2006 Election Post Mortem: Part 1

Crossposted at Young Philly Politics

A couple of months back I mentioned that I had proposed and accepted a job doing political outreach and organizing with Philadelphians Against Santorum (PAS). Since then I have been completely overwhelmed with the work at hand and a big move back to Philly (I lived in Brooklyn for the past 8 years with my wife), so I wasn't able to write as much as I would have liked to (and lord knows I love to self-promote!). But now that things have come to an end (and what a sweet, sweet ending it was!) I wanted to tell you a bit about the program I ran through PAS, and give you some of my thoughts and experiences from this election cycle. Since I am still working to get my life back to a sense of normality, I still don't have a ton of time, so I am going to keep this post short, and expand on it over the next few days.

How it all started...
This past summer I worked for the amazing documentary The War Tapes, doing outreach to the netroots, web support, and bit of event planning. As the theatrical release was coming to an end, sometime late in the summer, I looked around at the lack of political groups working in Philly and I started to get really nervous that the left was once again poised to snatch defeat from the arms of victory. I only knew of one group- Philadelphians Against Santorum- that was doing any sort of field work in the city, and as far as I could tell there weren't any groups at all doing youth outreach, which really shocked me given the fact that Kerry owed his victory in PA during the 2004 Presidential Elections to the 2-1 advantage he received from people under 25 (every age group over 25 voted for Bush by a small margin). At around the same time I noticed that PAS was hiring for field organizers, and I shot PAS founder/Director Ray Murphy an e-mail to tell him that I was interested in working with/for them.

A week later I met with Ray and PAS' Assistant Director Jen Murphy (not related to each other or to Congressional candidate Lois or Congressional-elect Patrick) and listened to what they were trying to accomplish and how they thought that they could do so. Basically, Ray's plan was to knock on the doors of new and infrequent voters, call them on the phone, and make sure that they got their asses to the polls on election day (I'll let Ray explain it better, or check out some of the great press pieces that PAS received). The plan sounded good, but I knew where I could have the most effect, both in terms of this election and for builaing the Future Majority that we will need to fix the multitude of problems our generation faces (or will face in the near future) and it wasn't on some stranger's doorstep. What I proposed to Ray was to implement the political side of a project that I have been working on for over a year now (and which I continue to try and make into a reality), which is an adaptation of the model that Music for America uses to bring young people (like yours truly) into the network enabled left-leaning movement. Basically, I proposed that I work at every concert thrown by Philly's independent show promotion king-- Sean Agnew and his company R5 Productions-- as well as on campus, to register as many millenials as possible and persuade them to vote and vote Democratic through face-to-face encounters in spaces where they feel comfortable and at home.

Youth Outreach & Building a Future Majority
I could write an entire Masters Thesis on why focusing on young voters is paramount to any movement that strives for long-term success, why face-to-face interactions with a peer are extremely important to accomplish this, and why the connections between culture and politics need to be pointed out to young people, but as I said, I'm a bit short of time at the moment. Okay, that's a bit of a bad joke (if it wasn't for bad jokes, I wouldn't be able to tell any at all). I wrote my Master's Thesis on this exact subject (titled Keys to a Future Majority), which you can find here on Future Majority. Here are a few of the relevant sections that led me to believe that youth outreach was the most important activity that progressives could engage in:

Reminiscence Bumps, Collective Memory, and Generations. Our identities, our individual and collective memories, and our behaviors all solidify when we are between the ages of 15 and 30. This means that young people are, by definition, swing/persuadable-voters, since they have not developed the heuristics that older people rely upon to make their political decisions. It also means that investing in youth outreach is a double investment: by focusing on young people you are more likely to get them to vote for you in this election and if you can convince that young person to vote a certain way for a few elections, you pretty much guarantee that you can rely upon their vote for the rest of that person's life. This sections also gives one hint about why it is important to culturally embed political activism: because the Reminiscence Bump phenomenon (those memories from this age period are the easiest to recall throughout the human lifespan) is directly linked to the formation of one's identity.

P2P Contact, Social Groups, and Voting. As I note in this piece, face-to-face interactions with a peer are the most effective technique of outreach available to political campaigns. The study cited in the article notes that face-to-face outreach through canvassing is the best way to increase voting, something which has been replicated numerous times in other studies. However, as you might imagine the real value is in the face-to-face interaction and not the act of talking to someone who comes to your door (as far as I know there is nothing magical about an interaction at one's doorstep, other than the fact that you might know the person's name whom you talk to and, more importantly, it is easier to measure than other types of face-to-face interactions where, more often than not, the identity of the person who is being reached out to is completely anonymous). The social contexts of voting have also been widely studied, and again, the results point to the need for a socially embedded outreach effort.

Getting to Work, the Socratic Method, and Persuasion. Why do you think that talking to someone in person is more persuasive than a TV broadcast? Okay, that's a bit of a leading question, which hopefully leads you to take a look at this section of my thesis, which deals briefly with the science of persuasion and the Elaboration-Likelihood Model (ELM). The ELM is accepted by most psychologists as the best way to think about and measure ones ability to change the attitudes and behaviors of others, and it basically asserts that the persuasive ability of a message is directly linked to how much the person being persuaded thinks about (i.e. elaborates on) the message. Again, it seems like common sense that it is easier to persuade people when you can change your message as a conversation goes on, and that having someone answer questions is more persuasive than telling someone what to think, but try telling that to all of the campaigns that pour hundreds-of-millions of dollars into TV ads during a campaign, while spending next to nothing on field operations and P2P interactions.

Anyway, I told all this to Ray and Jen, and they seemed a little (okay, very) skeptical. But, they told me that they'd think it over, and about a week later they accepted my plan.