We need articulate leaders who can inspire us and be judged by their record

In 2024 the average Hawaiʻi household paid about $213 a month for electricity, against a national average of $144, while drawing less power from the grid than households in any other state.¹ A third of residents said they had cut back on essentials to keep the lights on. Households below the poverty line spent close to a fifth of their income on power.

Everyone here knows electricity is expensive. That knowledge has not produced a movement or a leader able to carry one.

It has produced villains and slogans. Call it emotional catnip: it holds attention, it produces motion, and it leaves the problem exactly where it was.

Hawaiʻi needs leaders who can inspire us and still be checked, and a public that judges them by the record rather than the label. We have too little of either.

Labels have replaced the record

Democrats hold 63 of the 76 seats in the Legislature.³ That is not fraud; it is decades of voters’ choices. But it moves the real election into the primary, and the primary is where Hawaiʻi stays home. In 2024, 32.3 percent of registered voters returned a primary ballot, the lowest since statehood. In 2026, 33.2 percent did. In 1994, nearly two-thirds did.⁴

The rules channel what is left. Hawaiʻi does not register voters by party, yet its primary makes every voter choose one party’s ballot and stay on it.⁵ A candidate without a party must win 10 percent of all primary votes cast for the office, or match the weakest winning party nominee, just to reach November.⁶ So a third of the electorate, voting inside one party, chooses the government for everyone, and the label does the work the record should do.

In “Wrong Enemy” I argued that the problem is not that parties exist. Parties can still pool small contributions and volunteer labor against concentrated money; the trouble is that one party faces no competition and the other has no program.⁷ I still believe that. But better structures are not enough. A competitive system can still run on catnip. People still need leaders, in any party or none, who can inspire them and still be checked, and a public that judges them by the record rather than the label.

Loyalty makes people surer and less informed

Information alone does not move people. A major synthesis of the research by Martijn van Zomeren, Tom Postmes, and Russell Spears found that collective action rests on three convictions: this is wrong, it concerns us, and together we can change it.⁸ Someone can understand the electric bill perfectly and still feel alone or doubt that anything will change. Two-thirds of voters skipping the primary is not proof of ignorance. It may be a reasonable reading of where decisions are made.

That is where leaders matter. Few citizens can investigate every public question, and trusting someone who has is how representative politics works. The danger begins when the leader, or the party, becomes the standard of truth.

In two survey experiments, on offshore drilling and immigration, James Druckman, Erik Peterson, and Rune Slothuus found that when parties were sharply polarized, endorsements counted for more, substantive information counted for less, and people grew more confident in their opinions.⁹ The label gained weight. The evidence lost it. Confidence went up anyway. That is emotional catnip, measured.

Those experiments tested a two-party contest on national issues, not Hawaiʻi’s one-party arrangement. My guess is that the effect holds here too, because the label still tells people whom to trust. Once defending the leader becomes the task, failure can be explained away forever.

Feeling is not the enemy of evidence

A policy paper cannot invite a neighbor to a meeting or notice who has stopped coming. Doug McAdam found that the volunteers who actually went to Mississippi for Freedom Summer in 1964 had more organizational ties and stronger personal ties to others in the project than those who withdrew.10 Sympathy is not participation. In island communities, where the person asking is a neighbor or a cousin, those ties are the one asset no campaign budget can buy.

Nor does preferring evidence mean organizing without emotion. Marshall Ganz teaches organizing through shared values, relationships, and public narrative, the story that links personal experience to a common purpose and a choice that must be made now.¹¹

The test is whether the story stays answerable to evidence. Can its claims be checked? Can someone describe a different experience without being cast out? Does the action address the documented problem? A story that passes is leadership. A story that fails is catnip, however beautiful.

What accountable leadership looks like

On electricity, a renter cares about the monthly bill, a shopkeeper about reliability, a farmer about the cost of pumping water. They can back the same proposal for different reasons, and none of them has to join a party first. Begin with a specific demand and a decision-maker who can deliver it: a committee vote, a ruling by the Public Utilities Commission, a line in a county budget. Establish the evidence, state the costs and who pays them, and set a date to review what actually changed. Publish the result whether it flatters the effort or not.

Then judge leaders by the capacity they leave behind. Can members read the budget and question a claim themselves? Is there a clear way to choose a successor? A group that calls itself leaderless still has leaders. It just has leaders that need to be removed.

The case against this argument

“Data-driven” can be its own catnip; numbers can be chosen to flatter a conclusion. Party loyalty is a reasonable shortcut for busy voters.

