What's the matter with Kent? No local newspaper means low voter turnout

Perry Sobolik calls himself “an old newspaper junkie.” So he scours the press like a hawk for any scraps about his town, which happens to be the Seattle suburb of Kent.

“We still get some attention down here, every once in a while,” he said. “Like when somebody gets killed.”

When it comes to local politics, though, Kent, now a city of 139,000 people, is like “living in a desert.”

“I’m not sure there was much awareness there was a local election being held,” Sobolik told me.

You may have seen the news that Washington state just had the lowest voter turnout for a general election in its history. Only 36.4% of registered voters participated – meaning more than 3 million out of 4.8 million sat it out.

Well, down in Kent they would have cheered to get 36%. Only 24% of registered voters there returned their ballots. It was the worst turnout for any city in King County – and lower than turnout for the far-flung water and sewer districts.

Kent had four seats up for grabs on the City Council, as well as two school levies for the larger Kent School District that totaled nearly half a billion dollars. One of those ended up failing, so it’s not like there was nothing controversial on the ballot.

Neighboring Auburn was second worst at 25%. (It had this paltry turnout even though restless voters tossed two incumbents, including the deputy mayor, off the City Council.) Federal Way clocked in at just 26%, while Renton was also at 26% – even though it was picking a mayor.

By contrast, Seattle was at 46%, nearly double the turnout in Kent.

What is going on? I bring up the South End cities not to dump on them – that’s my old stamping grounds, where I got my start as a reporter for the now defunct Valley Daily News. But something seems off when a city the size of Kent holds an election and scarcely 17,000 people mail in their ballots.

In Auburn, only 9,600 voters determined who will be running that city of 89,000.

Voter turnout in these cities has been plummeting. Ten to 20 years ago it averaged 10 to 15 percentage points higher during these off-year, municipal elections.

My theory – and I’m definitely biased on this one – is that it’s not you, it’s us. There’s a direct link between the collapse of the news in the South End and the lack of voter interest.

In Seattle, we still have TV stations, news radio, blogs and, most importantly, newspapers all covering local politics, at times obsessively (ahem). Several campaigns groused to me that the media ecosystem in Seattle is so potent that there’s no way to advance anymore without getting the endorsement of either The Seattle Times or The Stranger newspapers. While that might not be exactly what the founders envisioned for democracy, it does create tension, drama, and voter interest.

In Kent, the local newspaper, the Kent Reporter, is aptly named because it literally has just one reporter. One person to cover crime, politics, features, you name it. The tiny paper doesn’t do editorial endorsements.

“He’s the entire newspaper,” Sobolik said.

That one reporter, Steve Hunter, often writes multiple stories a day and should be given a medal (though never a vacation, because then Kent would go haywire). There’s also a blog called ILoveKent, owned by hyperlocal news publisher Scott Schaefer, who started the popular B-Town Blog in Burien. But the point is that politics in Kent – or Auburn, Federal Way or Renton – no longer gets anywhere near the attention it used to.

Recently researchers studied 46 such cities and towns in California, where newspaper staffing had fallen sharply, and concluded that political races became less competitive while voter turnout fell.

“We found that when newspapers cut more staff, the mayoral races that followed included fewer candidates, resulted in larger victory margins for winners, and more regularly featured unchallenged incumbents,” the authors wrote.

Said one editor in that study: “It certainly would depress voter turnout, because if you don’t even know there’s an election, or you don’t know what’s at stake with the election or don’t know anything about the people running, why would you bother to vote?”

That pretty much sums up 2023, which will go down in history for disinterest.

The current proposal to help all this is to switch our odd-year city elections to even-numbered years, when the presidential, congressional and statewide races are also on the ballot. This is a bad idea, as it would make the real source of the problem – scanty info about city and local issues – worse. National and state politics will suck up all the scarce media oxygen, so voters will hear even less about city councils and mayors than they do now.

What’s the matter with Kent? And by extension Renton, Auburn, Federal Way and countless other cities and towns? They just need more news.

Of course I would say this. Plus fixing it won’t come easy, as we at The Seattle Times can attest (as someone who used to work in the now shuttered Times South bureau, I could be a witness). But the stats don’t lie. So if someone can build it, the voters will come.

Danny Westneat: [email protected]; Danny Westneat takes an opinionated look at the Puget Sound region’s news, people and politics. Published Nov. 29, 2023. Reprinted with permission, The Seattle Times.