An Activist Base is a Terrible Thing to Waste

More on my and Lara Putnam's NYTimes opinion piece on how the Beltway Brain churned and burned through the post-2016 surge in Democratic volunteerism, and what needs to change.

It’s been a while since I’ve had an opinion piece published in The New York Times, so forgive me but to some extent this edition of The Connector is going to be pretty self-reflexive. First some internal housekeeping: To all the new folks who have just subscribed as a result of reading my and Lara Putnam’s article “Fed Up With Democratic Emails? You’re Not the Only One” welcome aboard! Regular readers know that all of the content here is free to read (contrary to the advice Substack gives all its authors which is to stash the good stuff behind a paywall) but if you like what you get from this newsletter, please upgrade to being a contributor so I can keep it all free.

Also, if you are a new or recent subscriber and you got here because one of my recent posts about how the insular world of political campaigns keeps validating the same ineffective strategies or why just-in-time, top-down, data-driven campaigning can’t beat the power of actual community-building or how Everytown for Gun Safety bigfooted the kids who started the March for Our Lives and turned the gun safety movement into a monoculture, then I recommend you also dig through the Connector archives and don’t miss posts like this one examining how the DNC has impoverished grassroots organizing, this one on the problems of the Democracy Alliance big donor network or this one on “digital organizing as if volunteers really mattered.” Catch up, there’s a lot here!

OK, housekeeping done. On to the main topic. I’m glad to say that our Times piece has struck a chord. It’s also getting some pushback. So let’s dive in.

A confession to start. At first, neither Lara nor I were crazy about the title the Times put on our piece. Her working suggestion was “Democrats Face Disaster; They Have to Stop Treating it Like a Crisis.” Mine was “An Activist Base is a Terrible Thing to Waste” (hence today’s post title). In the end, the headline they used is fine because there’s clearly a lot of people who can’t stand the barrage of Democratic emails and texts begging for money lest the apocalypse or this month’s fake funding deadline crashes down. But to be clear, if you came thanks to a little rage-bait about annoying emails, we’re hoping you stayed for the spinach about strategy, because our main concern is what happened to the millions of people who got active post-2016 and whether we can shift the political-industrial complex from exploiting them to nurturing them. Along with that, Lara’s got a whole essay about how local activist groups can think through the best options for strategic political action that I’m going to publish shortly as a bonus post here, since we couldn’t do much in our Times piece beyond wave our hands broadly at the kind of multi-year local grassroots work she has followed closely in the Pittsburgh area. So more on that soon.

Judging from the nearly one thousand comments the piece got on the Times’ website before comments were closed, professional Democrats—be they establishment types running orgs like the DNC, DCCC and DSCC or the equally data-driven campaigners helming many progressive efforts—live in a world apart from their activist base. Gosh, you might even call it a Big Disconnect. Here are some representative examples:

forgotten voter, Indiana PA

“This is an example of that the authors of this article are saying. I am very unhappy with the Pennsylvania Republican gubernatorial candidate. I could never vote for Mastriano, a promoter of the Big Lie and an anti-Semite too! I hope Shapiro, the Democrat gets elected. The problem is that I get emails and texts every day asking for money. There is no contact information about attending an event or even holding my own event. It is just, give me money, today, tomorrow and forever. This is turning me off to the point where I may skip voting entirely. The personal approach of having conversations with people the local residents respect and reaching out to us is the best way to maintain our interest and even get our money.”

William from Oregon

“I'm a progressive voter, but I finally had to tell Bernie and Our Revolution and ActBlue to stop spamming me -- every day, often 2-3 times a day, sending me the-sky-is-falling emails begging for money. My wife and I contribute quite a bit every election, so we are on every progressive's spam list. And it is spam, no other word for it. The final straw was Raja Krishnamoorthi -- who? Every day, screaming he was in danger of losing his seat if I didn't send money. What seat? He never says. I had to look him up -- Illinois 8th District. Well, Raja, I'm in Oregon, you're in a solid Democratic district 2,000 miles away, you didn't even have a Republican opponent in 2020, and you have *$12 million cash on hand!* And you're begging for money, although you say (every time) that you hate begging for money? You even got your wife to beg for you.”

