I have long had a great love for the messy, cumbersome work of democracy, which led me to run for, and serve four terms in the Vermont House of Representatives. Over those eight years, I knocked on all 4,000 doors in my district. I registered more than 750 voters personally, including dozens of 18-year-olds. And I came to know my constituents through the letters, postcards, and emails that they sent, through face-to-face visits at the State House, through town hall meetings, and through perpetual, impromptu meetings at the local grocery store (Vermont is a small state).
The personal touch wasn’t simply quaint. It was a critical part of my job. My constituents got to know me, and I got to know them and their concerns. Many times their ideas became bills that I wrote or co-authored. Some are now law here in Vermont, proof that sometimes messy, cumbersome work can pay off in meaningful ways.
Democracy is invaluable. And it’s a heck of a lot of hard work when you do it right. More and more, we are seeing vast sums of money overwhelming voter engagement, even here in tiny Vermont. This subverts the democratic process.
So when I looked for a progressive organization to work with for the 2018 election, I turned to Fight for a Better America. As a former lawmaker, it was imperative that I work with an organization that I trusted and respected. Not only are they passionate about protecting democracy, they are also painstakingly building the infrastructure to support it. For them, the 2018 elections are not just about winning back Congress. They’re also about setting the stage for the future, and promoting the type of meaningful, personal engagement that I have come to value in Vermont.
Fight for a Better America is a grassroots Political Action Committee. They’re an experimental pilot program formed in 2016 just after the disastrous presidential election. With success this November (please knock on wood while you read this), their work could contribute to our democracy for years to come.
Fight for a Better America is different in that they don’t raise money to donate to candidates. They support work in key swing Congressional Districts (CDs) that have been neglected by the Democratic Party. Fight is building capacity from the ground up and building infrastructure for future wins as well.
One of their investments is in Working America, a national affiliate of the AFL-CIO that fights for good causes nationwide, including raises for the working class, public education, environmental protections, and equality. Their Executive Director, Matt Morrison, told me this about Fight for a Better America, “What I admired about the early thinking of Fight for a Better America is that they didn’t want to fund more over saturated things like late TV. They didn’t particularly want to do high-profile things, but instead, effective things.”
That’s because buying ephemeral ads or glossy folders that hit the trash can (or at least the recycling pile, please) faster than you can say, “ohmigod what a waste of resources” is an empty calorie proposition whose sugar high doesn’t last a day past the election.
Fight’s first investment was in San Diego’s Flip the 49th. “There was little here in North County San Diego in terms of electoral organizing before 2016, ” said Terra Lawson-Remer, co-founder of San Diego’s Flip the 49th, and former Obama administration advisor.. “We needed a vehicle for people with outrage to move beyond demonstrating to advance lasting political engagement through real voter contact. We put together a coherent strategy of who to target, how to message, and you need capacity that will support volunteers in a sustainable way.
Based on Fight’s initial $50,000 seed money, Flip grew dramatically, attracting new donors (including Jane Fonda), hundreds of volunteers, and the ability to reach 90,000 households in meaningful ways. “The work that needs to be done is the voter work, person to person, and neighbor to neighbor. That doesn’t happen in a vacuum,” said Lawson-Remer.
After its initial investment in Flip the 49th, Fight started scanning the national landscape for other winnable battleground districts with organizations doing promising work. Fight found dozens of such gerrymandered areas, but narrowed their focus to 6 additional districts. To be Fight-worthy, a Congressional District needs a politically savvy entrepreneur or organizers willing to put in blood, sweat, and tears strategically, and for whom money and other support is a big accelerant.
Those districts include one in New Jersey, one in New York, and five in California. Seven districts was a manageable number for Fight’s trial run. Not too many CDs, so that their funding and expertise would not be spread too thin, and not too few, so that after November 6, 2018, they could tell if they were on to something. The investments aren’t going into splashy, shiny objects. We’re talking clipboards, desks, chairs, stamps, and… wait for it… data analysis.
