Use Your Superpower
My good friend Marc Cooper writes a newsletter called The Coop Scoop with a very iconoclastic, “party of one” voice from what might be called the angry populist left. Informed by his early experience working in Chile as one of Salvador Allende’s personal translators, and then later experience reporting on politics for places like The Village Voice and The Nation (where I had the pleasure of editing him), Marc is as strong a critic of the Democratic party as he is of the Republicans. His latest edition, which he titled “The Black Xmas Edition,” is very dark. Instead of whistling past the horror of a Republican party that is still trying to undo the results of the election while the country experiences a 9-11 level of new deaths from COVID-19 every day, Marc is furious.
But in addition to asking why there isn’t more outrage, he goes further, warning that “millions of Democrats just want to go back to sleep, … clinging to this fairy tale of a coming ‘normalcy’” under Joe Biden. As his first example of Democratic cave-in, he points to the weak hand being played by their House and Senate leaders in the negotiations still underway over a new COVID relief package. And as his second example, he points to “Democratic interest group pleadings over the racial composure of [Biden’s] cabinet” as an “appalling” way to ensure that progressive goals at seated at the Biden Administration table. If we want a cabinet that “looks like America,” he writes, “Instead of the current ragtag collection of lobbyists, generals, long-time members of the permanent national security ‘blob’ like Tony Blinken, and career Democratic apparatchiks like the horrific Neera Tanden, a truly all-American cabinet in 2021 would include two or three unemployed, maybe some COVID survivors or surviving spouses, a union official or two and maybe somebody who recently experienced a bout of hunger – something I doubt will ever happen even remotely.”
Marc’s screed may be a bit hard-edged and unpleasant to digest. But why after an election that saw a massive grassroots mobilization to defeat Trump and block the rise of fascism in America, are we seeing so little change, either to the way Congressional Democrats behave or to the choices Biden is making? Or for that matter, why isn’t there a massive call for progressive taxation when the collective wealth of America’s 651 billionaires has risen more than $1 trillion since the start of the pandemic? I think part of the answer is the opaque way that Democrats in power exercise their power, and who they feel they must answer to first. (I found it amusing this past year how many personal phone calls I got from Democratic candidates running for Congress after I happened to max out for one old friend, Allison Fine, in her primary bid. If you are a big donor or could be, Democrats want to talk to you.)
But as the dust settles on the election of 2020, something else is jumping out at me: a big disconnect between how the Democratic ecosystem organizes to win elections and how grassroots Democrats experience politics.
The New Big Disconnect
First, a little story that was recently shared with me by Antonia Scatton, a long-time Democratic strategist who engages volunteers to reduce the costs of running for office. In 2018, she ran a pilot program with the Arizona Democratic Party to evaluate the potential of giving volunteers a wider range of roles in the campaign process. When incumbent Republican congressman Trent Franks resigned his seat early, a special election was called to fill his seat. Scatton recalls that hundreds of grassroots Democrats volunteered to work on behalf of their candidate Hiral Tipirneni, an emergency room doctor. Though she was running in a very red district, she also was an early rider on the great anti-Trump wave of 2018, and came just a few points short of winning the race (doing 20 points better than previous candidates in that district). Tipirneni’s campaign became a rallying point for many local Democrats, who previously thought they were alone, Scatton recalls. The campaign office became a hub of community connections. That is, until a young organizer sent by the Democratic National Committee to run the final push of canvassing arrived. “The first thing she did was put tape down on the floor to set up a path for how people would come in to get their walk packets,” Scatton told me. The goal was to get volunteers in and out the door in three minutes or less. “Standing around the office talking isn’t an efficient use of their time,” Scatton recalls the DNC staffer saying. The volunteers ignored her.
Keep that story in your mind as we pull back to the big picture of 2020, which by the numbers alone looks amazing. A data-driven Democratic organizing infrastructure mobilized and channeled literally millions of people into useful electoral action in 2019-20. Here are some of the key data points that various organizations have shared in recent days:
-Number of unique donors in 2019-2020 on ActBlue: 14.8 million
-Number of those donors who were new donors: 10.6 million
-Percentage of donors to Democratic presidential primary candidates who then gave to other candidates or campaign organization: 51.7%
-Number of phone calls made by Biden campaign supporters to voters: 332 million
-Number of volunteers who signed up for shifts on the Mobilize event organizing platform since 2017: 4.2 million
-Number of shifts signed up for since 2017: More than 15 million
-Number of shifts focused on the Biden campaign from April to November alone: 5.5 million
-Number of shifts in the final week of the 2020 election alone across all campaigns: 5.3 million
(Sources: report.actblue.com, online presentations this week by Vishal Disawar of the Biden campaign, Liz Mullen of Mobilize, and Daniel Souewine of GetThru during yesterday’s DNC Digital Debrief online)
Liz Mullen, head of client success at Mobilize, also shared some impressive details about how volunteers used the platform to take agency. (You can watch the whole Mobilize presentation here.) In the 2020 cycle, there were 35,000 volunteer hosts who used Mobilize, and organizations that enabled their folks to use that feature vastly expanded their reach. “In early 2020, huge swaths of the United States only had volunteer-hosted events,” she noted, including the whole states of Alaska and Hawaii. For the Biden campaign, there were 1.5 million RSVPs to 11,000 volunteer hosted events. Not only that, people who first attended a volunteer-hosted event were at least twice as likely to come back the next month than people who first attended a staff-run event.
