We're here in Austin at Netroots Nation and our panel -- Organizing for Change: An Inside Look at Obama For America's Grassroots Strategy -- is about to begin. Deputy Campaign Manager Steve Hildebrand, New Media Director Joe Rospars, Ohio General Election Director Jeremy Bird, and Georgia Deputy Field Director Joy Cushman, are all here to share stories and insights from the campaign and take questions.
Here's the official description and I'll be providing live updates after the jump...
In this panel, you'll learn about how the Obama campaign built an unprecedented grassroots movement -- from the way the campaign uses community organizing principles in its local field operations, to the campaign's use of online tools that empower supporters to self-organize, to the training a new generation of grassroots leaders through our Organizing Fellows program. And you'll learn about why the Obama campaign is the first in a generation to pursue a 50-state strategy, engaging new people and empowering supporters from all across the country to not only win an election, but build a long-term movement for progressive change.
From left to right: Joe, Jeremy, Joy, and Steve
Joe Rospars is introducing the panelists... Jeremy Bird was in South Carolina and organized South Carolina in a way that had never been done before.
Jeremy...
About 17 months ago, found himself in SC. Started organizing as a community organizer in Boston, where he was in grad school. Worked as an organizer with Howard Dean and then DNC. Read Barack Obama's book and particularly the chapters about community organizing and said "I have to work for this guy."
In SC, Jeremy was told the way you win is pay of ministers and local officials. That didn't fit with our candidates message or his bio. We wanted to do things differently.
Showed up at a church in Orangeburg, SC, one of our first events. Showed up and said we're here with Barack Obama's presidential campaign, they looked at us like we were crazy. No one had really reached out to folks like this before.
We started to go out and find people who were community leaders and have our organizers meet with them. We went out and had thousands of 1-on-1 meetings and asked folks to host house meetings.
Shows video of Grace Cusack...
After house meetings, people like Grace became team leaders responsible for helping to organize their communities. On election day, we had 300 neighborhood teams, over 10,000 doors, and we knocked on every single voter we ID'd in the state three times.
After SC, went to Maryland and Pennsylvania, then Chicago. We interviewed over 200 organizers from multiple states, and started to put together a plan for the general.
Several things were key:
- Training -- Really investing in people like Grace Cusack, how to become a real leader in your community.
- We were close to the ground -- In SC, we had 37 offices where people had a home, a community to go to, somewhere where people could feel like they were a real part of something.
- Teams -- When you have volunteer leaders, grassroots folks can go out and organize their own teams, make things happen on their own.
- Integrating Technology -- Tech tools to support organizing. If you sign up on our email list, we can follow up with you and get you involved. This is unlike any campaign he'd worked on before. On election day, we had tons of cell #s and we texted folks to turn them out on election day.
- Community Organizing and Strict Accountability -- Without real goals, you can't win. But without a community organizing spirit, and just having people go through a list of calls, you don't have the same spirit and investment.
Great story -- a grassroots volunteer organizer with the campaign was inspired to run for office and actually won the race for Mayor of Florence, SC by one point.
Joe introduces Joy Cushman...
Joy...
Grew up in conservative religious community in Maine... One of her first organizing projects was to get prayer back in school. She realized issues need to connect to values in a meaningful way.
Went on to become a community organizer in Lowell and Lawrence, MA, old industrial mill towns. Old mills were turning into luxury condos, and we wanted to get some affordable housing mixed in. First real organizing experience was bringing different folks together in Lowell to create a neighborhood team. They met with local leaders for various sit downs, and Joy realized that it really matters a lot who's sitting on the other side of the table. She realized you need to make change from bottom up and top down at the same time.
Joy went to SC and watched some of the 1-on-1 meetings, realized that real change is something that happens one living room at a time, one kitchen table at a time. It's about having people awaken and realize their ability to make change.
Jeremy invited Joy to come to Chicago and be a part of the Organizing Fellows program. She said "of course! This is going to be one of the biggest organizing training programs ever..."
Interviewed thousands of applicants, accepted 3,600. And then we trained them all!
We decided to really invest in training them as community organizers, rather than just basics of field campaigns. Trained them how to share their stories and build relationships with people in the community, how to lead house meetings, how to do voter registration. Proud to say Georgia fellows registered 1,200 people in one day.
We put them in teams and gave them the task of organizing Unite for Change house meetings all across the country -- we did over 4,000 house meetings. They did something truly American -- gathered in living rooms talking about what our responsibility is and how we can help change the country.
