With the city election just a month away, today I’ll share some thoughts about voter turnout in Lowell, or more accurately, the lack of it.

In the last city election in November 2023, only 7,516 people voted. That’s 7,516 of the 75,516 registered to vote, which is fewer than 10 percent. That’s down from 12,145 in the November 2021 city election and 11,075 in November 2019.

While it’s unclear what caused the precipitous drop in voter participation, even in the higher turnout years, only a fraction of those eligible to vote participated in city elections.

I’m not alone in recognizing this as a problem. Some say the solution is to register more voters; others suggest moving election day to Saturday, or making it a state holiday, so that it’s easier for people to cast their ballots.

Neither of those approaches would improve voter turnout. Consider this: In presidential elections, the average turnout in Lowell over the past three elections has been 36,777 votes cast per election. That means there are 26,531 people in Lowell who cast ballots on a Tuesday, non-holiday election day when voting for president who don’t return to the polls the following year to vote for city councilors.

This phenomenon is not limited to presidential elections. In state elections when the governor is on the ballot, average turnout in Lowell is 22,666 votes, which is more than double the average turnout in city council races.

Who are all these people who show up to vote for president and governor but who don’t participate in city council elections? After all, a city councilor has a greater impact on the everyday life of a Lowell resident than does the president of the United States. The city council collectively is responsible for our drinking water, sewerage disposal, trash collection, public safety, the condition of our streets, sidewalks, parks and public buildings, snow removal, and countless other things that touch our lives in so many ways.

Although this problem grew much worse in 2023, low turnout in city council elections is not a recent phenomenon. Over the past decade, whenever I’ve been asked to speak about Lowell politics, I often cite these turnout numbers and probe the audience for reasons for not voting in city elections. The overwhelming response? People don’t know anything about the city council or city councilors. They understand the importance of the office and the effect it has on their lives, but there is no easy way for them to educate themselves on the candidates and the issues. Without knowing the candidates or where they stand on the issues, these voters stay home on city election day.

In March 2007, I started blogging on my website, richardhowe.com. Ten years later, co-blogger Paul Marion and I published History as It Happens: Community Bloggers in Lowell, Mass., which was a compilation of “the best of the blog” over its first decade. The book contained 500 pages of community writing by 40 contributors who covered politics, history, culture, economics and more from Lowell and beyond. (A few copies of the book are still available from Loom Press.)

In the book’s Introduction, I wrote about the role of media and shared information in the political life of the city of Lowell and how it had changed in my lifetime. Although ten years have passed since I wrote it, the essay remains relevant because it described a period in which the public information ecosystem that dominated Lowell for more than 100 years was shattered by the internet. I’ve reproduced selections from the Introduction below, and end with new observations of how things have changed since I wrote this ten years ago.

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The following excerpts are from the Introduction of History as It Happens:

Lowell politics has always played a big part in my life. In November 1965, my family celebrated both my seventh birthday and my dad’s election to the Lowell City Council in his first-ever campaign for public office. When I turned 47 in 2005, he was still on the Council although he had decided not to seek reelection that fall. Forty consecutive years of service seemed like a good place to stop. During those four decades, Lowell had transformed itself from a faded industrial town with the highest unemployment rate in the nation to a global model of urban revitalization.

Politics played a big part in that transformation. So did the media. For most of that period “the media” consisted of the Lowell Sun, local AM radio stations WLLH and WCAP, and for a decade, cable television’s NewsCenter 6. There were other forms of political communications: incessant phone calls, quiet conversations over coffee, mailed notes and clippings, and, once the council meetings were televised live, elected officials speaking directly to their constituents via cable TV. But the conversation was usually driven by what was written and said by those who were paid to write and talk about politics—the professional media.

