Bonus Post: Connections, Capacity, and Impact: Strategic Thinking About Political Action
A guest post by Lara Putnam on taking a "core-outward" approach to political organizing.
As promised in this week’s Connector, here’s a guest post from my friend and collaborator Lara Putnam, professor of history at the University of Pittsburgh and a close observer of grass-roots organizing in modern America. Follow her on Twitter @Lara_Putnam.
Lara Putnam
Donald Trump’s 2016 surprise victory shocked millions of Americans into action, amid real confusion and uncertainty about how best to respond. Experts, including the leaders of many Democratic-leaning organizations were caught flat-footed, while newcomers flooded in trying their own strategies and tactics to build resistance. People pulled guidance from sources near and far, seeking confident voices who offered diagnoses and direction.
While we may (or may not) be done with the pandemic phase of COVID, we are definitely beyond any novel or acute phase of the political emergency of 2017-20 and into the endemic phase of troubles for our democracy. Today Democrats face an uphill battle in the midterms, in many cases running against opponents whose agenda seems ever more extreme on issues from abortion rights to false claims of supposed electoral fraud. Action doesn’t just feel urgent—it is urgent. But it’s high time for that action to be more strategic, which must include taking an unsentimental look at results achieved so far and making changes as needed. What does the evidence of the last five years say about the techniques and tactics on offer? Which ones are going to be most impactful over the long haul, given that the threats to an inclusive democracy did not, it turns out, end with Donald Trump’s exit from the Oval Office?
If you are reading this, you are probably one of the millions of concerned individuals who over the past five years has given your time, talent, and treasure to try to support small-d democracy and capital-D Democrats. You may well have worked as a volunteer on local, regional, and national candidates’ campaigns, or as part of campaigns organized by various national activist organizations.
This note seeks to help you place the tactics those campaigns prioritize in context, understanding why what is most urgent from their perspective may not be right for you. The “data-driven” or “evidence-based” voter mobilization strategies that campaigns channel volunteers into as they try to win elections should not be either the starting point nor the centerpiece of your own thinking about how to make political change.
When campaign professionals evaluate tactics, they measure return-on-investment in terms of impact on votes cast in one election, with the gold-standard impact data being that generated by randomized controlled trials. The findings they rely on are useful within their own parameters, but it’s crucial to recognize that those studies:
assume anonymous and interchangeable actors;
look only at impact within one election cycle;
place no value on participants’ learning or relationship-building; and
presume that volunteers’ time is free and has no better or higher use.
It’s natural that campaign practices reflect these assumptions and limits. Campaigns have finite resources, a short time horizon, a pre-set geographic territory, and staff who often have no prior connection to or knowledge of their target communities. Given all of these, they calculate likely “cost per vote” and choose tactics to follow.
Meanwhile, on the independent advocacy side, national groups offer prescriptions for social change that work from a nation-wide panorama and matching theory of how to make change within it. Here again, what their programs don’t and can’t do is constitute a guide to what you should most optimally do, even if you share their goals and vision. Labels like “emerging majority” or “new American electorate” or “low-propensity voter” define targets based on ideas about optimal future shape of the national electorate. But your question is not “how could a random, anonymous person make change, and which demographic groups should they focus on to do so?” Rather your question is “how can I—an actual, specific human being, who lives in a particular place and has particular social connections within and beyond it—make change?” Asking this is what I call taking a “core-outward” approach to political organizing and strategic choices.
For instance, let’s say you’re a member of a Unitarian church in a purple suburb of a purple state, and you are part of a committee interested in doing non-partisan voter engagement in support of racial justice. A focus on the “new American electorate” might suggest you should focus on voter registration and Get Out The Vote doorknocking in the majority-minority neighborhoods of a nearby city. A core-outward assessment would begin with recognition that the existing social networks of your congregation offer a rich target vein of people who are not yet voting for candidates supporting your values—maybe people who are susceptible to scare-mongering about “rioters” or “radicals” or “CRT”—and develop plans that start there instead.
