The 2010 ground game

Great summation, Judy, (4.00 / 3)

but I disagree with this

advancing the Democratic agenda is not always about electing Democrats - there's pleasure and power in finding the will to fight.

If you don't get elected, you cannot directly influence policy. You cannot govern. Period. Before 2006, we spent 84 years in the wilderness. It is not good for anyone, including the Republicans and especially the citizens of New Hampshire, if that happens again.

Finally, I am not a big fan of the popular veil-of-ignorance theory of political organizing, which seems to be based on the belief that people will work harder if they are shielded from information about adverse conditions in the field.

I agree people should not be shielded from this information. But I must admit, I shielded myself from it. There was no way I could have done the campaigning I did, including knocking on around 1000 doors, with the consciousness that it would all be for naught. Hope springs eternal. And good has come out of it. Democrats are organized in New Boston as never before. A group is springing up in Mont Vernon where there was none. People I don't know have come up to me and told me what a great campaign I ran with my teammates. People are concerned and are waking up to the importance of state government.

I have a quote on my Facebook page  from Frederick Douglass that ends with "Power concedes nothing without a demand". We could not and should not expect the forces of regression to roll over and allow us to implement the change we need. Looking at Dean's diary below, we know where this red tide is going. And they will own it. We have to make sure they own it.

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by: Jennifer Daler @ Sun Nov 07, 2010 at 13:35:28 PM UTC

I just want to point out (4.00 / 3)

that you acknowledge that by campaigning against  the odds - in one of the most reliably Republican voting communities in state - you added value Democratic community in New Boston. A new group is forming in Mont Vernon. People, as you note, are waking up. That is exactly what I'm talking about when I say that winning elections isn't everything - how well we do the fight is a big part of how rapidly real progress can be achieved. I know your team worked really hard, and you worked to win - thank you! But if we want to see a permanent blue shift in NH, it's important that we figure out how to do this type of purposeful base organizing every month of every year, not just every election cycle. And as we've just seen, the political power that comes from winning elections can be pretty fragile.

Of course winning elections matters, for precisely the reasons you state (although plenty of people who are never elected to public office can and do use their clout to shape public policy). But for at least the next two years, it will be vitally important to cultivate an resilient, outspoken base of everyday Democrats who will stand up and publicly oppose some of toxic policy that is washing in with the red tide.  

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by: judy stadtman @ Sun Nov 07, 2010 at 14:44:46 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

Great Suggestions (0.00 / 0)

I'll be offering more thoughts too, but as I expressed in June when I first wrote about the impending losses for Democrats being the "perfect storm" against us -- and projecting a House of 250 Republicans, 150 Dems, and a Senate of 16 Republicans, 8 Dems, which ended up being optimistic -- I advised that we were being too "defensive."  

We needed to -- and we need to -- talk about our vision, our idealism, our "hope" and our brand of "change."  We let the Republicans have that message this year, which we had done so well with in 2006 and 2008.  People who are out of work or fearful of losing their homes don't buy it when they hear a ruling party say "wait a while, things will be better."

We need this self-evaluation.  We need to encourage inclusion of diverse strategies in our campaigning.  As you say, it's not just about GOTV.  It's messaging, making a bigger tent, not trying to portray Republicans are evil, and talking about the future rather than what we think we have done in the past.  Voters vote for what they think you will do, not for your resume or what you think you've done already.  

We can smile again.

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by: Rep. Jim Splaine @ Sun Nov 07, 2010 at 14:08:17 PM UTC

Confessions of a Ward Captain (4.00 / 1)

The groundgame  down here:

His plan started with the notion that a Massachusetts governor's race could be won by 21,700 organizers, each of whom recruits 50 friends. Then, the campaign handed organizers responsibility for those friends, inviting them to join conference calls and giving them talking points to disperse.

Then, they gave up on traditional phone banks, reasoning that the voters who still own land lines don't answer calls from phone numbers they don't recognize. Instead, they created "friend banks,'' getting people to tap their cellphone lists and call their friends to get out the vote.

But with all signs pointing to Democratic defeats this year, and with so many Republicans waging contests in Massachusetts, Walsh knew he would need Democrats on every doorstep.

In the final weeks of the campaign, he pooled the party's substantial forces, persuading all 10 members of Congress, all statewide candidates, and most legislative candidates to pool their voter lists. Rather than individually identifying potential votes and enlisting separate organizers, the candidates could tap a massive base of voters and volunteers. "We as Democrats had to absolutely cooperate with one another, which doesn't always happen historically,'' Walsh said.

