We’ll try to write a longer diary on this when a bit freer from work (cases flooding in lately and the paralegals are running around hair-on-fire) but wanted to get the word out ASAP to any volunteers and coordinators out there focusing on the GOTV side, since the preparations today in early 2021 can be instrumental in big wins for us in 2022 and 2024: If you haven’t already included this in your outreach and strategy plans, try to work in encouragement of accelerated naturalization of eligible Dem-leaning voters, particularly in the Battleground States with a large immigrant population like Florida, Arizona, Texas, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Michigan and (more and more) South Carolina. We were doing some retrospective studies and updates on our canvassing efforts over the past two months, gathering info from our interviews and interactions with potential voters and Dem-leaning households, and it boggled our minds how much GOTV power we can unlock simply by encouraging more rapid naturalization and citizenship of nascent citizens now on the sidelines.
As a bit of background, one of Kos’s very best interviews was his appearance on Bill Maher’s show a couple months back, essence of his insight was simply that when it comes to bang for the buck for campaign spending by the Biden-Harris campaign in 2020, the many hundreds of millions of dollars spent on TV, print and other ads had comparatively modest effect -- what really delivered victory to us in Swing States, esp. Georgia and Arizona was the Stacey Abrams approach, spending a comparatively modest sum (Kos said it was around $50 million tops) for targeted GOTV of voters leaning our way. It’s in-line with what political scientists have been saying about our polarized electorate, winning elections in the USA is more-and-more about delivering for your voters and getting them to the polls. And the hate-filled, racist, bigoted, ugly and anti-democratic GOP, which has basically set its legislative focus on suppressing voters and attacking the poor and PoC, has helped to greatly broader our tent if we can get them to the polls. One of Trump’s nastiest but sadly, most effective voter suppression techniques in his horrible term--and one comparatively neglected by the media, ex. in comparison to him gutting the USPS, was the way he almost shut down naturalizations for eligible immigrants (legal permanent residents) with green card status. The Biden Administration is working hard to restore the naturalization process, but an unfortunate knock-on effect from the Trump admin’s criminality has been a discouragement among eligible immigrants to naturalize. This is where we can make a difference.
While we don’t have exact numbers, basing on our reviews from just a few precincts in Florida, Arizona and Texas, we could potentially boost our turnout by 10 million or more voters in key Battleground States for 2022 and esp. 2024 by making a stronger emphasis on encouraging naturalization and closely linking it to registration and follow up GOTV. Simply incidental findings, ex. talking to eligible voters who fortuitously mentioned their household relatives who were permanent legal residents but unnaturalized, this is a huge but thus far relatively untapped pool of new Dem voters. Some things to emphasize:
1. Start with just building awareness that naturalization is available for a lot of potential voters, which can often begin by simply communicating this fact in our existing GOTV by talking to household members who have eligible but (as yet) non-naturalized relatives, social media, and at things like community meetings or brochures at clinics or state assistance and legal offices. It’s easy to forgot for those of us on DKos, the big majority of the Dem-leaning population is so busy with work, family, just dealing with daily life that they’re comparatively disengaged politically. A lot of getting them to the polls is just getting the importance of registration (and naturalization as a pre-requisite for it) into their awareness.
2. Just like we do with more hands on GOTV to get people to the polls on or before election day, ex. with ride coordination and transportation, map out flow-charts for naturalization at a micro-level depending on your precinct, and bring this up repeatedly in precinct meetings and discussions.
3. Use your team’s language skills to maximal effect. This is a bread and butter thing for us legal eagle types, but your level of engaging with your community of interest will go up many-fold when you speak to them (and provide materials and literature, in both print and social media) in their native languages, and this is esp. important for encouragement of naturalization. Spanish-speaking resources are an obvious plus, but we’ve also already had a big spike in potential voter engagement in Florida with naturalization outreach through team members proficient in Haitian Creole, Tagalog, Hindi, Chinese and Korean. If we can get them naturalized, this will translate to tens of thousands of additional Democratic votes in just a few Florida precincts alone, enough to tip elections in our favor.
4. If there are any DHS staffers (or friends of them) lurking here--please place a huge emphasis on clearing the back-logs and easing the naturalization process. This isn’t for political reasons even--Trump and his fellow criminals, in all their corruption worked hard to gum up the naturalization process right along with crippling the USPS to reduce Democratic turnout. We are therefore entirely in the right to move energetically to speed up the naturalization process, and to use every tool in our arsenal to make it happen. There’s nothing in the law that says that naturalization has to drag out for years and years the way it’s been under Trump (and unfortunately to an extent, even before that)--cutting red tape, helping legal permanent residents to sign up for and take the citizenship tests faster (in whatever locations, preferred languages, and modes--in-person vs. online--are available), removing unnecessary roadblocks and unnecessary forms, all these things are fair game to speed up the process. As a democracy with a jus solis citizenship principle, the United States has every reason to make naturalization happen faster and help immigrants to more quickly become part of the American nation, something the Republicans fear in their growing voter suppression efforts. The modern GOP is basically a criminal organization, and we need to be ruthless in using every legal tool we have to block them from power and bring progressives into positions of elected authority. So it’s important not to get hung up on abstract ideals and outdated expectations that may hold up naturalization and increase the dangers of Republicans getting into power, with all their authoritarian tendencies. If there’s a way to speed up the process, let’s do it.
5. To extent that any of you are in contact with Dem donors, large or small, encourage them to contribute more to naturalization efforts.
6. As much as possible, try to link the awarding of naturalization to immediate registration in newly minted citizens’ states, especially Battleground States.
A lot of this may seem obvious to many of you here but it’s still important to keep repeating the message to make it a focus, it’s things like this in 2021 that are important to boosting our voting base and margins of victory in 2022 and 2024 wherever we can. Have to go for now, will try to add more on this topic whenever schedule not quite as tight.