This Tuesday, June 10, voters the length and breadth of Maine have an opportunity to vote in municipal elections, voting on school budgets, school board membership and various referendum questions on items like zoning, building and bonds. Voter turnout in small local elections is often low — sleepy summer election dates can be passed over and are too easily missed.

That shouldn’t be the case this week.

Braced for a period of national political pandemonium last year, this editorial board made a couple of appeals for the redoubling of the public’s focus on state and local matters. Avert your gaze from the federal picture, we advised voters, “leave the downward slide to the country’s highest office,” and “get back to basics, get back to Maine.”

“The neighborhoods and the streets we live on are the places upon which our concern and care can leave a positive impression almost right away,” reads the editorial of Nov. 10, 2024. “By comparison, the hand-wringing over the most hotly debated and stress-inducing national matters — the southern border, the future of the Supreme Court, the question of trade policy — seems almost abstract.”

While that abstraction has waned by degrees — for better or worse, we now have ample evidence of the direction President Trump is seeking to move the country in — this advice has not aged terribly. It’s at the community level where our civic engagement is forever at its most direct and immediate. It should come as a relief, in 2025, to restrict one’s focus to the accessible questions in our cities and towns, to be able to engage with our surroundings and with our neighbors in mind.

The political discord in this country in recent months has escalated to levels that, for many, is almost too much to bear. Maine and Mainers cannot afford to let vital local matters fall foul of any of the same despair, fatigue or impatience.

It’s when the stakes nationally and internationally seem to be at their most staggering that attention to the circumstances within our control is particularly important. Most polling places will be open between 7 a.m. and 8 a.m. Tuesday. See you there.