The World-Historical Consequences of Inconsequential Elections

The 2025 off-year elections preserve the rituals of democracy in the shadow of a looming authoritarian threat.

Credit: Me and my dog Britt

Maple season came on strong and suddenly in Western Pennsylvania this year. After a brutally cold January when the ground was buried beneath many inches of snow, mid-February brought a glorious thaw. Temperatures nearly reached 50 degrees. My wife and I bundled up, grabbed the power drill, retrieved metal buckets from the second floor of our barn, then trudged out into the melting snow, tapping holes in maple trees scattered throughout our land. It is hard and careful work, harvesting buckets of liquid then boiling it down for hours, waiting for the fleeting moment when the sap becomes syrup, just minutes before burning and ruining the entire batch. It is certainly not a cost-effective or time-efficient operation. But it has become a yearly ritual, tying us to the cycles of nature, giving us something warm and sweet to look forward to during the bleakest days of late winter.

While hefting heavy buckets of sap out of the woods this year, the natural cycles of maple season conjured up reminders of a different cycle, a human-created cycle, the electoral cycle. 2021 was the first year we harvested maple. It was also the year I first ran for public office, as Supervisor of Indiana Township’s District 5. I remembered tapping the maple trees the same weekend I went out to collect petition signatures to get on the 2021 ballot. The beginning of this year’s sap flow reminded me that February 17th was soon approaching, the first day to circulate petitions for signatures in 2025. Maple season was nearly over by the time I had collected all the signatures needed for this year’s primary and turned them in to Allegheny County’s Office of Elections just before the March 11th deadline. The aluminum buckets that were once overflowing with clear maple sap would be almost empty, aside from a milky white sludge at the bottom filled with drowned wasps and moths. Seasons come and seasons go, in both nature and elections.

Most Americans would say that the 2025 off-year elections are inconsequential. Sure, New Yorkers have to pick a mayor from a field of two fallen stars and a longshot progressive upstart. But outside New York City’s five boroughs, the 2025 elections will barely register in the collective political consciousness of the American people. That is why municipal and local elections are called off-year elections. Most people take the year off from voting or even thinking about politics.

If I wanted to be provocatively ironic, I would say 2025 is the most important election of our lifetime. I won’t go that far. But in this moment when the threat of autocracy in America has never felt so uncomfortably close, the seemingly inconsequential 2025 elections may play a pivotal role in preserving the sacred rituals of democracy, keeping the flame of freedom burning into the critical 2026 mid-terms. Like the cycles of nature, electoral cycles create a kind of external memory, reminding us of what is normal and proper throughout the passage of the year, marking off moments in time and space that we can return to when we find ourselves again in the same position of Earth’s orbit around the sun. In a time when political institutions are being dismantled, due process withheld, and the highest courts ignored, the 2025 elections allow us to maintain the institutional momentum of the most effective weapon the people have ever devised against tyranny: the ballot.

Trump and Congressional Republicans have already begun to meddle with elections. Trump’s March 25th Executive Order to mandate proof of citizenship in elections is currently in a state of limbo after being struck down by federal court judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly as an unconstitutional exercise of power reserved for Congress and the states. With the Executive branch temporarily stymied, it is now a question of whether the GOP-controlled Congress can find the votes to pass the SAVE Act, a sweeping voter ID law that could disenfranchise millions of American women whose names on driver’s licenses and passports do not match their birth certificates.

Regardless of the ultimate fate of Trump and the Republicans’ attempts at overhauling the voting system, those changes will almost surely not impact the 2025 Primary elections. There is a preserving power in the rapidity of one election cycle beginning almost immediately after the victors of the previous cycle have been sworn in. Even Trump, with his unprecedented overuse of Executive Orders, will struggle to profoundly alter the course of the 2025 elections. Off-year races begin too quickly and unfold across so many diffuse and diverse municipalities that it is nearly impossible for the heavy hand of authoritarianism to snuff them out immediately. Trump and the Republicans will also face a dilemma in 2025. If they try to meddle with the November 2025 general elections, they will provide valuable information to the Democrats, the courts, and the American people about their strategy. Messing with the 2025 elections might spark legal challenges, mass demonstrations, and public outcry capable of thwarting any plans to tilt the critical 2026 mid-terms in the GOP’s favor. But if Trump and the Republicans do not attempt to influence the 2025 elections, the torch of democracy is passed on through another electoral season, preserving rituals that bind us together, creating new memories of what it is like to vote in a free nation. With the 2025 off-year elections inconveniently occurring before the 2026 midterm elections they so desperately want to manipulate, the Trump administration is stuck with the unpleasant choice of either striking to soon and wasting their attack on democratic institutions during seemingly inconsequential local elections or striking too late to be sure that their plan will work during the pivotal 2026 mid-terms.

