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.
Robert Hubbell here, the Democratic "cheerleader" referred to above. Here is a portion of a note I just sent to Micah:
Hi, Micah. Thanks for your reply. I stand by my criticisms, but note the following:
I linked to your op-ed. Readers of my newsletter can and did read your op-ed. They did not need to rely on my summary. You can read their reactions--in their own words--in the Comments to my Substack. I suspect comments from my readers reflect the comments you received in the NYT comments to your article.
You are clearly experienced and accomplished, and therefore understand the argumentative techniques that you used in your op-ed. Since you were writing an opinion piece, you were not bound by academic or scholarly objectivity or precision. But, at root, you chose to set up a straw man argument (i.e., that postcarding is ineffective) by selectively citing an outlier study that was small, non-randomized, and used an endpoint not consistent with the postcarding campaign it studied. But I am sure you knew all that when you cited the study—without mentioning contrary research.
You are free to selectively cite whatever research studies you choose in an op-ed. But neglecting to mention that there are many other, larger, more-controlled studies that find a positive effect on turnout was, in your words, incomplete. It was fair criticism by me to note your omission.
But beyond using postcarding and letter writing as a straw-man argument, your suggestion those efforts are “chum” to attract small-dollar voters was gratuitous and not grounded in any evidence. In the interest of brevity, I chose not to address other comments that attempted to denigrate the cohort of postcard and letter writing volunteers, e.g., including that "impassioned newcomers are [treated] like cash cows, gig workers and stamp machines to be exploited."
Such criticisms were offensive to people entering activism for the first time in their lives. To suggest that they are victims of a con is wrong, confusing, and groundless. And suggesting that organizations like reputable organizations like Vote Forward are using volunteers as “cash cows” for fundraising is offensive.
Based on responses to my article by academics, researchers, and organizers, I will likely have more to say about the state of research on the effectiveness of postcarding and letter writing.
Finally, I make no apologies for trying to maintain morale among Democrats when the media and cynical operatives do nothing but war-dial defeatism, cynicism, and criticism. When Democrats finally prevail over Trumpism, I am sure you will explain in great detail why everything we did was wrong.
Cheerlead away, Robert. People entering activism for the first time in their lives, or re-entering it, deserve a lot better. Many of them--including the majority of comments on our NYTimes piece--are fed up with being treated like cash cows and gig workers by the Beltway Brain. Their own common sense tells them that when the potential voter they are calling or texting for the Nth time complains about being barraged and deluged that these metric-driven tactics aren't working, but up the political food chain the people who run campaigns refuse to listen. It isn't denigrating to advocate that these folks reason for themselves about what makes the most sense to do, rather than asking them to trust research that is driven solely at the needs of short-term campaign goals. None of the studies you put your faith in look at impact beyond one election cycle (ie. are these tactics growing or degrading the Democratic base?), they impute no value whatsoever to relationship-building or the development of institutional knowledge; they just assume that volunteers are interchangeable inputs to be plugged into easily replicated tasks.
Yep, came here from the NY Times article. I have been driven almost crazy since a month after the Jan 6 insurrection.. Emails started flooding in from all over the country - multiple times a day, multiple times a week. In the beginning I was both repulsed and fascinated by them. I added a folder to my email called "politifcal email spam" to which I sent all the political emails so I wouldn't have to see them after I glanced at them. I stopped saving them after the volume hit 5,000, which was well before the end of 2021.
I am an 83 yo progressive via being a child of the New Deal. Before I even had any clue to what he was talking about, my father talked at the dinner table every night about the Depression and how bad it was, how people suffered and FDR was elected President and initiated programs the would improve lives or ordinary people. Growing up, I knew that all the good things happening in my life pointed back to FDR.
I am a few years older than Bernie Sanders, but I was growing up in Queens at the same time as he was growing up in Brooklyn. When Sanders set up his portable podium in 2015 to say he was running for President and why, I understood him immediately and I rejoiced. After a long drought, politics was finally alive again.
His two runs for the Democratic Presidency were disappointing and disheartening - not because of Bernie but because of the behavior of the Democratic Party. The second run was the worst ending in what I call "Murder on the Orient Express", Albert Finney version.
