Where Your Civic Hours Should Go

We spend about eight hours a week taking in news and politics, mostly about Washington, and about one hour doing anything civic. Here’s what the law asks of you, where the power sits, and a healthier split: half your civic time on Dayton.

By Rich Vandall · Nov. 1, 2026

This one started with my buddy Cooper. He asked me a simple question I couldn't answer: how much should one person actually engage with politics? How many hours, and where? So I went looking.

Ask most people in Dayton who the president is and they'll know. Ask who sits on the Dayton City Commission, or who runs the school board their property taxes pay for, and the room goes quiet. That isn't a knock on anybody. It's how the attention economy is built. Cable news, social media and the national parties all fight for our eyes every hour of every day, and the people who decide whether our street gets paved and whether our kids' school stays open never come close to that.

The numbers show a mismatch. The government that touches your day the most is the one you hear about the least. In the 50 biggest U.S. cities, an average of 67% of eligible voters turned out for the presidential race, while off-cycle mayoral elections averaged 26%. Here at home, 16,170 people voted in Dayton's 2025 mayoral race, in a city of about 137,000.

So how much of your civic energy should go to Washington, how much to Columbus, and how much to Dayton? And how much of it does the law actually require? I went to the data.

What the law requires of you: almost nothing

Here's the whole list of what an adult in Dayton is legally required to do as a citizen:

• File your taxes. In Dayton that means three returns: federal, Ohio, and the city's 2.25% income tax. The IRS estimates the average federal return takes about 13 hours.
• Show up for jury duty if you're summoned. Nearly all of it is local or state: Montgomery County Common Pleas or Dayton Municipal Court. State and local courts handle about 66 million cases a year. Federal courts handle a sliver of that.
• Answer the census once every 10 years.
• Register with Selective Service if you're a man between 18 and 25.

That's it. Voting is not required anywhere in the United States. Neither is attending a meeting, reading a budget, or knowing your commissioner's name. Count by where each duty lands and the required part splits about evenly: one tax return for each level of government, jury service mostly local, and the census and draft registration federal.

Add it up and the law asks for maybe 15 to 20 hours a year, most of it spent on paperwork. A democracy that runs on that little required participation only works if people volunteer much more than the minimum. Whether you give more, and where you spend it, is up to you.

Where the money and power sit

If you go by dollars, Washington wins: about $5.1 trillion of the roughly $9 trillion spent by all U.S. governments in 2023. Most of that, though, is checks sent to people (Social Security, Medicare, interest on the debt) and the military. It matters, but it's mostly decided by 535 people in Congress and largely locked in by formula.

The things you run into on an ordinary Tuesday are mostly paid for and run closer to home: the school down the street, the police officer who answers your call, the court that hears your case, the water main, the zoning board that decides whether a warehouse goes up next to your house. State and local governments pay about 86% of public school costs. Most criminal justice spending is local. And your vote counts for far more in a city race decided by 16,000 ballots than in a presidential race decided by 150 million.

Where our attention actually goes

We pay attention backwards. Big-city mayoral elections held off the presidential calendar draw about 26% of eligible voters, compared with about 67% for president. Interest follows the same pattern: 54% of Americans say they're very interested in presidential elections, and 34% say that about local ones.

This isn't because people don't care. National news is everywhere and free. Local news has been gutted, and the people who do show up for local elections skew old. In some big cities, residents 65 and older are dozens of times more likely to vote in a mayoral race than residents under 35. The result is that a few thousand regular voters decide the races that shape the rest of us.

There's one more number worth knowing. In a 2023 Gallup survey, 67% of Americans said they trust their local government to handle local problems, compared with 32% for Congress. We pay the least attention to the level of government we trust the most.

Counting the hours

Put a clock on it and the picture gets sharper. A large study of Americans' media habits found the average adult spends about 7½ hours a day with TV and screens, and about an hour of that on news: 54 minutes of TV news and under 10 minutes reading news online. Social media adds a little more. Americans average about two hours a day on social apps, but Meta says less than 3% of what people see in their Facebook feed is political. That works out to a few minutes a day.

