We're done with electoral phone banking for the year -- and probably for a year. Yes, we will be calling representatives from time to time, but unless we focus on one of the constituencies (like New York City or Virginia) with off-off-year elections, this is it until 2010.
My use of the term "crisis" in the title is purely intended to bring you into the diary in a whimsical way -- there is no real "crisis" -- but there are things about an intensive year spent phone banking, in my case to probably half of the states in the country at one time or another, that struck me as worth reflecting on. Some of them are good, some less so.
Here are some of my thoughts. Yours will, I hope, be found in the comments section.
(1) Phone banking is a great way to connect with voters who think very differently than we do here. Some of the best insights I've had into how people view the political process, including some of their most basic misonceptions and more underreported concerns, have come from talking to hundreds of voters before a given contest. It's worth doing it simply for the reality check, even though it's not a representative sample, etc. It's still a helpful non-blogging perspective.
(2) It's also a great way to connect emotionally with voters. I think of phone banking as a "customer service" job as much as mining brains for information. It's a nice way to give voters a good impression about a campaign and, frankly, to make them feel good about being Democrats. After a while, I substantially altered the scripts I got from the Obama campaign to do this. I would end calls with people who said they were voting the way I wanted with something like "That does my heart good to hear. I get a lot of answering machines and it's great to hear from a supporter." People are thrilled when they hear something like this. (Some elderly women I called today even giggled in delight, to my surprise.) I don't know that this sort of PR work leads other people to become more active, confident, and pleased themselves, but I hope so.
Similarly, over the primary season, when voters went from dry to drenched by campaign calls in a matter of days, I would usually start out my call with something like this: "I realize that you're probably getting a lot of campaign calls these days; I just want to take a moment, if I may, to tell you why I support Barack Obama." I don't know, obviously, how this worked with people for whom I left answering machine messages, but for live voters that brief acknowledgment that they were being put upon and may well not have wanted to talk to me seemed to do wonders at establishing rapport.
(3) Lists matter I did calls in California for local candidates (and against Props 4 and 8, on my own initiative) as well as for the Obama, Martin (today only), Kleeb, and probably some other campaigns. I can tell you that some lists are more awful than you can imagine. Candidates, don't waste your volunteers' time. If a list it really bad, get a better one. It's so alienating to get nothing but wrong numbers.
(4) We still haven't figured out some of the basics of response forms. The Obama campaign was better than most and it got even better over time, but there are several problems that really need to be addressed -- in training (or "training") if not in writing forms:
- people will not necessarily answer enough of the questions to allow you to code responses: even supporters, or seeming supporters, will close down the conversation, using tone of voice and other tricks of oral communication, so that it becomes very clear that one should not ask the questions that the sheet indicates should be asked. In phone banks, I've heard people soldier on and, predictably, get abused by those they have called for not getting the hint. This is demoralizing. We need to do a better job of gaming through how reluctant respondents will try to close things down and what information callers should be willing to leave on the floor.
- the biggest problem is that the person that you talk to may not be the one to answer the phone. In survey research, it is important to talk to the actual respondent. In phone banking, it is often less so -- and it is awkward and time-consuming to get the right person on the phone. There should be an easy way simply to note, where circumstances dictate, that one did not talk to the target -- and, in fact, that the person who answered the phone may for whatever reason be highly disinclined to
let you talk to the right person. (I ran into this a lot with parents or husbands who wanted to keep the targeted children or wife from talking to me, probably because they supported McCain.) Rather than sweating this, there should be an easy way to note this so people can readily move on rather than needlessly spending time on pointlessly trying to get everything up to "polling research" perfection.
(5) People need to know the big picture of what they're doing. Sometimes the point is not to get all of the information from each caller in exquisite detail, largely because there isn't enough staff to get through the entire list anyway. In such cases, it makes sense to go after the low-hanging fruit. This is not well-enough conveyed to phone bankers, who feel guilty and demoralized rather than just plowing through many calls. In phone banks, you can tell where people think that they are screwing up (and perhaps costing Obama the election, ONOZ!) I have had to tell people that they could relax a bit. And, sometimes, Obama supervisors would say "no, this is how it's supposed to be done." I would ask them a few questions and they would agree that the best was the enemy of the good. We need to be more clear about when we really need things done perfectly well, and we need to design response sheets to address those areas where they won't be.
(6) People need to feel that their time was not being wasted. I resisted doing phone banking for Miller until today, not because I didn't think he was a good candidate but because so many signals seemed to be coming from the Democratic establishment that he could not win. The official organizer's position seems to be that you always tell people that they have a great chance and induce them -- largely through guilt, it seems -- into phone banking. I think that there is an unacknowledged cost to this, in the "crying wolf" genre, that we should respect more. On the one hand, I feel good at having put in my token efforts -- about 75 calls -- for Martin today; on the other hand, if I had been doing this for weeks, I'd probably feel like a chump. If Democrats want people on my level to work hard, they have to be willing to do it themselves. That is why I would have liked to see Democratic officials -- yes, including Obama -- put some skin in the game when it came to the Georgia Senate runoff, showing up there and in some cases planting themselves there -- and requiring Lieberman to do the same, as I argued in a diary a month back. If we are going to give our time without real gain, less so than many elected officials can receive, then they have to go through the motions better than they did this time. I know that I fell into my old role today, guilt-tripping people into calling as I'd done for much of the year. I don't feel as good about it as I hoped.
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UPDATE (as I've realized that I had omitted one point I'd wanted to make):
(7) Poorly worded and poorly updated pitches. This ties into the "wasted time" point above. Seeing a really good pitch -- and most of them were not -- made me feel less like I was wasting my time. Seeing ones that would have gotten someone booted out of Radio Advertising 101 gave the opposite impression. I won't go into specifics -- although I think that I included some examples of rewriting I did on Obama calling diaries over the course of the primaries -- but I will mention one thing: updating. It is simply not that hard to have one person tasked with reviewing a script every morning and giving changes to someone who can make them. There were probably tens of thousands of calls going out some days in some states: can't we avoid scripts inviting people to events that have already passed, talking about "next week's" election when it takes place tomorrow? This is an area where having a public forum in each state where people can send in suggestions for rewordings and corrections would be invaluable. It would also be good to have much more sharing of information and scripts between states. I recognize that it's proper that a pitch may differ between states, but it was also clear that some states had a much better idea about what they were doing than did others. It would have been great to let the pitches in various states be improved by what had come before.
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I look forward to your comments and thoughts as well. (And thanks to Diary Rescue!)