The Seven-Minute Abs of Electioneering

Why just-in-time, top-down, data-driven campaigning and celebrity endorsements can't beat the power of actual community-building.

A few issues back, I shared an interview with Eitan Hersh, a political science professor at Tufts University and author of the book Politics is for Power, titled “If Politics is Your Hobby Horse, Then You’re Riding To Nowhere.” The interview struck a nerve with a lot of readers, judging by how much it got shared, and probably because of one key line from him: “Anytime a volunteer is talking (or writing) to a stranger, it's basically a mistake. It's like a Band-Aid for the lack of actual civic engagement.” Hersh himself got some pushback, particularly from people involved in postcarding campaigns (and there are lot of them), and decided that he wanted explain himself a bit further. So I’m pleased to lead off this week’s issue of The Connector with a guest post from him:

Eitan Hersh

A little over a month ago, my town held a local election. Seven thousand people, or 18% of registered voters, cast ballots. Using a few simple strategies, I personally got about a dozen people who would not have otherwise voted to show up and vote for the candidates I endorsed. With very little effort, I was responsible for about one of every five hundred votes in the whole election.

Soon, America’s political junkies will once again become obsessed with federal elections. Partisans will be anxious. They will frantically send in financial donations to their favored candidates. Some will write postcards to strangers in faraway states begging them to vote. After the elections, they will feel sad if their side loses seats in Congress.

If only more of them knew my quick and easy strategies to increase voter turnout in just thirty minutes or less.

Here’s one of my strategies.

I compiled a list of about fifty people in my town. I sent them an email reminding them how to vote (e.g., polling locations, hours of operation) and for whom to vote (e.g., a slate of candidates endorsed by an organization I like).

And, except for one small catch, that’s it. Some of these fifty people went to vote that day because of my email. Standing in the polling station, they pulled out their phone and clicked the link in my email to the endorsement list. They filled in the bubbles just as I had asked them to.

By my estimate (which is based on some of them writing to me saying they only voted because of me), my email was responsible for about eight votes, which makes it five to ten times more effective than well-known strategies such as postcards, phone banks, and door-to-door canvassing. Those strategies have been shown to increase turnout by 1-3 percentage points. And whereas many volunteers spend hours writing postcards to squeak out a 1 percentage point effect, my lazy email took me just a few minutes to write.

So, what’s the catch? The 50 people I emailed are my friends. Most of them I know from a religious community. They know me. They know I know something about politics. I know they know a lot of other things. I take their advice on the other things. And at least some of them take my advice about politics. It’s the division of labor at the core of any community.

Political scientists who measure these things say that strategies like mine are very effective. Canvassing is more effective when done neighbor-to-neighbor rather than by strangers. It is way more effective when you can include an element of social pressure. My specific email was not part of a rigorous experiment. But we know from other experiments how potent my email was. Plus, my friends told me directly that my email had a causal effect on their behavior. And these friends wouldn’t lie.

Here's another strategy I used last month. In the evening of Election Day, around dinner time, my six-year-old and I walked the few blocks between our apartment and the polling station with a megaphone. Six-year-olds like to use megaphones. “DON’T FORGET TO VOTE. IT’S ELECTION DAY. POLLS CLOSE AT 8,” is fun and loud and cute.

A neighbor in my building thought so. This man hadn’t voted yet when he saw us, and wasn’t planning on it. But then he joined our little parade right over to the polling station. He and I talked as my amplified kindergartner led us to the senior housing building where we vote.

The megaphone strategy is especially good for neighborhoods like mine, with lots of apartment buildings. The strategy is also great for making elections exciting for kids. And, really, few activities so perfectly combine the rule-breaking feeling of noise pollution with civic virtue.

One person tsked-tsked us. “Totally unacceptable behavior,” she said meanly as she walked by.  What a gift! A sourpuss scolding a 6-year-old and a dad for reminding people to vote! That was our favorite story of the outing to tell the rest of the family back at home.

Between the neighbor who followed us to the polling station, and three others who let us know that the megaphone reminder got them to the polls, I’m putting my total estimate at twelve votes obtained from an email that took a few minutes to craft plus a 20-minute walk through town. It’s probably higher, but I’ll be conservative.

Though these strategies are easy, they cannot be suddenly manufactured in the days before an election. Behind them is a long-term commitment to building community. A little every day. Like seven-minute abs. The neighbor who followed us to the polling station? He and I (and a dozen other people) have pizza together in the courtyard of our building in our regular summer pizza nights. I’m not a stranger to him.  The people in my email list? They see me regularly at religious services. I’m no random stranger.

My strategies are not new, or clever, or mine. But here’s the thing: when I give lectures around the country to groups interested in civic engagement, and I tell them about stuff like this, many people find these ideas radical and new. That’s frightening. In our era of civic rot, they have heard of phone banks and postcard campaigns, but not community.

Even the seemingly savvy donors and foundations that fund political initiatives aren’t always in on the power of community. They’re twisted in knots with their scalable, “effectively altruistic,” sanitized, arms-length, social do-gooding ideas. Roll-up-your-sleeves community-building is under their radar. They want to have a big, “disruptive” impact fast, and community is slow and steady, seven-minute abs everyday forever.

An awful lot of people who care about politics are simply not playing the right game. They want to do their part. So, they donate money knowing that their dollars will scale, even if not so efficiently. They make phone calls to strangers knowing that they might get lucky and connect positively with a stranger on the line, but the time they spend phone-banking feels mostly wasted and exhausting.

They aren’t in communities. And so they lose political fights they care about. No amount of feelings of righteous anger or knowledge of political factoids will save them. The postcard campaigns to strangers won’t save them. How could they, when these people are in a laughably uneven fight against people like me who can bring in a dozen votes with almost no effort at all. Professional campaigners try their best to cultivate neighborliness among strangers, such as by investing in “relational organizing” strategies. But that’s no match against communities of people who know each other already.

