Field

We talk a lot here about the importance of field work and peer to peer campaigning as the gold standard for getting people to the polls. But what exactly does that mean and why, in the day to day operations of a campaign is it important? How does it work and how does it fit into the internal workings of a well-run campaign?

If you've ever asked yourself these questions, you need to go read this piece at FiveThirtyEight.com explaining the importance of "voter contacts":

The other day, after Jonathan Martin wrote a piece that suggested John McCain’s field campaign was moving up closer into competition, we wrote that if Martin’s reporting is accurate with McCain's numbers, the state of the organizing race is now something more like a 35-to-1 edge for Obama rather than the 567-to-1 edge it held earlier in the summer. That’s not a field office edge or number of organizers edge, that’s the voter contacts edge, and both ratios are absurd.

Despite publishing an inside scoop on Obama’s Ohio numbers, our piece didn’t make much noise. But it’s not because the numbers aren’t shocking – they are – it’s because reporters and most people don’t really understand how to put voter contacts in context. Marc Ambinder will note that the Obama campaign has “preternatural self-confidence" about its strategy, but that confidence has to come from some type of hard data.

So let’s explain what voter contacts are, and what they are not. A voter contact occurs whenever someone from a campaign – organizer or volunteer – collects information from a voter about candidate preference or indecision, party preference (strong, lean, independent), or important issues to that voter in making the ultimate choice between candidates. A contact would ideally get an answer on all these questions to qualify as a contact, but even if the voter is only able or willing to give some meaningful data feedback, that counts. It takes about 4 attempts for every 1 contact, or roughly 25%.

Every bit of information gleaned helps the campaign make choices about how to target these voters for further messaging and GOTV. A strong Obama supporter will be targeted for volunteer work, early voting and/or GOTV. A strong McCain supporter will likely be ignored. A voter who describes herself as normally a Republican but who is undecided in this race and has health care as a critical issue will be targeted with persuasion mail pieces and/or person-to-person contacts about each candidate’s health care positions and voting records.

The author prepares for Trick or Vote in 2007

Pop Quiz Time:

1. What is the single most effective way to mobilize voters?
   a) Visibilities
   b) Sitting on a couch and bitching
   c) Talking to ‘em face-to-face
2. What holiday always immediately precedes Election Day and has a built-in tradition of door-knocking?
   a) Halloween
   b) The 4th of July
   c) Festivus
3. What does everyone love?
   a) Rick Rolling
   b) Costumes!
   c) Voting
   d) All of the above

All of us who work in the field of youth engagement face big competition. The biggest competition we face – for volunteers, for attention – is not from one another’s organizations either. It’s from the Wii (which is sweet) and the bar scene and friends and loved ones. Our biggest challenge is overcoming that noise and building a politics that is fun and exciting and relevant to people’s lives.

That’s what makes Trick or VoteTM so freaking sweet. It’s the Best Way on the Best Day.

It’s actually such a sweet idea it doesn’t even really need an explanation. But here it is in a nutshell: Get some people who are a bit too old to trick or treat (go as young as high school and as old as the retirement home for your recruitment), rally ‘em in costume, meet in a centralized location, train these folks to canvass effectively, and knock some doors.

In short, we combine a cultural more (knock doors on Halloween) with hard-minded political research (knocking doors is an effective voter mobilization tool).

The result?

• More volunteers. In Portland in 2004, 850 canvassers assembled for the largest mass canvass in the history of the state. By all accounts, this year will be even bigger.
• More virgin volunteers. Out of that same crowd in Portland, more than one-in-three were first-time political volunteers who came out of the woodwork for a program well-suited to help our fellow citizens lose their voter virginity.
• More conversations. On Halloween evening, people are home – either waiting for trick-or-treaters or getting ready for their parties. They’re even prepared to open the door. And they’re definitely ready to engage in a conversation. All of which means that we don’t just hit more doors, we hit more doors in a more effective manner.
• More voters. Do the math -- more canvassers, more conversations, and more doors? More people are hitting the polls.

The Bus Federation wants to take Trick or VoteTM national this year – and we can do it with your help. If you’re part of a local or national organization that is serious about doing Trick or VoteTM, get in touch soon so we can coordinate our efforts. Contact Alex Aronson at the Oregon Bus Project @ 503-233-3018.

Just looking for a project for the fall and think you could pull off a kick-ass Trick or Vote in your hometown? Or even just want to assemble 15 of your closest friends and friends-of-friends and friendly-friends-of-friends’-friends and go hit some doors? Drop us a line. I swear to you, you’ll be glad you did.

Major props, by the way, to our friends at the Bus for this innovative program -- Trick or Vote is their brainchild.

