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I don't know who needs to hear this but: the feeding frenzy currently underway over address lists to send postcards to voters in Georgia is evidence of a progressive volunteer universe that has been deeply misled about the levers of political change.
If you run a national "progressive" organization and are contributing to this, & not-incidentally driving up your engagement stats & goosing your own fundraising, shame on you. Whatever self-serving tale you're telling yourself about the greater good being advanced: inadequate
Both! 1)Very likely entire waste of time (v low impact of technique under best circumstances; least effective in cases of onslaught of other political info as will be here; meaningful targetng impossible given locally-ignorant actors generating lists etc https://twitter.com/KmSmmns/status/1329756945092403202
2)As with donating $1 cans to food drives, by *far* better option is to send cash: to people on the ground who do ongoing, embedded, relationship-driven outreach. Movement Voter Project eg has a fund. If that feels cold, set up zoom mtg to share knowledge & donate with friends
And meanwhile 3) there is a accelerating collapse of democratic structures & legitimacy all around you that politically engaged regular people have a crucial role to play in countering. There are municipal & judicial elections coming up in a matter of months that aren't going to
be run in some magically more fair & rational universe than the one we are currently living. Are you watchng upright local officials & judges hold the line against baseless fraud claims this wk? *Those* are the offices up for grabs in 2021: don't doubt others are already planning
A gracious interlocutor points me to this data, but to me it underscores what I'm trying to say. RCTs of the impact of postcards in elections _that *aren't* having 100s of millions of $ spent on them_ range fr 0.2 to 1.2 percentage point turnout bumps https://d1h4zokikhjm0v.cloudfront.net/content/sl_letters_vs_postcards.pdf
You & your networks will have so much more impact by not treating yourselves as interchangeable units in anonymous scaled action: but rather assessing the scope of your existing relational leverage & identifying the urgent political targets that voters you can reach will decide
and/but what I want to underline is that most existing evidence-based assessments of voter outreach techniques evaluate interchangeable-actor implementations & are a misleading guide for individuals/groups trying to *shape* this complex interaction https://twitter.com/dabrams2021/status/1329772305313050624
Very much appreciate these questions! Gonna run off & zoom conference with grad students (who are so much better than I deserve) for the next seven hours. And then will pick up this thread & try to point to examples of other people's wisdom re: then, what? https://twitter.com/aaronhuertas/status/1329778165531750401
In the meantime leaving you with this link. Yes Georgia really matters: today & tomorrow both. Give if you can! https://secure.actblue.com/donate/ga-fund?refcode=mvpsite-homefund
Back to pick this up & appreciating comments. Some thoughts: Absolutely, I get that writing postcards is a way to feel that one is making some contribution to urgent elections far away, at a time when so much in our political system seems disastrously beyond our ability to impact
Is writing postcards to voters a better use of your time than doomscrolling political commenters on twitter? YES. So from that point of view I heartily approve of anyone who stops reading this *now* & goes to write postcards instead. Seriously. Get off this hellsite. Go!
People in comments mention ways they've integrated postcarding into volunteer-building, so it becomes part of a ladder of engagement that includes canvassing phonebanking donating & more.
All on-ramps have value! & Do Something. Then Do More. is a great rule of thumb
[my desk]
![People in comments mention ways they've integrated postcarding into volunteer-building, so it becomes part of a ladder of engagement that includes canvassing phonebanking donating & more.All on-ramps have value! & Do Something. Then Do More. is a great rule of thumb[my desk]](https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EnUCtZuXcAIEJQu.jpg "People in comments mention ways they've integrated postcarding into volunteer-building, so it becomes part of a ladder of engagement that includes canvassing phonebanking donating & more.All on-ramps have value! & Do Something. Then Do More. is a great rule of thumb[my desk]")
All on-ramps have value! & Do Something. Then Do More. is a great rule of thumb
[my desk
]
My basic point though is a truism among organizers & confirmed by all research: messages conveyed in the context of pre-existing relationships are far more impactful than anything anonymous ever could be. And together in groups we can become more than the sum of our parts
Your relationships are your superpower. & using them intentionallyâalongside other people doing the sameâthey can transform the political landscape around you. & "around you" might be local... or statewide.. or even in places not adjacent to you, if you have ties or find partners
Look at what's happened this week. Every elected judgeship in PA or MI or NV or GA turns out to matter. Every *failed* opportunity to electâ2 or 4 or 6 ys agoâa state legislator who'd feel accountable to a broad constituency & uphold the rule of law, brought risk.
We don't have a time machine to go back & change those races, where even a fraction of the attention cascading into GA now could have been transformative. What we *can* do is recognize what a time traveller from the future would tell us: build everywhere https://twitter.com/lara_putnam/status/1325083895931564032
The research campaign pros draw on as they build field operations is going to systematically misdirect you if you allow it to set priorities. It's designed to answer: Given this election in this time frame in this territory, how should we channel interchangeable units of labor?
