The other day, a friend from out of town asked me what I thought of Mayor Cherelle Parker’s first year. I struggled to think of anecdotes beyond street cleaning, the Kensington community revival plan, a proposed stadium deal, and a lower homicide rate. Had I missed something, or was that really all to remember from Parker’s first year in office — a year so hotly anticipated after years of underwhelming mayoral leadership from Jim Kenney?

And if I couldn’t think of more to evaluate Parker on, whose fault was it — mine, the media’s, Parker’s? After this year’s presidential election, it’s clear we need to rethink how people understand what government is doing and whether it’s doing a good job.

In some fairytale past, we had media that accurately and frequently covered local, state, and federal government in a fair and balanced fashion that gave people a good sense of what their taxes were funding and what the people they elected were doing. This provided a consensus reality of the state of current affairs.

The current situation is nothing like that. We have a fragmented media landscape that is rarely trusted to provide accurate information, and is disincentivized to cover the unsexy topics of day-to-day government. Perhaps the biggest shift is the media’s orientation toward opinion, rather than reporting, making it all the more difficult to understand what’s really going on.

But while the “vibes voter” has been well documented, there’s been less coverage of a correlated issue: the breakdown in politicians actually knowing what is going on with their constituents. We saw this phenomenon in the 2024 presidential election, when many people were shocked to find out how dissatisfied people were with Democrats’ leadership, even in blue strongholds.

Unfortunately, many leaders and pundits have rushed to assume why that is (people are tired of woke politics, people were really mad about inflation and Covid, etc.). But oftentimes these oversimplifications misconstrue what people really want, care about, and think.

How about talking to people?

Zack Rosen is writing an interesting series of memos aimed at the new leaders coming into office in San Francisco. In his most recent post, he notes how many people running for office got the key issues wrong, in part by oversimplifying what voters cared about:

For example, there was a belief this cycle that the overriding issue for voters would be public safety. Given the polling, a compelling case by campaign strategists was made to this effect. But in reality, the campaigns built overridingly on Public Safety — Marjan Philhour, Trevor Chandler, Matt Buscetto — lost, and Danny Sauter, Bilal Mahmood, and Myrna Melgar, who included urbanist issues such as housing and transportation, and were more nuanced on crime and safety won. It’s not practical to reduce races down to simple assumptions such as ‘public safety trumps everything.’

It’s funny to think that many politicians were dumbing down the issues when the public yearned for politicians that had a more robust slate of ideas to offer. But how could politicians actually know that? Well, by actually talking to people.

While the “vibes voter” has been well documented, there’s been less coverage of a correlated issue: the breakdown in politicians actually knowing what is going on with their constituents.

Rosen notes that what makes the difference in winning a local supervisor race is knocking on doors. By knocking on doors, candidates can break through the noise and make a personal connection with voters. But presumably they also are getting information in return – how voters respond to the candidates’ ideas and what actually matters to them. If media runs on sound bites, in-person interaction may support nuanced ideas.

CA State Senator Scott Wiener told Rosen about his experience becoming a supervisor in SF:

I wasn’t supposed to win the race — there was too much stacked against me — but I did, handily. When I evaluate how Supervisor candidates are doing now, I look at their shoes. I wore out the soles on two pair of shoes during my Supervisor race. That seems like a decent benchmark — are you destroying at least two pair of shoes?

It’s kind of amazing that in 2024, this medieval approach is still what is required to break through. And yet it also makes perfect sense: we need this real level of human interaction to understand who a candidate is, what their ideas are, and to feel compelled enough to vote for them. Particularly in a world where media is so unreliable, people need to see things to believe them. (It can go the other way too: I found it hilarious that Butler County, where Trump was shot at a rally and then later returned to rally once more, was one of the few counties to swing a tiny bit left this election.)

Part of why Biden’s economic approach fell so flat is that few people experienced the miracles of the IRA, CHIPS, and IIJA Acts firsthand. And only a fraction of the money is out the door years after their passage

Could it be that people want … complexity?

Here in Philadelphia, Mayor Parker gets that. Her focus on street cleaning and sanitation are meant to show residents she is on the case for improving the city. Outlawing parking in bike lanes is similarly a nice gesture. But in a way, I wonder if this isn’t another way of dumbing down the message as well. People know that the city needs more than clean streets. They know that just fining people for parking in bike lanes is a good start, but not enough to advance the cause of complete streets citywide.

While the old media landscape did many things better, the new media landscape – with its overwhelm and myriad voices – may have one advantage: I think it is building a hunger and capacity for complexity. Even if many people aren’t truly versed in the issues, people acknowledge that there’s nuance to them. Much the same way people are more open to authentic, complicated selves, they want politicians that get beyond simplistic ideology.

This more nuanced approach is also at odds with old ways of viewing voters. The 2024 election proved that the days of identity politics that simply matches voters with the race, ethnicity or gender of candidates are over. And so are the days when the media’s depictions of reality and the experience people are having in everyday life matched.

I’m probably not going to know how Mayor Parker’s first year was by reading about it in the media. The fact that politicians and residents will have to devise new ways to understand each other is both daunting and exciting.

Diana Lind is a writer and urban policy specialist. This article was also published as part of her Substack newsletter, The New Urban Order. Sign up for the newsletter here.

MORE FROM THE NEW URBAN ORDER