If you are a liberal/progressive and active in the Democratic Party, then you like me may often feel as if you are beating your head against the wall when it comes to the talking to your party. I have gotten over any shyness I might once have had and am spending a significant amount of my retirement time communicating with my party and our candidates, always trying to express I am doing so out of respect and a desire to see us succeed.
However, a message my party seems reluctant to hear and consider is that our party’s conventional wisdom, group think, common assumptions, whatever you want to call them, and the resulting behaviors may sometimes be undermining our success.
Not sure I can offer a satisfactory answer to the questions posed in the title, but some thoughts are below. And I would remind my party of Albert Einstein’s saying to the right.
LEARNING THE WRONG LESSONS FROM THE OBAMA WIN
Obama won Iowa twice. Did the Iowa Democratic Party, or the national party for that matter, consider that his ability to inspire people was a major contributor to his victory? If they did, it is not reflected in the way we teach candidates to campaign.
One of my dreams is to have candidate training include broad communications skills so they can discuss policies in authentic, passionate ways from the moral and ethical perspective. Win hearts and minds. This comes naturally for a few but can be learned by the many.
The lesson the Democratic Party seems to have taken away from the Obama victories is that the ground game is more important than anything about the actual candidate themselves, including whether the majority of voters can pick that candidate out of a group photo.
Republican voters are much more reliable and an R by a candidate’s name for many is all that matters. Many potential Democratic voters are thought to need reasons why they should show up to vote in the first place, why they should not vote for Republicans or 3rd party candidates, and why they should vote for the Democratic candidate. I of course prefer thoughtfulness over blind loyalty, but that does require the Democratic Party and our candidates to work harder and smarter to win.
More thoughts below.
THE SACRED METRICS OF THE GROUND GAME
In my state, and I think this is widespread, we teach candidates/campaigns that there is a ‘data-driven’ formula that should be used to measure the quality of our candidates, volunteers and staff and the likelihood of our success. The formula is this:
X dollars raised + Y phones dialed + Z doors knocked = Democrat elected
Where the values for X, Y, and Z come from I have never been able to determine. And being a former scientist I am left shaking my head whenever campaign staff tell me that they were taught research studies support this approach. I have looked, something I am trained to do, and can’t find any such research.
X dollars raised also appears to be the major metric for gaining support from the national and state Democratic Parties. I recently learned that $7 million is the magic number to win a U.S. House seat in Iowa. Who knew? Once we hit that, no worries, right?
Iowa Democrats did add absentee ballot requests as a metric at one point, but never developed a good system to get those ballots off people’s counter and into the county auditor’s office. In previous elections, we were too busy knocking doors for the third time in each precinct to chase the ballots. Still no statewide plan that I have heard about.
I have seen the incredible dedication of campaign volunteers and staff and example after example of us meeting these ground game metrics and LOSING, sometimes closely sometimes decisively.
I am not arguing that candidates do not need ridiculous amounts of money — please vote for Democrats who support public financing of campaigns — or that phone calls and door knocking are not important ways of engaging voters, or that you don’t need some guidelines, standardized practices and metrics.
I am just suggesting that we seem to value quantity over quality and that perhaps, this is undermining our effectiveness.
One final note on this — no more messaging to our campaign staff and volunteers that they are to blame if we lose. How many times have we heard politicians and campaign organizers say, “Do you want to wake up the day after the election and know we lost because YOU didn’t donate enough or YOU didn’t dial enough phone numbers or YOU didn’t knock enough doors?” Cut it out!
THE HIGH COST OF RE-INVENTING THE WHEEL
We hear over and over that we need to be more data-driven. Yes, yes and yes! And as a lover of data, I always volunteer to be one of the data entry helpers for campaigns. That is why the problems are glaringly obvious to me and many others who see our data first hand.
The Voter Activation Network (VAN) is a web-based system the Democratic Party uses to keep data on voters. To help support its maintenance, the party sells VAN data to campaigns who add to this data using a web-based program called VoteBuilder.
Each campaign separately collects its own data. Once a campaign closes, their Votebuilder account ends and the data, much of which may not be in VAN, is lost. Rinse and repeat with each new campaign season.
Somehow, even if a campaign or other group offers to share their data, i.e., offers to have it added to VAN, that doesn’t seem to happen.
You’re a campaign that wants to know what issues are most important to this voter so when you encounter them you can have a high quality conversation. Sorry, you’re going to have to call or knock their door to find out what issues they care about, right after they’ve been called or their door has been knocked several times that day.
Oh, and you and every campaign will have to separately dial the same number to learn it has been disconnected or the person has moved out of state or to simply be ghosted since that voter is really tired of being called.
And my heart aches for families who have to tell multiple campaigns their loved one is recently deceased. Or the time I found someone I knew (who was very much alive) was designated as deceased in VAN because they had the same name as their father who had died.