SW, MA

“We made the mistake - and it was a mistake - of donating a few dollars to Hillary Clinton in 2016.  The donation itself I don't regret or consider a mistake.  But it unleashed YEARS of constant badgering by phone, text, email, and mail.  I will never donate to another political candidate again.  We eventually set up a feature to block entire area codes on our phones, and blocked the entirety of Washington DC and Virginia, whence most of the calls originated.  We asked dozens of times to be removed from their lists. We even pretended to be dead.  Still, they called, texted, emailed, and sent letters.…  It's a HUGE turn off.”

ny, LA

“As I read this article I kept thinking, 'yes, I've experienced that.' I've been a volunteer on Democratic political campaigns in California and Northern Nevada in several national election cycles. We helped get Catherine Cortez-Masto elected. In between cycles I, and my fellow volunteers, have been largely forgotten. There has been no outreach, no attempt to keep us connected to the local Democratic organizations. And each new national election requires starting from square one. I keep wondering why. What a waste of potential time, enthusiasm, and energy on behalf of Democratic candidates. It would be much more effective to cultivate a core of loyal volunteers -- who have already shown their willingness to get into action -- throughout the year who can be organized to get Democrats elected at every level.”

[Emphases added.]

My friend Josh Nelson, who is one of a handful of digital strategists who has been trying to address what Democratic spam is doing to their base, told me after reading our article that, "I'm not surprised that this struck a nerve.” On a positive note, he said, “More and more campaigns are explicitly calling this out in their own fundraising emails. We've seen it recently from AOC, Maura Healey, John Fetterman, New Dems Action Fund and the Democratic Attorney Generals Association. I take that as a positive sign that the industry is taking notice and the counteroffensive is building steam.”

Still, until the day that Democratic donors and activists decide to go on strike (or some wily politician or group organizes them), there’s not much that will change. “There will always be vendors and entities (PACs in particular) that will do whatever they can get away with,” Nelson observed. “That's why I've focused so much on changing the incentive structure by pressuring NGP/Bonterra [the main fundraising vendor] to strengthen and enforce its terms. There's some evidence that they've started to enforce their terms against spam, but they are totally uninterested in being an arbiter of what is and isn't acceptable when it comes to the substance of the emails. Perhaps ActBlue – as part of its leadership transition – will be more open to taking a leadership role on these issues.”

Of course, there already is an ecosystem of Democratic and progressive groups that are trying to channel the energies of grassroots activists in more effective directions too. Many agree with our critique of the Beltway Brain and its extractive practices (though often they feel they have no choice but to use the same techniques). But several are taking issue with other parts of our essay, especially where we criticize groups that have pulled hundreds of thousands of people into writing letters and postcards to voters in faraway states. Some have written to us privately and I don’t yet have their permission to share their comments, but here’s a start at a response to some public pushback to our piece.

Reid McCollum, the founder of Postcards to Swing States, which is now part of the Progressive Turnout Project, posted a lengthy piece titled “In Defense of Postcards.” (No, it is not a postcard-length rebuttal, alas.) In my opinion, his strongest argument is that groups that make postcarding a regular part of their volunteer organizing have found it keeps them engaged. I can understand how offering people something they can do from the comfort and safety of their own home (especially during the pandemic) helps keep group members involved, but McCollum is wrong to claim that writing brief notes to people you don’t know and who don’t know you is “on par with other voter mobilization tactics, including phone banking and door-to-door canvassing.”

Actually, as this research review by the Sister District Action Network found, letters/postcards are the least effective tactic (with text-banking next-least). And a later study by VoteFWD of the entire “Big Send” 2020 project, where 200,000 volunteers sent nearly 18 million letters to voters in the fall of 2020, found that the net effect was pretty small: just 126,000 additional voters turned out, compared to a control group. Proponents of the Big Send love to argue that in a hyper-close election this mattered, but buried in the fine print of this study are these words: "we can’t tell exactly which voters were the ones who otherwise wouldn't have cast ballots." So it's also unclear whether the people who were activated by getting a postcard then actually voted the way activists were hoping they'd vote.

A Substack writer named Robert Hubbell, who apparently has a huge following among grassroots Democrats, got a lot of emails from his own readers since so many have uncritically bought the claims for postcarding and wrote a defense in response. I’m all for debate, but not when someone doesn’t even bother to fairly describe the argument he is rebutting. Here’s how he summarizes my and Lara’s main point:

“The authors describe a supposedly revolutionary new approach to encouraging turnout used in a school board election in Pittsburgh:

“The [school board campaigns] sent the candidates themselves and trusted endorsers (community leaders and popular local incumbents) to knock on doors.”