The get-out-the-vote operation was massive. On Election Day, they estimated the number of volunteers reached a stunning 800,000. Walsh is thrilled to think that his brand of campaigning, unusually personal and interactive for the information age, was so effective that it probably will be replicated. "To me, that's changing politics,'' he said. "Everybody wants that. Scott Brown did it. Deval Patrick did it. It is possible and everybody wants it so let's go try it.''

In NH, voters are spread out thin. So the door-by-door approach will have to be used where it fits. Maybe, combined with friend to friend contacts.

But let me fill in some blanks in the Globe article.

- The 50 friends outreach had limited success. Mostly because, imo, the online tools provided were awkward. The premise was great. Walsh gave us access to the VAN via a tool called a-Pebble. So individual activists could reach voters and gather IDs. All that resided in a database.

But, it seemed like no one wanted to use it. I for one didn't. I didn't want those I contacted bothered by party hacks bent on filling quotas. However, I think it is a big step to give activists access to the VAN. One criticism I have of NH is the way VoteBuilder is controlled.

- When the Regional Organizer put me on the spot, I did a gut check and pressed my friends to do the canvass. I felt wierd begging my friends for help, BUT IT WORKED. Lowell's Ward 5 identified "universe" was lit dropped twice in 4 days. That is  about 10 people contacting 60 people, twice. I won't know the actual uptick until a week or so, but we met the FD's goals.

Gotta run. I'll add more later.

"Ill writers are usually the sharpest censors." - John Dryden

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by: Jack Mitchell @ Sun Nov 07, 2010 at 14:14:01 PM UTC

Useful discussion (4.00 / 3)

As a first time candidate, running in a solo red district, I find this to be a valuable discussion.

I did not win - lost by about 100 votes. I did a far more extensive campaign than my opponent. At some point it was clear to me that many folks were going to vote "R" irrespective of the candidates - bevause of national/state issues ( or their perception of them).

While I do believe there could have been far better messaging of the Democratic achievements in Concord & Dc, I am not sure how much difference that would have made in State House elections this year.  Sometimes you are the windshield - sometime you are the bug.

This is, by , far, the best discusison thread I have seen as to how to move forward. And i do like that Frederick Douglass quote...

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by: pberch @ Sun Nov 07, 2010 at 15:03:26 PM UTC

GOTV requires strong message (4.00 / 3)

The reason I keep harping on Obama's inadequate messaging is that I feel that this is the key to our having lost across the board -- all the way down the ticket. GOTV is premised on a successful message. People can then be encouraged to act on their already-formed perceptions. The entire democratic party was AWOL on messaging this go-round and it started at the top.

One would be hard-pressed to find a better message than Deval Patrick's. He talked about having  decided --despite the recession -- to invest in the future, in education and health care. I think the best ad I saw anywhere in the election was the one he ran about how we can't tell second and third graders to wait until the recession is over; that this is their time now. He was positive, calm, not defensive and spoke right to the heart of democratic values. He said that "his opponent" would do otherwise. I think that one ad about second and third graders might have given him the election right there (not to belittle the monumental GOTV effort Menino's machine provided!)

The national democrats have not provided this kind of positive message to their candidates. Individual efforts at communicating a positive message came off as defensive, scattered, ineffectual because they were not part of cohesive messaging from the top. Obama, in my eyes, has lost his way and become a transactional politician with no vision (as opposed to the transformational politician he projected during his campaign.) How can a strong message emerge from this?

I do think the NHDP could step into the void and, as Patrick did in MA,craft a strong, compelling, non-defensive message for our national and state-wide candidates. But unless things change, they will not get much help from above. It's hard to buck the conventional wisdom fed to us by the media. If it doesn't begin with the White House, it becomes even more difficult.

I am in awe of the mighty GOTV efforts that were waged here in NH by democrats during this election. We should resolve to support these efforts with the critical tools they need.  

""Hope is the dream of a soul awake.""

/French Proverb quotes.

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by: susaninrindge @ Sun Nov 07, 2010 at 15:09:05 PM UTC

Spot on. (0.00 / 0)

It's not possible to compensate locally for a message not being delivered at the top. In the current environment, if there is distaste or confusion with the message from the top of the ticket, it will roll right down to the bottom almost every time. John Lynch was the only major outlier this time around.

They. Don't. Care.
We do.
Rinse, repeat.

