Leading horses to water again
“Ya’ll got the secret sauce,” the neighboring congressional district chair said in a call after the 2014 midterm elections. Could I bottle it and send her counties a case?
November 2014 was not as bad for Democrats as 2010, the REDMAP election in which Republicans flipped 20 state houses across the country. But 2014 wasn’t good either. Still, North Carolina was the only state across the South where Democrats picked up state legislative seats. We netted three, two in my county. Betsy wanted to know our secret.
Listen. Political campaigns are not just contests of ideas. They are contests of skills. No matter how much people believe money, ideas and policies win them, at some point you have to play the game and put points on the scoreboard. Once polls close, we don’t count policies or ideologies. We count votes.
State parties are like little armies. Each year, veterans retire, and new volunteers arrive. Parties run recruits through basic training. This is a precinct; here’s how you organize it. Here are our charter and bylaws. This is the voter database; here’s how to pull a basic walk list and canvass your neighborhood. Etc.
Unlike the U.S. Army, what state parties lack is Officer Candidate School. Volunteers who might eventually lead a county’s worth of precincts pick up higher-level skills by the seat of their pants over multiple election cycles. If then. Democrats have gotten by on the assumption that they will for decades. Bad assumption.
Activists who live in more rural counties where big races don’t parachute in satellite campaign offices may never learn how a well-organized turnout operation works. Especially in a non-swing state. They don’t know what they don’t know.
Amateurs talk strategy. Professionals talk logistics.
– attributed to Gen. Omar Bradley
“It’s like they give you a small box of parts with no assembly instructions,” one organizer observed of state trainings.
Seriously. I have county chair manuals from multiple states, some over 250 pages. They are heavy on administration and light on electing Democrats. That’s why I wrote For The Win. This is nuts-and-bolts, mechanics and logistics for maximizing your county’s down-ballot vote and for building enduring infrastructure with little money and modest computer skills. Theoretical Foundations of Campaign Craft this is not.
In 2011, The New Yorker‘s Jane Mayer wrote “State For Sale” about conservative millionaire Art Pope’s influence on North Carolins elections. She opens on the story of State Sen. John Snow, a likeable, moderate Democrat incumbent in the state’s western tip. Pope threw nearly a million dollars at Snow’s 2010 reelection campaign, including two dozen attack mailers that might have accused him of being a pedophile, except that was not yet a default Republican smear.
Snow lost by 161 votes spread over eight counties, less than the combined undervote in his down-ballot race in two of his smaller counties. I’m convinced to this day that if those rural counties were better organized, Snow would have held his seat.
In the 2020 elections, COVID was a big influence. North Carolina Chief Justice Cheri Beasley lost reelection in her statewide down-ballot race by 401 votes. That’s the undervote in just a couple of precincts.
It’s hell down-ballot. And while not marquee races, state legislative and judicial races mean more to your daily lives than the clown show under the U.S. Capitol dome. Ask state activists fighting to secure women’s bodily autonomy post Dobbs.
With the advent of early voting, most elections are no longer one-day, 14-hour turnout marathons for precinct captains. The county party plays a larger role. It coordinates a weeks-long turnout operation involving perhaps dozens of precincts and multiple early voting sites and campaigns. A big part of that job is education and ensuring voters know to not simply vote for president and walk away. But beyond gaining seat-of-the-pants experience, and with states’ training budgets and bandwidth limited, few are teaching less experienced and under-resourced county committee chairs how to step into that role. So I do it.
This free “cookbook” is on its way to over 2,500 county chairs this week. It’s still a lead-a-horse effort. You can’t win if you don’t show up to play. And if you do show up, you’d best have “game.”
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For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.