 “Knock on doors.” That’s it. That is the revolutionary insight that justifies denigrating the engagement of millions of Americans whose first step into activism has been postcarding and letter writing.”

Actually we do a lot more than argue for mere door-knocking in that sentence; we point out that instead of sending random local volunteers or distant digital volunteers or trusting the value of “anonymous contacting” via text or postcard, the school board campaign “sent the candidate themselves and trusted endorsers” to do that key work and channeled other volunteers (next sentence Mr. Hubbell) into “hyperlocal fundraising and house parties, capitalizing on existing ties rather than ignoring them.”

Hubbell, I should add, appears to think that his main job is to be a cheerleader for Democrats and that it’s more important to “maintain[] morale and engagement during a period of negative press coverage and predictions of doom.“ I disagree. If you were trying to lose weight, I wouldn’t tell you that walking slowly around your kitchen 50 times was helping either. Sure it’s better than sitting still but it’s not like you broke a sweat.

McCollum made a similar argument in an email to me and Lara this morning. He wrote, “What motivates many to activism in blue bastions is expanding the Senate majority and holding the House. Throwing cold water on what motivates them and downplaying the very real impact of their efforts in close elections doesn't translate to them getting more involved in local school board races. Aligning volunteer preferences just doesn't work that way in my experience.”

Well, here’s my answer to that. Our ability to influence other people is greatest on those we are closest to, either personally (family, friends), professionally, geographically or through some other community of shared activity (faith, hobbies). The people we have the least influence over are strangers and those far from us. So if you want to influence elections in other places, the best thing you can do is give money to organizing groups that are themselves local to those places. Not candidates, because those operations shut down the day after election day. Giving money allows them to do more local organizing of their friends/neighbors; imagining that faraway people writing anonymous letters or texts or phone-calling strangers (with odd accents) is a better use of your time is a fantasy sold by campaigns and other orgs happy to exploit your free labor.

If you want to find groups to give to that do year-round community organizing aimed at lifting the voting participation and power of those who have less power, the best single resource is the Movement Voter Project, which has been going since 2016 and which moved more than $120 million from its network of 40,000-plus donors to dozens of vetted groups in key states in 2020.

Odds and Ends

—A lot of the same issues afflicting the political-industrial complex are also at work in the world of charitable giving, where donations to traditional nonprofits is in steep decline from more than 2/3 of households a generation ago to less than half. Twenty million households have stopped giving to traditional charities, and the Chronicle of Philanthropy’s Drew Lindsay writes that it may be because “an obsession with cash may be tamping down the desire to give, threatening not only revenues but also the standing of nonprofits as a primary force for good.” He also notes, “The rate of volunteerism has dropped from 65 percent in 2013 to 56 percent last year, according to Gallup polls. Donor-retention rates have fallen from about half to around 43 percent over the past 15 years. Nonprofits can attract donors, it seems. But building the relationship that makes them want to give again? That’s another story.” Foundation giving has filled some of the gap, but people like my friend Mario Lugay of Justice Funders say that’s only making the disconnect worse. The availability of big money from philanthropy is causing nonprofits to spend less time building community connections that cross class and other lines and more time writing grant applications that attest, explicitly or implicitly, to their organization’s value and superiority over similar groups. Such self-promotion soon bleeds into all fundraising, Lugay says. “You start to absorb that approach. And it keeps going and it keeps going and 20 years later, we are the most narcissistic folks.”

—Speaking of the value of building connections across class, this big new study of the Facebook friendships of 72 million people suggests that having friendships that cross class lines is a big factor in who escapes poverty in America.

—South Texans for Reproductive Justice are trying to raise enough money to buy the building that housed one of the Rio Grande Valley’s two abortion clinics in order to convert the building into a community center and a base of operations for their free emergency contraception program.

—My pal and co-conspirator Allison Fine has started her own Substack called “Our Next Chapter,” focusing on what you need to know and do for repro rights. A topic she knows a lot about as the former national board chair of NARAL. Go subscribe! It is a very fine substack.