Upper management wanted to replicate her success without changing how it thinks
Hoo boy. The post down below was already in the pipeline when this column in the New York Times popped up. Like the tagline on my email, the message is, You can’t win if you don’t show up to play.
Canyon Woodward cut his political teeth as a Bernie Sanders regional director in Upstate South Carolina. He ran field operations for a rural North Carolina state senate race just west of here. He and Chloe Maxmin have had more success running her rural campaigns for Maine state senate:
As a 25-year-old climate activist with unabashedly progressive politics, Chloe was an unlikely choice to be competitive — let alone win — in a conservative district that falls mostly within the bounds of a rural Maine county that has the oldest population in the state. But in 2018, she won a State House seat there with almost 53 percent of the vote. Two years later, she ran for State Senate, challenging the highest-ranking Republican in state office, the Senate minority leader. And again, in one of the most rural districts in the state, voters chose the young, first-term Democrat who sponsored one of the first Green New Deal policies to pass a state legislature.
That’s not supposed to happen. And yet. “Democrats have to change the way they think …”
Democratic campaigns often seem to revolve around white papers and wonky policy. In our experience, politicians lose rural people when they regurgitate politically triangulated lines and talk about the vagaries of policy. Rural folks vote on what rings true and personal to them: Can this person be trusted? Is he authentic?
I put that somewhat more colloquially as “I wouldn’t trust anyone my dog doesn’t like.”
A campaign with heart
Maxmin and Woodward continue:
In our two campaigns, we turned down the party consultants and created our own canvassing universe — the targeted list of voters whom we talk to during the election season. In 2020, this universe was four times larger than what the state party recommended. It included thousands of Republicans and independents who had (literally) never been contacted by a Democratic campaign in their entire time voting.
Our campaign signs? Hand-painted or made of scavenged wood pallets by volunteers, with images of loons, canoes and other hallmarks of the Maine countryside. Into the trash went consultant-created mailers. Instead, we designed and carried out our own direct mail program for half the price of what the party consultants wanted to charge while reaching 20 percent more voters.
When they succeeded, party upper management wanted to replicate their approach with other races. In a one-size-fits-all manner, naturally. Controlled from the top. Instead of outreach to the transpartisan swath of voters Maxmin’s team nurtured, the Senate Democratic Campaign Committee told other campaigns to limit calls to “people over 60 who were likely Democratic voters.” Maxmin and Woodward tried to get them to reconsider. “They brushed us off.”
It was far from the only time party leaders told us they knew better than we did. In the final stretch of the 2018 campaign, they insisted that as part of their turnout effort they would send their people to conservative households that had told us Chloe was the only Democrat they would support. We were terrified that volunteers reciting a generic script, pushing folks to vote for Democrats up and down the ticket, would alienate the disaffected Republican voters whom we had worked so hard to persuade to vote for Chloe.
We begged the party officials to reconsider. They refused. It wasn’t until the afternoon of Election Day that they backed down, telling us they were unable to mobilize enough volunteers to send down the back roads to the district. That experience only reinforced our belief that candidates should be able to control the resources that the party puts into districts, so that they can iterate and improve on the one-size-fits-all strategies that the Democrats tend to employ.
Days ahead of Heath Shuler flipping NC-11 in 2006, a Democratic consultant high up in the food chain offered to spend last-minute party money on our race despite the fact that we didn’t know what else to spend it on. Perhaps a round of robocalls, he suggested. The field director and I practically shouted “No!” into our phones. That was 16 years ago.
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