Look Back to Look Ahead
-“It could be a very long time before we can truly trust the polls again,” former Obama communications director Dan Pfeiffer writes, summing up his cogent analysis of what went wrong with polling in 2020. His newsletter, Message Box, is doing a series of deep dives into what went right and what went wrong for Democrats in 2020; definitely worth a look.
-One piece that I missed when it came out a few weeks ago (hat tip Pfeiffer): While Democratic turnout in urban areas was relatively flat, this piece by Rebecca Poyourow about how local organizing—14,000 letters sent by neighbors to neighbors, plus a lot of personal follow-up including door-knocking—produced a 23% increase in Democratic votes in Philadelphia’s 21st Ward has a clear lesson.
-This recent conversation between Perry Bacon Jr. and Lara Putnam is worth a close read. The question isn’t just whether Democrats wasted $88 million on Kentucky Senate candidate Amy McGrath. Putnam’s key point is that we have too much punditry about which message will move the right voters, and not enough about how ideas actually get to voters and circulate among them. She calls this the “Magical Message Unicorn.” As in “Bill Pundit says, ‘Dems should embrace this popular policy and it will win them votes!’ and Dave Pundit says, ‘Dems should stick with this popular message and it will win them votes.’ But the unaddressed question is: ‘How on Earth is news about that policy, or that smart rhetorical frame, actually going to reach its intended audience?’ Is a unicorn going to carry it there?”
-Putnam argues that Democrats who want to shift the direction of the country would be better off spending their money on supporting more local media outlets and community colleges because of how they can foster long-lasting trust in civic endeavors in places where it has been breaking the most. To that I would add my suggestion in Inside Philanthropy that we back more community “civic halls” designed to foster local civic collaboration and problem-solving innovators. Otherwise, we’re in the cul-de-sac that Aaron Strauss, former executive director of the Analyst Institute, inadvertently describes in a really interesting guest post in Mattthew Yglesias’s Slow Boring newsletter. Strauss, who is one of the Democratic ecosystem’s best analysts, argues that “relational persuasion” is the way to improve on existing tactics of voter mobilization. But after pointing to what real “relational” work is (the kind of personal engagement employed for a long time by unions and local political machines), Strauss steps out on a very thin reed, urging that “we need to direct volunteers to start Facebook and WhatsApp groups of their friends” and “campaigns need to produce content that feeds and sustains these groups.” No, no, no, no, no! As we know, investing more time and energy on Mark Zuckerberg’s attention plantation, where the most emotionally engaging content gets amplified because it is good for his bottom line, is not the way to go.
-Far better, to do more to build “connective democracy,” as Natalie Stroud and Gina Masullo write in their contribution to the Knight Foundation’s new compendium of essays on “Democracy and Civic Life: What’s the Long Game for Philanthropy?” And to also invest more in supporting protest movements, which act as crucial guardrails of democratic norms, as Cathy Cohen writes. And as Lucy Bernholz argues, “If foundations aspire to any legitimacy in struggles for justice, equity, or sustainability, they need to support policies that expand people’s ability to take collective action, to associate with whom they choose, and to give time, money, and data safely and with agency.”
-Coming out of that same Knight compendium, Janet Haven and danah boyd of Data & Society (I’m on their advisory board) have an excellent piece in The Chronicle of Philanthropy arguing that the field “must rethink its support of technology solutions that harm democracy.” They write, “The deafening regulatory silence in the United States has allowed the Silicon Valley mantra of ‘move fast and break things’ to drive our societal understanding of how technology should be designed and deployed. Philanthropy is in a unique position to reject such thinking and, instead, support the multiyear, costly, and radically necessary work of ensuring new technology is governed by policies, norms, laws, and practices designed with and by the communities they aim to serve.”
-Related: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s congressional campaign staff is stepping into the gap left by austerity government, organizing a tutoring program called Homework Helpers that is matching trained volunteers with students in her Bronx district, Maressa Brown reports for Parents.com. They have 120 trained tutors now and hope to serve 1,000 students this academic year. This is great. It’s also telling that the program is a product of AOC’s campaign organization rather than her formal congressional constituent service office; the former obviously has a lot more flexibility and resources than the latter.
-Will America’s foundations and philanthropists follow these signals, or will they keep pouring tens, nay hundreds, of millions into “moon-shots” and short-term media-centric campaigns that never seem to leave anything behind? If you, dear reader, sometimes wonder why I write so harshly about Democratic fat-cats’ misplaced decisions, it’s because we are running out of time to solve hard problems (see below) and need to stop simply repeating the failed strategies of the past.
-Speaking of failed strategies of the past, David Roberts writes in Vox that the only way for the Biden Administration to make progress in our hyperpolarized time will be to flood the zone with every major initiative at once. Not only does this make sense given the sadly depraved state of the modern Republican party, Roberts makes a critical point: there’s no longer any such thing as “political capital” that presidents have to win carefully and spend wisely on good-faith entreaties across the aisle (the way the Obama team behaved during its first years in power). And he offers a great list of changes the administration can make without requiring congressional approval, ranging from environmental, public health and worker safety regulations to immigration policies and climate change.
Odds and Ends
-Want to learn more about building networked campaigns? One of the earliest practitioners of that work, Marty Kearns, is offering a five-email course on “Netcentric Campaigns.” Go sign up!
-WeWork was a multi-billion dollar con job. And the con was built by Adam Neumann, it’s high-flying charismatic founder with delusions of messianic grandeur, right? Nope. Mark Hurst makes a convincing case that the con was actually run by the VCs who invested deeply in the company, giving it the capital to crush its putative competition, who managed to bail out before WeWork crashed.
-Send this piece in Teen Vogue by Lindsey Beth Meyers, a wellness leader in an assisted-living facility and nursing home in Buffalo, to everyone you know who thinks their “freedom” to not wear a mask is more important that our collective responsibility to stop the spread of the virus.
What I’m Reading Now
-I’ve finished A Promised Land, Barack Obama’s long and long-awaited memoir, and will have a review of it out next week. Now on my Kindle, Kim Stanley Robinson’s new book, The Ministry of the Future. I’m about 20% in and enjoying his daring premise: Someday in the not too distant future, a massive heat wave hits India, killing millions in a few days. That triggers a phase change in how people and nation-states respond to climate change, starting with India choosing to break the Paris Agreement and seed the atmosphere with enough aerosols to temporarily cool the earth. It also produces with a new generation of eco-terrorism aimed at the worst climate deniers. Robinson, who has always been one of the more explicitly radical sci-fi writers, is aiming high with this novel. Early on, one of his key characters says to a top international official, “We’re in a mass extinction event, and there are people trying to do something about it. You call them terrorists, but it’s the people you work for who are the terrorists. How can you not see that?” Is there a non-violent path out of the climate nightmare ahead? That’s the question Robinson is working through with this book.