Non-Partisan Victory Party

Grand Rapids MI has elected a new mayor, and in the process ruined one of the surest predictions I'd ever made regarding local politics. But you'll have to forgive me: I didn't really understand what I was talking about.

At the time, John Logie, Sr. was in his first term, replacing a homophobic dork named Helmholdt, who'd given no end of close-minded grief to the lesbian/gay community. When Logie was slow-moving in changing city policy to be more gay-friendly, some people started to bitch and talk about replacing him. "He's the most liberal mayor this city is going to see in our lifetimes," I cautioned. This is a city dominated by the Republican Party and conservative Christian denominations, after all. We were lucky to get Logie - member of a liberal non-denominational church downtown - in the first place. Under Logie's leadership, city government became much less hostile, and eventually added "sexual orientation" to the city's non-discrimination ordinance, as we'd been asking.

But I was wrong about his place in history. Turns out the new guy makes Logie look like a member of the Chamber of Commerce. His name is George Heartwell, and he needs no educating about civil rights. As a City Commissioner he was one of our advocates, and before that he ran a program to aid the homeless and poor living in one of downtown's blighted neighborhoods. Formerly a Reformed Church pastor, he left the denomination over its abysmal positions on social issues. I've spoken with Heartwell (we sat next to each other at a dinner) and when I heard he was running for mayor, I wanted to rush out and get a yard sign from him. I didn't need to.

Heartwell won the primary with over 80% of the vote, which means there won't be a run-off election in November. It might have been a closer race if a stronger challenger had run against him (the other two candidates were political newcomers), but the fact that no one else filed in response to his well-in-advance announcement means he was pretty much elected by general acclaim.

What's weird about all this is that we're talking about Grand Rapids, a city where the primaries usually decide the outcome of the final election, because the run-off is between a Republican and a Democrat, and the Democrat always loses. It's a city dominated by conservative Calvinist churches. So how did we get a three-term non-denominational mayor followed by a bleeding heart refugee from one of those denominations?

What I didn't realise at the time of my prediction was that there was plenty of precedent for this iconoclasm in City Hall. I didn't realise that the mayor before Helmholdt (when I was still a kid) was a Jew: Abe Drasin. And the mayor before him, in the early 1970's, was black: Lyman Parks, elected here when Detroit was still electing white guys to be mayor.

None of which makes any sense until you look at the big difference between city politics and the rest of politics in this city: the elections are held in odd-numbered years, and there are no party affiliations. I don't know Heartwell's or Logie's party registration (which is kinda the point) but they each hang with known Democrats and probably vote that way at least some of the time. But neither had to run for office with that word on their yard signs or next to their name on the ballot. And the local GOP wasn't obligated to field a prominent candidate to run under their banner to oppose either of them. I suspect it was much the same with Drasin and Parks: without their party to tell them whom to elect, the voters listened to the candidates, made up their mind based on what each person was like, and voted accordingly. The voter turn-out is also much smaller, which means that the dunderheads who just vote a straight GOP ticket stayed home, and neither party had a get-out-the-vote effort.

I'm not exactly endorsing low voter turn-out as a Good Thing (though there is a fairly strong argument to be made along those lines), but the non-partisanship of these city elections has put some darn good - and diverse - people in the mayor's office. And considering what a corrupt mess the rest of the party-driven electoral system has become over the past 200+ years, this is a good argument for doing away with - or at least cutting back the prominence of - political parties. They're undemocratic, and bad for the republic.