But you are not stuck with only one possible campaign or territory, & you are in it for the long haul. And the relationships that make you *not* interchangeable are your greatest power. Ask: what political outcomes can be changed by voters with whom *we have* relational leverage?
Campaigns that lose can still lay tracks [h/t @LisaF_SEIU]. In evaluating any tacticâor campaignâyou can ask:
1) how much impact will it likely have on the outcome?
2) does it build internal capacity (knowledge, skills, bonds, more)?
3) does it strengthen external connections?
1) how much impact will it likely have on the outcome?
2) does it build internal capacity (knowledge, skills, bonds, more)?
3) does it strengthen external connections?
That trio of questions underlines part of what's so valuable about face-to-face canvassing (& phone- & text-banking at their best): the canvassers themselves learn *so much* about how normal people around them think (or often, don't think) about politics https://www.vox.com/first-person/2019/3/25/18275868/2020-presidential-election-midterms-democrats-candidate-progressive-base
True! But OTOH the Christian right's local organizing to flip schoolboards & more began over a decade before Fox News: & shaped the cohorts of rising politicians who evolved with it, & the opportunities they would encounter https://twitter.com/mnemosyneous/status/1329991829899587593
Trust me I do not think that Local Organizing Solves Everything https://twitter.com/lara_putnam/status/1324727200877318144
But! I do think your efforts will be most impactful if you begin with a self-outward assessment of which voters your networks best reach, & which complementary allies+relationships you might work with to bring which goals (school board? governor? minimum wage law?) within reach
This question of the "missing ladder of engagement" is important. A healthy local/regional political ecosystem will have *multiple* alternatves for ongoing involvement: some issue-focused, some non-partisan, some explicitly partisan. Diff ideologies=fine https://twitter.com/KmSmmns/status/1330090181924446211
A lifetime ago after the 2016 election I went looking for allies to flip my own state senate seat: & discovered all across the Pgh suburbs new groups were being formed.
I knew enough to know this was incredibly powerful. I wrote up a doc to describe it https://docs.google.com/document/d/1EF4y7YbrR4eagQojtURB94rjy-xGPgQsGgMSTeKl9nE/edit
I knew enough to know this was incredibly powerful. I wrote up a doc to describe it https://docs.google.com/document/d/1EF4y7YbrR4eagQojtURB94rjy-xGPgQsGgMSTeKl9nE/edit
& when I say "I wrote up a doc" literally it was a google doc. I was a history prof! I wasn't on twitter. I had no sense of how to push info out into the world. No one read it. But luckily they didn't need to: across the country people were already On It https://docs.google.com/document/d/1EF4y7YbrR4eagQojtURB94rjy-xGPgQsGgMSTeKl9nE/edit
I've been writing about what they're doing ever since. The capacity of ordinary people to look around them & come up with & execute transformative political plans blows me away. In places with favorable trends they can accelerate, things like this happen https://twitter.com/ChesCoDems/status/1330009317630685184
https://twitter.com/ChesCoDems/status/1330009317630685184
Where surrounding trends are less favorable, the outcomes don't look triumphant. But the *impact* may be even more important. New spaces of engagemnt help new coalitions work their way toward forming. Future leaders rise: who don't look just like past ones https://democracyjournal.org/magazine/57/rust-belt-in-transition/
Bottom line: Postcard if it gets you off twitter/sparks joy. Definitely send money to Georgia! But also urgently: find likeminded people around you, map the geography of your relational leverage, ID allies, & work to turn leverage into a new rep or new law https://secure.actblue.com/donate/ga-fund?refcode=mvpsite-homefund
Picking up this thread to share two fabulous postcard stories, from about 40 ys apart. One is from the daughter of this state rep, who reports that when she would go door-to-door before each election, voters would eagerly tell her they had the full set of cards her mom had sent
The other is from a powerhouse organizer south of Pgh, who first got involved in politcs thru a Fb group in 2017. She's now a member of her Dem cttee & sent every voter in her precinct a postcard introducing herself on arrival, & now followups before each election. Turnout surged
Turns out if you distill the best research-based knowledge re how to build political parties from the ground up you come up with exactly the same lessons. Build relationships. Build on relationships. Layer multiple forms of outreach & two-way communication https://scholars.org/contribution/local-political-parties-guide
A lifetime ago @daschloz @CarolineTervo @JakeMGrumbach @adamsethlevine @awh Tabatha Abu-Lughod, Joseph Anthony & I were finalizing this (useful!) guide. Then coronavirus hitâ& we added an appendix about network-based building in a socially distanced world https://scholars.org/contribution/local-political-parties-guide
