‘Progressive’ Sacramento’s race for mayor contributed to a lot of paper waste. Are campaign mailers even necessary anymore?

By Jacob Peterson | Solving Sacramento One nearly universal experience for voters during election season is a mailbox flooded with campaign messages. Communicating with an electorate is arguably the most vital part of a political race, and one of the oldest ways of doing that is through the U.S. Postal Service. The Sacramento mayor’s race is no different, with a deluge of mailers being left at addresses all across the city.& One of the Sacramento mayoral candidates, Assemblymember Kevin McCarty, said that his campaign sent out roughly 60,000 to 80,000 mailers ahead of the March 5 election. He noted that a key part of sending this literature out was in response to opposing mailers from special interest groups. “People spent a million dollars attacking us,” McCarty explained. “We had to respond with mailers refuting these lies they were sending about me and my record.” In other words, politics turned into paper waste begets more politics turned into paper waste.& McCarty went on to assert that no other candidate in the race was attacked as much as he was, and that, if he didn’t respond to mailers with his own mailers, he might not have made it to the November runoffs....