Aside from the scale, that is pretty much how things worked nationally. At least that is how it worked until the summer of 2003. Earlier that year the United States and a handful of allies had invaded Iraq with the overwhelming support of the media, many Congressional Democrats, and a majority of the public. The chaotic post-invasion occupation of Iraq, however, gave strength to those who had opposed the war. By August 2003, the Iraq war and continued economic unease from the post-9/11 recession were becoming major issues for the emerging field of Democratic candidates for the 2004 presidential nomination.

In the early stages of that campaign, the nation’s political class was stunned when Howard Dean, the little-known former governor of Vermont, bolted ahead of a Democratic field that included John Kerry, Joe Lieberman, John Edwards, Wesley Clark, Dick Gephardt, Al Sharpton, and Dennis Kucinich. While Dean’s fervent opposition to the war and support for universal health coverage were sure to endear him to the most progressive members of the party, those things alone did not explain his skyrocketing popularity and the many millions of dollars contributed to his campaign.

Dean succeeded because his campaign was the first to fully harness the power of the internet as a campaign tool. Using online fund raising and Meetups, the Dean campaign raised more money and signed up more volunteers than any of its opponents.

They also blogged. Blog for America was the first presidential campaign blog. Hosted on the Dean campaign website and posting articles about campaign events and policy issues, Blog for America was interesting to read and gained much attention . . .

. . . By the close of 2003, the political structure in [Lowell] in some ways paralleled that of the country at the time of the invasion of Iraq. There was a powerful and popular leader – in the city’s case, it was City Manager John Cox – who was overwhelmingly supported by the City Council and by the local media. That support was not unanimous, however, and the opposition found voice in a blog called Left in Lowell.

A New Hampshire native who came to Lowell with an English degree and skills in website design, Lynne Lupien launched Left in Lowell to add a voice to the national and state political debates that were waging at the time, but Lupien was not immune to local politics.  She soon became a harsh critic of the Cox Administration and provided an electronic publishing platform for others who felt similarly.

Left in Lowell became a must-read for those interested in local politics. With a flood of anonymous, unmoderated comments, it became a raucous, profane, passionate platform for local political debate. It was also unsettling to those who had heretofore controlled the city’s political power structure in the same way that Howard Dean and his Blog for America had so disrupted the nation’s political hierarchy.

As much as the substance of the local political debate on Left in Lowell fascinated me, that blog’s utility as a communications platform intrigued me even more. For my entire life, I had witnessed the power of the media in Lowell to shape and influence the debate on public policy. Now, thanks to the internet and blogging software, anyone with a computer could have an influence on local events far beyond that ever before wielded by an individual citizen. . .

. . . While the Dean campaign flamed out in the fields of Iowa in January 2004, blogging did not. Interest in citizen journalism was intense with frequent gatherings and conferences around the region such as “Beyond Broadcast 2006: Reinventing Public Media in a Participatory Culture” at Harvard Law School; “Democracy & Independence: Sharing News & Information in a Connected World” at UMass Amherst; and “Beyond Broadcast 2007: From Participatory Culture to Participatory Democracy” at MIT. Closer to home, blogging made its mark on statewide politics when in April 2006 a group of bloggers organized and conducted a debate of the Democratic candidates for Lieutenant Governor in that year’s election. Televised and streamed live from the studios of Lowell Telecommunications Corporation, the blogger debate received extensive coverage in the Boston Globe, the Boston Herald and the Lowell Sun. . .

. . . I leaped into political blogging in March 2007, when Marty Meehan decided to leave Congress to seek the position of Chancellor of UMass Lowell. Having just witnessed the intense coverage of the 2006 gubernatorial election in both blogs and the mainstream media, I suspected that the upcoming special Congressional election would present a unique opportunity for politically attuned individuals on the ground to share their observations and opinions online. It did. . .

