After Paul Wellstone's tragic death, his family, his campaign, and his volunteers wanted to continue his work. They founded
Wellstone Action. Wellstone Action is a non-profit, non-partisan group devoted to training people how to win elections the Paul Wellstone way. They have developed a three-day program called "Camp Wellstone" to teach progressive activists.
I am attending the "super" Camp Wellstone from January 16-18. It's "super" because it's the largest Camp Wellstone yet: 250 people. Camp Wellstone is an intensive program. You go from 3:30 - 9:30 PM on Friday, 9:00 AM - 6:30 PM on Saturday, and 9:30 - 4:30 on Sunday. The last hour on Sunday is an "Opportunity Fair" featuring groups looking for volunteers -- and maybe the occasional paid staffer. This is the story of my experience there.
Day 1
Camp Wellstone is split into three tracks: community activism, working on a campaign, and being a candidate. The track I chose is working on a campaign, because I want to become a more effective volunteer in the 2004 campaign.
Camp Wellstone opens with a big lecture by Jeff Blodgett, Wellstone's long time campaign manager. Everyone from every track is present. Blodgett tells us a little about Wellstone Action and Camp Wellstone. Then he launches into a fast-paced presentation on the "Wellstone Way". As you probably know, Paul Wellstone ran his campaigns a little differently than the traditional way. Instead of ignoring the base to go after swing voters, Paul fired them up and used their energy to run a massive field operation.
The Wellstone way to run a campaign is expressed as a triangle. At the base is grassroots organizing and electoral politics. At the top of the triangle is good public policy. Overarching it all is leadership. It comes as no surprise to see this integrated campaign philosophy reflected in the training: candidates learn how to use their values to craft good public policy, campaign workers learn electoral politics, and community activists learn grassroots politics. Since the whole structure is integrated, the training for each track is a different view on many of the same topics.
After some videos of Paul talking about leadership and progressive politics, we close and move on to our next topic: message development.
Message development is another big lecture with the whole group. Diane Feldman from The Feldman Group gives a presentation about her approach to developing a message. Your message is not spinning what you believe. It's distilling the essence of what you believe into an easy-to-communicate package with an over-arching theme. For example, the theme could be "competence". She riffs on George Lakoff a little. Instead of "nurturant parent" or "strict father", she sees progressive politics as "adult to adult" -- a conversation among equals.
Feldman talks about how to research to determine what your message should be. The two main ways to do this are polling and focus groups, but in smaller campaigns, you'll also (or exclusively) use unscientific measures like talking to people face-to-face and canvassing.
Then she gives us a tool to use to hone our message: the message box. The message box collates what we say about ourselves with what the opponent says about us.
What we are saying about ourselves | What they are saying about themselves |
What we are saying about them | What they are saying about us |
Using this tool, you can evaluate your message to see how effective it will be in the face of attacks and how to appeal to your audience. She gave an example from the LA Justice for Janitors unionization campaign. The janitors had unionized and were about to strike against the LA office tower landlords for health coverage. The audience for the campaign was the people who would be affected by losing janitorial services in their buildings. The janitors were working class, union, minority, and immigrants. The workers were middle class, non-union, mostly white and native. If the union walked out and left these people in the lurch, the landlords could easily pass the blame. But if the union could get the workers on their side...Using polling, the union determined a common value with the workers: the idea that if you work hard, you deserve to get ahead. Here's the message they came up with:
People should be able to use their job to get themselves ahead | We cannot afford to pay more without raising rent |
People cannot succeed without fair wages and health care | The union is taking advantage of these people |
The union won.
After the messaging lecture, we broke first into groups (A and B) and then into tracks (organizer, worker, candidate).
In my campaign worker track, Jeff Blodgett gives us a whirlwind tour of the campaign plan. The campaign plan is the document that lays out how you are going to spend your three finite resources: dollars, time, and people to get to your vote goal: 50% + 1 (some restrictions may apply!). There are ten parts to a good campaign plan, which is divided into WHO & WHAT, and HOW & WHEN.
WHO & WHAT
- Structure: who is in charge of what. This is vital for accountability and clear delegation of responsibility.
- Goals and objectives: how many votes do you need to win (vote goal), and who are those people (targeting)?
- Message: what do the voters want, self research, and opposition research.
HOW & WHEN
- Schedule: how to use the candidate's time to achieve strategic goals.
- Media: paid and earned media.
- Field operations: this is voter contact, including base consolidation, voter ID, GOTV, and volunteer coordination.
- Technology: website, email, data management, etc.
- Fundraising: how to raise the money to get to your vote goal.
- Budget: What is it going to cost?
- Timeline: when you will reach goals. Every campaign has a deadline: election day.
Whew. After this presentation, it's clear that Camp Wellstone is
not what I expected. We are learning how to
run a campaign, not volunteer for one. When the weekend is over, we will all have learned the skills necessary to take major responsibility in a small campaign -- perhaps even be campaign manager!
In the last presentation of the night, John Blackshaw (he created Wellstone's distinctive ads) talks to us about "earned media". The Wellstone people call it "earned media" because while you don't pay for it, it is not free. Earned media is getting a letter to the editor, a photo in the newspaper, or coverage on the local news. Blackshaw says he "believe[s] earned media is the backbone of every campaign" because limited money requires the use of earned media. Every candidate has to move along a communications continuum with voters from AWARENESS to LIKABLITY to PREFERENCE. Earned media is one way to move voters along that line.
John gives us the four rules of earned media:
- Be the first to define your candidate
- Give voters a context to understand the candidate and campaign
- It is a pro-active exercise
- Always respond honestly
To define your candidate, you conduct attribute polling to find out what voters
want. Then you find a way to structure message around those attributes.
Being pro-active means making sure your earned media is schedule-driven (getting the word out to reporters about newsworthy events) and always looking for an opportunity to tell your story. For example, if something is happening in the community, you want to be on top of it so your candidate can get a comment in the newspaper about it.
There is also re-active earned media. Usually this is when something bad happens. In a crisis situation, John says you must be open and honest and make sure you don't blow off reporters. Call them back before their deadline! Don't be afraid to counterattack, but don't make it personal. If you go after the messenger, it makes them look more credible (Paul O'Neil anyone?) More typical is rapid response. Here, you need to respond quickly, but make sure your research is correct. Always respond, because "no comment" looks really bad in a news story. If the issue is big enough, the candidate should respond. But, again, don't get personal.
After this, we broke into six randomly chosen, whimsically named teams (I'm on the "Mad Salmon") for our first exercise. We're promised a "fabulous prize" to the winning team on Sunday -- "better than a new car" (a new President?).
Each small group has about 20 minutes to develop a 2 minute campaign ad for the whole team. We're running for city council in Charleston, West Virginia. The whole slate runs together, and the top voter-getter becomes mayor. After 20 minutes are up, you're on! With two minutes on the clock, the camera is rolling, as a Wellstone Action staffer films your campaign ad. When everyone is done, we file back into the room, and watch all the ads. Diane Feldman, the media consultant, judges.
It's fun to watch what everyone has come up with (of course, the Mad Salmon have the best ad!) but by now, we're all exhausted. It's almost 9:30 when we head home. We've had six solid hours of training. We'll be back at 9:00 tomorrow for nine more.