Filed under: coalitions, electoral politics, national, organizing, organizing networks
There is some buzz in the Community Organizing world around the Movement Vision Project coming out of the Center for Community Change [CCC]. When CCC has an idea, people listen, mainly because they’ve got some cash to throw around thanks – in part – to the big Mott Foundation hook-up. The project aims to bring a bunch of organizations with a base around the country together to try to coordinate their agenda so that progressives can team-up in a big way over the next few years.
It sounds so nice to you, I bet.
CCC is saying that we are in the midst of a giant opportunity, that opportunity being, namely, everyone hates President Bush. So let’s all put our heads together and fight a lot of crime. Go, team.
It all sounds nice, but we here at The Organizer aren’t too crazy about working with national organizations or getting “coordinated” by them. Team Organizer has a fair amount of experience working with D.C. organizations – we may or may not have been a part of one at some point (though we intend to keep working hard to maintain our anonymity so maybe we just had some really good friends who did and we feel like we were there. Will you ever know?). We are especially unexcited about working with a national organization that isn’t “us.”
I mean, if I were the Organizer for a local chapter of ACT-UP, say, I would probably be much more inclined to get some direction from the national organization or even other ACT-UP’s in my region than I would be to work with some big organization that wants to network with every organizer under the sun. That’s sort of the CCC approach.
Here’s one example of organizing work I’ll give you. I’ve served on coalitions with People For the American Way. I mean, who hasn’t? They are one of the most profoundly annoying groups to work with that you are ever likely to come across. By annoying, I mean they completely throttle the spirit of good organizing. They come into coalitions that they learn about that form around issues in which PFAW shares an interest (i.e., anything that might help a Democrat get elected President). They instantly start pushing people around and shoving whatever line their obnoxious press staff is shoving down the junior staff’s throats that week.
Organizing works when people come together, build on each other’s ideas and move forward on the stuff they agree on. People find disagreement frustrating and disagreement tends to undermine liberal coalitions. That’s why it’s best for liberals to keep their coalitions simple, with finite goals. There are two situations in which local groups don’t mind national groups shoving a gameplan down their throats.
- When it’s something that such huge news and it’s so simple that it’s easy for tons of folks to glom on. Like the spontaneous protests around Bush’s first election by the Supreme Court.
- When the national organization has lots of money to throw around. The Immigration Protests last summer? Bought and paid for by the Pew Charitable Trusts. Thank God they did it, but let’s not pretend that they were really evidence of a movement.
Otherwise, what happens is that the pushy national organization slowly drives others away who become frustrated by the way the national organization undermines their ideas and plans, and then whatever they are involved in fizzles out.
I have no doubt that the staff at CCC have a very clear idea of what they want the local groups around the country to do, when they want them to do it and what it should look like. I hope they have a lot of money to throw around because the conversation is only going to last so long and then local people are going to get annoyed because they’ll realize that they don’t want to completely rewrite their gameplan for the year because some suit in D.C. called them up and asked them to on a conference call.
Which brings us to one of the real weaknesses of liberals: we accept everyone and give everyone a chance. When we want to work together, it would all work so much better if we turned each other away from time to time. It doesn’t make sense to have some people involved in certain groups. Great example: when it’s protest planning time – the lawyers need to leave. Sure, they might be able to answer some questions, but you can also write those down and ask them together. If you try to make an organizing plan with lawyers in the room then you’re going to spend the whole meeting arguing about what you want and never get to what you’ll do.
When a national organization asks you to skip a day and go to their meeting: you probably shouldn’t. Don’t give them the benefit of the doubt. They wasted your time before, they’ll waste it again.
If you want to work with other organizations like yours around your state or region or country, do it the way we do it when we want to make it happen around our city: pick up the phone and call them. If they’re into it, ask them if they’ll call a few people.
If you end up reaching a critical mass, organize you’re own damn conference call. FreeConference.com will host it for you for free. And you’re an Organizer, my son, you don’t need some Inside-the-Beltway schmuck to write an agenda for you.
I recently met a guy who’d won a seat on the board of his neighborhood’s civic association. I don’t know much about his neighborhood, but my impression was that it was pretty affluent and the civic association had a fair amount of power in local comings and goings.
Apparently, the board had long been dominated by a group of residents who liked to run things a certain way and always had. This guy had objections. I don’t know what they were. He’s a wealthy guy, so they probably aren’t the kind of things that would interest me much, but he did want to buck the system he found himself in. We here at The Organizer are always interested in that.
He’d volunteered a little on a big campaign that had a local office, and learned simple organizing techniques like doorknocking, turnout calls and reminder calls. Good stuff, but nothing out of the advanced textbook of organizing.
It turned out that anyone in the neighborhood could vote for board members and anyone who lived there could run. So he ran, and he spent a little time knocking on doors and telling people why he was running. Usually, no one voted on the civic association board election.
So he turned out his own constituency and sailed to an easy victory.
What’s the lesson here? Sometimes there are people with power that are so fat and happy that they neglect to watch their own backs or power base. Any organizing at all takes them by complete surprise, and people, like this guy, can sail to an easy victory just by doing a little old fashioned legwork.
