Politicians Care Mostly About One Thing

How the need to get elected can manifest itself into local communities

Recently, I’ve had the pleasure of serving on the Policy Committee for Downwinders at Risk, an environmental justice organization in the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex aimed at “taking effective action on behalf of those being harmed by air pollution.” They were founded in 1994, with their first major issue being a cement plant in Midlothian that held the largest hazardous waste incineration permit in the United States. They later prevented illegal gas drilling in Dallas, stopped four batch plants from emerging in the predominantly black and Hispanic Southern Dallas, and demolished the notorious Shingle Mountain. Through these undertakings, Downwinders formed the Neighborhood Self-Defense Project, which seeks to roll back racist zoning laws that allow polluters to create dumping grounds in these communities.

To understand how we arrive at situations like these, we have to ask ourselves what truly drives most of our elected officials. Although the desire for public service might initially serve as enough of an impetus, complacency often quickly replaces that zeal. At that point, it becomes less about fulfilling the needs of the people and more about keeping their jobs or securing positions after their terms end.

To calculate how much effort they need to assume to win elections, elected officials gauge outside pressure. Pressure usually takes two forms: money and organizing. Traditionally, money has come from people of means and large corporations while organizing efforts have been spearheaded by average people and grassroots organizations. These two forces often compete with one another for the attention of politicians and voters.

Holding on to Seats in Dallas

To examine how politicians’ desire to maintain their positions and temporarily mollify community members beginning to demand change might translate into adverse effects in local communities, let’s go back to Downwinders and Dallas. The organization’s current campaign is called Toxic Twins: Fund the Fund. The “Toxic Twins” part of the campaign name derives from two asphalt shingle plants in Dallas producing dangerous levels of air pollution in their respective communities: TAMKO in the historic Freedman town of Joppa, and GAF in the predominantly black and Hispanic West Dallas. These two plants set up shop decades ago when those areas’ zoning laws allowed them to move there. Now, however, those neighborhoods have been rezoned, but TAMKO and GAF have been grandfathered in and permitted to stay and operate. This legal gray area, legacy permits predating updated zoning laws, is known as nonconforming use. And that’s where the “Fund the Fund” part of the campaign comes in.

In 2023, a Republican state senator from Dallas, most likely with the assistance of one or both of these corporations based on the subtext, authored a bill that eventually passed that implemented stricter criteria for municipalities to shut down these sorts of polluters. In response, the City of Dallas passed a bill earlier this year that set up a nonconforming use fund. This fund is a pot of money tied to a certain dollar amount determined by the Dallas County Appraisal District that the City can offer TAMKO and GAF to close their operations. The objective of the campaign, then, is to make sure that the City allocates the needed amount of money to buy out TAMKO and GAF. Either way, whether these two corporations stay or leave, they set themselves up to win.

There are more policy details involved but that is the gist of it. Things become even more disconcerting, though, when considering that certain City of Dallas council members, the ones representing these communities and the ones who proudly call themselves Democrats, upon meeting with community members to figure out how best to relay their grievances to the leadership of these plants, feigned ignorance of long-standing community concerns, presumably figuring that not enough pressure from their constituents existed to warrant meaningful action. But currently, Downwinders has been on an organizing and media blitz, staging protests outside of Dallas City Hall and conducting weekly meetings with its committees. Their work has, to say the least, not gone unnoticed.

Voter Turnout and Political Will

If all that sounds a bit too corrupt and too much like a bribe, that’s because it is. And this instance is not even an outlier taking into account the endless number of deals taking place at the local level across the country. To be sure, multinational corporations moving into underprivileged black and brown communities, aided by government officials crafting arcane laws with the backing of those corporations’ lobbyists, is no coincidence. Systemic racism seeps deep into our nation’s identity. It also plays a significant role in discouraging people to use their most effective tool to voice their opinions: voting.

