On my Washington, D.C. ballot this year, there were eight choices to make. With just one exception, they ranged from meaningless to absurd.

The first was which presidential candidate should get our three electoral votes, which are certainly going to Kamala Harris; Democrats won D.C. in the last three elections by an average margin of 88 points. I voted for Harris, but it’s frustrating not to have any effect on what will probably be the closest presidential election since 2000.

I was given two picks for D.C. Council; there were four options, two incumbents and two others who didn’t seem to even have campaign websites. Another three races were for non-voting members of Congress, whose only purpose would be the utterly futile task of convincing Congress to make D.C. a state. One candidate was a former Council member who served prison time for taking $55,000 in bribes.

There were two uncontested races — one for a school board position, and the other for my neighborhood’s representative on the Advisory Neighborhood Commission (ANC). The incumbent running unopposed, Alan Kensek, is known for terrorizing bar staff and threatening to use his elected position against them.

The only choice that’s truly uncertain is Initiative 83, a measure that would establish ranked-choice primaries and allow independent voters to participate in one party primary of their choosing. As Reuters (Center bias) recently explained, ranked-choice voting changes the political game by allowing voters to pick true favorite candidates without having to vote strategically. I strongly support the initiative, but the Washington Post (Lean Left) reported D.C.’s Democratic party, mayor, and Council chair all oppose it and could potentially block its implementation.

It’s understandable why many people like me who move to D.C. either stay registered in their home state or simply don’t bother to vote. The presidential election feels about as high-stakes as possible, while our local choices are laughable. Indeed, D.C. ranked among the bottom half of states in 2020 election turnout.

But the idea that state and local elections are less important than national elections is misguided. In fact, local races are where your vote and civic engagement make the biggest difference, by virtue of the voter pools being much smaller. And local election outcomes have the largest direct impact on your life — even if you live in a non-state like D.C. They’re also a crucial piece of the foundation for a healthy and responsive federal government, providing entry-level opportunities for future national leaders.

RELATED: Are You an Engaged Citizen or a Political Hobbyist?

Unfortunately, polarization on the national level is driving more and more neglect of local elections. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy: less attention is paid to local offices, fewer and lower-quality candidates run for them, local politics seem less worth getting invested in — rinse and repeat. Those who win uncompetitive races are left unchecked and often exploit their offices to the benefit of themselves or their friends, further diminishing the legitimacy of local government.

To reverse the trend, more Americans ought to pay more attention to local politics — and not just on Election Day, but throughout the terms of their local officials. Reforms like ranked-choice voting can help make local politics more inviting, but a revitalization of local government can only happen if the public adopts strong norms of civic engagement and backs out of the lobster trap that is polarization.

RELATED: Ranked Choice Voting Improves Politicians’ Incentives and Should Reduce Political Polarization

Local Government Matters to You — Yes, You

If you ask me my favorite part of living in D.C., the thing that immediately comes to mind is its bike infrastructure.

Since 2001, the District has converted car lanes into over 100 miles of bike lanes, making it the fifth most bike-friendly American city. And since 2010, the pioneering Capital Bikeshare public-private partnership has seen tremendous success. Stations are available every few blocks across much of D.C., and the most remote stations in Virginia and Maryland reach as far as 25 miles from the city’s center.

In an extremely car-reliant country, D.C.’s bike infrastructure is a huge step forward for reducing per-capita emissions, encouraging healthy lifestyles, and minimizing deadly car crashes. It’s the biggest transformation of physical reality in the city for decades, but it wasn’t authorized by Congress in an omnibus spending bill. It wasn’t created by an executive order from the President. It came to life after years of Council votes, zoning assessments, impact reports, and comment periods.

Think about the infrastructure in your own community — how different might your life be if local officials had made just a few decisions differently?

This is of course not to say that every community in America should install bike lanes and bikeshare stations. They clearly make the most sense in dense, urban environments. But that’s the beauty of federalism: I don’t get to force rural residents to make way for bike lanes, and they don’t get to force me to bike in car lanes.

All that said, D.C.’s bike-friendly policies exemplify some of the problems with having an unengaged electorate. Though I think they’ve been a home run for the city, they’re disproportionately used by white, male, high-earning professionals, and fewer stations are located in places with more longtime D.C. residents.

Studies of local politics have shown the small portion of residents who pay attention to them typically have some combination of time, energy, and faith in government which most others do not. When outcomes seem more favorable to one group over the majority, inequality and polarization snowball.

Disengaged voters are also less likely to notice a policy decision until it’s implemented, prompting backlash over something they didn’t have a voice in. For many D.C. drivers, one day a bike lane suddenly appeared on their work commute route, and they never had a say in it. Driver backlash has already prompted the city to cancel a planned bike lane on one of its busiest and most dangerous roads.

But perhaps the biggest factor that’s setting local government up for failure is the accelerating partisan polarization sweeping the entire country.

National Polarization Makes Local Government Worse

In recent years, communities across the nation have been swept up in a “culture war” over whether themes of race and LGBTQ identity belong in the classroom, exemplified by videos of heated school board meetings.