Answers to the pop quiz: 1-b, 2-c, 3-a

Matt Singer is the CEO of Forward Montana, dedicated to training, mobilizing, and electing a new generation of progressive leaders. Forward Montana is a charter (get it?) organization of the Bus Federation.

In conversation, the President of one of YDA's state chapters raised a really interesting question: What would happen if campaigns stopped putting money into the senior vote and redirected that to youth?

It's a provocative question. Campaigns tend to spend no money on young people "because youth don't vote," and they expend a large share of resources reaching out to the "reliable" senior vote. When you think about it, it's a little ass-backwards. Voting is a habit and seniors tend to be full-on addicts in their turnout rates. If we stopped spending money reaching out to them and encouraging them to get to the polls, would they turnout anyway? Probably. It seems highly unlikely they would quite voting cold turkey. Couldn't that money be better spent reaching out to people whose voting habits are not so "reliable" and whose partisanship is still up for grabs?

It's not an all or nothing proposition. You don't need to stop spending ALL money on seniors, but perhaps adjusting the proportion spent on seniors and that spent on young people might yield better returns on investment overall? What would happen if half the money spent robo-calling, direct mailing, and door-knocking seniors went to contacting young people?

Conversely, if we did see a big drop-off in senior turnout under such a campaign, doesn't that speak to the importance of doing outreach to ALL demographics? If less resources and contacts means a smaller senior vote, the same is true of young voters. You can't claim they're unreliable and not worth resources if the very act of withholding resources is what drives down their turnout numbers . . .

It would be interesting to run this as a field experiment in a super-safe Democratic seat. I don't think we will, but it would be a good piece of data to have.

This is probably the best "news" piece I've seen about how Sen. Obama is turning out young voters in record numbers. It's not just technology and it's not just star power. It's a real commitment to field organizing, and making sure that young people are targeting their fellow youth. In other words, it's all about the peer-to-peer organizing.

This is the real message that needs to get out there because this is the strategy that campaigns, the DNC, DCCC, and DSCC need to learn if they want to replicate Obama's successes in down-ballot races.

The program will air on Current TV tonight at 10pm Eastern. You can also grab it here.

Zack Exley has a must-read piece posted to Open Left about how the campaigns - specifically the Clinton campaign - is grooming the next generation of field organizers.

Seriously, this is mandatory reading.

Music for America relaunches today as a local, Seattle-based organization sponsored by the local chapter of SEIU.

I’m sad that MFA has shrunk so much, but hopeful that the folks in Seattle can maintain a vibrant music/activism scene and pioneer some best practices that others can replicate in cities across the country. Good luck y’all.

I’ve got a whole lot more to say about the general decline in concert-based electoral activism (with some exceptions) even as political statements and activity from musicians are becoming more acceptable than at any point in over a decade. It will all be in an article I wrote for WireTap, hopefully to be published in the next couple weeks.

(And yay on SEIU for supporting young voters and cultural outreach).

So today I want to riff a little on numbers 35-39 of my youth vote theses:

35. Culture is a progressive's natural advantage.  We should use it.
36. 95% of the people in these constituencies won't ever care about politics as much as you do
    
37. Asking them to participate in hard core political actions (canvassing, phone banking, etc.) as their first introduction to politics is doomed to failure and low conversion rates.
    
38. Politics must be made relevant to the life of a person if you want them to participate and make civic participation a habit.
    
39. This means there must be a ladder of participation providing substantive involvement for people at multiple levels of engagement.

Culture is a progressive's natural advantage.  From Hollywood to Madison Avenue, the creative class leans heavily democratic.  Most often, that translates into money for campaigns, or a pretty face on the trail.  Rarely does it mean employing the natural talents of that segment of the base.  We see it when campaigns hire political consultants to manufacture stale, uninspiring ads while guys like Bill Hillsman get locked out.  This is as true on campus and among young professionals as it is among the "adults." Yet if you look at the work of someone like Michael Moore, or watch An Inconvenient Truth, creative use of media (old and new) can be one of our biggest assets.  Considering their media consumption habits and the growth of new outlets for that creative energy online, this is doubly true when reaching out to young people.

I don't mean to traffic in stereotypes - there are certainly exceptions to what I'm about to say - but in general, political involvement on campus and among young professionals typically draws membership from a specific type of person: (ex)poli-sci majors and aspiring politicians/staffers/policy wonks.  The volunteer and leadership opportunities in youth activism are similarly limited: donate money, canvass, phone bank.  

I fully understand that democratic youth groups are under enormous pressure to justify their existence to the party and to political operatives.  That means they need to quantify their work and produce tangible results: voters registered and GOTV'd; doors knocked and phone calls made.  Volunteer efforts are generally focused like a laser on producing the highest numbers possible in those categories.  But that leaves a lot of people who (understandably) don't want to participate in those activities out of the Party.