Organizing fellows are teachers, airline pilots, firefighters. One of our fellows grew up in Alabama and participated in Selma march with MLK. Left politics for decades but got involved for the first time in years because she believes this campaign has the potential to change the country like the Civil Rights movement did. Now she commutes every week from Georgia to Alabama to part a part of this.
Shows video of Organizing Fellow, Andy in Ohio...
Joe introduces Deputy Campaign Manager Steve Hildebrand.
Steve...
Talks about challenges the campaign faced when we originally make the decision to run. Barack and Michelle wanted to make sure that even if the campaign was not successful, they wanted to use this opportunity to run for president to impact people's lives positively. Barack thought winning the presidency would be remarkable, but building a movement for change would be worth anything and everything they'd have to go through to get there. Barack's major point -- let's not just win the election, but build a movement to change the agenda. Let's change Washington. These were the principles he learned as a community organizer and registering voters in Illinois in 1992. He's well aware that best policies aren't coming out of K-street but out of people's backyards and in community events and grassroots meetings across the country.
Obama did surrogate work in 2006, and he used it as an opportunity to help candidates for Governor, Congress, Senate, across the country.
We knew that the Internet was going to play a vital role. A lot of us learned from Dean that the Internet alone couldn't win an election -- that people had to organize on the ground as well as online or we couldn't be effective. We've had an incredible marriage between field and our online team.
We knew we really had to run our campaign differently. Tremendous skepticism initially, but we proved that we could be a different kind of candidate and win. We knew that campaign had to look, feel, and operate differently, and we did.
We turned out 15,000 people on a very cold day in Springfield, continued to build great crowds in places like Austin, Texas, early on in the campaign.
We had 28,000 people come to the website and sign up during the Austin event. Those rallies were very important for optics, to show America that there was this movement being created out there.
As we started to look at the electoral map for the primary, we looked at Iowa, but we needed to make sure that we were also building a national movement. We couldn't just be about Iowa. We needed a path forward. We looked forward to Super Tuesday to be ready to compete in all 22 states. For any campaign in America to be ready to compete in 22 states after going through the first 4 was a big, big challenge.
Was skeptical of Jeremy in SC... Could house meetings build the capacity we needed? But quickly lost that skepticism when he saw that they were able to build that capacity... tons of credit to Jeremy for building a field model that states like SC had never seen before.
We were told over and over again that SC was not a field state. Every state is a field state if you know how to organize.
Did Walk for Change events across the country four months after we announced the presidency. There was a lot of skepticism, but we knew what was out there -- we knew we had vols and activists who were willing to take time to do this right. This campaign took volunteerism to another level -- this was about people who wanted to build a community around issues. It wasn't just about Barack Obama, it was about whether we can build a progressive movement across this country that has a life of its own and that has a future. It's about what we're doing for the next decade.
We saw voter reg opportunities that had never existed before. We learned through experience that our efforts on the ground to register voters was really really important. That's where you all come in. Four factors that have given us unprecedented opportunity.
- We have the seriousness and urgency of everyday Americans who have never been politically involved. Folks who face problems in their own lives and are nervous about their futures, jobs, health care, war -- there is a ton of urgency.
- Barack Obama is inspirational -- and people view him as someone who can bring people together.
- Volunteer resources that we've never seen before
- Financial resources
I want to use these four things and these opportunities to register millions of new Democrats, and not just get Barack elected but change Washington, bring in new Senators, members of Congress, etc, and build our party. If we don't capitalize on this opportunity, shame on us, because we don't get this kind of opportunity too often.
We need everyone here to be a part of this registration and turnout effort. If we can do this, we will truly win this election, and build this party to be a majority party for a long time.
We might not be able to win Texas, although won't write it off. Tom Delay did a lot to make Texas a GOP-dominated state for decades through redistricting. The opportunity exists to change this and put Texas back in a place where it sends more Dems to Congress and matters to progressive politics in this country in a big way. There are 5 house seats to win control of the state house -- won't be easy but it's doable. Anything the Obama campaign can do to help, we're going to do it.
Washington is polarized because we don't have strong enough majorities -- but we can make this happen together. That's why we need a fifty state strategy -- it's not just about Barack Obama.
We need to keep building a movement for change at every single level. That's why Texas, Wyoming, North Dakota, Alaska -- we're not writing these states off. And we're not going to give up.
There are 2.3 million unregistered voters in Texas. We need to use the opportunity to capitalize on voters under 30, get them registered, and keep them as Democrats... This is how to build a movement.
Joe Rospars shows Vote for Change video...
OK, gonna take a short break but we'll be back with updates later including some video interviews with members of the Kossacks for Obama community!