Over the summer, as folks were writing withering online obituaries for OFA, I recommended they give the President's Field Team time to prove itself.
Organizing for America is something no one has ever tried. Which makes it hard to pull off. And it is based on a local organizing model. Which makes it hard to see how it is working. But here's what I learned the last time - don't judge an Obama-led organizing effort by its early reviews.
Yesterday, TPMDC published an interview with Mitch Stewart and Jeremy Bird of Organizing for America about what OFA has accomplished on healthcare.
Half a million phone calls starting October 20, including over 300,000 on that single day. In a single week in August, 65,000 people visited their Representatives to advocate for health care reform. Nearly a quarter of a million Letters to the Editor submitted.
OFA has become something its early critics never expected. A success.
Here are just a few examples of what otherwise smart people said about OFA in its first months of activity:
From Zephyr Teachout: Organizing for America sent out a request for house parties today, asking people to watch a video about Obama's economic recovery plan, talk about it with their friends, and build support for it. While there will be tweaks, this is the kind of action we can anticipate from OFA.
I predict that there will be perhaps a thousand of such parties, then hundreds, then dozens. I think OFA will fail in its mission to directly engage Obama supporters in supporting Obama's executive actions. And I think this is a very good thing. . . .
From Ari Melber: OFA launched a new email and petition drive on Tuesday afternoon, ratcheting up pressure on Congress to pass the President's health care plan. . . . A DNC official says the message is significant because it is "the first email" that is "going out from the OFA and DNC lists organizing for health care." The declaration drive will culminate, the official added, in a supporter list that organizers "can deliver to members of Congress." But there are some problems here.
It is early, but so far, these OFA legislative "organizing" efforts run the risk of being boring, vague and redundant.
The drive is boring and thus more likely to falter.
From Harold Meyerson on OFA's early health care efforts: All very commendable, and about as likely to affect the outcome of the health-care deliberations as the phases of the moon.
At the time I said they were misunderstanding the method. 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.
So how did that turnout? While the interview has a a number of choice bits - including the inside story on how local volunteers helped secure Joseph Cao's commitment to vote for the bill - what is worth paying close attention to are the numbers.
Let's start with that supposedly anemic petition drive. In the end it got 1.5 million signatures in support of the President's plan, which by the way explicitly asked Congress to support a public option. And it provided local on the ground actions in every Congressional District during the critical month of August, as volunteers personally delivered those declarations to members at public events or to their district offices.
And during August, when we really needed to show public support, all that work of reaching out over the spring and early summer paid off. Here's just a few examples of metrics from the
TPMDC interview. (You can also read the transcript here.)
* Over 2.2 million supporters have taken action in the health care campaign.
* In a single week in August, 65,000 supporters of health insurance reform visited their local Congressional offices to have their voices heard on reform.
* Supporters submitted over 233,500 Letters to the Editor in publications across the country including over 76,000 since Saturday.
* OFA has organized over 23,000 local events in all 50 states and all 435 Congressional Districts since June 6 when President Obama started his health care push.
* In the final week of August and first week of September alone, 110,000 people attended pro-reform events, including 20,000 supporters at the 18 stops of the Health Insurance Reform Now Bus Tour.
And then there's the phone calls. On October 20, OFA announced they planned to generate 100,000 calls to Congress in support of healthcare. Meaning 100,000 calls made and reported/logged through the system. That meant we needed to ask far more than 100,000 people to make calls, because some people who were asked would not respond. From the OFA metrics:
- On the October 20 National Day of Action, OFA volunteers and other organizations made over 315,000 calls to Congress. Since then, that number has grown to nearly 500,000 calls to Congress
What really comes through in the interview is what local volunteers on the ground are doing to actually move votes in DC. The story of what led to Cao's vote is really compelling.
Organizationally, the boots-on-the-ground, Washington outsider vibe has translated into real results as well. Saturday morning, an OFA volunteer in Louisiana flagged for the team that Rep. Joseph Cao (R-LA) might end up supporting health care.
The administration had been talking to Cao behind the scenes, but it was the volunteer who emailed OFA staffers to report that the Republican's office wasn't saying he was against the bill which opened the floodgates. OFA volunteers made 550 calls to the district office on Saturday in the hours before he became the lone Republican to back the bill.
Here's another anecdote from Jeremy Bird:
In Arizona one woman was making calls to constituents in her district to call Mitchell and the woman that she talked to on the phone said 'It won't make a difference if I call, they are not going to make a decision based on me calling, but I'll call anyway.' So she called, and 15 minutes later Mitchell's staff put out a release saying they were voting for it. That volunteer called that person back to say 'I'm sure it wasn't just your call, but your call and a lot of other calls made a difference and check this press statement out.'
And I know that here in California, where we were running phonebanks around the state leading up to the House vote including until the bitter end Saturday night, every single Democrat in the California delegation voted for the bill, including some previously undecided Blue Dogs who got a lot of phone calls urging them to vote yes. We all felt like we made a concrete difference in a very close vote.
All told, "supporters made 152,000 calls to Congress between Tuesday and Saturday morning on health care."
But it isn't just numbers. One of my favorite California organizers once described our work as "a numbers-driven, people centered organization" - a phrase I continue to use. Because at the end of the day, every one of those numbers is a real person engaged in the political process - some for the very first time in their lives. That's what will change this country over the long term.
And the short term effect is pretty powerful too, as Jeremy Bird sums up:
What motivates us now is just hearing from volunteers talk about the work they do it helps toward grounding us in reality. People are not used to being effective on legislation in Washington, D.C. or having any impact on it. ... That's changing with a lot of people. They saw people who in the states in June said they were very much probably a no vote, become a yes vote. Even if it wasn't their member they saw other members do that and they heard from volunteers on the phone and I think it gives them a lot of hope.
Updates: Some good things in the comments:
Newsie8200 reminds us of other important allies who have been out knocking doors and making calls and getting folks out at events, townhalls and rallies. HCAN, the unions, many medical professionals and community organizations have been making heroic efforts and we should thank them.
skippythebox says "get off your but" and do something (and that isn't a typo)
cmlane talks about OFA asking folks in IL-10 to pay Rep. Kirk a visit and explain where his constituents want him to come down on reform. Apparently OFA is doing this in all the Republican districts that went for Obama, according to this report today from Ari Melber.
Disclaimer: I volunteer with Organizing for America in California. When I write here, I speak for myself and not the organization in any way. My diaries, and all the words in them, are my own.