Turnout For What
From the ancient astronomers who first charted the stars to modern physicists probing the depths of space, humanity has always been driven by an insatiable curiosity to unravel the universe’s most profound mysteries. Our sense of wonder compels us to comprehend the incomprehensible, to see the unseeable. We speculate about places beyond the boundaries of human perception, imagining what we’d find in the hidden recesses of black holes. Alien intelligence? Portals to hellish alternate dimensions? Matthew McConaughey? But no matter how badly we want to know, we’ll probably never find out. This also happens to be true when it comes to guessing what’s going on inside the minds of people who didn’t vote in the June Democratic primary.
Here in Alexandria, despite all the hurly-burly of campaign season, there are more people who don’t vote in local elections than people who do. Or in the case of last month’s primary, way more—turnout was only 16% of registered voters. Which naturally raises a lot of questions. Why didn’t the other 84% decide to cast ballots? How do the non-voters feel about the results? Why didn’t Matthew McConaughey get crushed when he went into the black hole? [Editor’s note: Sorry, it’s been ten years and we’re still confused by the plot of that movie.] Pondering these mysteries is all harmless fun until low turnout—and the imagined reasons for it—starts being offered up as evidence that the results are not what the majority of Alexandrians want. This is a claim that’s been aired in various local online forums over the past couple weeks, and it is a deeply eye-roll worthy complaint to say the least.
The thing is, we have one actual way of figuring out what people want here, and it’s deep space travel telepathy witchcraft Alexandria Times letters to the editors elections. Yeah, we know. Hot take alert! But seriously… that’s what an election is. No one has done any scientifically valid local polling on candidates or policies (and no, online surveys do 👏 not 👏 count 👏). Any assertions about what “the majority” of Alexandrians want, especially to the extent that those desires differ from the results we got on June 18, are the fever dreams of chronic ALXNow commenters with a bad case of Nextdoor brain. It’s just not something that anyone can claim evidentiary proof of with any degree of legitimate confidence.
Academics have even tackled this, and a number of studies have found little or no difference between the policy preferences of voters and non-voters. Others have shown that voters do tend to differ from non-voters in that—especially in low-turnout races—voters tend to skew slightly older and more conservative. So what does this mean for the claim that there are a substantial number of non-voters out there who disapprove of the city’s current direction square with the behavioral science we’ve written about before showing that people who oppose things are more motivated to participate in civic discourse? We don’t know. You don’t know. And because Alexandria’s non-voters chose not to register their opinion in any official way, none of us can know because we are not mind readers and unlike Matthew McConaughey do not have access to a four-dimensional tesseract.
However, we do know what the people who voted want, and that’s useful and important information. More than that, it’s the information that counts! Generally speaking, it seems like voters have shown they’re pretty happy with the way things are going—all top six finishers in the Council primary are current elected officials. In our view, that’s a solid endorsement for the next Council to continue doing more of what the city has been doing, to keep pursuing the types of policies that have been advanced in recent years: economic development, housing affordability and accessibility, racial equity, and sustainability, to name a few of the higher-profile examples.
Look, is it great that turnout was so low this year (and for that matter every year when only local races are being contested)? Of course not. Democracy works best when more people participate. And we should continue to seek ways to increase voting rates, like aligning election dates when possible so people don’t have to go to the polls as often. But that’s not to say that residents convinced their slow-growth preferences represent a vast silent majority should use low turnout as an excuse to do a Four Seasons Total Landscaping and reject the results of this primary. Like Rudy Giuliani’s hair dye, democracy is messy, and voters will never perfectly represent the public as a whole. So we work with what we’ve got, like we always have. All eligible voters in the city had an opportunity to weigh in if they wanted to do so—between in-person early voting and mail voting it’s pretty darn easy to cast a ballot here. Ultimately, questioning the validity of the outcome is an insult to the nearly 20,000 Alexandrians who took the time to make their voices heard. So let’s leave the black hole spelunking to characters in unnecessarily convoluted sci-fi films and chart our course by the stars—the votes—that are actually visible to us.
Things You May Have Missed Because You Have a Life
Freedom House Museum got a nice profile this week in the national travel magazine AFAR.
The Zebra posted an article about local squirrels “splooting” during the heat wave. Apparently this term means an attempt to cool down by lying flat on the ground and not, as we’ve been led to believe, something that happens to you after a visit to the Taco Bell Cantina.
Everyone is talking about the 250th anniversary of the Fairfax Resolves, meanwhile we’re wondering when Fairfax will Resolve to stop pretending it’s part of the city of Alexandria.
Local Discourse Power Rankings
America’s Non-275th Birthday (Last week: NR). Ohhhhh my god you turned 248 years old this week? Should we tell everyone? Should we throw a party? Should we invite the Marquis de Lafayette? Listen sweetie, you’ve always been younger and less mature than Alexandria and we’re used to you embarrassing us like the annoying little sibling you are, but your behavior lately has been out of pocket and not in a good way. Like, the way you’re showing your whole ass with last week’s “presidents are kings now” and “regulations are for dorks” Supreme Court dipshitpalooza is actually excessive. Maybe instead of celebrating you should take a break to look at your life, look at your choices. Get back to us when you’ve reached your bicenterquasquigenary, until then please leave the self-congratulatory parties to the big kids with functioning governments.
