Makes Sense To Me
by tristero
I was a top organizer in [Obama’s] 2008 campaign and trained thousands of the campaign’s staff members. I and the book’s authors fear that the wealthy elites on the left have less respect than ever before for the strategies that got Mr. Obama elected. If Democrats want to win in 2020, they must get back to investing in the power of everyday people through organizing.
Republicans know how President Obama won, yet there is a contentious debate among progressives about how to run campaigns. One side says you engage your most excited supporters, organizing them into local leadership teams and helping them host trainings, house parties and voter registration drives so that they can build support and gather accurate data about their neighborhoods.
This creates the capacity for millions of authentic, person-to-person conversations about families’ experiences, and their hopes and fears — the kinds of conversations that can expand an electorate, energize a base and demobilize the opposition. Data and technology are tools to improve this work, not the machinery for controlling people.
Back in the Oughts, I went to a Renaissance Weekend and met Howard Dean. He yakked a lot about this very strategy, about how important it was to get people excited and GOTV everywhere, even where there was quote very little chance unquote of Democrats winning. I thought he was 100% right.
But no, the Dem leadership didn’t listen. And Bush remained in the Oval Office for 8 awful years during which his administration murdered 100,000 Iraqis in a senseless war in which thousands of American soldiers died. And Bush totally crashed the American economy and…don’t get me started.
Going into 2020, Democrats cannot fall into the trap of being overly seduced by shiny tech-only tricks. They must get back to the hard work of pounding the pavement to organize the people who already want to vote for them. That’s how we’ll create the power to build a movement that attracts others. In fact, data from 2016 and 2018 show that organizing increases voter turnout more than any other single outreach method, including mail, TV and digital advertisements, and twice as much as contact from a stranger.
Yep.
…after the [2008] election, I came bright-eyed into a project where I interviewed senior Democratic consultants to help train campaign managers for the midterms. Here’s what they told me: We’re going to have an extraordinary backlash to President Obama’s victories, so we have to double down on likely white voters. After two cycles of terrible midterm losses, this was, again, the narrative after the 2014 elections.
In the winter of 2015, I sat in a room of about 400 political operatives where Stan Greenberg, a pollster for Bill Clinton, made that very argument from the main stage. His polling data sliced and diced white people in myriad ways: rural/urban/exurban, married/unmarried, college educated/non-college educated, seeking the magic formula that would deliver victory in 2016. But a single spreadsheet column — “People of Color” — had lumped together black, Latinx, Asian-American, Pacific Islander and Native American voters.
This problematic love affair between the analytics masterminds and those on the left focused almost exclusively on white voters is suffocating the Democrats’ base from the top down. As we get closer to the 2020 election, this is the mantra of many progressive political elites and labor groups, epitomized most by Third Way, a centrist think tank, and by Catalist, the dominant data provider for the Democrats and the left’s independent sector.
We’re so afraid of the leadership required to shape a new future that we’re turning on our own base. This retreat is augmented by a hunger for technocratic control that has only delivered further failure. The programs that organize data have come to control the programs that organize people as we eke out marginal returns and obsess over “votes per $1,000 spent.” But remember that Donald Trump won with only a fraction of the resources of Hillary Clinton. He knew he had to animate his own base and was good at doing it.
We will keep losing elections if we continue to campaign this way.
Yep.