This is an odd political year in Newtown, and we’re not just talking about the date, which is indeed an odd number indicating local elections. There is very little actual drama in the races up and down the 2015 ballot. Republican First Selectman Pat Llodra has no opposition to her reelection bid. Seventy percent of the candidates for the Legislative Council will be elected, and for the four Board of Education candidates, the success rate will be 75 percent. When The Bee was trying to decide on a race to highlight for its annual candidates’ forum, it settled on the Board of Finance race, where Republicans and Democrats each fielded four candidates for the four vacancies on the board. Still, the forum revealed a remarkable bipartisan consensus on most financial issues facing the town. The relative calm in this election has left Newtown’s political parties talking about partisanship itself.

This year, local Democrats declined to challenge Mrs Llodra’s reelection and left several seats uncontested down the ballot, fielding 24 candidates to the Republicans’ 32. They have, nonetheless, mounted a vigorous rhetorical challenge to the status quo, charging that “one-party dominance” of Newtown has deprived the town’s governing bodies of “balance, inclusiveness, and transparency.” While it is true that dominance is sometimes construed as entitlement by those who enjoy it, the normal rules of American democracy still apply, especially to those who get clubby and comfortable in elected office.

When people perceive that their government is lopsided, exclusive, and opaque, they tend to do something about it at the polls. The one-party dominance the Democrats are criticizing, however, was put in place by the voters of Newtown and not the Republican Party; the same voters will on Tuesday again assess the value of the status quo and, we trust, vote accordingly.

It could be that Newtown is facing a new era of partisanship that we have not yet seen. Still, most votes by local boards and agencies are unanimous, the product of quick consensus. When lines of disagreement do form, they are almost never along party lines. To date, most of our local government’s accomplishments — and shortcomings — can be credited to both Democrats and Republicans. Perhaps that is changing, and the warnings about one-party dominance are prescient. Perhaps partisanship is about to take a toll on representative governance in Newtown.

If that is the case, the answer may not be electing more of one party or the other, since the biggest bloc of voters in town is neither Republican nor Democrat, but unaffiliated. Occasionally, unaffiliated candidates do wander onto the tickets of the two major parties when there are spare slots to fill as they have in this election. And sometimes they petition their way onto the ballot. For the most part, however, our elected representatives arise from 36 percent of the voting population that is Republican or the 26 percent that is Democrat. If we are truly concerned about the perils of partisanship, worrying about whether the charter should allow a bare majority or a big majority on the Board of Education for one party or the other may just be incremental tinkering with no real benefit or effect. If partisanship is a real problem and not just election rhetoric, then maybe the solution should be to look outside the party apparatus to explore nonpartisan, at-large nominating options, where every registered voter has a say.