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by: GreyMike @ Sun Nov 07, 2010 at 15:34:40 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

Change NHDP leadership (0.00 / 0)

The NHDP was cited in the original post as a major part of the problem, and I agree with this assessment. Obama provided more message than the NHDP did.  I could quote several repeat volunteers who were extremely frustrated by the lack of any message at all from the co-ordinated campaign staff. They should be able to give a simple three point bullet list of why to vote for ___ but they even know the candidates at the top of the ticket at all. Instead volunteers were given multiple position papers. In the best of circumstances local volunteers who were experienced created their own message which in fact was effective in some cases. One of the major lies that the Republicans won with was that Paul Hodes and Annie Kuster et al would take away the voters Medicare and for the first time today I heard an effective answer from Jim Clyburn of SC. Did anyone see an age shift in the data?

Finally the assessment in the original post that more volunteers could not have made a difference is an exaggerated statement. Certainly 3200 votes for Kuster could have been mustered when the stay home rates for D's was 83,000 vs 30,000 for Republicans. Many of our state reps and senators lost by very thin margins. You will see in the next two years what a veto proof General Court looks like and even a few more reps and senators could have prevented that.

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by: robert @ Sun Nov 07, 2010 at 16:58:16 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

Research (0.00 / 0)

Research shows consistently that the quality of message on GOTV is not particularly important. What is important is the quality of contact -- do people listen well, truly engage in conversation, etc.

Quality actually beats quantity too -- phone banks can do so poorly that they are getting less than one new vote for 200 calls, or well enough that each 33 contacts yield a vote.

In any case -- looking at the research the very last thing that could have swayed the election was quality of script.

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by: Mike Caulfield @ Sun Nov 07, 2010 at 17:19:40 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

To be clear (0.00 / 0)

What I am saying is that the mass media message matters a lot, but the script you send volunteers out with, not as much.

It's possible better messaging from candidates might have mattered, it's certain that better DC messaging would have mattered, but not much you had written down after Hi, my name is ______________________ was going to overcome that.  

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by: Mike Caulfield @ Sun Nov 07, 2010 at 17:26:06 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

about those scripts (0.00 / 0)

I did little if any phoning this time around, except to my own local supporters--- but I did do a lot of canvassing.  I found the door-to-door scripts virtually unuseable: way too long and way too platitudinous.  (The phone scripts seemed a little better, from what I overheard.)

People in Strafford County, NH tend to be very friendly and they tend to be very interested in political issues, but they don't put up with some random person with a clipboard reciting a couple pages of talking points.

In my case, I have to admit, my #1 concern was my own race as well as the other local state legislature races.  My #2 concern was Carol Shea-Porter's race.  Concerns #3 through #999 were way down my list.  The state races weren't really addressed at all in the script with even Lynch being an afterthought, and Hodes got a lot more attention than Shea-Porter.  

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by: TimothyHorrigan @ Sun Nov 07, 2010 at 18:14:52 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

Experiments (0.00 / 0)

This 10% number floats around, and it's useful for motivating people, but I'm the kind of person that wants to know more -- for instance, when you look at the actual literature you see stuff like this:

Results of random effects logistic regression weighted by number of contacts within the states indicate a statistically significant intent-to-treat effect for the MoveOn effort. The weighted estimate in log-odds units indicates that voters living on the un-contacted (pseudo-control) side of the block with a 0.5 base probability of voting would have had a 2.3 percentage point increase in the probability of voting had they lived on the treatment side of the block. When all thirteen states are included, Middleton estimates a 1.73 percentage point intent-to-treat effect. Including the contact rate, Middleton estimates a treatment-on-treated effect of 11.4 percentage points.

What that seems to say to me is that the population of voters that were targeted and contacted had a 11% increase in turnout (am I reading this wrong?).

For motivation, tossing 10% around as a goal is fine, but for the purposes of knowing what happened, we should be more precise. When I did four hours of canvassing for Working Families Win on the Saturday before the election, our contact rate was very low (these were college students in Ward 1, but still very very low.) There's a huge difference between saying walking that area a couple times and adding in phone calls could get an 11% bump and saying the seven people out of the hundred that a) hadn't moved since 2008, and b) were home when we knocked were 11% more likely to vote. In one case, canvassing gets us the 1-2% bump in the area we walked -- in the other case it gets much more than that.

Which is it? Any thoughts? My money is on 11% bump of those ID'd and contacted multiple times.

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by: Mike Caulfield @ Sun Nov 07, 2010 at 16:10:35 PM UTC

The 10% figure is a cumulative estimate (4.00 / 1)

for all the voter contact activities that can be combined as part of a strategic voter mobilization campaign: paid media, earned media, door-to-door canvassing, paid and volunteer phone calls, direct mail, neighbor-to-neighbor mail, lit drops, door hangers, online social networking, election day reminder text messaging. Strategies that don't involve person-to-person contact are not effective unless they are layered with with activities that do.

