Ran across a (now deleted) tweet recommending @Tech4Campaigns — anybody know more about them? Are they legit? Are they useful?
"Vote harder" is supposed to be a joke about how yo can't do electoral politics harder…except you can! There are tons of options, from giving money to phone banking to canvassing to simply encouraging normies in your life to vote
— ProofOfBurden (@ProofofBurden) July 5, 2022
There is a frustrating thing where people will post that we need to participate and get out in our community and the last few elections I’ve schlepped around in Indiana’s iffy October weather dropping fliers and talking to potential voters
— ProofOfBurden (@ProofofBurden) July 5, 2022
Ok well writing the letters isn't that hard. Anyone who can do it can bust out a hundred or more in a few hours. Texting can get draining though
— Wasp Specter (@CelluloidHoax) July 5, 2022
It won’t get as much attention as a flashy messaging operation or even a big ad buy, but building this kind of infrastructure is one of the most important things the DNC can do to help advance all the things we care about: https://t.co/mj21LVha8y
— Matt Compton (@mattcompton) June 23, 2022
I’m surprised this is considered a breakthrough, but that’s probably just me:
… The DNC’s new Geographic Address Dataset is a repository of 260 million addresses in the U.S., which the tech team painstakingly compiled by combining nearly a dozen sources — from the voter file to Postal Service data to records from private vendors. That includes 25 million new addresses that were never before included in the DNC’s records. The team affixed nearly all of the 260 million records with census block data, giving Democratic campaigns a new window into demographic information on hundreds of millions of homes, as well as geocodes, which tell campaigns the actual latitude and longitude of where hard-to-find homes exist on a map.
“As much as we all live online these days, people also live in physical locations, and specifically knowing where a voter is located powers door-to-door canvassing, direct mail outreach and just helping campaigns know and truly understand their jurisdictions,” Nell Thomas, chief technology officer of the DNC, told Protocol…
… Historically, campaigns and political parties have focused on collecting as much information about individual people as possible, starting with all the data they can get — phone numbers, Facebook profiles and more — on names contained in the voter file. But the voter file, by definition, only includes the names of people who have registered to vote, leaving out millions of Americans who aren’t registered.
This data set takes a different approach, telling campaigns not everything they need to know about a given person, but everything they need to know about a given address, regardless of whether they know the name of the person living there or not. “When we know that those [households] are in areas where we have a lot of supporters of the Democratic Party, it’s easier for us to target those people and turn out our vote and register Democrats to get out in the next election,” said Jesse Presnell, a DNC engineer who helped build the Geographic Address Dataset.
By focusing on addresses, not individuals, the DNC was able to find 8 million homes for which the party had addresses but no geocodes that would have enabled a campaign to actually go find that home on a map. This work has given the party a 10% increase in canvassable voters on tribal lands and an 11% increase in canvassable voters in rural America…
Addresses also aren’t the DNC’s only focus this year. The tech team is spending another $5 million to buy other data sets, including cell phone numbers, to help with voter contact.
And yet, Thomas believes that the new tool could help give Democrats an edge they can’t get by flooding people’s phones. “The most impactful interaction a campaign can have,” she said, “is in the real world at a door.”
Baud
Cool stuff. Thank you, AL.
One of the reasons I dislike the vote mockers is not simply because it discourages voting, but I feel it’s disrespectful to the people doing the hard thankless work out in the real world.
UncleEbeneezer
I thought the only thing the DNC does is Rig Primaries!!1! /sarcasm
Kropacetic
Keep up the good work, Dems. If the media insists on stepping all over tour messaging, bring it straight to the people!
Eta: It’s also the media that rigs the primaries.
Mike E
@Baud: the vote mockers are mostly mock people… the ‘real’ pundits coming out with this trash are Jill Stein types in my book, probably on the Putin payroll.
Baud
That could be a game changer if it works.
Kropacetic
@Baud: Hope we got enough canvassers for the new terrain.
Suzanne
@Baud: The thing i was always struck by in my canvassing days was how many people were registered (AZ has motor voter), but lose the plot after that. Changed addresses, didn’t know where their polling place was, knew there was an election but didn’t know which day.