Concern over these disputes is evident in both left and right media, and for good reason. But often, it’s framed as “the other side is being too extreme about this, so rational people need to push back.” This framing makes people feel more righteous in prosecuting the culture wars instead of turning down the temperature.

Issues of race, gender, and sexuality are certainly consequential to many people, and I don’t mean to diminish or dismiss them. Children should feel comfortable and accepted in classrooms, and to that end, LGBTQ identification ought to be respected by teachers. And any teaching of American history without the ugly racial parts leaves students very poorly equipped to understand the world around them.

But outrage will not lead to lasting, positive change, no matter what that means to you. Progressive parents can’t create a tolerant school environment by indefinitely overruling conservative parents. Similarly, conservative parents can’t shield their children from ideas by banning them for all students. These create resentment and perpetual tug-of-war instead of understanding and consensus.

And frankly, there are much more relevant issues in education that are going unaddressed. These culture war fights occupied so much time in meetings that could have been better spent dealing with the massive crisis in American education brought on by policies aimed to stop the spread of COVID, a crisis characterized by chronic absenteeism and plummeting test scores.

Polarization has a few second-order effects that also impede local governance from being effective. Incumbents find it easier to argue that intraparty criticism and contested primaries pose an unacceptable risk of getting the other side elected, effectively shutting out all mechanisms of accountability. Parties divert more and more funding from local races, especially the least competitive ones, to a handful of national races. And moderates struggle mightily to win elections in polarized conditions, as primary voters in their own party increasingly choose the extremes, and general election voters in the other party are less willing to cross the aisle.

Anyone who’s not a Democrat has no hope of winning office in D.C. Hence, the only opportunities for voters to hold electeds accountable are Democratic primaries; but they’re often crowded, with no clear opposition candidate emerging against incumbents. Under our first-past-the-post voting system, incumbents often win with rather small pluralities of the vote. Besides, the D.C. Democratic Party has little incentive to facilitate robust primaries — perhaps even an incentive to keep them quiet so incumbents don’t have to work hard to be re-elected.

As Americans increasingly sort themselves into more politically homogenous communities, more places will experience the same problems D.C. has. But the trend can be countered if polarization’s ills are better and more widely understood, and people make a focused effort to bring local politics back down to the local level.

How to Make Local Politics Worthwhile (and Actually Local) Again

Escalating polarization sucking the life out of local politics is hard to combat because it’s something of a self-fulfilling prophecy: the higher the stakes people perceive in national elections, the higher they get.

As the author experienced while writing the above section, it’s hard to phrase an argument for cooperation and compromise between the two sides when each believes most or all of the other side’s policy positions are fundamentally dangerous — it intuitively feels like giving any ground could bring those policies closer to reality.

That’s why it takes a leap of faith to consider that, actually, collaborating with people whose views you find objectionable and dangerous makes those things less likely to happen. But research indicates it’s true.

That leap of faith can be facilitated simply by bringing people together in less contentious settings, starting conversations from collaborative and not combative values. Many people would be surprised at how much common ground they have with even their most bitter partisan rivals. And healthy local politics is, theoretically, the perfect venue for such conversations; everybody needs potholes fixed and garbage collected.

AllSides partners Living Room Conversations and Braver Angels provide venues for depolarizing contact, using thoughtfully developed conversation guides to remind participants of their commonalities and enabling productive discussions on topics that are otherwise often contentious.

Ranked-choice voting would also alleviate some of the problem by convincing those on the sidelines that local politics has something to offer them. It seems voters are increasingly frustrated with the choices they end up with in the general election — under first-past-the-post, voters must consider both how much they like a candidate (preferential voting) and how likely that candidate is to win based on their polling (strategic voting).

With ranked-choice voting, strategic voting virtually disappears. Instead of compromising between preference and win likelihood, you can rank first the candidate you genuinely think would do the best job. If that person wins, great. If they don’t, ranked-choice automates the process of going back to you and asking for your second choice, third choice, etc. It incentivizes incumbents to defend their own record during elections and govern responsively for constituents while in office.

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Ranked-choice rebalances the playing field by punishing ideologues, who win primaries by relying on small but highly motivated voter segments, and rewarding moderates, who can put together a broad coalition of support.

There is no silver bullet to slay polarization, and it may take decades to unwind. But we can all take steps in our communities to marginally depolarize the country, with the added benefits of insulating ourselves from dogmatic partisan politicians on the national level and getting some good stuff done while we’re at it. Just remember: finding common ground with your neighbors impacts your life much more than going all in on the national culture war see-saw. And here’s hoping I get to try ranked-choice voting in D.C. in 2025.

Evan Wagner is a News Editor and Product Manager at AllSides. He has a Lean Left bias.

Reviewed by Andy Gorel, News Editor and Bias Analyst (Center), Clare Ashcraft, Bridging Coordinator & Media Analyst (Center), and Malayna J. Bizier, News Analyst and Social Media Editor (Right).