If the 2025 off-year elections move forward without any impact from the SAVE Act or Trump’s Executive Orders, they will provide valuable insights into the public’s approval or disapproval of his regime. With Trump’s approval ratings currently plummeting, free and fair elections in 2025 might send a stunning rebuke to local GOP candidates who are too cowardly to speak out against Trump’s unprecedented attack on American democratic institutions. We saw this happen earlier this month in the special elections for the Wisconsin Supreme Court, when even Elon Musk’s promise of $1 million checks for voter registration could not coax enough MAGA voters to the polls to overcome the general public’s disgust at the chaos of Trump’s second term.

To the observant eye, off-year elections provide a preview of election trends to come. In the off-year elections of 2023, I saw in my own community an ominous preview of Trump’s 2024 triumph. The balance of power on our Board of Supervisors was on the line, and despite dissatisfaction with three Republican incumbents, they managed to maintain their majority by the slimmest of margins. Bipartisan enthusiasm for our local Democratic candidates was swamped by an influx of young, male first-time voters driven to the polls by fear-mongering ads targeting a District Attorney candidate funded almost completely by George Soros-controlled organizations and a female County Executive candidate who was formerly a member of the Democratic Socialists of America. While our local Board of Supervisors would lose their races by only one and three votes, respectively, the DA and the County Executive candidates would lose in our Township by over 20 percentage points. The sting of defeat may have been felt most acutely on the local level, but the 2023 off-year election results in my neck of the woods revealed that Democrats were underestimating the angry rightward turn in young male voters in swing states like Pennsylvania, a trend that would carry Trump into the White House in 2024.

While off-year elections can provide valuable insights into the public’s opinion on the two major parties, we should not overlook the ability of local elections to also heal the wounds of partisan division inflicted by mid-term and presidential contests. Local elections often scramble the sharp lines of partisan division that shape state and federal races. The direct face-to-face interactions that drive local retail politics can counteract the dehumanizing partisan narratives inflicted on our communities by billionaire-funded races. As I prepare to knock on doors to seek re-election in 2025, I am well aware that support and resistance for my candidacy will not always neatly map out across Republican and Democratic lines. My record of being a strong supporter of my neighbors’ struggle against developers and frackers might trigger criticism from YIMBY Democrats enthralled by the trendy rise of Abundance liberalism and its call to prioritize cheap housing and cheap energy over the Democratic Party’s more traditional values of protecting the environment and public safety. Similarly, newly converted right-wing wellness moms who drink raw milk might appreciate my efforts to keep fracking fluid out of our drinking water, while MAGA hat-wearing old men have voiced their appreciation for me preserving the quiet rural character of the community. I will not change myself to get these Republican votes or appease picky Democrats. I am who I am, and I stand firm on the principles I believe in, primarily a commitment to protect my neighbors from outside corporate interests. But going door-to-door in 2025 allows me to discuss my principles and occasionally bridge the partisan divides that will seem so bitter in 2026 and 2028. Throughout America, these innumerable inconsequential elections have a cumulative effect of reinforcing the ties that bind us together as one nation, bonds that seem more and more tenuous and frayed with each congressional and presidential election.

The last drops of 2025 maple sap.

Last month, as I lugged my aluminum maple buckets up to the second floor of my barn, I passed the yard signs I used in my 2021 race. Maple season was over, but primary season would soon begin. I took the yard signs out of the barn and gave them a good cleaning. When I put those yard signs away in November, I will know whether my foray into local politics will have run its course or extend for another four years. I wonder, when I return to the second floor of the barn to retrieve my maple buckets in February 2026, will we be looking forward to the mid-terms as a chance to make Trump pay for an authoritarian power grab that was thwarted by the rule of law, the independence of the courts, and the will of the American people. Or will the darkness of late winter reflect the darkness in the hearts of Americans who saw their democracy crumble beneath the weight of authoritarianism? It is too soon to say whether 2025 will be the last year of free and fair elections in the United States. But no matter how inconsequential the 2025 election may seem, you should get out and vote like the fate of American democracy depends upon it.