I get frustrated with the messaging to vote, not because it’s wrong, but because it sometimes is delivered with the condescending tone that it is all there is to the solution. Like when the nurse says, “And how are we doing today, hmmmm!”. Like, I’m a fucking mess, that’s why i’m here, please don’t be chipper.
Baud
@Suzanne:
You just need to turn that frown upside down, Suz.
Ross
I’m a former Tech4Campaigns volunteer. They’re legit and great at targeting state races for maximum impact.
bbleh
In my very limited experience, there is NO substitute for F2F campaigning, which at the non-office-seeker level means door-to-door canvassing. Handwritten notes have a little of the same flavor, and of course they’re much easier to do, but for the receiver the appearance of an actual person at their door — or on their street — who is polite and informed and wants to listen to them and talk to them can be little short of miraculous.
It can be tiring, physically and emotionally (there’s a lot of people who DON’T want to talk to you), but the political benefits are huge. And you get to meet a LOT of people you would never get to meet — very different kinds of people — which can be both rewarding and pleasantly surprising.
Omnes Omnibus
@Suzanne: What exact tone would you prefer? I can easily do frustrated anger that we have to keep begging people to vote when it should be fucking obvious that it is a necessary but not sufficient part of the solution to our current problems. Also, that if people had voted and kept voting in every fucking election, we might not be in such a fucking mess. But I am told that that tone is a bit frowned upon.
Baud
@bbleh:
I wonder how much it hurt us not doing it in 2020 because of covid.
Omnes Omnibus
@Baud: I think it probably made a difference at the margins.
Salty Sam
That phrase is considered by some of us to be exculpatory to a homicide charge . Tread carefully…
bbleh
@Baud: It certainly helps to activate the sympathetic-but-unactivated, and since IMO that is the key to winning right now (pace Republican interference in election administration), it could indeed have been very significant. But again IMO, since there are enough other ways the Dems could do better on that front, I’ll leave the retrospective to the statisticians and soldier on.
debbie
@bbleh:
Tough to do face to face with dead, dying, and horribly sick people. ♀️
SiubhanDuinne
I don’t like the word “just” in “just vote.” It makes it sound as though voting is the least of what we have to do, and of course there’s much more we can and (IMO) must do, every cycle.
Voting is necessary but not sufficient.
Martin
Oh, no – that’s absolutely a breakthrough. One of the things you learn in a bureaucracy is that trivial ideas benefit from your institutional scale better than disruptive ideas – particularly if you can get them rigorously implemented. The solution to climate change is to drive less and wear a sweater. You don’t need some hero to show up with the revolutionary idea – just convince people to walk their kids to school instead of driving them. That shit x 300,000,000 people goes astonishingly far.
Even simple things like poor implementation of who is still active in the DB, who had their zip code changed, finding mis-entered informations etc. can easily find you the 10,000 votes needed to swing a purple state.
The challenge is that it requires a dedication to focus that you usually don’t get. The folks running that database need to treat it like a video game they are constantly trying to get the high score on. They need to care about the integrity of the address book more than anything else. Those people are weird (I am one). And Dems have always struggled with that kind of centralized focus and control, because the database is money and every candidate wants to own it. That primary fight almost demands that the database get broken in order for each candidate to find their advantage. Requires a lot of discipline and focus to institutionalize this stuff.
Gvg
I am terrible at evaluating this stuff because I don’t ever answer the door for strangers, don’t like being approached by strangers, can’t stand being bombarded by text messages. I am female and live alone but also have always been shy and a bookworm. interacting on the web is distance enough to work for me. it’s reading and I choose it. The only thing that doesn’t bother me is Tv adds because I barely watch TV, just a few movies. I know from statistics that the face to face works much better for most people who aren’t me so I know we need to do it but I keep thinking yuck, or no way….
Send me a flyer with your positions. If they show you are a jerk I will throw it away. Lots of give away phrases and words. Mostly just the board of education or county positions sometimes bother around here.