The central principle to core-outward strategic action is that you need to figure out where you have relational leverage and lean into maximizing that leverage to make change—and in doing so, strengthen those relationships and build more leverage.
One of the most consistent (and least surprising) findings in social science is that we are all much more influential with people we have some connection to. Moreover that influence is dynamic, not static, because relationships are like muscle—the more you use them, the stronger they grow. So a great first step is to find a partner or partners for this process: a friend or set of friends, or an existing local grassroots political group or local party organization. Then you can walk through the following exercise together.
Here’s the basic rule of thumb. When trying to decide if I (or we) should do a particular action, ask three questions: How likely is it to have an impact on the outcome? How likely is it to build my or our capacity (knowledge; skills)? And how likely is it to strengthen my or our external connections?
The goal is to choose or design political actions that take both today and tomorrow into consideration, maximizing your present impact while also building capacity and connections for efforts to come.
1. Think about people: relationships matter
Think of two categories of people: 1) people you know personally, or who know people you know, and 2) people with whom you have other kinds of connections in common. These two categories likely overlap a lot, but not entirely.
They are your high-impact universe.
What portion of those people are currently voting differently than you on an issue or for an office that matters to you? That is your high-impact persuasion universe. What portion of your high-impact universe is voting less frequently than you? (Check voter turnout rates for your township or district from the last off-year primary or off-year general election: you’ll be surprised.) The portion of your high-impact universe who largely agrees with you on the issues, but votes less often than you do, is your high-impact mobilization universe.
The ability to shift the views and votes of the people in your high-impact persuasion universe and high-impact mobilization universe is your superpower.
But what about the people who already vote just like you?
The people in your high-impact universe who already 1) vote like you, and 2) vote as often as you, are not part of either of your high-impact universes. You can think of them as your choir, as in, “preaching to the choir.” Time spent talking politics with them or actions taken to reach and resonate with them are lost opportunities—vis a vis impact [because there’s nothing for you to change], connection [because you were already connected to them], and capacity [because you already knew how they saw the world] —unless you are reaching them in order to bring them into activism, to make them part of your change-making core.
2) Think about place: electoral geographies matter
Some of the people you know and with whom you have lots in common live near you. Others (family? college networks? religious networks?) may be spread across the country, or around the world. All are meaningful but with different roles to play in your planning and execution. Because people matter, but place matters too.
People tend to know people who live near them, and people tend to have lots in common with people who live near them. On the other hand, these things don’t just line up smoothly in concentric geographic circles. Nor do electoral territories simply nest inside each other.
So having a good mental map of where your high-impact potential targets reside within your city, county, region, and state is really useful. Again: the question is not where your “choir” resides, although it may partly overlap: it’s where people your core partners have current or potential ties to, but who are *not* yet part of your choir, reside. Knowing that will help you identify electoral units where your involvement can have the greatest impact, whether that means reaching a tipping point and flipping a seat (school board, countywide, congressional, whatever—although remember, the smaller the race, the more likely that your network can be the tipping point); joining a statewide issue campaign whose current coalition isn’t reaching the people you can reach; or making the strategic choice to prioritize and strengthen specific connections now that will be essential to being able to win a particular race several cycles down the road.
3) Think about actions. What tools do you have to shift political outcomes?
There is a wide range of these within your reach, maybe more than you’re used to recognizing.
First of all, you can shape which candidates run, or whether anyone runs at all. Here you have a lot of impact, especially in smaller geographic units or low-profile offices, and especially in cases where absent your engagement, no one may run at all. Giving money -- including especially early -- is one but only one piece of this. The main reason most people don’t run for elected office is that no one ever asked them. To intentionally diversify the people running as candidates by reaching out and recruiting community leaders who do not just replicate existing political activists or elected officials but instead bring real-world ties and experience and diversify who your party speaks for and to: that’s huge.