It doesn't have to be that way, and I worry that by not reaching out and involving these folks while they are young, we're making more work for ourselves (and shooting ourselves in the foot creatively) further down the line.  These lost volunteers have a lot to offer, and Democratic youth groups, and the progressive movement generally, need to make an effort to expand the scope of what it means to volunteer to include the types of activities and talents that these other people who are left out can offer.

Originally posted on MyDD earlier today

Youth turnout is trending up.  At this point, I hope that is a given.  When we talk about those turnout numbers, frequently they are discussed in the context of national turnout or Presidential elections.  But what does it mean at the local level?  How does this play out in a Senate or House race? What about gubernatorial bids and state legislative races?  

In last year's midterms, 58 federal elections, and 80 state level races were decided by easily surmountable or razor thing margins.  Breaking those numbers down, five U.S. Senate and three gubernatorial races were decided by less than 50,000 votes; 35 House races by less than 10,000 votes and 18 by less than 5,000 votes; and 77 state legislative races were decided by fewer than 100 votes.

In almost all of these races, the margin of victory was less than the turnout increase among young voters in that state.  

A combination of three factors drove the increase in turnout: highly competitive races, in which the potential value of a single vote is recognized by formerly disenchanted young voters; non-partisan voter registration efforts aimed at youth; and partisan outreach to young voters by campaigns.  Two of these factors are outside the control of a candidate and his/her campaign.  But the third is something we can study and replicate to help drive progressive youth turnout and increase our majorities in 2008.

A new report by Young Voter Strategies provides a road map to do just that.  The report features a series of case studies on how campaigns- Democrats AND Republicans - reached out to young voters to create victory in '06.  Below the jump I've pulled out and summarized some of the more interesting case studies, and noted some best practices that have emerged - some of which are smack on the head obvious (but still aren't utilized by most campaigns), and others which go against conventional wisdom.  This is required reading for all Democratic campaign staffers.  

Matt Stoller at MyDD has an excellent essay posted about disruptive field tools like Social Networks and rising youth turnout. Here's the highlight, but you should go read the whole thing.

Rock the Vote, in 2004, registered 1.2 million voters with a simple online voter registration download tool. That's more than twice as much as they had ever registered in any other cycle, including the youth-spike year of 1992. And the online voter registration tool wasn't particularly flexible. What's happening this cycle could be ground-breaking, in that Rock the Vote is building a voter registration engine with an API anyone can innovate on top of. Groups and individuals will be able to capture the number of people they register, the data of the people they register, and the contact information of those they register. This means that, unlike with a standard voter registration download form, the person who asked you to register, presumably someone you trust, will be reminding you to vote. That's a big deal. They will also be able to get credit for registering you to vote, since the voter engine will let people see how many people have registered through a page. It'll be kind of like Actblue, for voter registration.

I've been combing around voter registration statistics, and the number of 18-29 year old voters who voted in 2004 versus 2000 jumped from 15.8 million to 20.1 million, an increase of 4.3 million. With Facebook, MySpace, and Youtube turning intensely political, it's pretty clear that voter registration, and specifically, being able to count voter registration and compete over it, will be a killer ap. Finally, field will be at least in some part measurable and put online. Facebook alone has 22-24 million members, and is growing at 150,000 members a day. MySpace is over 100 million. And though it's unclear how many of these user accounts are citizens and how seriously they take participation in these public spaces, the fact that there are these public spaces, and that they are gargantuan, is a game-changer. My guess is that the opinion leaders in these communities are traditional pundits and stars, but it doesn't have to be this way, and bands and bloggers are in the mix as well.

If Rock the Vote experiences the type of growth of regular Web 2.0 startups like Flickr, Facebook, MySpace, Youtube, etc, there's no reason that 18-29 year old voting block can't expand its share of the electorate by 3 or 4 points. This would swing Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, Florida, Iowa, and Ohio. And it would put North Carolina, Virginia, Missouri, and Arkansas into the swing category, while pulling New Hampshire, Oregon, Washington, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Michigan, and Pennsylvania out of swing state territory.

I've heard similar things about Rock the Vote's voter registration tool, but I heard that it would be built into the FaceBook API - presumably as part of the new F8 applications. Regardless, I think the rest of the post is absolutely on point w/r/t what such a registration tool might mean for turnout. The youth vote is going to blow up huge this year, and self-organizing tools like FaceBook, MySpace, YouTube, blogs, and yes - new ways of doing voter registration and GOTV online - are going to be some of the primary drivers of that surge. The barriers to entry have been massively lowered.