Why more good candidates don’t run for office. It’s not the money.

By Brian Hicks

Many of the best and brightest — people who may actually have good ideas that could make the state better — wouldn’t run for office at any price for precisely the reason they’d be so good at it.

“People have asked me why I don’t run,” says Lynn Teague of the League of Women Voters. “It would drive me crazy to have people stop me in the grocery store, or at a restaurant.”

That’s saying something, seeing as how one of the League’s goals is to get more people involved in the political process. But she’s right. Teague spends most of the session at the Statehouse, which means she gets to see all this regularly. She can confirm that although the divisive politics of the day has driven some people to run for office … it has driven more to run for the exits.

Read the full article at the link above.