It was shaping up to be a mellow MLK weekend for me this past January. I was pretty wiped out from working on healthcare and so I wasn't looking for a big job. But it turns out a big job was looking for me and thousands of other OFA volunteer organizers. A Massachusetts Senate race that had previously polled with a comfortable lead for Martha Coakley was suddenly too close to call.
We know the rest of that story - in ten days OFA mobilized an entire GOTV operation from scratch. We made up a stunning amount of ground, but it wasn't enough. We needed more time.
Fortunately, the midterms aren't ten days away, they are 190. But we will need an army of highly trained organizers mobilizing an even larger pool of volunteers for races across the country. And this OFA army will be implementing Vote 2010: bringing the 2008 "Obama surge" voters back to the polls. If we can do it, that could change progressive politics forever.
Of course, we aren't starting from scratch. For over a year OFA has been organizing, building a structure that covers all 50 states and all 435 Congressional districts. I helped organize the first major volunteer trainings in California early last summer. Since then, we have trained hundreds of organizers in California alone - and many more across the country.
And these leaders aren't just trained, they are tested. The health reform fight was longer and harder than anyone imagined, and the Coakley race forced all of us back into GOTV mode - dusting off skills that I hadn't used since November 08.
But as OFA continues to grow, building more and more local neighborhood teams, there is a continuing need for training the team leaders, data managers, volunteer coordinators, and the other organizers who will be responsible for turning out voters this fall.
So this past weekend, across the country, OFA organizers held over 150 trainings for organizers who will lead the Vote 2010 effort in their communities.
In California alone there were 35 trainings, and many of them were overflowing capacity. One was held at San Francisco's Marcus Books - the oldest African-American bookstore in the country. (You can see in the slideshow of photos below that organizers hung a sheet in front of the bookcase to project video and powerpoint.) Here's a great quote from that event, (h/t the OFA California blog):
To those angry or disillusioned, volunteer Alex. B said: "For disillusionment and cynicism, the best vaccine is volunteering. Get back in there. Tap back into the flow of energy from the campaign. Meet people who will inspire you to inspire others."
I went to the Oakland training on Sunday, where 113 people jammed into the new Northern California office to learn about recruiting volunteers, forming teams, and using personal stories to persuade voters. You can get a sense of that event and others from the OFACA live tweets of the training weekend. And here's a great slideshow of photos.
(Update - my cool slideshow embed keeps crashing so the link will have to suffice . . .)
At the trainings, volunteers were organized into teams based on where they live, and told to start organizing activities and events. These events can be used to recruit more volunteer leaders, who get trained, build teams, and reach out themselves. Over time, this process will build a vast network of organizers responsible for carrying out Vote 2010.
Vote 2010 is the OFA plan for the midterm elections. It is focused on turning out the people who voted for the first time in 2008 - registered and turned out by the Obama campaign in states all over the country.
Here's how David Plouffe describes the plan:
I believe we can avoid the nightmare electoral scenario that Republicans in Washington have already convinced themselves will happen. But only if we work together.
Two years ago, we challenged a group of young and disaffected voters to participate in the 2008 election. They cast votes for the very first time and helped us elect a new president. You told us that your top priority for 2010 was to help these people head back to the polls -- and we built our plan around that goal.
As wmtriallawyer's excellent diary points out, these surge voters could be the difference between winning and losing.
Let me just run the numbers from my own County. In 2008, we had over 35,000 Democrats who voted who didn't vote in 2006, the last off-Presidential year/Statewide election we had. Of that number, fully a 1/3 of those Democrats -- over 12,000 -- were newly registered voters.
Which gets the brain whirring...if I can turn out just 10% of those voters in 2010 -- 3,500 more D votes than we had in 2006 -- we'll beat back any Republican threat.
Don't think so? Yeah, I know. 10% isn't a lot. But in a swing county like mine, believe it or not, that 10% is the difference. Between a Republican County Executive and a Democratic one. Between one Republican State Senator, two Republican State Delegates, and two Republican County Councilmen and Democratic ones.
I've written since 2007 about the idea that the combination of nationally-networked locally-based organizing can produce stunning voter contact results. The people out talking to voters are volunteers from their own communities. But they have national tools and staff support to make them more effective. Here's how it works:
The idea is to build organizational capacity, so when really critical moments in the campaign happened, OFA could deliver huge numbers. Easy asks get more people engaged, who can then be cultivated as local leaders and tasked with organizing others. This multiplier effect, combined with local on the ground knowledge and credibility, can yield huge payoffs.
It's hard, tedious work to build neighborhood by neighborhood. The work is invisible and the time to payoff is pretty long. What lead to millions of volunteers on Election Day was weeks and months of much smaller below the radar screen work. . . . Back in late 2007, a lot of people were writing off the Obama campaign. But from the ground, it looked like a potential winner. Time will tell if we are about to see the same dynamic play out again. But there's good reason to hope it will.
The Obama model gave us the Obama surge. Can OFA, working with David Plouffee produce an unprecedented midterms result? I'm willing to take that bet. Because who is better positioned to reach out to and persuade the voters we registered and turned out last time?
Will it be enough? Hard to say. Midterms are always tough for the incumbent President, and with the economy and the challenges we face, I'd expect the Republicans to gain seats. But I'm expecting far less of a gain because I think we will get out some portion of the Obama surge vote this year.
And here's why that is so exciting - it has an effect that goes far beyond simply winning seats in November. Research shows that the more often people vote, the more they become likely voters. The first time voters from 2008 right now aren't considered likely to come back because they have voted only once. Get them to vote again, and for a Democrat, and you start to lock down these voters -- many of whom are young voters and people of color -- for the long term. And that's what can start changing the Democratic Party in ways many of us would like to see.
Crossposted at Blue Wave News