So after being a die-hard Democrat for almost all my life. my feelings about the Democratic Party is somewhat negative, to say the least.
But the elected progressive congresspeople are going the wrong way. If I understand rightly, a congressperson can be in the progresssive caucus if the vote against progressive issues no more than 30% of the time. But these pseudo-progressives have voted against progressive issues may more than they're allowed: 50%, . . .up to 100% of the time. Shontel Brown who voted against progressive issues 80% of the time and the CPC endorsed her over Nina Turner. They're trashing their own franchise.
It is clear that neither you nor Putnam is familiar with the abundance of evidence produced by the Analyst Institute regarding GOTV techniques- postcards/letters/standard canvassing/texting/phone banking — they are all pretty much the same.
I mostly agree with your arguments in the op-ed, to the extent I have any independent basis for assessing them. However, one point in your argument against postcarding troubled me. (I’m doing this from memory, which can always be faulty.) You cited an academic study of postcarding in a state legislative race. You presented that study as support for your argument against the effectiveness of postcarding generally. However, I clicked through and read the study abstract. If I understood the abstract correctly, the authors of the study were arguing that postcarding was ineffective *in the particular context of that state legislative race,* possibly because the effort siphoned attention from more prominent races higher on the same ballot. If I’m correct, then that study doesn’t support your broader argument. Perhaps I’m missing something — I did not take time to read the full study — or perhaps you have a more nuanced account of why you believe that study’s findings ultimately support your argument. But at a glance, IMHO your reliance on that study seems misplaced.
In my postcarding group last night (yeah, I know you don't like them, but whatever... but we've met every Monday for two hours since the start of the pandemic), we were chatting about the times we've tried to volunteer for local Democratic clubs. One of the women writing with us is a retired copywriter who moved to Florida. When she mentioned wanting to help out with PR, her county's all-volunteer Democratic club dumped the entire website on her without explaining how to use it, started sending her dozens of update requests a day and -- the kicker -- would not publish articles she wrote about getting out the vote on their blog. She quit and has never been back, but she's written 15,000 postcards to voters.
I tried volunteering with my local Democratic club and was turned off by them too. I attended one meeting where we spent 30 seconds discussing bail reform, a full half-hour talking about a potential city rule about neutering pets (with some awful "it's like the Holocaust/slavery!" comments from the floor) and then spent ten minutes wondering why The Youth never joined our group. I petitioned with them, but I didn't feel like I was connecting with the folks there. I wasn't at one meeting and they came out against a bike lane because it disrupted parking, so I never went back. When I moved out of their area, it took a year and a half for them to stop contacting me. That club regularly had great speakers, including our Congressperson, but the people weren't my people. I joined a lot of resistance groups between 2017-2020, and that was the group that had the most potential but also really left a sour taste in my mouth.
A lot of people just want to be helpful, and we're not able to do that in the base-level Democratic clubs. It also doesn't feel great to be stuck in a meeting where people are debating pet laws and bike lanes when democracy is melting down nationwide.
Sounds like you and your friends could maybe do a lot to shake up or displace these terrible local Democratic clubs if you set your mind to it. My local Indivisible group was a big part of shaking up the local Democratic machine politics that had, pre-2016, been so cozy with NY state Republicans the club's endorsed incumbent state senator, Jeff Klein, was the key leader of the breakaway faction of NY Dems who kept the state GOP in control of our state senate. In many places the local Democratic party is indeed terrible but it's folks like you and your friends who could change that.
Micah, my resistance group, Rise and Resist, was one of the first Indivisible groups to get the word out about the IDC by protesting wherever Cuomo and Klein showed up for public schmoozing. The No IDC candidates are the only set of politicians we'd ever endorsed. I called the head of Postcards to Voters to get them to write for those No IDC campaigns, even though that group doesn't normally get involved in primaries. I was at the victory party for the No IDC candidates. The No IDC campaigns were one of the few campaign groups that really wanted all hands on deck. I'm a former board member over at Rise and Resist, and I'm still active on their finance committee.
