Marvin, don't be stupid. If you watch one second of the news, the presidential candidates are shoved down your throat. Just kind of by design, people are going to know more about the presidential candidates than the local ones. Local candidates have extremely limited funding and rarely receive much play time on local news networks, if any. It's up to the people to take the extra step to figure it out, and we all know how much we can rely on the average person to do that.
But don't loop me into that category about young people who don't care about anything else besides the presidential vote. I helped my parents make a decision in 2002 on the mayor of Huntington Beach as well as several other local figures. I was 11.