Republicans in the state House are one seat short of a rule that would let them force floor votes on bills. The majority would rather leave those bills in committee. Earlier this week, I asked what that power would be for.
A tactic needs a goal. But the party has never settled whether it is a party for Hawaiʻi first or a local franchise of the national brand.
That question should be settled before November. A caucus that can force votes will have to decide, bill by bill, what it wants on the record. Those choices will define the party more than any platform document. The answer should start with the people who actually live here.
The franchise model has real appeal. National alignment offers a ready message, a famous brand, and the hope of donors.
But Hawaiʻi is not a battleground state, and national money for state House races here is scarce. The branch pays its dues in loyalty and receives little in return. It is odd for the party of freedom to take its cues from a capital nearly 5,000 miles away while ignoring the voters next door.
Local Democrats are in a similar position. Their party, too, is more a platform people stand on than an institution that shapes them. The difference is that the Democratic platform is attached to a ladder. With an all-blue delegation in Washington, a young Democrat can climb from a neighborhood board to Congress. Republicans have no ladder, which is all the more reason to build the ground floor well.
That ground floor is the electorate Hawaiʻi actually has. More than one in five residents is 65 or older, a larger share than the nation’s, and older people vote. According to Pew’s latest Religious Landscape Study, about six in 10 adults here are Protestant, Catholic, Latter-day Saint, or Orthodox. Many hold traditional views on marriage, life, and the rights of parents. Few lawmakers speak for them. And nearly half the state was born somewhere else, on the continent or abroad.
That last fact undercuts an old campaign assumption. In a college class on intercultural communication, I was taught that Hawaiʻi has a collectivist culture, where people set aside their own desires to keep the peace.
My family is of Japanese ancestry and has been here five generations. We take off our shoes at the door and eat rice with nearly everything. But we have far more in common with other Americans than with anyone in Tokyo. Much of the old wisdom about campaigning here took shape before statehood, when voters had less in common with the rest of America.
Voters who are older, churchgoing, and deeply American are good soil for the party’s message of faith, family, and freedom. The Democratic establishment supplies the contrast on its own. Hawaiʻi is among the costliest places in the country to raise children. Yet the state’s instinct is to regulate the family more, not to get out of its way.
Still, a party can misunderstand its own platform. A party does not form souls. Families and churches do that work, and they were doing it long before anyone founded a political party.
The party’s task is humbler: to speak for the people those homes and churches have formed and to protect the room they need to do their work. A Republican Party that understood this would stop importing fights from cable news. It would start with the questions Hawaiʻi families ask at the kitchen table.
Can my kids afford to stay? Who decides what my daughter learns at school? Will my church be left alone? Who will care for my mother?
Those questions are local, and so are the answers. God’s word to Judah’s exiles still holds for anyone who lives in one place and pines for another: “Seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you into exile, and pray to the Lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will find your welfare.”
Floor votes are coming. The party can use them to echo Washington, or it can use them to put Hawaiʻi’s families on the record. The platform is sound. What it lacks is people willing to carry it door to door, and that is a harder problem than any floor vote.
Author Sterling Higa can be reached at hello@sterlinghiga.com.
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