Notes on Organizing (or, Waiting for the End of Roe)

The one addition I’d make to Hersh’s sober advice: if you want to contribute to changing political outcomes beyond your own community, don’t give money to candidates. Give money to organizations that engage local people in communal work. (And if you don’t have the time to figure out who those organizations might be, start with the Movement Voter Project’s array of choices.)

If you are reading this newsletter then you are most likely someone who is worried about the dark clouds on the political horizon. We seem to be at a “perfect storm” moment where the long-term organizing strategies of the religious and corporatist right are on the verge of major victories, where the open organization of racism, homophobia and antisemitism is spreading (along with more glorification of violence), and where the weakness of the Democratic party’s geriatric leadership is at a peak. While there are counter-trends, including a resurgence of labor organizing (the latest being among Apple workers), a lot of state-level power-building work, and deep resistance to authoritarianism in the culture, it’s a time of gloom. But maybe it can also be a time for reconsideration and planting the seeds for renewal.

In that vein, it’s worth noting the common thread tying Hersh’s critique of political hobbyism and the thinness of modern politicking and two terrific articles about the declining fortunes of third-wave feminism by Michelle Goldberg and Susan Faludi that were just published in The New York Times: the shift from communal engagement with people close to you to virtual engagement with people far away. First Goldberg, writing about how the future no longer looks female, notes that same thing we’ve been ruing here at The Connector, the shrunken turnout at recent rallies meant to defend abortion rights as well as the rise of more open misogyny and other kinds of reactionary behaviors.

“After four years of Donald Trump, more than two years of a pandemic, and an unending right-wing onslaught, a lot of people with feminist sympathies are numb and exhausted,” Goldberg writes. She also cites Arielle Angel, editor in chief of the left-wing magazine Jewish Currents, who recently wrote, “People who have long organized direct action campaigns in response to every other political emergency have no faith in the capacity for mass movement while the left is so weak.”

Why has the organized feminist movement become so weak? Well, Goldberg zeroes in on a problem familiar to all social change movements, which is the tendency for advocates to divide into factions. But then she makes a double-sided point about how the relatively recent rise of social media has warped the organizing environment, not just by elevating the extremes but also by increasing the likelihood of division and disarray among the like-minded:

“Social media, though, strengthens the forces of entropy. It magnifies anger, rewards trolls, and encourages conflicts to spiral. Second-wave feminism was, of necessity, based on face-to-face organizing. In her forthcoming book Bad Sex: Truth, Pleasure and an Unfinished Revolution, Nona Willis Aronowitz writes that her mother, the great second-wave writer Ellen Willis, met with the same women’s group for 15 years. Such groups can keep people tied to a movement, and to one another, through disagreements and lulls in political action. Without them, activism becomes more evanescent; people gather during emergencies and then disperse.”

Then take Faludi, whose 1991 book Backlash charted an earlier period of anti-feminism in the 1980s. For her, the impending end of Roe, along with the way Amber Heard lost her recent defamation trial with Johnny Depp, both signal the same weakness: how modern feminism has come to rely on celebrity and marketing, corporate endorsements and mass pop culture, as a substitute for communal action rooted in the lives of ordinary people, not actors or businesswomen. She writes:

“Celebrity, individualistic and commercial efforts tend to betray their dowdy collective partners. When housekeepers organizing at a Hilton DoubleTree Suites hotel in Boston asked to meet in a “Lean In” circle with [Facebook COO Sheryl] Sandberg while she was in town to deliver a Class Day speech at Harvard University, which owned the hotel’s building, her office reportedly declined, citing her busy schedule. Those ubiquitous ‘This is what a feminist looks like’ T-shirts were being manufactured by women earning about $1 an hour in a Mauritius factory. Branded feminism had indeed allowed itself to be sold.”

What are Goldberg and Faludi telling us? Groups with members who know each other and who feel some obligation to each other, a.k.a., community, are the missing link in this picture. And organizations that keep leaders close to the needs of ordinary people, rather than the whims of celebrities, are the glue that hold those links in place. In an era of “civic rot” there are no shortcuts to these basic building blocks; when we treat politics as another consumer product that someone else makes for us rather than something we have to make for ourselves, the results will be weak, at best.

Life After Facebookistan

—Peter Thiel, the rightwing tech billionaire who recently left Facebook’s board, isn’t just donating to MAGA Republicans, Elizabeth Dwoskin reports for the Washington Post. He’s also making “investments that cater to consumers who he thinks are overlooked by societal institutions that have moved to the left,” including a Catholic prayer app, a conservative dating app, a rightwing YouTube alternative, and a financial firm that “will buy large stakes in companies and push them away from environmental, social, and what the group describes as political agendas that the hurt the bottom line.” Like the crypto world, all of this may eventually go bust once Thiel gets bored with being a rightwing Rasputin; but it could do a lot of damage along the way.

—In the Atlantic, tech guru Jaron Lanier offers a creative solution to the free speech vs social media problem: “require users to form groups through free association, and then to post only through those groups, with the group’s imprimatur…. The point is that the people in the groups know one another well enough to take on the pursuit of trust and quality, and to rid their groups of bots.” It’s an intriguing idea, centered on the concept that it’s only through groups that we build reputation and trust.

Deep Thoughts

—As summer starts, Kenneth Bailey of the Design Studio for Social Intervention offers a modest proposal, which he titles, “Doing Dishes in a Collapsing Society.” He suggests we take a season “to step away from superfluous distractions and step into shared study, community and society building.” Who’s in?