Inspiring leaders also are the ones most able to mislead. The danger of inspiring leaders is exactly why support for them must stay conditional.

I want a politics in Hawaiʻi in which people can say, “We chose you to do this work,” and keep the authority to say, “You have not done it.”

That sentence belongs to no party. It belongs to the people who pay the bill.

What it requires is simple to state and hard to build: leaders who can inspire us and still be checked, and a public that judges them by the record rather than the label.

Notes

1. U.S. Energy Information Administration, “Residential Electric Bills in Hawaii and Connecticut Are Twice Those in New Mexico, Utah,” Today in Energy, May 12, 2025, https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=65244. Figures are 2024 averages. Honolulu Civil Beat (note 2), using a different period, reports an average bill of $230.80 and ranks Hawaiʻi fourth; the EIA figure is used here.
2. Jeremy Hay, “Data Dive: Consumers Sacrifice to Pay Hawaiʻi’s Record Electric Bills,” Honolulu Civil Beat, February 19, 2025, https://www.civilbeat.org/2025/02/data-dive-consumers-sacrifice-to-pay-hawai%ca%bbis-record-electric-bills/. The survey figure is from a LendingTree analysis of U.S. Census Bureau survey data (August 2023–August 2024); the income-burden figure is from the Hawaiʻi Department of Business, Economic Development and Tourism (2022). In October 2024 the residential rate was just over 41 cents per kilowatt-hour against a national average of about 17 cents.
3. “Hawaii Senate” and “Hawaii House of Representatives,” Wikipedia, accessed September 30, 2026, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaii_Senate; https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaii_House_of_Representatives.
4. State of Hawaiʻi, Office of Elections, “Registration and Turnout Statistics,” https://elections.hawaii.gov/resources/registration-voter-turnout-statistics/; “Primary Election 2026, State of Hawaii—Statewide: Summary Report, Final,” August 14, 2026 (281,214 of 846,543 registered voters), https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/bd/7b/c761f33743289f0acb816fc2eef3/histatewide-081426-4thprintout.pdf. For 1994 (65.7 percent): Chad Blair, “Hawaii Saw the Worst Voter Turnout Saturday of Any Primary Since Statehood,” Honolulu Civil Beat, August 12, 2024, https://www.civilbeat.org/2024/08/hawaii-saw-the-worst-voter-turnout-saturday-of-any-primary-since-statehood/. Blair’s election-night figure for 2024 (32.1 percent) was revised to 32.3 percent in the final count.
5. Chad Blair, “Why Can’t We Vote for Who We Want in Hawaii’s Primary?,” Honolulu Civil Beat, June 18, 2024, https://www.civilbeat.org/2024/06/chad-blair-why-cant-we-vote-for-who-we-want-in-hawaiis-primary/. The courts have upheld the system; changing it would require a constitutional amendment.
6. Haw. Rev. Stat. § 12-41; Courtney Teague, “Want to Run for Office in Hawaii Without Joining a Political Party? Good Luck,” Honolulu Civil Beat, August 9, 2018, https://www.civilbeat.org/2018/08/want-to-run-for-office-in-hawaii-without-joining-a-political-party-good-luck.
7. Richard Bodien, “Wrong Enemy: Hawaiʻi’s 2026 Primary and the Adversary Neither Party Is Willing to Name,” hawaiifirst.blog, September 2026.
8. Martijn van Zomeren, Tom Postmes, and Russell Spears, “Toward an Integrative Social Identity Model of Collective Action: A Quantitative Research Synthesis of Three Socio-Psychological Perspectives,” Psychological Bulletin 134, no. 4 (2008): 504–35, https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.134.4.504.
9. James N. Druckman, Erik Peterson, and Rune Slothuus, “How Elite Partisan Polarization Affects Public Opinion Formation,” American Political Science Review 107, no. 1 (2013): 57–79, https://doi.org/10.1017/S0003055412000500.
10. Doug McAdam, “Recruitment to High-Risk Activism: The Case of Freedom Summer,” American Journal of Sociology 92, no. 1 (1986): 64–90, https://users.ssc.wisc.edu/~oliver/SOC924/Articles/McAdamHighRisk.pdf.
11. Marshall Ganz, interview by Salimah Samji, “Intro to Leadership and Organizing,” Building State Capability, Harvard Kennedy School, accessed September 30, 2026, https://bsc.hks.harvard.edu/tools/podcasts/leadership-organizing-and-action/intro-to-leadership-and-organizing/.

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