Here is something useful and educational that we could do together: Check out the election results below and beyond the senatorial and partylist races.

I'm referring of course to the congressional, provincial, city, municipal and the Muslim Mindanao races.

I've checked the election results in Bulacan. In city after city, municipality after municipality, I saw husbands, wives, children swapped, ran and won for the top posts. Some more durable and more daring than others.

After a fair amount of effort, I've also tried to list down and compare the results in our 82 provinces.

You can check out my Facebook post where I shared what I found.

This column would run out of space if I mentioned every province whose governor, vice mayor, and district representatives belonged to one family.

Surely, you would perhaps arrive at the same observation or conclusion. Still not legally defined, the dynasties are still going strong, and have a firm grip on political power in the provinces.

That's just at the provincial and congressional levels. It would probably take the patience and power of several dozen researchers and a lot more time to drill down to the city and municipal levels.

In many instances, as the tallies would show, the dynasties ran unopposed. In others, the stronger dynasties defeated weaker or weakened dynasties.

While I am as happy as others that some dynastic candidates were defeated, and that good leaders won, these happy incidents appear to be the outliers and the exceptions.

The victory of dynasties at the provincial and congressional levels is something not mentioned in many post-mortems we have read, and there's no mention how this is related to the much-praised victories of Bam Aquino and Kiko Pangilinan, and the roster of other senatorial winners, and vice versa.

In town after town, voters feel that most of the macro and national post-mortems don't apply to them, or don't consider their situation.

What do we make of provinces where Aquino topped the senatorial race while also electing dynasties, and vice versa?

If one campaigned for only two, three or four senators, and one partylist, it would be easy to claim victory. But such point of view must also confront the reality in the over 18,000 other races where they had no candidates and thus practically gave away the posts to other parties or coalitions.

In most of those places, voters simply had no choice. It should be the duty of progressives to create and develop leaders who can credibly challenge the dynasties.

As in Pasig, voters have shown that they are ready to elect non-dynastic or anti-dynasty candidates. The successful Vico Sotto experiment is awaiting to be replicated in other cities. We can only hope that progressive political parties and coalitions would give such a choice to the voters, on a nationwide scale.

This responsibility of parties and coalitions is truly immense: Every election, they have a duty to present candidates for 12 senators, 63 partylist representatives, 315 district representatives, 82 provincial governors and vice governors, 840 provincial board members, 149 city mayors and vice mayors, 1,682 city councilors, 1,493 municipal mayors and vice mayors, and 11,948 municipal councilors. Then, there's also the Bangsamoro Parliament members for our kababayans in the new Bangsamoro autonomous region of Muslim Mindanao.

Just like in the run-up to the 2022 elections, the focus now is merely on the possible presidential candidates, with no mention about the thousands of other positions. Would these presidential candidates offer no change from the dynastic politics at the sub-national or local levels, or would the presidential candidates actually rely on them for victory?

This inconvenient question, and other bothersome matters like campaign finance and massive vote-buying, present serious challenges to the widespread myth that what only matters in elections is to "vote wisely" and that at the root of the political mess is the invented trope of the "bo-botante." It is more complicated than these destructive myths and tropes.

With less than three years to the next elections, voters should start demanding more not just from politicians who won, but from those who wish to contest the next polls. At the same time, perhaps we could encourage grassroots, community, entrepreneurial, academic and professional leaders and mass movements to rise and to present choices to the voters.

To put it simply: We are a nation in search of 18,000+ Vico Sottos. With vision, organization, and effort, we should be able to find, create and make them win.