Now look at the doing. The federal government's own time-use survey finds the average American spends 0.12 hours a day, about 7 minutes, volunteering of any kind, civic or not. Add the 15 to 20 hours a year the law requires, and that's it. We spend roughly eight hours a week taking in news and politics and about one hour a week doing anything about it. Most of those eight hours go to Washington, because that's what cable, network news and the feeds are built around. Only 22% of Americans now say they follow local news very closely, down from 37% in 2016.

How much is healthy

There's no official safe dose of news, and I won't pretend there is. But there's good evidence that too much does harm. In a 2022 study in Health Communication, 16.5% of U.S. adults showed signs of severely problematic news consumption: checking compulsively, unable to look away, and worse mental and physical health to go with it. In the American Psychological Association's 2024 Stress in America survey, 77% of adults named the future of the nation as a source of stress, and 69% said the same of the presidential election.

Here's my rule of thumb, and it's opinion, not medicine:

• Healthy: about 2 to 5 hours a week. Roughly 25 minutes a day of news you chose on purpose, plus an hour a week of actually doing something: a meeting, a call, a letter, a vote. Spend half of it on Dayton.
• Heavy: around 2 hours a day, 14 hours a week. At that point you're mostly absorbing national outrage you can't act on. If it's leaving you angry, anxious or worn out, cut the cable and the feeds first, not the local paper or the city commission.
• Tuned out: almost nothing. That's where the few thousand regular voters end up deciding your city's races for you.

The point isn't to care less. It's to trade a few hours of watching Washington for one hour of showing up in Dayton. You'll likely feel better, and you'll get more done.

The case for 50-30-20

Here's my proposal. Whatever time you can give to civic life, whether that's an hour a week or an hour a month, put half of it into local government, 30% into the state, and 20% into federal.

Local, 50%. This is where your vote and your voice count the most and where the results show up fastest. Spend the time going to a city commission or school board meeting once a quarter, reading the city budget, knowing your commissioners and county commissioners by name, and voting in every May and November election, including the off-year ones nobody talks about.

State, 30%. Columbus decides how much money your schools get, how your elections run, what your city is allowed to do, and much of criminal law. Ohio's statehouse districts are drawn so that most races aren't competitive, which makes your attention more valuable, not less. Know your state representative and state senator, and follow the bills that land on Dayton.

Federal, 20%. It still matters. War, Social Security, Medicare, the courts, the tax code and Wright-Patt's budget are all set there. But it already gets most of the national news coverage, and you'll take in plenty of it without trying. Vote, stay informed, call when something big is at stake, and don't let it eat the rest of your time.

Compare that with what's required, which is roughly 15 to 20 hours of mostly paperwork a year. One hour a week is about 52 hours a year. That's not much to ask, and it would put most of us well ahead of the few thousand people who currently decide our local races.

What this looks like in Dayton

The 26 local hours aren't hard to fill:

• Dayton City Commission holds its regular public meetings on Wednesdays at City Hall, 101 W. Third St., and streams them at daytonohio.gov/govtv. Go to one a quarter, or watch online.
• Dayton Public Schools Board of Education. Your property taxes fund it, and levies come back to the ballot regularly.
• Montgomery County Commission and Common Pleas Court judges. Judicial races sit near the bottom of the ballot, and most people skip them.
• May primaries and November off-year elections. That's where commissioners, school board members and tax issues get decided. The 0.5% piece of Dayton's income tax has gone back to voters four times.

The other side

There are fair objections. Some of the biggest forces in a Dayton family's life are federal: Medicare, Social Security, the minimum wage, the defense budget that keeps Wright-Patt running. A neighborhood can't fix a recession, a war or a broken immigration system. And for people facing discrimination, Washington has often been the one that stepped in when local governments wouldn't. The civil rights era is the obvious example.

All true. That's why federal gets 20% and not zero. But national politics already reaches into every phone in America without anyone asking. Local politics only gets your attention if you go looking for it. A split that leans local makes up for that gap. It doesn't mean ignoring the rest.