Poor people, indeed middle class people, experience powerlessness on a daily basis, and as Saul Alinsky teaches us:
“Never go outside the expertise of your people.” It results in confusion, fear and retreat. Feeling secure adds to the backbone of anyone. (Organizations under attack wonder why radicals don’t address the “real” issues. This is why. They avoid things with which they have no knowledge.)
Poor and middle class people, the 99%, have no control over their rent or mortgage, no control over their bank, their utility company, their insurance company, children’s school, place of employment, or a host of other institutions that shape their life. Political parties are asking people to believe that once a year they can go into a booth, press some buttons, and materially affect their life. Nothing in their experience in life suggests that this simple act will have real consequences. So how can party activists at the local level change that? Well, it would be nice if Democrats who won elections didn’t instantly turn around and start attacking Social Security and other institutions crucial to the well being of the 99%. But even in the face of that sort of betrayal, there are things that local activists can do to drive up turn out.
Traditional voter registration drives are exhausting for volunteers for the few new voters who are identified. Traditionally you have a card table, some clip boards, and voter registration forms. You locate yourself in a in front of a grocery store or some other location where you will meet like low income citizens who are mostly likely not registered to vote and try to convince people to register. After an entire Saturday if you come away with even half a dozen new voters you will have done well.
But there is a far more efficient method, which I describe in my book The precinct captain's guide to political victory. Go to your local Registrar's office and get a few cartons of voter registration forms. Then print out some labels with the proper address, probably the Registrar's, so that people won't have to figure out where to send the from once they have filled it out. Pre-addressing the from saves the citizen trouble and confusion. Next make up a simple flier asking them to register to vote, something along these lines:
Please register to vote. Your country needs your voice. No one understands your family and community as you do. No one else understands their issues. No one can take your place.
If you are already registered, or not eligible to vote, please pass this form to a friend or family member who is not registered and is eligible to vote.
By authority of [your name, city and zip code]
Assuming that you have done your precinct analysis, you will know what other languages your flier needs to be translated into and have recruited someone to do that.
Then you collate the fliers and voter registration forms and distribute them door to door. Just roll them up together and place them between the door handle and the frame, just as the pizza places do.
You do not need the landlord's permission to distribute voter registration forms or political literature on their property. It is urgently necessary that we separate economic power from political legitimacy. The one does not equal the other. Tenants and employees are in no way obliged to take any notice of the political views of their landlords and employers.
Don't be discouraged if no one else on your local Democratic committee understands or supports your voter registration effort. At first I went out by myself; no one on the committee understood what I was doing. But after I was able to report that indeed, voter registration applications were trickling into the registrar's office, committee members began to volunteer. After a few months I had a regular group who could be depended upon to go out, even in the hottest weather, and distribute fliers and forms in every low rent garden apartment complex in the county.
It was difficult to persevere. I remember a very hot Saturday in July distributing forms in the Vista Gardens apartment complex. My volunteers distributed forms to each of the 1200 apartments. Of these, only 11 were mailed in, a return of less than 1%. Furthermore there is an excellent chance that 3 of these new voters were Republicans. Virginia does not register by party, so this is only a guess. But if the guess is correct we registered a net gain of 5 Democratic votes. However, when you consider that Jack Kennedy won the 1960 election by an average of less than one vote per precinct, you realize that 5 new voters per precinct is a significant gain. Moreover, there were several large apartment complexes in that precinct and we worked all of them. And yes, each weekend saw a return of less than 1%. But altogether we added something like 60 new voters in that precinct that year, and almost certainly at least 50 of them Democrats, for a net gain of 40 votes. 40 additional Democratic votes in a single precinct is a major gain. Furthermore, all the voter registration activity in that precinct had the effect of mobilizing those people who were already registered to vote. The Democratic vote in that precinct increased by an additional 10 points, one of our best gains. Only some precincts offer the opportunity for this sort of gain. But it breaks my heart that local Democratic committees are walking away from these opportunities.
In his great documentary, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, Greg Palast observes that before they take away your job, your pension, your house, first they must take away your vote. If progressives are to protect jobs, collective bargaining, pensions, and the rest, first progressives must defend voting rights. If you are not doing voter registration and voter protection, can you really say you are a progressive?
Ideally, the Democratic National Committee would make voter registration and fighting voter suppression a priority. Realistically, that is not going to happen. That is why I wrote The precinct captain's guide to political victory, described by one reader as "clearly written, right to the point and will certainly drive political campaigns to victory." My book is not for candidates, campaign managers, nor consultant. My book is for every grassroots political volunteer who wants to win elections and is looking for practical guidance as to how to do so. My book assumes that the reader has little or no experience of electoral politics and little or no institutional support from the local party apparatus. I have personally tried every method I describe here and can guarantee the effectiveness thereof.