I wish the local paper was still any use especially on judges. Those are the hardest to find out about.
Cameron
@Baud: You’re onto something – since Republicans don’t believe in covid, they had no problem going door-to-door (dunno if they actually did that, though).
kindness
I don’t like the rise of fascism within Republican ranks but can deal with it ’cause it isn’t my party. The Rose Twitter contingent within the ‘liberal’ community is starting to take me back to the days of yore with BernieBros. That hacks me off to no end.
Bill Arnold
@Cameron:
They differentially killed a lot of Republican voters with that disbelief, though. That will matter in some very close elections, and I for one plan to mercilessly rub that into the Republican losers’ faces; that their party killed enough GOP voters to throw the election to their Democratic Party opponent.
But that’s after the election.
Until this fall’s election, it’s all hands on deck(s), with whatever political tools/skills one can effectively wield.
MisterForkbeard
I love this so much. It’s true, too: I run a service used by ~13k people at my company. It has performance and load issues because it was designed to run for about ~2k.
When we manage performance, we get enormous gains out of getting everyone to do something very small, while big disruptive changes are overall helpful but band-aid it. A huge, overarching genius idea might pay off, but getting your population to make simple changes does more.
It’s also a lot damn harder when you have a group (Republicans) that regard cooperation with a Democratic government to be essentially treason, but you can still make huge and widespread impact.
James E Powell
@Omnes Omnibus:
I don’t think it would have changed any senate races, but we lost some very close congressional races. Every one matters.
Brachiator
Robert Reich has a YouTube channel devoted to progressive issues. Videos are generally short, snazzy with simple but punchy visual points.
Here’s one about the importance of donating time and money.
I simply do not understand why more Democrats do not use all the media tools available to get their ideas across. And clips like this can be distributed all around social media.
Also, Republicans make no secret about using every trick in the book, next to the book and outside the book to suppress, steal and minimize votes. So I do not understand why anyone would still want to debate about the right messaging to get people to vote.
UncleEbeneezer
@Martin: People complain that phone-banking yields mostly wrong numbers and people not answering, but that is part of how campaigns and the organizations that run GOTV efforts “clean” the lists to make sure that final week push targets only good addresses/numbers/voters etc.
Brachiator
@SiubhanDuinne:
How about Vote Hard!!
Often what is possible begins with the vote.
Omnes Omnibus
Yes, that is sort of implied in the idea that voting is necessary but not sufficient.
debbie
@UncleEbeneezer:
I remember when a successful direct mail campaign yielded less than a 1% response (.4% maybe?). We need to lower our expectations.
Uncle Cosmo
@Brachiator: How about
H.E.Wolf
Amen to doing non-glamorous voter-outreach tasks. This month I’m slogging through some data entry that is eye-glazingly dull, but it’s going to be useful to phonebankers and canvassers – of which this introvert is definitely not one.
I encourage men, in particular, to show up and volunteer. Women usually carry a disproportionate share of the volunteer load. When men don’t participate, that means there’s a lot of potential GOTV power going to waste.
Geminid
@James E Powell: The single most consequential thing we could do to beat the pandemic was to beat Trump, and we almost didn’t pull that off. If we had lost the Presidential race, the Democratic Party’s restraint on in-person campaigning would have been very controversial.
The party did lighten up in October of 2020. I think they’d gotten an earful from people who saw how Republicans never let up. And some organizations “went rogue” and continued door to door campaigning throughout.
After the general election, my Atlanta friend campaigned door to door for Warnock and Ossoff (until he tripped and broke his wrist). He wore a mask, stepped back six feet after he rang a doorbell, left literature on the porch or sidewalk if a resident was receptive. He thought this could have been done safely earlier in the year.
debbie
@H.E.Wolf:
The last couple of door knockers at my apartment have been older married couples (they introduce themselves by names).
Mnemosyne
I mostly do Postcards to Voters. Which reminds me, I need to buy postcard stamps before the price goes up.
H.E.Wolf
…You rang? :-)
If anyone else reading Martin’s description thinks that sounds interesting, your local GOTV org. (Democratic Party or other group) needs your skills. They may not know it until you’ve done a small project or two for them… and then, omg, they will adore you.