For four years, I fought the good fight and really tried to get involved anywhere I could. I wanted to volunteer, so I was willing to give my professional services pro-bono and I took time off work to gear up for campaigns. I did admin work and organized what I could, but I came to the conclusion that no one wants my volunteer time, and they're not interested in my professional skills. There are groups that want me to phone or text bank right before the election, and then there are a lot of groups that want everyone to jump into a massive meeting where we "get trained" on a basic skill. It's really, really frustrating for volunteers to get involved. You may not like postcarding and letter writing, but they're some of the few activities that are consistently available for volunteers and they have a low barrier to entry. Some of the groups will even buy stamps and supplies for the participants, so they only need to set aside quiet time to write.
If you take nothing else from the masses of people writing, here's one takeaway: there are a lot of dedicated people out there who aren't fitting into the existing pathways the Democratic Party offers to activists, and they're easy to organize if we just give them a simple, concrete task.
Yes, and it absolutely tracks with how the people I know have been treated when they try to volunteer. It feels like activists have to keep reinventing the wheel every time and are rebuffed by the big campaigns except for fundraising appeals.
In a marketing funnel, everything you do in outreach warms up your connections to get them to take action. For brands, getting people engaged and having them feel connected to the business or product is a big deal, in the hopes that people who feel warm and fuzzy about the product will remember those feelings at the store. Small businesses will ask for reviews or make homemade videos about their bakery. Big businesses will have people write funny tweets or give your kids a toy with their junk food. For brands, it often feels a little forced, but for parties, it should be soooo much simpler since we're asking people to make a difference in their communities and calling to really deep shared values. If you look at what everyone's asking, it seems like a lot of the outgoing messaging for Democratic groups is only ever about giving money and scoring PR wins in the news. That's not building up communities around a shared idea. There are no other steps in the funnel, all these other volunteers are waiting for something to do, and the choices they're offered are really slim.
Robert Hubbell here, the Democratic "cheerleader" referred to above. Here is a portion of a note I just sent to Micah:
Hi, Micah. Thanks for your reply. I stand by my criticisms, but note the following:
I linked to your op-ed. Readers of my newsletter can and did read your op-ed. They did not need to rely on my summary. You can read their reactions--in their own words--in the Comments to my Substack. I suspect comments from my readers reflect the comments you received in the NYT comments to your article.
You are clearly experienced and accomplished, and therefore understand the argumentative techniques that you used in your op-ed. Since you were writing an opinion piece, you were not bound by academic or scholarly objectivity or precision. But, at root, you chose to set up a straw man argument (i.e., that postcarding is ineffective) by selectively citing an outlier study that was small, non-randomized, and used an endpoint not consistent with the postcarding campaign it studied. But I am sure you knew all that when you cited the study—without mentioning contrary research.
You are free to selectively cite whatever research studies you choose in an op-ed. But neglecting to mention that there are many other, larger, more-controlled studies that find a positive effect on turnout was, in your words, incomplete. It was fair criticism by me to note your omission.
But beyond using postcarding and letter writing as a straw-man argument, your suggestion those efforts are “chum” to attract small-dollar voters was gratuitous and not grounded in any evidence. In the interest of brevity, I chose not to address other comments that attempted to denigrate the cohort of postcard and letter writing volunteers, e.g., including that "impassioned newcomers are [treated] like cash cows, gig workers and stamp machines to be exploited."
Such criticisms were offensive to people entering activism for the first time in their lives. To suggest that they are victims of a con is wrong, confusing, and groundless. And suggesting that organizations like reputable organizations like Vote Forward are using volunteers as “cash cows” for fundraising is offensive.
Based on responses to my article by academics, researchers, and organizers, I will likely have more to say about the state of research on the effectiveness of postcarding and letter writing.
Finally, I make no apologies for trying to maintain morale among Democrats when the media and cynical operatives do nothing but war-dial defeatism, cynicism, and criticism. When Democrats finally prevail over Trumpism, I am sure you will explain in great detail why everything we did was wrong.
