While perusing YouTube engine animations not long ago, I explained to my wife (mansplained, if you insist) how the four-stroke, internal-cumbustion engine in her car works. She’d been driving cars for decades but never thought much about what was going on under the hood. The car either started when you turned the key or it needed fixing. The particulars were a mystery.
Democracy is like that. People expect it to work when they go to vote but don’t really think about the machinery under the hood. That’s changing, what with Republicans working furiously to monkeywrench elections.
I stopped by our local Democratic headquarters this week to ask about progress on finalizing our list of election judges and poll workers for the next two-year cycle. There was only a receptionist there, a regular volunteer who had no idea what I was talking about. This work happens out of public view when attentions are elsewhere. Even as a veteran volunteer, she’d never heard of it.
In a Facebook thread recently, someone commented on the lack of younger people at party meetings, “Since I have been here, I have seen young people mostly at protests with and for DSA, Sunrise, Reject Raytheon, Free Palestine, Amazon workers, BLM. Young people here seem more attracted to movement politics than party politics.”
That’s because much of what local parties do between elections involves election planning and mechanics that, while critical to sustaining democracy, has less appeal to people whose focus is candidates, legislation and policy. Like recruiting poll workers and election judges, for example. I’ve written before (of a job I no longer have):
The handful of people you see every Election Day don’t appear out of thin air. Precinct leaders from each party recruit them (plus multiple backups) in the odd-numbered years here and provide a list of their names to the county Board of Elections. I spend six weekends every other summer compiling the list for local Democrats. It’s a chore and a half. Four or 5 people per precinct, plus backups. In my county there are 80 precincts. In North Carolina alone there are 2,709 precincts.
That’s over 11,000 people to mobilize for Election Day, just inside the polls. Add to that the three county Board members in each of 100 counties, the Board of Elections staffs in 100 counties, plus the party and precinct officers (volunteers, of both parties) in each of 100 counties, plus the state Board of Elections staff in the capitol, and the Election Protection attorneys on standby, and the thousands of party volunteers with literature who answer questions and greet voters outside the polls.
Combined, we’re talking something like an army division mobilized on Election Day so democracy can happen. And that’s just one of the larger states in the country. The U.S. Elections Assistance Commission counted roughly 185,994 polling places and “at least 845,962 poll workers that worked at polling places on Election Day.” In 2004.
Many younger activists have neither the life flexibility nor interest in that kind of work in between elections, and that’s fine. Oldsters are glad to do it as community service. It’s not sexy. It’s not a political career path (neither is blogging, frankly). It’s not bare-knuckles, ideological battle. Most of it is unpaid, unpublicized grunt work and meetings. But the elections DSA, Sunrise, MoveOn, Indivisible, and other activist groups work their butts off to win don’t happen without it.
I joke that every other new activist who wanders into our local headquarters wants to write the white paper that will remake politics for the Democrats nationwide. But there is no The Democrats. The DNC has virtually nothing to do with what goes on locally. And local parties don’t make state or federal policy. We elect candidates to do that.
The Democratic Party here (as an organization) generally doesn’t organize street protests either, not out of disinterest, but because as soon as we’re involved they become partisan events. Friendly 501(c)(3) groups (as organizations) don’t want any part of that. It puts their nonprofit tax status at risk. So, those of us on the party side attend/supportdonate to their rallies individually, but we generally don’t organize or sponsor them. It’s a misconception that we are supposed to or that we’re doing nothing because we don’t.
But you’ll find us at Moral Mondays, the Women’s March, HKonJ, etc. A friend reminds me he was a DNC member when he was (in an unofficial capacity) the stage manager for Mountain Moral Monday here in 2013 when 10,000 people showed up. Many other party members participated in an individual capacity. That’s how things really work.