The comment that quality matters more than quantity in voter persuasion is exactly right, but the kind of SVM campaign that gives a 10% bump is characterized by a very high volume of extremely high quality contacts. Another big factor in successful voter mobilization is which voters you target for contact, and when. It also matters who is doing the talking - local volunteers who closely match the age and social characteristics of target voters are more effective than paid staff or out-of-state volunteers. I've noticed that voters are often more impressed by the time and effort required to make calls or go door-to-door on behalf of a candidate than the contents of the script. The fact that you, the candidate or volunteer, took the time and effort to walk up to the door of a complete stranger and knock on it holds a lot of meaning.  

To put this in perspective, phone calls generate one new vote for every 35-38 contacts. With an average contact rate of 17-20%, a caller will have to make 200 dials (roughly 3.5 hours of dialing for an experienced caller) to gain one new vote. So to get than 10% bump you have to plan for a whole lot of voter contact, and you have to do it all very well.  

By the way, I'm not revealing any trade secrets here - there is quite a bit of good research on effective GOTV methods available to the general public.  

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by: judy stadtman @ Sun Nov 07, 2010 at 20:10:40 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

This is exactly what we need (0.00 / 0)

at this point.  A good look at what our situation is.  At the same time, I know in my bones what happens in my little nook here, where I have been organizing since Howard Dean came into town.  Keeping people engaged has been very, very difficult.  What has worked best is new projects, like our farmers market.

I am going to try to get some more media going, I think.  Maybe just more independent-of-the-town videos that they have to show on our PEG channel (our town has a paid cable coordinator and a cable advisory committee, and I want to work outside that, and produce some video that talks about current affair, I think).  I know nothing about video, really, but I can learn.  And I think I know some people who do know.  

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by: Lucy Edwards @ Sun Nov 07, 2010 at 17:24:36 PM UTC

Lucy, this is my thought exactly (0.00 / 0)

Engaged people vote and volunteer. And we have not done enough of that on local level.

I believe that if people took an interest in their communities they would vote in more informed ways. But I'm a person that like most have barely any time left for my community at the end of the work week.

Random thoughts, I guess. Hashing out a new project myself...

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by: Mike Caulfield @ Sun Nov 07, 2010 at 17:34:45 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

The secret (0.00 / 0)

is to find really interesting projects that can be done with little money and a commitment of a couple of hours a month.  No meetings unless actually doing something.  E-mail can take the place of meetings.  We set up our farmers market with a group of 6 busy women and one busy man.  We formed an association, got insurance, we did have some meetings at the beginning, which were fun, but we've been keeping the finances, advertising, etc. going without hardly seeing each other this year.  (Only one of us actually sells at the market, the rest just wanted a market to be consumers at and for sustainability reasons.)
If you are like me, and see everything through a political lens, you can find any project that gets people involved together as a political opportunity.  I guess that's why I finally called myself a community organizer.  

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by: Lucy Edwards @ Sun Nov 07, 2010 at 21:30:17 PM UTC

[ Parent ]

.., I hate NH and I approve the message. (4.00 / 3)

Bresler was constantly crabbing about how the state he lived in was not portrayed in the GOP message. Especially, in the ads from out of state groups.

Gov. Lynch gushes about NH. His opponents dragged it down in an attempt to scare voters away from Lynch. NH voters could not be fooled.

But, at the national level, NH voters took the bait hook, line and sinker. They are afraid of what they see "away." They know it hasn't reached them yet. A la Lynch. But, they sent Ayotte, Guinta and Bass down to D.C. to try to keep it from reaching them.

Fortunately, it is going to get worse. NH GOPers will hijack their mandate, assaulting NH voters with a rehash of their narrow social agenda. To do this, NH GOPers will have to make NH feel like shit about itself.

For that, they could be punished.

All I can say is; Gov. Lynch, appoint that Justice NOW! The Court is your back stop. Your commitment to equality is now exposed to further scrutiny.

"Ill writers are usually the sharpest censors." - John Dryden

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by: Jack Mitchell @ Sun Nov 07, 2010 at 18:19:53 PM UTC

Three things killed the party in 2010 (0.00 / 0)

1. Picked the worse possible year to take over just as the shit was hiting the fan.
2. Trying to compromise with a foe who had no intentions of compromising.
3. Not finding a way to successfully answer the attack ads.

Its like fighting a battle when you let the enemy pick the location.

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by: Herb @ Mon Nov 08, 2010 at 01:55:52 AM UTC