Cheerlead away, Robert. People entering activism for the first time in their lives, or re-entering it, deserve a lot better. Many of them--including the majority of comments on our NYTimes piece--are fed up with being treated like cash cows and gig workers by the Beltway Brain. Their own common sense tells them that when the potential voter they are calling or texting for the Nth time complains about being barraged and deluged that these metric-driven tactics aren't working, but up the political food chain the people who run campaigns refuse to listen. It isn't denigrating to advocate that these folks reason for themselves about what makes the most sense to do, rather than asking them to trust research that is driven solely at the needs of short-term campaign goals. None of the studies you put your faith in look at impact beyond one election cycle (ie. are these tactics growing or degrading the Democratic base?), they impute no value whatsoever to relationship-building or the development of institutional knowledge; they just assume that volunteers are interchangeable inputs to be plugged into easily replicated tasks.
Yep, came here from the NY Times article. I have been driven almost crazy since a month after the Jan 6 insurrection.. Emails started flooding in from all over the country - multiple times a day, multiple times a week. In the beginning I was both repulsed and fascinated by them. I added a folder to my email called "politifcal email spam" to which I sent all the political emails so I wouldn't have to see them after I glanced at them. I stopped saving them after the volume hit 5,000, which was well before the end of 2021.
I am an 83 yo progressive via being a child of the New Deal. Before I even had any clue to what he was talking about, my father talked at the dinner table every night about the Depression and how bad it was, how people suffered and FDR was elected President and initiated programs the would improve lives or ordinary people. Growing up, I knew that all the good things happening in my life pointed back to FDR.
I am a few years older than Bernie Sanders, but I was growing up in Queens at the same time as he was growing up in Brooklyn. When Sanders set up his portable podium in 2015 to say he was running for President and why, I understood him immediately and I rejoiced. After a long drought, politics was finally alive again.
His two runs for the Democratic Presidency were disappointing and disheartening - not because of Bernie but because of the behavior of the Democratic Party. The second run was the worst ending in what I call "Murder on the Orient Express", Albert Finney version.
So after being a die-hard Democrat for almost all my life. my feelings about the Democratic Party is somewhat negative, to say the least.
But the elected progressive congresspeople are going the wrong way. If I understand rightly, a congressperson can be in the progresssive caucus if the vote against progressive issues no more than 30% of the time. But these pseudo-progressives have voted against progressive issues may more than they're allowed: 50%, . . .up to 100% of the time. Shontel Brown who voted against progressive issues 80% of the time and the CPC endorsed her over Nina Turner. They're trashing their own franchise.
I'm stopping here because I could go on forever
It is clear that neither you nor Putnam is familiar with the abundance of evidence produced by the Analyst Institute regarding GOTV techniques- postcards/letters/standard canvassing/texting/phone banking — they are all pretty much the same.
I mostly agree with your arguments in the op-ed, to the extent I have any independent basis for assessing them. However, one point in your argument against postcarding troubled me. (I’m doing this from memory, which can always be faulty.) You cited an academic study of postcarding in a state legislative race. You presented that study as support for your argument against the effectiveness of postcarding generally. However, I clicked through and read the study abstract. If I understood the abstract correctly, the authors of the study were arguing that postcarding was ineffective *in the particular context of that state legislative race,* possibly because the effort siphoned attention from more prominent races higher on the same ballot. If I’m correct, then that study doesn’t support your broader argument. Perhaps I’m missing something — I did not take time to read the full study — or perhaps you have a more nuanced account of why you believe that study’s findings ultimately support your argument. But at a glance, IMHO your reliance on that study seems misplaced.
In my postcarding group last night (yeah, I know you don't like them, but whatever... but we've met every Monday for two hours since the start of the pandemic), we were chatting about the times we've tried to volunteer for local Democratic clubs. One of the women writing with us is a retired copywriter who moved to Florida. When she mentioned wanting to help out with PR, her county's all-volunteer Democratic club dumped the entire website on her without explaining how to use it, started sending her dozens of update requests a day and -- the kicker -- would not publish articles she wrote about getting out the vote on their blog. She quit and has never been back, but she's written 15,000 postcards to voters.