. . . Others in Lowell [recognized the power of the internet which made] the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century . . . the golden age of blogging in Lowell. Besides richardhowe.com and Left in Lowell, Gerry Nutter, Corey Sciuto and Jackie Doherty all had self-named blogs. City Manager Bernie Lynch launched his own blog from city hall. Greg Page and Cliff Krieger tackled broader issues on a New Englander in Lowell and Right Side of Lowell respectively. Marianne Griese posted about culture and cooking on Art is the Handmaid while Anne Ruthman wrote about current events on Lowell Handmade. Anonymous writers launched sharp political commentary and satire on Kad Barma, Mr. Mill City, and the Lowell Shallot. The Lowell Sun, a bastion of the mainstream media, also jumped into the blogging pool with Chris Scott’s Column Blog, Rob Mills’ Police Line Blog, and others.

The crowded Lowell blogosphere era was short lived. Blogging on a regular basis requires a significant commitment of time and intellectual energy. Changes in circumstances and the ongoing demands of life caused many of the above-mentioned blogs to disappear or at least go on extended sabbatical.

However, the burgeoning online political world of Lowell did not disappear; it shifted to social media. Both Facebook and Twitter reached maturity shortly after the birth of richardhowe.com. In a relatively short period of time, many of those who had been active in the Lowell blogosphere migrated their political commentary to Facebook. . .

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Back to 2025:

The first blog post in History as It Happens was from March 13, 2007. Called “D-Day for the Fifth,” it explained that UMass President Jack Wilson was supposed to announce later that day that Marty Meehan had been selected as the next chancellor of UMass Lowell which would trigger a special election to fill the Fifth Congressional District seat Meehan would vacate. The final post in the book was from November 9, 2016. Called “President-elect Trump,” it reported that unofficial results from the prior day’s election indicated that Donald Trump would be the next president of the United States.

Between Donald Trump tweeting directly to his millions of followers on Twitter and “fake news” sites gaining more traffic on Facebook than stories from traditional news outlets, the 2016 presidential election demonstrated the disruptive effect of the new media landscape on politics.

That disruption was not limited to national issues. The habits formed online in the 2016 presidential election migrated down to the local level. That was especially true in Lowell with the 2017 fight over the location of Lowell High School. I’ve witnessed many controversial issues in Lowell politics, but the high school fight was the bitterest and most intense by far. I think a big driver of that was Facebook.

The rise of smartphones and high-speed mobile internet have made digital media ever-present in our lives. Tech companies, particularly social media platforms, have business models built on selling user attention to advertisers, but the amount of digital content and media available to everyone is overwhelming, so attention is the bottleneck.

Playing upon human psychology, social media companies have engineered their algorithms – meaning which information the app chooses to show you – to prioritize sensational, emotionally-charged content. Because human beings are more likely to read and engage with an outrageous story than with one that is neutral and unemotional, we are fed an expanding diet of outrage. This plays into another human psychological trait: confirmation bias. We’re more likely to believe something we agree with than we are with something contrary to our world view, regardless of whether the fact reported is objectively true or not. Consequently, many have become immersed in information silos that provide a distorted view of the world.

Another consequence that may be more relevant to the problem of low voter participation in local elections in Lowell is that many people just give up on following the news. After all, there are plenty of other things competing for our attention.

What can be done to re-engage those who forego consuming news? Experience has taught me that most people have an insatiable thirst for information about the place in which they live. One of the benefits of local journalism, both professional and citizen, is that familiarity with the community helps develop a trusting relationship between local writers and local readers, so the more content is produced locally about Lowell and its politics, the more likely people are to consume it.

In some ways, this is a call to action. If you are interested in local affairs, find a way to write about it. Creating a blog is easier now than it was 15 years ago during that “golden age” of blogging in Lowell. The Substack newsletter platform that I use is free and easy to set up, but there are many alternatives. If you don’t like to write, start a YouTube channel and record your observations of local news and events. Admittedly, it takes some time and effort, but it’s fulfilling and provides a valuable service to the community. If more people in Lowell know what’s going on in local government, more people will vote in local elections, and our government will become more representative of the community than it is when fewer than 10 percent of all registered voters select our leaders.