Although local economic output is widely assumed to be a valence good for both residents and local politicians, such assumptions fail when local labor demand outstrips the resident workforce, drawing commuters from surrounding municipalities and effectively creating a non-voting “daytime” and a voting “nighttime” electorate. Existing scholarship highlights the importance of economic growth for local politics but overlooks how non-resident labor forces distort local accountability and representation. This study addresses this gap by examining how the influx of in-commuters—workers who cannot vote in local elections—reshapes political incentives, participation, and public goods provision. Using an original harmonized dataset of all German municipal elections between 1990 and 2020, combined with time-varying municipality-level data on in- and out-commuters, I link commuting flows to changes in voter turnout, incumbency turnover, social capital, and public service allocation. Preliminary results show that higher net commuting inflows correspond to lower electoral turnout, more frequent incumbent replacement, weakened civil society networks, and a shift in local policy priorities away from strictly economic goods. These findings illuminate how mobility-induced decoupling of residence and workplace challenges traditional models of local political accountability, offering new insight into how spatially fragmented labor markets reshape the political economy of governance in an era of increasing geographic mobility.