American

By Christian Schneider

Thursday, November 06, 2025

 

On Tuesday, Kentucky Secretary of State Michael Adams said his office had been receiving some unusual calls: Residents were confused about why the polls were closed. He explained on Twitter (X) that the polls were not open because Kentucky did not have any elections this year. “You cannot vote today in Kentucky for the mayor of New York City or the Governor of Virginia,” he said, adding, “Sorry.”

 

Granted, there were some smaller elections all throughout the country — for instance, the City of Cincinnati, which sits right across the border from Kentucky, had a mayoral election. But the belief that elections of national importance were taking place yesterday is simply evidence of a psychosis in American politics brought about by the nationalization of our political process.

 

If you don’t live in New York City, New Jersey, or Virginia, the mayoral and gubernatorial elections in those states will not affect your life in any way. The fact that New York elected a formerly shirtless rapper as its mayor is of no concern to anyone without direct ties to the Big Apple. (Incidentally, last year, Zohran Mamdani reported $1,267 in income related to his music career, which is roughly how much a loaf of bread is going to cost at one of his government-run grocery stores.)

 

And yet, Tuesday night’s cable network coverage focused on only a handful of state and local races, with the intensity of a presidential election year. Fox News, CNN, and MSNBC all burned hours of programming explaining what this week’s votes meant for the MAGA movement, for the 2026 midterms, and even the 2028 presidential election. The elections led the front pages of every national news outlet, all of which have been running frantic stories about these elections for months.

 

But what is the real effect of these two gubernatorial elections and the New York mayoral election? If you don’t live in those areas, the answer is nothing. Nada. Zilch. They don’t tell us what the state of politics will be a week from now, much less a year or three away. Abigail Spanberger’s reign as governor in Virginia won’t affect tax rates in Arkansas, and Mikie Sherrill’s tenure as New Jersey governor won’t turn kids in Montana into drag queens.

 

In fact, George Washington crossed a lot of rivers and killed a lot of Brits to ensure that future American citizens didn’t have to care what happens in other states. Our federalist system requires us to focus our attention on the place where it matters most: our local and state governments. It’s a lot easier to sway a school board member than a U.S. senator.

 

But federal politics have now so thoroughly vacuumed up our attention span that every state and local election becomes a referendum on what is happening nationally. Both progressives and the new brand of nationalist “conservatives” agree that there is no problem either big or small enough that the federal government can’t fix it — thus, with so many aspects of our lives dependent on national politics, every ballot cast anywhere becomes a clue as to where federal elections may be headed. Polls are expensive and unreliable; elections give us a snapshot as to what voters are actually thinking.

 

Or at least we think they do. Statewide elections can provide a temporary measure of the national public’s dyspepsia, but individual state elections are run by different candidates with different issues at play. A terrible Republican candidate losing in one state in 2025 is not predictive of a race featuring a great Republican candidate running in a different state in 2026.

 

But the national media never learn. Every few years, for instance, Wisconsin holds a Supreme Court election in April that floods the state with national reporters. In 2023, the New York Times breathlessly reported the race between liberal Janet Protasiewicz and conservative Daniel Kelly carried “bigger policy stakes than any other race in the country” that year.

 

Protasiewicz dominated the election, leading liberals to think 2024 was going to be their year. Donald Trump was an anvil holding down Republicans! The overturning of Roe v. Wade was going to kill the GOP with suburban soccer moms!

 

And you know who won Wisconsin in the next year’s presidential election? Donald Trump.

 

Of course, the rise of social media has exacerbated this problem. X and other platforms are sponges that soak up every state and local election and convert them into national news. For instance, people from far and wide across the nation spent weeks routinely banging on their keyboards about Virginia attorney general candidate Jay Jones, who had previously texted colleagues about wanting to shoot his political opponents. Yet despite national condemnation, Virginia voters responded with a collective shrug and elected Jones to the commonwealth’s top law enforcement job anyway.

 

Elections are our entertainment, and the election industrial complex needs to be fed. Those Substack posts aren’t going to write themselves. Somehow, NBC needs to pay for Steve Kornacki’s strategic khaki reserve.

 

As a side note, it is about time we drop the idea that the mayor of New York City is somehow “America’s Mayor” and thus granted outsized media coverage. Enormous cities like Los Angeles and Chicago also have horrifying mayors, but they tend to slip under the radar because everyone is focused on who’s running the Big Apple. Ed Koch hosted Saturday Night Live not once, but twice — America is a big country and surely we have the attention span to give more mayors the spotlight.

 

Clearly, America is better when we recognize our electoral humility. For people of a certain age, the idea of their parents sitting down in 1981 and telling them, “Sorry, I can’t play Uno with you because Idaho is holding a special election and I need to know how that might affect Ronald Reagan’s reelection effort in 1984” is patently absurd. And yet it is how we currently operate.

 

Instead of being glued to your television watching election coverage for a contest that makes absolutely no difference, play a board game with your kids. Learn a musical instrument. And if you want to watch TV, do as I did and tune in to a reality show competition like The Traitors, where contestants lie, cheat, and stab each other in the back in order to win.

 

Come to think of it, maybe I was actually watching election coverage.