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What is it about incumbency that makes politicians clam up when somebody else is asking the questions?

Ninety-four elected officials are trying to hold onto their jobs across the island this year. Civil Beat reached out to all of them, and so far barely half of them have bothered to respond to our candidate Q&A surveys.

It’s true that a handful of these folks aren’t even on the Aug. 10 primary ballot, automatically advancing instead to the Nov. 5 general election.

But that’s also true of the 184 non-incumbents who are on ballots in Hawaii, and 109 of them have already sent in their surveys. That’s a 59% response rate compared to 51% for the incumbents.

There aren’t any trick questions in the survey, although a couple of sitting legislators have told us we focused too heavily on government reform issues this time around. We don’t think so, because over the last two sessions the Legislature has failed to approve the major proposals to clean up state government after two former state lawmakers were convicted of taking bribes.

State senators have been especially uncommunicative. Of the 12 incumbents on the primary ballot, we’ve heard back from two — Lorraine Inouye and Sharon Moriwaki.

Their colleagues in the House have been more forthcoming. We have surveys from 22 of the 46 incumbent representatives — much better but still less than half. (These numbers do not include District 1, whose representative, Mark Nakashima, died July 11.)

Outside the State Capitol, the response rates among incumbents vary widely, with the best results coming from the neighbor islands. Six of seven Kauai County Council incumbents are in, as are six of eight in Hawaii County. You might think that after last year’s wildfires Maui County Council incumbents would be leaping at the chance to communicate, but only five of nine have done so.

The real silent treatment is coming from the Honolulu City Council, with zero out of four incumbents answering the questions so far. Three of them are unopposed, but still …

And then there’s the highest-ranking no-show, U.S. Sen. Mazie Hirono.

If it seems like we’re picking on incumbents, it’s because we are. They already work for their constituents, after all, so it’s especially egregious when they ignore an invitation to explain their views and defend their records.

Plenty of challengers and candidates for open seats have also failed to respond, of course. This falls more into the category of rookie mistake.

This Is Actually A Pretty Good Year

Overall, this year’s pre-primary Q&A response rate is relatively good at about 56%. The official primary date is Aug. 10, but mail ballots are expected to be in the hands of at least some voters by July 23.

That’s when we historically start seeing a big surge in reader clicks on the Q&As — when the ballots are on the dining room table.

A lot more candidates were campaigning across the islands two years ago — about 400, but the overall return rate at this juncture was lower at about 50%. There were 90 incumbents that year, and only about 45% had responded, so their reluctance to do so is a trend, not an anomaly.

This year we’ve been publishing the Q&As at a five-per-day clip, a total of 120 as of Wednesday. 

The pre-primary Q&A response rate hit 61% in 2020, the first year of the pandemic and Hawaii’s conversion to all-mail balloting.

But it was only 43% in 2018 and even lower in 2016, perhaps understandable because that was the first year that we expanded the Q&As to include the neighbor islands.

This year we’ve been publishing the Q&As at a five-per-day clip, a total of 120 as of Wednesday. That means we have about 37 to go, plus any more that arrive in the next couple of weeks. The top priority is contested primary races — if we’ve received them, we’ll make every effort to have those candidates published before voters get their mail ballots.

Finding Your Candidates

One way to find the surveys for particular candidates or races is by going to Civil Beat’s 2024 ballot and clicking on the links — if there’s a little red “Q&A” box to the right of their names, they’ve been published.

That ballot, by the way, is a list of all candidates who filed their candidacies with the state Elections Office by the June 4 deadline. While all state legislative races, even uncontested ones, are on the primary ballot, that’s not always the case in county races.

For instance, one- or two-person races are on the primary ballot in Hawaii County, but go straight to the general election ballot in Honolulu, Maui County and Office of Hawaiian Affairs contests.

There’s still time for candidates to email back their Q&As.

The latest Q&As to be published are on our homepage, and they gravitate from there to a rolling queue that is searchable by keywords — the other easy way to track down particular candidates or races.

There’s still time for candidates to email back their Q&As. And those who can’t find the surveys we’ve sent out — twice to the scofflaws — can email us at candidate@civilbeat.com to request a new invitation.

We’ll even accept the surveys post-primary from candidates who are advancing to the general election. Successful primary candidates who have already sent in surveys will see them republished before the general election with updated introductions linking to their general election opponents.

During past elections, some candidates who sent in their surveys early have complained that we still accepted questionnaires much later from their tardy opponents.

But unlike many of the incumbents out there, we want to do everything we can to see that candidates communicate with their constituents before it’s time to vote.