UncleEbeneezer
@Mnemosyne: Here’s a good link for voter-themed post-carding supplies.
H.E.Wolf
Awww. In 2016, I remember there were a handful of young dads canvassing on weekends, with their toddlers riding on Dad’s shoulders.
Suzanne
@Omnes Omnibus: I think a tone of resolve is better than a tone of optimism. As in, this is a fight, we may win it, we could lose it….. voting is the first task of many. This is the work of generations. I don’t find optimism credible in the face of certain suffering.
H.E.Wolf
[ETA: I write for them, too!]
Prices go up this Sunday. (Says the person currently knee-deep in recently-purchased stamps….)
Martin
@H.E.Wolf: I’m currently deliberating between doing this and volunteering to help with the election.
H.E.Wolf
Given the pandemic, I chose the most hermit-like option… although I miss the hustle and the bustle of a campaign office. There was always a corner from which to enjoy observing all the extroverts in action.
H.E.Wolf
I like that. One of the best compliments I ever got (though it was meant as a putdown by the person who said it to me) was, “You are relentless.”
Omnes Omnibus
@Suzanne: I thought you were complaining about a perceived tone of condescension?
H.E.Wolf
And… am now signing off the internet for the rest of the day. Tenacity is more successful, long-term, when there are rest breaks. :-) Best to all!
Geminid
@Cameron: Republicans went door to door in 2020 because they believed in winning.
Suzanne
@Omnes Omnibus: I find optimism condescending. Like, democracy is crumbling and we’ll be in debt slavery forever and being told to vote feels like you’re putting some tussin on my gunshot wound.
HinTN
All well and good but the Rs did this in 2010 because their eyes were on the redistricting prize then, twelve fucking years ago.
raven
Here’s the final, optimistic song, in Better Things.
Geminid
@HinTN: Democrats historically have had a bigger vote drop off in non-Presidential elections. I think that is changing now. These midterms will be a good test of that trend. Despite the petty controversies about voting we’ve seen the past few weeks, Democrats are as motivated and unified as in 2018 and 2020, I think. And Republicans have some real divisions they might not be able to paper over by November.
Omnes Omnibus
@Suzanne: Optimism is condescending? Okay.
James E Powell
@Geminid:
But we did it! We fucking did it! Even Arizona & Georgia, which no one expected.
The #1 lesson to be learned from every election is to make sure we are focused on the election that is in front of us.
raven
@Omnes Omnibus: Oddly, I just got this from my ex-Pat friend in Sydney.
livewyre
@Omnes Omnibus: To be fair, that could just be coming from a position of being burned out in general with either the prospect or the process. By contrast, some of us want something to aspire to. I’ve been reminding myself not to generalize.
Suzanne
@Omnes Omnibus: Optimism that is not merited, that doesn’t feel like it realizes the gravity of a situation, feels condescending. It feels toxic.
Omnes Omnibus
@Suzanne: So is it condescending, in your opinion, to tell people they need to vote because if we get enough votes we can hold the House and gain two or more Senators at which point we can start making some real progress?
livewyre
@Suzanne: It may be true that optimism doesn’t account for having already thrown in the towel, but that’s not where everyone necessarily is. I would rather adjust for audience and context as far as that goes.
Suzanne
@Omnes Omnibus: It is condescending to talk to prospective voters as if voting is the solution that will fix it like magic. It isn’t. We voted, we won the Senate and the House and the presidency, and we’re still fucked. We have to vote, but even if we do, we may still lose our democracy. So the tone that everyone just has to vote rah rah rah go fight win!!! makes me feel like someone is insulting my intelligence. As a reminder: I vote, every time. And tone and credibility are incredibly important aspects of persuasion.
Omnes Omnibus
@Suzanne: Who is saying that voting is a magic bullet? Everyone is saying it is “necessary but not sufficient.”
There might just be the slightest possibility that I am aware of that.