I tried volunteering with my local Democratic club and was turned off by them too. I attended one meeting where we spent 30 seconds discussing bail reform, a full half-hour talking about a potential city rule about neutering pets (with some awful "it's like the Holocaust/slavery!" comments from the floor) and then spent ten minutes wondering why The Youth never joined our group. I petitioned with them, but I didn't feel like I was connecting with the folks there. I wasn't at one meeting and they came out against a bike lane because it disrupted parking, so I never went back. When I moved out of their area, it took a year and a half for them to stop contacting me. That club regularly had great speakers, including our Congressperson, but the people weren't my people. I joined a lot of resistance groups between 2017-2020, and that was the group that had the most potential but also really left a sour taste in my mouth.
A lot of people just want to be helpful, and we're not able to do that in the base-level Democratic clubs. It also doesn't feel great to be stuck in a meeting where people are debating pet laws and bike lanes when democracy is melting down nationwide.
Sounds like you and your friends could maybe do a lot to shake up or displace these terrible local Democratic clubs if you set your mind to it. My local Indivisible group was a big part of shaking up the local Democratic machine politics that had, pre-2016, been so cozy with NY state Republicans the club's endorsed incumbent state senator, Jeff Klein, was the key leader of the breakaway faction of NY Dems who kept the state GOP in control of our state senate. In many places the local Democratic party is indeed terrible but it's folks like you and your friends who could change that.
Micah, my resistance group, Rise and Resist, was one of the first Indivisible groups to get the word out about the IDC by protesting wherever Cuomo and Klein showed up for public schmoozing. The No IDC candidates are the only set of politicians we'd ever endorsed. I called the head of Postcards to Voters to get them to write for those No IDC campaigns, even though that group doesn't normally get involved in primaries. I was at the victory party for the No IDC candidates. The No IDC campaigns were one of the few campaign groups that really wanted all hands on deck. I'm a former board member over at Rise and Resist, and I'm still active on their finance committee.
For four years, I fought the good fight and really tried to get involved anywhere I could. I wanted to volunteer, so I was willing to give my professional services pro-bono and I took time off work to gear up for campaigns. I did admin work and organized what I could, but I came to the conclusion that no one wants my volunteer time, and they're not interested in my professional skills. There are groups that want me to phone or text bank right before the election, and then there are a lot of groups that want everyone to jump into a massive meeting where we "get trained" on a basic skill. It's really, really frustrating for volunteers to get involved. You may not like postcarding and letter writing, but they're some of the few activities that are consistently available for volunteers and they have a low barrier to entry. Some of the groups will even buy stamps and supplies for the participants, so they only need to set aside quiet time to write.
If you take nothing else from the masses of people writing, here's one takeaway: there are a lot of dedicated people out there who aren't fitting into the existing pathways the Democratic Party offers to activists, and they're easy to organize if we just give them a simple, concrete task.
Mary, I don't know if you read my post about Daniel Laurison's book, Producing Politics, but your experience directly tracks what he studied, which is the insular world of professional politics. See https://theconnector.substack.com/p/why-political-campaigns-are-self
Yes, and it absolutely tracks with how the people I know have been treated when they try to volunteer. It feels like activists have to keep reinventing the wheel every time and are rebuffed by the big campaigns except for fundraising appeals.
In a marketing funnel, everything you do in outreach warms up your connections to get them to take action. For brands, getting people engaged and having them feel connected to the business or product is a big deal, in the hopes that people who feel warm and fuzzy about the product will remember those feelings at the store. Small businesses will ask for reviews or make homemade videos about their bakery. Big businesses will have people write funny tweets or give your kids a toy with their junk food. For brands, it often feels a little forced, but for parties, it should be soooo much simpler since we're asking people to make a difference in their communities and calling to really deep shared values. If you look at what everyone's asking, it seems like a lot of the outgoing messaging for Democratic groups is only ever about giving money and scoring PR wins in the news. That's not building up communities around a shared idea. There are no other steps in the funnel, all these other volunteers are waiting for something to do, and the choices they're offered are really slim.