Having built capacity and connections will be particularly valuable in ensuring that you actually use that huge power for good. The more you know from first hand experience or prior results about the district—about the full range of its residents and their experiences, worldviews, and priorities—the more you will be likely to direct your effort in ways that turn out like you hope. The more capacity and connections you have, the more likely you are to influence candidate recruitment and viability in ways that are both in line with your broader goals, and in line with winning elections—and recognize and navigate the times when these two things may not be in sync.
Meanwhile, you can also impact what issue campaigns get run and how. In some places—especially in places where baseline partisan imbalance means that Democratic candidates face an insurmountable uphill battle—that has meant the creative use of ballot initiatives. The “Reclaim Idaho” grassroots effort mobilized thousands of volunteers in 2017 to get 75,000 signatures to get Medicaid expansion on the ballot, and passed it with 61% of the vote statewide. Now they are working to do the same for education funding, building on the networks and knowledge they grew.
Some elections lay tracks: there are campaigns worth running even if they fall short. On the other hand, helping a campaign happen is expensive in both time and money. It is best to decide in advance if you are in this for the outcome, the capacity, the connections…? If you don’t have many high-impact potential targets in the district, and recent results suggest it will be an uphill climb or lost cause, is there a smaller electoral terrain you could start with, where you might both build capacity/connections and have a chance of attaining an immediate win?
Second, you can affect how the public thinks about a specific campaign already underway. Campaigns rely on paid media (ads), owned media (Facebook and other social media accounts and platforms), and earned media (attention from traditional news media outlets) to shape public perceptions of who they are and what’s at stake. Regular people like you can be vital drivers of earned media and journalists’ view of campaigns, whether that means positive views of the ones you support, or negative views of their opponents. You can write letters to the editor, organize community meetings, hold public actions or protests, promote all of the above on social media, and more. Again, the capacity & connections you have hopefully already built through prior and ongoing engagement will be critical in helping you make wise choices that avoid counterproductive efforts—or at least make it more likely that the right person is in the room to head you off if you are about to dive in and make a mistake.
Third, you can impact the rules & structures that shape the electorate and the process of elections. Changing basic rules and practices can be hugely important. What laws are in place in your state: is there yet automatic voter registration and same day registration? How are these actually being enacted? Because the devil is in the details. A simple check-box redesign on Georgia’s driver’s license application, which reduced voter registration requests from 79% to 39%, cost as many as 150,000 new registrations before local voting rights groups caught the problem and got it fixed. Can you push your county board of elections to implement existing rules in more pro-voting ways? Can you partner with existing organizations (ACLU, League of Women Voters, civil rights groups) to push voter protection knowledge downward and outward? Are there groups working from and within marginalized neighborhoods to do this work that would benefit from your financial support?
Finally, you can try to change how individual voters think about a specific campaign underway. This is the realm of individual voter contacting. Since the vaunted Obama “volunteer army” driven campaign of 2008, this has largely been where Democratic and progressive campaigns have sought to channel any and all available volunteer hours and energies. Because they vary systematically along multiple dimensions, I’ve presented these tactics in matrix form. In addition to specific links below, see useful overview of academic findings from Yale University’s Institution for Social and Political Studies, summary of practitioners’ research conclusions from Deck Tools, and valuable individual studies from the Sister District Action Network.
Note that the top half of that voter outreach matrix is usually the totality of where national groups or campaigns ask volunteers to focus their time and effort. But actually those tactics are just a tiny and not very impactful subset of the voter outreach tactics laid out here in this matrix, which in turn are only a small part of the range of political action outlined in this piece. (Also note: since Substack doesn’t support dynamic charts, the links in the images below do not work; use the footnotes at the bottom of this article to follow those links.)
Intentional, non-anonymous repetition of the above forms of contact can strengthen the relationship, deepen the communication, and move the target into your activist universe so they themselves become a vector of persuasion and mobilization radiating outward through their networks
In general, the most uniform and portable tactics—which are also the ones that can be executed at a distance and require no prior context—are also the least impactful for either the person initiating the contact or the person being contacted. Conversely, those also are the easiest to study and most frequently studied, and are therefore the tactics for which we therefore have the more reliable estimates of impact on voters contacted.