Geminid
@James E Powell: Yes, and I don’t want to dwell too much about what didn’t happen. Especially when I don’t think we’ll ever have to do without in-person campaigning again.
But I think it’s good to keep in mind how close that election was. Not close as in there was an ambiguous result, and certainly not close in the popular vote. But Joe Biden won Pennsylylvania by just 80,000 votes out of almost 7 million votes cast. If he’d lost Pennsylvania’s 20 electoral votes he still would have won with Georgia’s 16, or with both Arizona (11EV) and Nevada (6EV). Biden carried Georgia by a little under 12,000 votes out of almost 5 million, Arizona by ~11,000 out of 3.3 million, and Nevada by 33,000 out of 1.4 million. Biden ran a tight, focused campaign with nary a mistep, and it looks to me like he had to.
raven
I had a friend one time, at least I thought he was my friend
For he came to me, said, “I ain’t got no place to go”
I said, “Take it easy man, you can come home to my house
I’ll get you a pillow where you can rest your head”
Took him home with me, let him in my house
Let him drive my Cadillac that I could not afford
When I found out he’d been messin’ ’round with my baby
You know I’m mad like Al Capone
(I’m burnin’ up)
I said I’m mad
(I’m burnin’ up)
Like Sonny Liston, yeah
(I’m burnin’ up)
You know, babe, I’m mad
(I’m burnin’ up)
Suzanne
@Omnes Omnibus: In my first comment on this thread, I noted how it is the tone of some of the messaging that exists in our ecosystem. I mean, I get probably ten emails a day from campaigns, DNC, advocacy groups, etc….. fundraising, looking for volunteers, yard signs, GOTV. And some of them are just terrible. The ones that strike me as the most obnoxious right now are the ones that have that tone of toxic positivity. YAAAAY!!! We’ll get out there in November and kick ass!!! And can you spare $20 before our next fundraising deadline?!?!
And that’s because I’m not feeling genuinely positive. I am not despairing, but I don’t feel like the outlook is good, either. I feel like it is important to acknowledge that.
It’s like of like how car commercials before the pandemic were like, “Buy a Ford truck!” and then the pandemic started and it became, “In these unprecedented times, buy a Ford truck.”
Scout211
@Suzanne:
Everyone is different and that is one of the many complications and frustrations of political messaging. Not every voter is motivated by the same message or by the same tone.
It’s a big wide world out there and it might be a good thing to invite more voters into our big tent than to shrink the message to fit a certain narrow group.
Just my two cents.
different-church-lady
Jesus Christ, the only way this became “just vote” is dishonest actors creating shit because creating shit is all they can do. Nobody is saying just vote and fuck everything else. But NOT voting will guarantee nothing gets fixed. So FUCKING VOTE and do some other stuff, and slap Twitter bastards hard.
Brachiator
@Suzanne:
If you vote, you might win.
If you don’t vote, you can never win.
Most of the people I hear defending their refusal to vote do not believe in politics or any organizations higher than grassroots community groups. They also assume that all politicians are corrupt and only listen to big money donors.
Then there are people like Trump supporters and some Sanders supporters who believe in various forms of mob rule autocracies.
different-church-lady
@Baud:
Throughout human history lazy people have always feel threatened by hard workers.
Suzanne
@Scout211: Sure. But having worked in advertising for some time, I got a lot of insight into how brands try to develop loyalty and call to action over time. There’s a lot of message testing. And many people are really, really turned off by a perception of being overpromised on something. That’s why I think a tone of resolve is better right now. It’s not defeatist, but it acknowledges that we’re in a bad place.
different-church-lady
@Suzanne:
Fine. Let’s just give up then.Never mind, should have read the whole conversation before spouting off. Sorry.
different-church-lady
You know what the message to democratic voters should be? “If you don’t vote in this election, you might not be able to vote ever again.” Because that’s the reality on the ground.
Suzanne
@different-church-lady: That’s actually a pretty good approach.
Anne Laurie
@Suzanne: Maybe you could use my personal favorite line from Lord of the Rings:
different-church-lady
@Anne Laurie:
It’s a Hobbit: just tell him there’s food.