Pyrotechnical Foul (Last week: NR). Speaking of parties… it seems like a great number of you didn’t bother to read the charming temporary warning signs erected on the city’s borders last week admonishing all of us “FIREWORKS ILLEGAL INSIDE ALEX.” First of all, sorry to Alex. That sounds both dangerous and painful. As for the rest of you, you’re all way too invested in stimulating the economy of West Virginia! It’s just disappointing on so many levels that off all the things we’ve collectively decided to smuggle into and across the commonwealth we settled on whimsical munitions and not, you know, allocated bourbon or decent crabs.
Summer Can’ts (Last week: NR). Did the standard workday get shortened and no one remembered to tell us? Feels like every summer camp is wrapping up at 3:15 in the afternoon, which (unless that McConaughey timey-wimey black hole thing is kicking in again) does NOT come after 5:00pm. Did the high school counselors unionize or something? Have they collectively bargained for a shorter workday?? We don’t get it. The basic social contract of summer camps is that bored and mostly disinterested teens do a basically competent job of keeping our children alive and generally un-sunburnt for 8-9 hours, and in exchange we get to do our jobs and stay employed. When did that get cut back to 5-6 hours!! It’s so upsetting that the teens went out and got better representation than we parents have, damn. Get our agent on the phone.
Noah Lyles (Last week: NR). It remains incredibly cool that the current fastest man in the world hails from the Port City. Noah Lyles is going to kick so much ass at the Olympics, literally the only thing that could refill our tank of patriotism after so much of it drained out during the events of the past week. Watching his playful exuberance at the Trials last week was a breath of fresh air, and reminded us that it’s ok to have fun even when you’re doing otherwise serious things at a high level. Now if you’ll excuse us, we’re looking into how we might also get Snoop to deliver us our daily outfit in a silver briefcase because, man, that’s living right.
You Idiots Are Doing This Road Wrong (Last week: 3). The city is evaluating options for reconfiguring King Street by the Bradlee shopping center, including potentially adding cycling infrastructure. This idea, of course, makes no sense. There’s no need to build bike lanes there because no one bikes there. This is absolutely not a cause-and-effect relationship that could be influenced in any way by changing the physical configuration of the road. To suggest as much is preposterous, especially when the upshot is to take away one single inch of our service road, a thing we did not realize we cherished with every fiber of our beings until this very second.
The Alexandria Times Quote of the Week
“Perhaps O’Connell’s penchant for penning snarky blogs that denigrate local residents with whom he disagrees on city issues caused those very local residents to cast their votes for others. As they say, what goes around very often comes around. Or, more simply: karma. We suggest that as the Alexandria Times quote of the week.”
Ok, fine. But only because you asked so nicely.
We Get Letters
Dear editor, is there an interesting story behind the brick police? Do they rumble with the parking mercenaries?
Signed,
Medium-time resident recently tuned into local politics
We’re glad you asked, MTRRTILP, because this is important information everyone needs to know. While various officers of the law are charged with enforcing rules around here, it’s Alexandria’s worst-kept secret that the brick police actually run this town. They take their mission very seriously: to protect the sanctity of the bricks’ one true color (red). You don’t want to get on their bad side or you may find yourself subject to fines, penalties, and/or stern lectures on chromatic sacrilege. The parking mercenaries aren’t their rivals but rather key partners in their reign of terror, working together to enforce aesthetic harmony and occasionally holding joint training exercises to drill recruits in the arts of precision ticketing and spotting a brick’s unauthorized hue from fifty paces. Consider yourself warned.
One Awesome Thing in ALX
We’ve written before about our appreciation for Casa Chirilagua, an organization that serves the city’s Latino community by providing academic and mentoring support to local students. But did you know they also have a SPACE CAMP? Now, before you get all excited about the kids of Alexandria blasting off and exploring the far reaches of the universe (following beloved Hollywood actors into black holes, perhaps) [Editor’s note: BAM! THEMATIC CLOSURE, BITCHES] we should probably tell you that they aren’t actually sending the kids into space. We know, we know. False advertising. But the camp is nonetheless very cool! From July 8 to 26, a group of 55 Casa Chirilagua students will work on robotics and coding projects in a bilingual setting, working on their STEM skills and hopefully also having a great time.
Casa Chirilagua runs this camp in partnership with CODE Rising, a non-profit organization dedicated to STEM education. It’s totally free for the kids, which is amazing. But that means they need support from the community in order to make it happen. If you’re interested in helping out, you can donate here—funds are used to provide learning materials like robotics kits, coding software, and Chromebooks, and of course to pay the instructors who lead and mentor the students. And if we all chip in a little extra, maybe they can even get the kids some NASA freeze-dried ice cream.
You can follow Becky @beckyhammer.bsky.social and Jesse @oconnell.bsky.social on Bluesky, or you can e-mail us anytime at alxtranewsletter@gmail.com.