Lots of people think Barack Obama is a lawyer. Turns out he's a mathematician.
As we know, he can count delegates. He has deployed his forces strategically to keep the delegate count close even where he's at a large structural disadvantage (OH, PA, CA), while identifying the places he can run up the score (the month of February). This is the kind of campaign I trust to figure out electoral vote math.
Now we learn Obama wants to harness the power of technology to reshape who wields power in the electorate. He wants to bring in enough new voters to destabilize all our assumptions about where and how Democrats can win. Obama's potential to "Change the Map" just got bigger - with an unprecedented 50-state voter registration drive that can change the electoral math for a generation.
This program will not only help put Obama in the White House, but also pay dividends for Democrats all the way down the ballot in November, and even bigger dividends for the Democratic Party in years to come.
There are deep forces at work here, while we're busy talking pastors or whatever the color and model number of this week's kitchen sink is. Forget the sideshow. Barack Obama is busy Changing the Math.
From the beginning of his political career, Obama has shown a healthy disregard for existing power arrangements. As Populista and others have told us, Obama's first post law school project was a wildly successful voter registration drive signing up unprecedented numbers of new voters in Chicago's communities of color:
After Barack Obama graduated from Harvard Law School he could have easily gotten a high paying job as a corporate lawyer or clerk for a federal judge. Instead he returned to Chicago to run the Illinois branch of Project Vote!, a national non-profit group dedicated to increasing voter engagement and participation in low-income and minority communities. Obama proceeded to add over 150,000 low-income and minority voters to the voting rolls.
A 1993 Chicago Magazine article credits this work to helping elect both Carol Mosely Braun and Bill Clinton in November of 1992:
The most effective minority voter registration drive in memory was the result of careful handiwork by Project Vote!, the local chapter of a not-for-profit national organization. "It was the most efficient campaign I have seen in my 20 years in politics," says Sam Burrell, alderman of the West Side's 29th Ward and a veteran of many registration drives.
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"I think it's fair to say we reinvigorated a slumbering constituency," says Obama. "We got people to take notice."
So what is Vote for Change, exactly?
Vote for Change is a new top campaign priority for Obama's prodigious field operation. Having built a cadre of trained grassroots organizers to contend for votes in primaries and caucuses that have already been completed, the campaign isn’t letting these state-level volunteer resources go to waste. This new nationwide volunteer voter registration program will go on throughout the summer to register huge numbers of new voters in every single state across the country. It will help build a broad, multi-racial, intergenerational coalition for change. It is part of Senator Obama's plan to start gearing up to win the general election, and to keep building his unprecedented network of organized, mobilized supporters. No national candidate has ever proposed a program like this.
Last week I wrote about the parallels between this initiative and the broader “50 Strategy” that many progressives have championed:
Rather than take the existing electoral alignments as a given, the Obama campaign will be out expanding its base in a concrete way, by bringing many new people into the fold.
Here's how Howard Dean famously described the new approach of the Democratic Party, the so-called 50 State Strategy:
“Election by election, state by state, precinct by precinct, door by door, vote by vote . . . . we're going to lift our Party up and take this country back for the people who built it.”
This massive voter registration drive is just that kind of painstaking grassroots work that can win elections but also build the party in the long term. We will be registering new voters in some states that probably will go for McCain in November. We will of course be registering all comers, Democrats, Republicans and Independents. But some of those new voters just might make the difference to Democrats fighting key downticket races in red states. And they may help the Democrats carry key swing states, or move previously red states to the blue column.
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Here's the best part - the benefits of this project will spread far and wide. One goal is to connect with as many existing, local grassroots organizations as possible to maximize the reach of the project, and to build a stronger progressive political network. A second goal is to target areas where downticket races need the most help. In the East Bay, we'll be gathering on the 10th at a staging location in Hayward, and sending teams to places like CD-11, where Jerry McNerney will be defending his newly red to blue seat in the fall. And a third goal is to take advantage of the incredible teams of activists and organizers the campaign has been training across the country, and build even more.
And here's why it matters.
Democrats keep asking themselves how to fight better on the existing terrain, how to counter the Republican attacks, how to win the three states that will matter in November. That wasn't how the Republicans came to have an outsized influence on American politics - despite being an electoral minority with a platform explicitly counter to the best interests of huge majorities of voters.
