Hi everybody. On Saturday at 1:30pm at Netroots Nation, I get the honor of moderating what I’m anticipating will be a fantastic panel entitled: Yes We Did? How Blogging Can (and Can’t) Support a Field Campaign. Earlier diaries from panelists Femlaw, Populista, and casperr do an excellent job discussing the subject, and if you missed them in recent days, do yourself a favor and check them out. There will be some real talent on this panel, so we all hope you can make it in person, or check out the livestream. Here's our facebook page.
My personal connection to both field and blogging is relatively straightforward. I know what it’s like to be a campaign field organizer, because I worked for Jon Tester in that capacity in 2006. I know what it’s like to be a blogger writing about field because I wrote extensively about the ground game at FiveThirtyEight during the campaign. I consciously attempted to explain to an audience of people, many of who’d never set foot in a campaign office, what was needed and why it was needed, most notably in a 14,211-mile reporting travelogue titled On the Road. so the topic of our panel is not just important from a meta perspective, but also a close one for me personally.
I haven’t publicly told this story, but I almost lost a job as a field organizer on Jon Tester’s 2006 Senate campaign before I ever began work.
The crime: blogging.
With any serious campaign, field organizers are expressly banned from blogging. And "blogging" means: pretty much posting anything publicly on the intertubes. This would certainly include all action diaries you have ever seen anywhere.
I won’t bore you with more than the basic details, but I'll give you the sense of the seriousness of this principle. Imagine a small handful of un-Tester-related, benign comments rather than an action diary, written after I had a start date but before I started work. These would have passed miles under the radar except that it just happened that another organizer already with the campaign happened to know my screen name, for some reason had time to search under it, and took it upon herself to report it. I received a dire call from the state field director letting me know a high-level debate had taken place and my job had barely survived. Sometimes I wonder how things would have been different for me had the apparently close call gone the other way.
It’s amusing now, but the story underscores how verboten blogging or communicating with the press is for those campaign staff not authorized to do so. It’s about message control, most significantly, and that’s a legitimate concern.
However, this is an important dynamic to understand because campaigns need volunteers. Volunteers, before they become volunteers, need to be persuaded to donate their time to help. People who care enough about politics to be reading and talking about action (blog-readers) would seem to be one good group from which to recruit volunteers. Yet the people who know exactly what, when and where tasks need to be done and action directed are the paid organizers on the ground, except they have to remain silent.
Now, the Obama campaign was in many ways an exception. They had so many resources that it could deploy a new media team dedicated specifically to the task of blogging and stimulating social networks. They worked incredibly hard and in innovative ways at lowering the threshold for a public much larger than the political blogosphere readership to become involved in the campaign.
Still, those unprecedented resources represent exceptional luxury for a field campaign, not to mention having as ideal a candidate to specifically champion field organizers as you could imagine. Even as lessons and techniques of social networking will be emulated in the future, there are a lot of campaigns that will have lower budgets and far fewer resources than Obama 2008 or Obama 2012.
Either way, there is still a need for volunteers and potential volunteers to become educated not only why action matters, but also about what tangible results will come from their action. Not only for elections, but for issue campaigns such as the current health care ground campaign being spearheaded by Jeremy Bird, one of our esteemed panelists, and his staff at Organizing for America.
One example of this campaign-volunteer education gap is found the controversy over yard signs. For those not familiar with the issue, the Obama campaign had been prominently characterized here, on the front page at DailyKos, as foolish and/or arrogant for eschewing yard sign prioritization. It wasn’t that they didn’t want the public to have yard signs, it was that, given finite time, the Obama campaign strongly felt that the money they were spending on field offices and organizers should go into high-quality voter contact rather than visibility/souvenirs.
Which is obviously correct, even at a glance, borne out by the results. Obama had 100% name recognition. We are not talking about a mayoral or even Senate race. With this particular election, the demand was insatiable, and the frustration level among organizers was epidemic. It’s not an exaggeration to say that organizers were under continual siege from an insatiable public over these things, and it not only interfered with their jobs, it took an emotional toll that’s hard to encapsulate.
But here’s the catch – organizers cannot blog and express this. They’d be fired. You can understand why the Obama new media team (who could communicate) might also be reticent also to push back against aggression in the specific aggressive way that was required to catch attention and make an impact. It’s others who have to pick up the slack if blogging is going to support field.
Now, if blogging is fueling problems in the field instead of helping eliminate them, then we haven’t fully answered the question: how can blogging support a field campaign? It was happenstance that I had a very large platform to push back. Even the incredible recommended diaries of some of our panelists – who, as activists who "got it," – by definition didn’t have as broad a platform as the front page. Once Pamela Coukos, another of our panelists, had graduated from blogging to joining the campaign staff in California, she too was precluded by the no-blogging rule.
So there is work to be done in terms of figuring out not only how bloggers can help convince others to volunteer and become active, but also once in the door, help them understand what is a priority and helpful, and what is not.
This requires a complex discussion, and we want it to be interactive. Most of us on the panel were specifically pushed toward activism by political blogs, so we know firsthand how critical a role blogging can play in pushing people toward activism in the field. Perhaps a panel at Netroots Nation? What a good idea.
____
Again, I’ll be moderating, and our panelists are all inspiring people I'm proud to call friends:
The Great Pamela Coukos (Femlaw, diary here), a brilliant woman who found herself called from blogging to campaign field staff; and
The Great Karl Singer (Populista, diary here), who is an inspiring and thoughtful 15-year old force of nature; and
The Great casperr (casperr, diary here), a tough-minded, elegant super-volunteer who among other feats dragged half of New York City to Pennsylvania every weekend to canvass; and
The Great Katherine Haenschen (kath25, look for her diary tomorrow), the infectiously gifted self-starter who essentially registered everyone in the state of Texas to vote last year; and
The Great Jeremy Bird, fellow native St. Louisan and Deputy Director of Organizing for America, as well as former Campaign for Change State Director of Ohio in the general election (South Carolina and a bunch of others in the primaries).
All of these people have considered this topic thoughtfully, and dealt with its subtleties up close. We want your input as well.
Please join us Saturday at 1:30, in Pittsburgh or online for the livestream. Hope to see you there!