Conclusion: What is To Be Done?
With all of the preceding in mind, we can begin to think differently about how to strategically prioritize our electoral activism, not just asking “what voter contacting tactics can we use?” but more fundamentally planning which efforts & campaigns we want to take up, when, and with what short and long term goals.
That planning should likely begin with the question: what is the full range of campaigns already underway in the places around us? Politics is about addition, rather than subtraction. If someone else is already building an effort that is in sync with the kind of change you want to see and the votes of the people in your high-impact universes would matter, you are bringing a meaningful comparative advantage to that work. Dive in!
What if someone else is building an effort that is in sync with your values and priorities, but the voters who will decide it are not within your high-impact universes?
If they are people who you don’t know, you don’t know anyone who knows them, and you have very little in common with, they are in your low-to-no-impact universes. You likely have a great deal to learn from talking to them! But you are not the optimal messenger for persuading or engaging them. If you choose to dive into canvassing or other outreach here, make sure you are proactive about the risk of backlash and build in activities and spaces that will speed your gaining of community-specific knowledge, skills, and connections.
Meanwhile and most importantly, those same target voters are in someone else’s high-impact universe. Is there a way you can make it possible for that someone else to focus on outreach? This is an argument for the foodbank approach: don’t buy cans, send money. For instance, identify Movement Voter Project groups implementing integrated voter engagement outreach in that place, and fund them. It can also be an argument for funding downballot candidates who have connections to the community they are running in and a plan for hiring local staff and building a high-touch local campaign—one of those “campaigns that lay tracks” discussed above.
What about volunteering from afar: sending postcards, texts, phonebanking? Such light touch methods executed by you vis a vis your low-to-no-impact universe from afar will have at most a very small impact on voters. Especially in the case of postcards and texts, it will teach you nothing about how people are responding. Are you ready to go into that open-eyed: knowing and admitting to yourselves in advance that your best case scenario is that by sticking precisely to a narrow script and sending 100 to 200 postcards you will inspire one additional voter to vote—and whether they vote for the candidate you wish will depend largely on how well targeted the list of addresses was, over which you have little control? The answer may be yes: it’s possible that the lateral connections that you can build by engaging in this campaign in this way are important enough that you or your group decides to dive in. But then for sure you want to shape your participation with attention to that capacity-building and connection-building from the outset. What are our goals and benchmarks here? How will we evaluate success? How should we weigh this against other potential uses of our time? These are important conversations to have from the start.
A complementary way to approach this kind of planning is to start with this question: What is the next upcoming election (or issue campaign or union drive) where our high-impact mobilization or high-impact persuasion voters can make a crucial difference? What is going to help get them to vote, and vote your way? What steps do we want to take now so that we are well positioned then to be optimal contributors? What networks, ties, or alliances do we need to start building now so that we can be persuasive in places we don’t yet reach: or so we’ll know how to judge who to support, or know what to say?
I’ll close by quoting a recent piece that Micah Sifry and I wrote: If democracy is on fire, the thing to do is to stop asking people to buy water bottles and organize them into fire brigades instead. That brigade is urgently needed, and we all need to bring our strongest selves to the task. That includes thinking strategically about building capacity, connections, and power for the long haul.
Footnotes:
[1] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17457289.2021.1949328?src=&journalCode=fbep20
[3] https://sisterdistrict.com/research/do-gotv-texts-motivate-voters/
[4] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2307631
[7] https://www.vox.com/2020/1/29/21065620/broockman-kalla-deep-canvassing
[8] https://www.relentless.vote/volunteer-relational
[9] https://d1h4zokikhjm0v.cloudfront.net/content/Vote-Tripling_Toolkit.pdf
[10] https://www.relentless.vote/volunteer-relational/blog-post-title-one-pkdr7
[11] https://www.relentless.vote/paid-relational
[12] https://www.relentless.vote/paid-relational
[13] https://www.turnoutnation.org/thereport
[14] https://www.mceanea.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2014/09/Primer-on-One-on-Ones.pdf