Join the PTA. No, seriously.

A lot of important politics is the stuff we pretend isn't politics

My three main pieces of citizen political advice:

• First, stop being a political hobbyist and start doing politics.

• Second, for the love of God, do not send money to a presidential candidate.

• The politics you should do is hyper-local

Go touch local political grass

In my view, the most important political science book written in the last decade is Eitan Hersh’s Politics Is For Power. The central argument of the book is this: a lot of college-educated upper-middle class people forgot how to do politics. Instead, they became what Hersh calls “political hobbyists,” who can tell you all about the soap opera going on in the Senate or the landscape for the 2024 election, but essentially don’t participate in actual politics. Or even know how to participate.

Politics has become a sport they observe but don’t play. They follow political news obsessively, but their own political activity amounts to voting, clicking likes on Facebook, and maybe donating small amounts of money. The actual work of politics—organizing people, pressuring officials, acquiring and using public authority to wield power over public policy—is something they almost, well, look down upon.

Hersh has lots of interesting insights on the origins and consequences of this—seriously, read the book—but a strand running through it that also resonated with me was the particular lack of engagement many of these hobbyists bring to local politics. I’ve always been keen to the idea that most people pay too much attention to national politics; it’s more or less absurd if you know and care more about some Senate race on the other side of the country than about who is running your kids’ school. I’ve written plenty of long threads about this on Twitter.

Matt Glassman @MattGlassman312

Now that we’re entering Serious Presidential Election Season™️, here’s my regular plea for you to pay more attention to local politics this year, and to prioritize local political action ahead of national. It’s important, easier to influence, and chronically lacks citizen input.

As Hersh documents in his book, one of the drivers of political hobbyism is social media, which creates a massive facade in which bullshit complaining online masquerades as actual political action. People like posts, sign online petitions, signal their hatred of Donald Trump or Kamala Harris, and generally accomplish nothing of substance beyond enhanced hobbyism. And it’s twice as bad for local politics. The faux community created online is inevitably national community. The core structure of the internet and social media aggregation funnels everyone into discussion about J.D. Vance and Nancy Pelosi, not their town council and zoning ordinances.

Kamala Harris doesn’t need your help

I’m going to be as blunt as I can about this: sending your money to a presidential candidate is fucking insane. They don’t need it. Kamala Harris raised $500 million dollars in the last month. On the other hand, Trump is really struggling. He and the GOP only raised $138 million. More is going to be pouring in every day. They are both closer to drowning in massive amounts of money than in need of your $200.

Now, a lot of people get some personal satisfaction from supporting the candidates they prefer, and that’s totally fine. And some campaigns like to tout the number of small donors they have because they think it helps their appeal to swing voters. Great. Send them $1 and check off both boxes.¹ But remember: there’s is almost nothing your marginal $100 is going to do for these campaigns.

Instead, put your money into local politics. This is a basic expected value calculation. Your $250 will have almost no marginal impact when the Trump campaign dumps it into the warchest, but it’s probably enough money to fund an entire campaign for school board in many small towns. Those campaigns are chronically underfunded, and lots of good people don’t even jump in them because they don’t want to spend their own $1000 or whatever on the necessary advertising materials.

Same thing for your time. If you’ve got two hours to spend working for a political cause, you just aren’t getting the bang-for-your-buck knocking on doors for Kamala Harris. Especially if you don’t live in Pennsylvania. Instead, go volunteer in a local election. A single person walking door-to-door for a town council candidate might swing the race. Five people doing that will often swing the race.

But even better, get yourself out of the electoral game completely. Put your time and money into influencing politics during the governance phase. Because there’s even less citizen engagement there, and seriously little at the local level. Go yell at the town council. Tell the school principal what they are doing right and what they are doing wrong. Show up at the homeowner’s association meeting. Join the PTA. You will be absolutely shocked at the results you get.

And yes, talking to the elementary school principal is participating in politics. In some ways, it’s the essence of politics. Way more so than watching the DNC and firing off some tweets.

The PTA is some serious political shit

Sometimes you’ll hear people say “everything is political.” There’s a kernel of insight to that—all group decision-making among humans in some sense is political—but in a lot of cases it just makes peoples’ eyes roll and tends to obscure a really important underlying point: most people have too narrow a definition of politics.

We can argue about whether a family birthday party is political or not, but what’s undeniably true is that the policies for your kids’ classroom at school and the resources the teacher has to do her job are the consequence of politics, and you can and should participate in politics by trying to influence them. And I’m not talking about federal funding or anything fancy like that. I’m talking about going to the bathroom.

Let me explain: I got a note from the elementary school last week that there’s a new bathroom usage policy in effect this year. Instead of kids raising their hand and asking to go the bathroom, every class is going to go to the bathroom twice a day as a group.

That struck me as weird. I have no idea what the genesis of the policy—my guess is that they’ve had some bad behavior in the bathrooms?—and I doubt it’s going to work that well in practice (will teachers really enforce it? Is it worth the waste of time?), but it also just struck me as bad policy. So I dropped a note to the principal yesterday with my concerns. And I’m pretty sure he’ll get back to me today. And I’m pretty sure my note is going to make him rethink the policy, at least a little bit.

But this is what most of politics actually is. Influencing policy by talking to decision-makers, in order to improve public life in your community. I have one set of friends who resist this. They don’t think it’s appropriate to tell the school administrators what they think, they don’t think it will do any good, or they’d just rather complain. I am here to tell you that if you talk to decision-makers in local politics you will influence their decisions. I have another set of friends who constantly talk to the school principal, the PTA leaders, and the folks running the town government. And they get results.

A state-federal partnership grant at work, literally in my neighborhood

And that’s the real upshot here: getting involved in the hyper-local politics will get you tangible results for your efforts. And most of the time you don’t have to deal with all the partisan bullshit that comes along with national politics. There are big fights down at the PTA—it can feel a lot like Congress—but they usually aren’t tribal/partisan in any discernable sense. People just disagree about what to do with limited supplies of money. That’s politics!

And there’s zero—and I mean zero—entry cost to getting involved formally in hyper-local politics. Like my dad always said, “rule one of local politics is show up and shut up and pretty soon you’ll be making decisions.”² It really is that easy.³ Most of the hyper-local political institutions are dying for people to come volunteer to be the decision-makers. In many cases, it’s seen as a sacrifice to be the person in charge. Showing up really is 70% of local politics.

1. Honestly, since a lot of campaigns like to tout the really low average size of their donations, you are arguably helping them more at the strategic level by sending them a tiny amount.

2. My dad was an absolute wellspring of hardcore realist political thought and advice. I’ve documented this many times—on Twitter of course—but I can’t shake the feeling that he would have immediately cut through the hobbyist nature of Twitter and gotten to its core political problem in one devastating quip.

3. My own hyper-local political work is instructive on that count. I sent one email five years ago and two weeks later I was on the board of our neighborhood pool. Three years later they made me treasurer and now they want me to be president. I made one phone call to the school asking permission to write a quick grant to start a bike-to-school program. The town leaders saw my bike program and asked me to be on a bike advisory committee to the town council. Then they put me up for the planning commission.