Before you yawn pointedly, let me argue that data analysis is actually pretty jazzy, and not just because I was on the math team in high school. Crunching numbers is pretty exciting when it can tell you what’s working and what’s not. Fight’s partners use carefully analyzed approaches to fine-tune volunteer training, perfect mailings, and bolster canvassing efforts , driving more voters to the polls and into democracy.
One of their partners, Saily Avelenda, Executive Director of NJ 11th for Change was surprised by the immense value Fight offered the organization. “We’re good with ideas, but not always great at breaking them down with monetary values. Fight made me think in those terms,” said Avelenda. “What does it cost for canvassing per voter? Analyzing the numbers provides me with more clarity about how we’re doing things so we can make better decisions. Rather than go with gut, I have a data based reason. [Fight] makes me do the math.”
The advantage that Fight provides their partners extends even beyond the money and the math. “Yes, it’s helpful getting the funding from Fight,” she said. “But also it’s so valuable to be able to talk to them, because they’re working on a national level and can help us understand what’s working in other areas.
“They’ve given us advice on canvassing, messaging, PR, parsing the more efficient and targeted things we’re doing, and helping us attract more canvassers. They focused on our how we’re doing our canvassing, making sure that we’re offering bags, taking them out for happy hour, making sure we’re building a community, and making it something that people would want to come to, even gamifying it.”
This hands-on help bolsters the campaigns in meaningful ways that produces stellar voter results and provides inspiration. “Fight kept urging me to think bigger,” said Quinn Ruvacava, Chair of Stand Up OC, which supports three CDs in Orange County, California. “They told me to think about everything we wanted, and they told me that they would see what they could get for us. And they got us some amazing help.”
“When you know you have someone at your back,” Ruvacava continued, “It relieves the pressure and allows you to focus on what you need to.” That focus has enabled Stand Up OC’s volunteers to send text messages to voters aged 18-to-35 across three districts, with reminder calls to vote, based on research-backed data.
Many of Fight’s partners are engaging in new and innovative strategies that are tested for success. “Fight made a risk and backed us on our ideas,” said Lawson of Flip the 49th. “So they were really betting on us, the people leading it. To innovate, we need to try new things. Sometimes they fail. But then you find success.”
Experimenting can only happen, however, when there is funding, as well as room for error, which means that it needs to happen early in a campaign. But with traditional campaigns, “there’s an over-investment in Big Media, meaning TV, internet, and mail, but not field,” noted Lawson-Remer. “Even when there’s strong investment in the field work, it’s way too late, like three or four months before an election. We built a neighbor-to-neighbor field program that worked for over a year.”
“We are failing when 70% of campaign contributions are raised during the last two months of the election,” said Matt Morrison, Executive Director of Working America. “That’s like buying plane tickets the day before you fly. If we are trying to win elections in the last two months, then we’re committing ourselves to a very expensive task.”
“Politicians need an incentive to rush at their constituents, rather than at their donors. The current model of campaigns – expensive, late investment – incentivizes politicians the wrong way. The power of the Fight model is that if you help the rising cohort of funders understand the value of long-term engagement as an investment strategy, that changes the incentives for the candidates or politicians. That affects governance.”
I found being a legislator hard work, especially because I wanted to understand the complexities of the realities we needed to address. But I was fortunate that I could spend time delving deep into issues with constituents, rather than dialing for dollars for hours every single day, as most in Congress do. If we want our legislators to legislate, we need to lessen the eroding impact of money on politics. That means we need more organizations like Fight for a Better America, which works tirelessly to engage voters day-to-day and year-round in impactful ways that support and strengthen our precious democracy.
Jason Lorber serves Fight for a Better America as their chief communications consultant. He served in the Vermont Legislature from 2005-2012 (D-Burlington, VT) and facilitates change through Aplomb Consulting.