If we analyze voting data for the most recent Dallas local elections, we discover that deep apathy. Let’s take the communities of South Dallas (I’m including Fair Park, Bonton, and Joppa for this analysis, which all share historical and cultural similarities as well as the same council member), where TAMKO resides. Let’s also take the community of West Dallas, where GAF resides. Finally, let’s take my community of Far North Dallas, a predominantly white and affluent suburb-like part of Dallas. The next thing we’ll do is try to eliminate any short-lived factors – such as the number of precincts examined, lack of reasons to vote, or whether the incumbent had a challenger – that might sway our numbers and paint an inaccurate picture.

For the number of precincts, South Dallas contains 22, West Dallas contains 19, and Far North Dallas contains 27. For the purposes of this analysis, I’ve considered these numbers sufficiently comparable.

For reasons to vote, South Dallas and West Dallas obviously house polluters in their communities that make people sick. In Far North Dallas, we don’t have polluters. We do, however, have Pepper Square, a mixed-use zoning battle that eventually prevailed but angered my NIMBY neighbors. Despite this difference, for this analysis, the issues present compelling reasons to vote in all three areas.

As far as incumbents and challengers, South Dallas’ officeholder faced challengers, while West Dallas and Far North Dallas had open seats. That might seem like it would throw things off, but I promise it won’t.

So what did voter turnout look like in the May 2025 local elections? South Dallas experienced a 4.60% voter turnout and West Dallas voters turned out at 5.89%, both lower than the county total of 8.35%. (If you live outside of Texas and you find these numbers appallingly low, I know how you feel.) In Far North Dallas, however, 12.04% of our voters visited the ballot box, easily beating the overall county total, not to mention the two other communities.

As far as who won in these communities, in South Dallas, the incumbent won. In West Dallas, the incumbent’s right-hand person in City Hall won. In Far North Dallas, however, the candidate who vehemently opposed the Pepper Square development project defeated the candidate who supported it and viewed by many as having the blessings of this community’s incumbent who also stood in favor of it.

Why such a clear disparity between communities such as Far North Dallas and communities like South Dallas and West Dallas? The topics of voter suppression and racial inequities can surely fill many pages outside of this post. But let's be clear: Most politicians have their fingers on the pulse of their districts, even if they pretend not to be aware of certain issues. They know what's affecting constituents because their staff brief them.

But in the end, it comes down to willpower and the sheer number of people aligning for or against the officeholder. If council members from South Dallas and West Dallas recognize that under 6% of their districts vote, and they don’t want to ruin relationships with leaders of multinational corporations because of possible business opportunities for life after politics, they’ll easily and happily maintain the status quo, perceiving less of a risk of losing their seats due to public disconnect if fewer people vote. That is, until their constituents properly organize.

Organizing: The Counterbalance to Money

If money is the rich man’s game, organizing is the common man’s game. So if you vote, especially in local elections, thank you. To organize, you can do at least one of two things. You can tell all your friends, family members, and neighbors to not just visit the polls or who to support, but why they should do so and what issues they should care about, making the discussion as local to them as possible. Don’t just say, “This person is an amazing candidate.” Say, “This person supports or opposes this thing in your community and it affects these people. Are you telling me you’re okay with how these people are being treated by their own government?”

The second thing you can do is to volunteer for an organization or a cause that resonates with you. Deep at the grassroots level, you might not feel like you’re accomplishing a whole lot, but those organizations always seek as much help as they can and will likely remember you down the road. Not to mention, you’ll look like a badass to your peers. And if no organization, club, or group exists that seeks to fix some problem? Then start one! And actually put in the work that your community depends on. I’ll be sharing more on how to organize in future posts.

Too few people have ever met a politician, let alone attended meetings with one. Soon, however, you will understand that most politicians, regardless of party affiliation, operate by staying cognizant of the next election cycle and calculating how much effort they need to direct to given sources of pressure. It sounds like activities outside of their job descriptions that we didn’t elect them to do, but this is politics. This whole game, the sustained struggles between money and organizing, dispels the image that politicians construct for themselves as the ones in control. You find out that the people with the actual power are the people who can produce the right kind and the most amount of pressure.

And the politicians who do stand up for average people without much prompting? Well, those are the ones you keep in power.