The Republicans have understood for a long time that control of the White House was meaningless without the political power to back it up. So while the opposition party held the Presidency, they worried about school board elections and built networks at the community level. They took control of state legislatures and governorships just in time for redistricting fights. They focused on taking vulnerable Congressional seats from newly elected Dems. They made sure that once the Democrats won back the White House after twelve years of Republican control, there would be no danger of radical change - no universal health care, no pushback on the prevailing neoliberal ideology of the market. No, we spent much of the 1990's beating back the Republicans' agenda, consumed with battles over a slew of anti-choice and anti-tax bills, welfare time limits and "unfunded mandates."
Frankly, I don't know who the Republicans "want" to run against and I couldn't care less. They don't get to pick our nominee, we do. But I do know what they want us to do. They want us to put all our eggs in the baskets of Ohio and Florida. They want us to spend as much time as possible talking about why white voters won't support Barack Obama or why Hillary Clinton is too "divisive." They want us to stop reminding people John McCain spent nearly three decades in Congress but apparently still needs some serious tutoring on basic economic policy. And they really, really want us to forget that Republicans are actually still a minority party, and getting more so every day.
Instead, we are upping the ante. Obama's plan means running to win in every state this fall. Changing who is voting can change what states are in play. That lowers the risk for Democrats of the election turning on a single state, or God forbid, a few hundred votes in Florida. Forcing McCain to defend that much terrain will stretch his resources way too thin. It will also boost the fortunes of downballot Democrats, giving Obama the legislative majority he needs to carry out his agenda.
And finally, given that this campaign has been so good about registering and turning out the youth vote, this program ties the Democratic Party to the future - to the Millennial Generation. I leave it to thereisnospoon, who explains it so well:
This time the realignment will be led by the Millennial Generation (born, depending on how you count it, between approximately 1982 and 2000). As with the GI generation that survived the Great Depression and fought in World War II, this upcoming Millennial generation is a Civic Generation marked by increased desire to work together to solve problems; an increase in partisanship and the belief in the power of political parties to effectuate results; a strong belief in the positive power of government; and a move away from divisive social issues toward more structural fixes in the economy, governmental process, and range of other issues. America is changing, and fast.
Even more importantly, the Millennial generation is the largest generation in history--larger in numbers even than the boomers--and we have the opportunity lock them in to the Democratic Party for the next FORTY years.
And I will just add this. We are doing more than just engaging the Millenial generation to vote in this election. We are quite literally training a whole new generation of organizers, who can help the Democratic Party and the progressive movement for years to come.
There's one more piece to this puzzle, and it is a philosophical one. I have contended that one thing setting Obama apart from most Democratic politicians at the national level is his sincere belief that participation is the key to effective change. He is our first "social entrepreneur" President.
Some of the most exciting social justice activism today departs from a traditional nonprofit model toward a so-called "social entrepreneur" model, one that focuses on innovative approaches to achieving socially beneficial ends. This framework takes what market-based approaches do best, which is foster creativity and invention, and turn it to socially responsible ends.
"Social entrepreneurs identify resources where people only see problems. They view the villagers as the solution, not the passive beneficiary. They begin with the assumption of competence and unleash resources in the communities they're serving."
David Bornstein, author of How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas
Think about microlending, the Echoing Green program, social marketing, and many more examples.
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What's the core of the model? Participation. Sounds an awful lot like the approach of a candidate who has blown the roof off of small donor fundraising and volunteeer-based campaigning strategies.
The Obama campaign has rejected the old top-down models. This time change is bottom up. If anyone should get that, it's the netroots.
So if you too, are ready to Barack the Vote, here's how you can get involved:
The big nationwide kickoff will be Saturday, May 10 at 10:00 a.m., with events in every state. Go to www.mybarackobama.com, where you can click on “events,” put in your zip code, and find something near you
Our main Bay Area event will be in Hayward, at UCFW Local 5, 28870 Mission Blvd. near the South Hayward BART. Sign up and get directions and details here.
We are hoping to get supporters to come out across the Bay Area to our staging location in Hayward, where we will give everyone a brief training and then send the to key targeted areas for new registrations.
Other Bay Area events will also be hosted by UFCW Local 5 and begin at 10:00 a.m.:
Martinez, at 4121 Alhambra Avenue. Sign up and get directions and details here.
Vallejo, at 410 Nebraska Street. Sign up and get directions and details here.
This project shows Obama is dead serious when he talks about building a movement, about this being more than just winning one election for one office, no matter how important. This is exactly why I began supporting Obama in the first place, and why I am working so hard for him now, months after California's primary ended. Me, I'm no mathematician. But I am all about Changing the Math.
Disclaimer: I am a volunteer for Obama for America in California, but I am speaking for myself and based on my personal experience as a volunteer, not for the campaign in any way. You can read my other posts about the campaign here.