There is a disconnect between how grassroots party politics actually works and how people think things work. Amanda Litman of Run For Something discussed some of that on Ezra Klein’s podcast. People see the hundreds of millions spent on presidential campaigns and think that money is somehow floating around the other three years of the cycle. It is not.
As Litman and James Carville observed, Democratic activists will pour $90 million into Amy McGrath’s doomed campaign to oust Mitch McConnell. But they won’t invest the same into thousands of small-potatoes races that build Democrats’ ability to compete and build their state benches. Plus, well-funded presidential campaigns don’t go into rural areas and model how it’s done. Nor do Senate or gubernatorial campaigns.
But in addition to chronic financial deficits at the state and local levels, and the lack of a command of media corresponding to that on the right, Democrats suffer from inertia. They do things the way they’ve always been done.
It is gospel that precinct organization is the foundation of the party. Has been for decades. That is still true from an organizational and election administration perspective. But what gets lost in that culture is that parties exist to elect their members to office. Period. All the rest is overhead.
Training geared toward precinct captains turning out their voters on Election Day is out of date. It’s not how elections have operated in decades. The majority of states have some form of early voting. Multiple states vote by mail. Training has not adapted.
My county spans 660 square miles. It has 270,000 residents, 200,000 registered voters. There are 80 Election Day voting places. Perhaps three dozen Democrats on the ballot in a presidential year. There are two and a half weeks of early voting ahead of Election Day at 15 or so locations scattered across the county. Anyone from anywhere in the county can vote at any one. These sites are not the responsibility of specific precinct captains. Yet, party trainings assume a precinct turnout model as though elections are still a one-day, 14-hour marathon at a time when two-thirds to three-quarters of the vote is cast before Election Day.
Where is the training to teach county committee chairs how to coordinate the efforts of all their campaigns and give support to the weakest? Where is the training to teach county committee chairs how to organize electioneering for two and a half weeks? How to ensure there are volunteers handing voters sample ballots, instructing them to vote not just the marquee races, but for the back-of-ballot races Litman hopes her candidates will win but voters often leave blank? Those volunteers have to be recruited trained, scheduled, supplied, and resupplied — thousands of volunteer shifts in a large county. And more on Election Day precinct chairs are supposed to schedule. What about training in how to organize a rides-to-the-polls effort? There are election protection attorneys to be recruited. And poll observers. There is literature to be designed, printed, and distributed in an orderly fashion so it’s not gone before Election Day.
Mechanics and logistics.
Naturally, the work (and budget) scales down for counties under 100,000, but it still needs doing. Precinct chair manuals are available everywhere online. But they don’t cover the above. Out of 273 pages on party administration, one state’s county chair manual serves up an entire half page on get-out-the-vote (GOTV) planning. One bit of helpful advice: “Organize rides to the polls.” How, exactly? Writers of these manuals assume people reading them already know what they’re talking about.
That’s why For The Win exists: for county leaders who don’t. To show them how to create a program with limited budgets and computer skills. One organizer said of state party materials, “It’s like they give you a small box of parts with no assembly instructions. You’ve written the assembly instructions.”
Learn how to run meetings somewhere else. Eight years on, you won’t find this available anywhere else.
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For The Win, 4th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.