ARBITRARY COMPARTMENTALIZATION
I recently attended Zoom-based training offered by the National Democratic Training Center. The presenters were lovely, smart and professional. The training was well run. The topics had to do with organizing campaigns. In two separate sessions, a model was presented that divided the campaign into two phases as follows:
75% organizing — raising funds, hiring staff, recruiting volunteers, and collecting and verifying voter information, including contact information.
25% Get Out the Vote (GOTV)
Not wanting to seem argumentative, I didn’t ask:
- What is the basis for this model?
- Why would you want to wait until almost the last minute to activate voters?
- Why arbitrarily separate organizing and voter engagement/activation? We should be able to walk and chew gum at the same time, right?
THE INVISIBLE MAN/WOMAN
I believe that the lack of appreciation for the importance of the candidate themselves, the lack of training of candidates and staff in valuable communications skills, and the highly limited direct engagement of candidates with regular folks (too much time fundraising) contributes to a vexing phenomenon in Iowa.
Many of our Democratic candidates are invisible outside the activist base.
Obviously this is not true in the science fiction sense, but rather in the sense that most voters have absolutely no idea what our candidates look like. I recently had to go look up a previous candidate on the Internet because I realized I didn’t know what they looked like. This person has run in more than one major Iowa race and I am fairly plugged in. I found this very scary.
This is a good place to mention that TV ads are both really expensive and not very useful.
MISUNDERSTANDING “THEY ARE NOT PAYING ATTENTION”
It is very true that most people are not thinking about politics until close to an election, and some not even then. However, instead of interpreting that to mean there is no use messaging until then, I would argue it means we should be messaging continuously, but only very sparingly using phone calls, texts, and emails. Let’s not up the odds of being deleted/ghosted.
There is a rule for presentations that goes — tell them what you are going to tell them, tell them, and then tell them what you just told them. This is a rule because we know audience members tune in and out and any particular person may miss something important if you don’t repeat it.
I try to post almost every day on Facebook about something I just read — bad things Republicans are doing and/or good things Democrats are doing — as a colorful slide. The only hard thing is picking from so many possibilities.
My reach is very small. Imagine if every day (or several times each day), we had numerous volunteers across the state posting something or writing letters to the editor or tweeting something (or using those other things I am too old to know about), and we had a coordinated network of people sharing them. Videos can be very powerful and many can be made fairly cheaply. Let’s have more of them.
We could define the Republicans and ourselves early and often. Any one persuadable voter might miss one or more instances, but cumulatively, it seems likely we would influence more people.
The Republicans have successfully branded us as “bad”, including among Independents. Time to beat them at their own game and bonus, using the truth instead of lies to do so.
MISSING OPPORTUNITIES: THE PERSON TO PERSON APPROACH
Relational organizing has been talked about in several campaigns I have been involved with, including the Warren primary campaign. But so far, I have never seen it taken seriously by the Iowa Democratic Party or by any campaign in terms of investment of funds and staff/volunteer time.
Contrary to how it is often used, namely, to recruit volunteers or to identify campaign donors, it is about using personal connections to activate more voters. As outlined in this article:
Relational organizing isn’t new. The theory is simple: a volunteer reaching out to someone they know is more effective than a volunteer reaching out to strangers. if you got a call from a campaign organizer asking you to vote, it would be easier for you to ignore it (assuming you even pick up the phone from an unknown number) than if you’re best friend texted you and asked you to vote.
MISSING OPPORTUNITIES: DEEP CANVASSING
There is a growing movement in Iowa to implement deep canvassing. Deep canvassing has shown significant effectiveness when used to win support for issues. In fact, Deep canvassing emerged out of the decades-long battle for marriage equality, and has since been applied to a host of causes - transgender rights, universal health care, undocumented immigration, and criminal justice reform.
Deep canvassing means less talking and more listening. In fact, a study of its effectiveness in electoral politics showed it to be over 100 times more effective at winning undecided voters away from Trump than traditional campaigning.
100 times more effective? Sounds like something our party and our candidates should get behind and fast.
A FEW POTENTIAL STRATEGIES
- Create better data by investing sufficient resources in VAN data management at the state and local level.
- Organize and use data in more effective ways. For example, add coding to help us more easily distinguish our reliable from our infrequent voters or along key demographic lines, so we can engage folks using more personalized approaches.
- Develop more effective ways to help voters see and know our candidates and our party.
- Whether the candidate themselves can inspire and energize voters should count for more, at at least as much as their ability to raise money.
- No more TV ads.
- Expand the use of social media beyond organization and fundraising to get the message out as widely and as frequently as possible.
- Consider not just the message but also the messenger and the platform.
- Make relational organizing central to our efforts.
- Make deep canvassing central to our efforts.
Please share additional ideas in the comments.
THINK BIG, FIGHT HARD, AND WIN