Questions Worth Asking

This is Seeing Clearly — food for thought as we head into a primary, into a general election, into the next argument over public policy at the city, the state, or the national level. Today I want to take on a simple question about questions: when you finally get a candidate in front of you, what is worth asking, and what is a waste of everyone’s time?

You’ve heard the saying — the only bad question is the one that wasn’t asked. With respect, I disagree. There are bad questions. So let’s name what makes a question inappropriate, and from there, work out what is worth asking.

01 — A word of cautionThe candidate forum

I’ll start with a value judgment, and I’ll own it as mine. The forum — where candidates for mayor, for council, for the legislature line up at a table or behind lecterns and answer questions — has a role. You get to see who is running, and you get to hear them speak. But understand its limits. A forum is an artificial environment, and I do not think it is especially helpful.

In that setting, the answers tend to be guarded. They tend to be a little ambiguous, deliberately, because no candidate wants to alienate a potential voter while glancing to the left and to the right at opponents. They want to show they can get along with people who see things differently. It is a time of careful, balanced, hedged responses — and because they’re hedged, you will rarely get a candidate’s full position. If a forum is happening near you, by all means go. Just go knowing you are seeing a very narrow slice of the person.

02 — The most common mistakeAsking the wrong office

Here is the test I apply to every single question before it leaves my mouth:

Coming out of the pandemic, with health policy on everyone’s mind, I watched someone ask a candidate for local, municipal office: “What is your position on vaccine policy?” It is a fair-sounding question. It is also the wrong one. Vaccine and health policy flow down from the federal level — from the Centers for Disease Control — and from the state. Consider Michigan alone.

So when you ask a city candidate where they stand on vaccines, what you are really asking for is their opinion on something they will never vote on. That is not a useful question.

03 — The question that starts a fightSchools

Nothing generates more heat than education. I have sat in a meeting and heard a candidate asked, “What do you think about the achievement in our schools?” It sounds reasonable. It carries a trap — the question already implies the schools are either wonderful and need defending, or failing and need fixing. And more to the point, it is usually aimed at the wrong office.

In most of our communities, the city and the school district are entirely separate. The school board is independent of the city; the city is independent of the board. (In some large cities the two are merged — that’s the caveat, and it’s worth knowing whether yours is one of them.) But for most of us, questions about how the schools are performing belong in front of the school board, or the superintendent — not the candidate for mayor or council, who has no role in it. When I was mayor, people asked me constantly how the district was doing. Whether I liked the answer or not was beside the point. I had no authority over it.

04 — Budgets, taxes, and one telling exampleMoney

People ask good-sounding finance questions — about the budget, about taxes, about whether services are being delivered. Those can be excellent questions when aimed correctly. One resident, worried about affordability, asked a city candidate: “Have you thought about imposing rent control?” To my knowledge, most municipalities have no power to impose rent control at all — that authority is reserved to the state, with at most a limited role at the county. So again, the discipline is the same: decide first whether this is something this level of government can actually affect, then build your question around that.

05 — The point of all thisSo what makes a good question?

Two pieces of homework, done before you ever raise your hand. Do them, and your questions will start returning real information — the kind that actually helps you decide how to cast your vote.

1. Learn the responsibilities of that level of government. What can a city decide? A township? A county? The state? Map the question to the level that holds the power.
2. Learn the responsibilities of that particular office. In some cities the mayor holds significant power. In a council-manager city, the mayor presides over meetings and manages the conduct of business on the council — but does not set policy alone. Know which kind of office you are voting for.