And this is just some of the data Mobilize collects on volunteers. It also knows who donated after volunteering to host or join a shift, who signed up for an event because a volunteer shared it via social media, what kinds of events people went to, what kinds of nudges work best when, and a whole host of demographic information shared by volunteers. Plus, it has a rich repository of in-depth qualitative feedback from millions of volunteers responding to one of those post-event texts or emails it sends to participants. “As the best frontend for your supporter events and actions, Mobilize automatically drives desired behaviors and offers a massive network for growth,” a slide that ended the Mobilize presentation boasted. And guess what, now that EveryAction has acquired Mobilize, all of that data on user actions is now going to be stored in a “unified CRM [constituent relationship management system], creating the ultimate source of truth for your supporter engagement” on the Democratic side, the slide added.
If you are in the business, and I mean business, of engaging voters in the political arena, 2020 wasn’t just a boom year. Those numbers—more than 10 million new donors, especially, and millions of new volunteers—are very good news if your organization or consultancy focuses on harvesting money and time from the grassroots. Who wouldn’t want to be able to tap “the ultimate source of truth” about the political proclivities of millions of potential supporters? But what I fear that what this bountiful harvest may reinforce is an approach to organizing that does not bode well for creating yet more power for those grassroots. Or, fully embrace the agricultural metaphor implied by the word “grassroots,” the dominant form of political organizing now maturing in the form of “data-driven” campaigning is the equivalent of industrial, chemical-intensive cultivation of crops rather than organic permaculture.
In other words, I worry that more young professional campaign staffers will be taught like that young woman from the DNC in Arizona, who thought the metric of “time spent” picking up a canvassing packet was more important than the long-term social capital created when local organizing draws a critical mass of participation. When local people “waste” their time talking to each other, they build bonds of friendship and trust. Those bonds, if nourished, tend to keep them more involved for longer periods of time.
Because data about voter and volunteer behavior is so bountiful, cheap and relatively easy to work with, 2020 saw a lot of innovation in tactics that amount to squeezing a bit more output from existing inputs. So, for example, take “relational organizing.” This has become a catch-all descriptor for a variety of tactics involving asking supporters to tap their own social networks to take a prescribed action. The Biden campaign worked hard to get its supporters to use its Vote Joe app, which was designed to make it easier to prompt them to send messages about voting to their peers and family. Vote “tripling,” another tactic in this toolbox, sought to get early voters to ask three friends to also get their votes in. Backed by behavioral science that showed such asks tended to “cut through the clutter” of campaign noise that most voters tune out, lots of Democratic organizations pushed tripling this cycle. The thing is, asking a voter as they leave a polling place to take a minute to call three friends is not “relational organizing.” It’s relational exploitation, however benign. The organizer or volunteer taking the time to ask someone to vote triple hasn’t built a relationship with that person, no more than a farmer injecting expensive chemical fertilizer into their soil to boost the yield of their crop has actually made their fields more fertile.
What does this have to do with the disconnect between massive grassroots participation and limited national power? If you volunteered to help Joe Biden or any number of Democratic candidates win in 2020, the odds are you did it alone. And it wasn’t just because of COVID. The tools for organizing built by companies like Mobilize, EveryAction and GetThru are brilliantly designed to make it easy for you engage on your own time and terms. Which is great for a short-term harvest, but it also means that you didn’t really build up much political capacity or capital that you could use now to make demands on your elected representatives. The Biden campaign harvested your volunteer work in exchange for a good feeling, but not much power. If you’re frustrated now by decisions being made by Biden or the Democratic leadership, ask yourself—what levers did you build that you could pull on now that might be anywhere near as muscular as the ones built by the campaigns in 2020 to get their candidates elected?
There are important exceptions to this pattern: a lot of people got mobilized through independent organizations like the Sunrise Movement or the Working Families Party or People’s Action, which do invest in long-term community organizing and which have local chapters. And here’s a great case study from Mobilize on how Persist Brooklyn, a local organizing group, used Mobilize’s suite of tools over the last year to grow a vibrant community base. We can shift this trend. But to do so, people have to stop behaving like activists taking isolated actions and instead insist on long-term community-organizing as the only way to build real power.
Bonus links: On the same theme, I highly recommend listening to this podcast conversation between Vincent Emanuele, a community organizer in Michigan City, Indiana, and writer Anand Giriharadas. In 2017, Emanuele, who describes himself as an antiwar veteran, and a friend, started a local center called PARC, for Politics Art Roots Culture. Here’s a bit of the transcript of their conversation, which you can get to if you are a subscriber to Giriharadas’ The Ink newsletter.
And highly related, this article by Lara Putnam in The Forge titled On Postcards and Superpowers looks at the rush by grassroots groups to get their hands on vetted lists of addressable Democratic voters in Georgia to mail to, arguing that while the hustle to help in the Georgia senate runoffs embodies a lot of the best of the post-2016 grassroots ecosystem, “the feeding frenzy over address lists also suggests a progressive volunteer universe that may misjudge the levers of political change and is at risk of misallocating its efforts as a result.” Here’s a little more from Lara:
“The effort to support campaigns far away when everything feels urgent and precarious is an understandable response to the absence of more enduring local infrastructure on the Democratic/progressive side. But it’s not a response that solves that absence. And, when it diverts attention and energy that could be doing the work of local building, it becomes part of the problem itself. The basic point is a truism among organizers: messages conveyed in the context of pre-existing relationships are far more impactful than anything anonymous ever could be. Your relationships are your superpower. And using them intentionally — alongside other people doing the same — can transform the political landscape around you.
In contrast, when you focus on distant battlegrounds, you are resigning yourself to only the most attenuated tools of political impact and missing the opportunity to address emerging needs closer to home, where your ability to shape outcomes, and to do so in enduring ways, is far greater.”
Use your superpower.