Voting Turnout Impacts Community Wealth

Let me start by saying that voter engagement impacts the vibrancy, poverty levels, and wealth of your community in a big way.  Only one in five eligible voters shows up when a mayor's race lands on the ballot. School board seats, the ones deciding how our children are taught and how our property tax dollars get spent, sometimes draw as few as five to ten percent of eligible voters. Meanwhile, when the same races get moved onto the same ballot as a presidential election, turnout can triple or more. That gap between what we care about and what we show up for is not just a civics problem. It is an economic one.

I have spent years writing about what makes a Main Street thrive. New storefronts filled apartments above them, a farmers’ market that draws people downtown on Saturday mornings. But underneath all of that sits something less visible and more foundational: whether the people who live in a place participate in deciding what happens to it. The research on this is not soft or sentimental. It is measurable, and it points in one direction.

When Baltimore shifted its local elections onto the same calendar as state and federal races in 2016, turnout jumped from thirteen percent to sixty percent. That is not a small shift. That is the difference between a handful of the most connected residents choosing who runs the city and something closer to the whole community having a say. Researchers who study municipal elections consistently find that when timing, awareness, and simple logistics improve, so does participation, and so does the sense that local government belongs to everyone rather than a select few.

There is another signal worth noting. Two decades ago, roughly four percent of voters left down ballot local races blank once they got past president or governor. By 2024, that number had fallen below one percent. More voters are finishing the whole ballot, not just the top of it, which means more of us are weighing in on the county commission and the school board rather than skipping past them.

The economic case is where this gets interesting for those of us focused on Main Street rather than Wall Street. During the last major recession, the National Conference on Citizenship tracked states by their civic health, meaning how often residents attended public meetings, helped neighbors, volunteered, and voted. The ten states that scored highest on civic engagement and nonprofit density had an average unemployment rate of nearly two percent lower than the less connected states and communities. Let me repeat that number, states with high social cohesion kept unemployment two full points lower than similar states without it, even after accounting for other economic factors. Civic participation, in other words, acted like an economic shock absorber.

There is a poverty angle too, and it comes from some of the most rigorous economic research done in the past decade. Researchers at Opportunity Insights, working with anonymized data from tens of billions of friendships, found that the strongest predictor of whether a child born into a low-income family climbs into the middle class is not the poverty rate of their neighborhood or its racial makeup on their own. It is economic connectedness, meaning how often people of different income levels know each other and interact as neighbors and equals. Children raised in counties with high economic connectedness saw incomes rise by twenty percent on average compared to children raised in disconnected counties. Voting, attending the pancake breakfast, sitting on a board, joining the volunteer fire department auxiliary, these are the everyday mechanisms that build the kind of cross class relationships that connectedness requires.

None of this means every ballot measure or candidate is the answer to poverty. It means the habit of showing up, in the voting booth and at the town meeting and on the sidewalk talking to a neighbor, is itself a form of community infrastructure. Just like sidewalks and broadband, civic participation must be built and maintained, or it erodes.

Here at home, I see the same pattern in miniature. The chambers, Main Street organizations, and tourism organizations that thrive are the ones where residents attend the annual meeting, participate on local boards, and volunteer for the committee nobody wants to chair. The quiet organizations, the ones where three people make every decision because nobody else shows up, tend to drift, eventually struggle and then become extinct.

So here is my ask, and you can do it before the day is out. Look up when your next local election is, whether it is a city council seat, a school board race, or a special district vote, and put it somewhere you will actually see it. Then tell one neighbor to do the same. That is how Main Street gets built, one vote and one conversation at a time.

John A. Newby, a Chamber CEO, Publisher & Media Executive, Business Owner, Consultant, and International Speaker is the author of the "Building Main Street, Not Wall Street" a column dedicated to helping local businesses & communities build stronger foundations allowing them to thrive in a world where local is lost to Wall Street interests. His email is john@truly-local.org

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