Tomorrow is Election Day in our fair nation of the United States, and this brings up the perennial armchair quarterbacking of American politics. We here at The Organizer bemoan the fact that America has such bad voter turnout and it deeply disconcerts us. That said, we here at The Organizer also completely disagree with all the quick fixes people like to propose to increase voter turnout.
Our least favorite proposal for increasing turnout is moving the Election Day to the weekend or making it a national holiday. We adamantly oppose either “solution.” The (perhaps) well-meaning folks at Why Tuesday have proposed moving Election Day to one that has fewer people working, like Saturday.
It’s a very slick website, so The Organizer is suspicious. Could this actually be created by conservatives who want voter turnout to go down? Who think they could control the government more easily that way? People who’ve actually watched the research and know that every time we make voting easier, paradoxically, fewer people vote?
The Organizer knows this. The voting experts at the Center for the Study of the American Electorate know this. So why is it that every Election Day, good people, even smart people, start talking about moving it to a non-work day?
The Organizer knows.
The first thing you realize as an Organizer, once you start to get it, is that most of our instincts about what moves and motivates people is wrong.
You think people take part in issues because they care about the issue. You learn this isn’t usually true. It’s because of who and how they were invited to take part.
You think that people follow others because they are well-spoken and articulate. You learn that’s not true, that those folks just do well on TV, but that people honestly listen to people that, for some ineffable reason, they trust – and they don’t usually trust the slick ones.
You think that politicians will pay attention to you if you have your facts straight and make a strong case. You learn this isn’t true. That they pay attention when you build power and shove it in their face, and at that point it doesn’t really matter if you’re right or wrong.
You also learn that coddling people and babying people into participation drives them away. That, in fact, challenging them, pushing them and giving them a chance to fail is what really generates buy-in, growth and participation.
So The Organizer isn’t surprised that all of our efforts to massage people into the polls isn’t working. The Organizer understands that the easier you make voting, the less important it seems.
The Organizer also understands people’s lives. The Organizer understands that it is middle class people who want the vote on Saturday, because they all have Saturday off. The Organizer knows low-income people, and he knows that the ones who have jobs work on Saturday all the time. Their day off is Tuesday or Thursday. Maybe they only have one day off a week. It could as easily be Wednesday.
The Organizer also understands that people are more likely to figure out a way to finnagle out of work a bit if they want to vote than they are to finnagle out of their kids’ soccer games or a chance to spend a weekend at a friends lodge. The Organizer knows people leave town on the Weekend or get caught up on all the other stuff they have to do.
The Organizer knows how little free time we have here in the states, and he doesn’t want to put voting up against free time when it can be put up against work time.
The Organizer understands the facts, and gets a little arrogant when writing about the facts. If only the people who support groups like Why Tuesday would pay attention to the facts rather than their own ill-formed opinions. The facts show it: making voting easier does not increase the vote. The Motor Voter failed. Let’s not throw good energy after bad.
Keep Election Day on Tuesday. It’s going to take good, old-fashioned work – Organizer work – to increase voter turnout. People have to care to vote, and if they care they will.
Here comes some big news from the “Who cares” files. The percentage of the vote represented by single women is slightly lower than their percentage of the population; the reverse is true of married women.
Wow. Stop the presses.
If you read this article, it gives statistics on the percentage of the population single women and married women represent and then how likely they are to vote. If I’m not mistaken, the difference is within a standard deviation on both counts. So, again, I say: who cares?
This is not meaningful information. Moreover, it only underscores the non-issue of the issue. It only shows that whether a woman is single or not is not a meaninful determinant of her likelihood to vote.
Is the issue of being a single woman really worth organizing around? It’s fair to say that a good number of them don’t intend to remain single, and temporary identities are always bad ones to organize around. I’ll write more about this soon.
On another note from the end of the above article, The Organizer continues to yawn in the face of all people arguing to make voting easier – in this instance, by moving Election Day to the weekend. You’re not paying attention if you believe this to be true – you’re just going with your misguided instincts.
Voter participation has dropped the easier voting has become. We took away poll taxes, we offered registration forms at the DMV, we’ve extended the franchise and voter participation has fallen, fallen, fallen.
I’m not arguing that all of those things weren’t good, but anyone who thinks that you’re more likely to see people vote if Election Day were moved to Saturday or Sunday is dead wrong.
In fact, The Organizer believes that the move is inevitable, as the clamor around this silly idea grows, and The Organizer predicts here and now that if Election Day gets moved to a Saturday then within four years the voter turnout will drop by at least 20%.
Why? People leave town and cut the lawn on weekends. That’s why.
And because the ease of voting is not now and never has been the issue. The issue is whether or not voters care.
Well, this is depressing. It sounds like more and more people are working to get out the vote this year, but the AP is not very optimistic that it will accomplish much. Apparently we’ve got lots of volunteers pounding the pavement to get out the vote on both sides, but, overall, lots of voter registration lists are declinining in numbers, not gaining.
I don’t want to add to the steadily growing list of speculation as to why so many people don’t vote, but I will say that I think much of the GOTV effort is rushed and impersonal. According to Robert Caro, LBJ had a very personalized campaign style. He had teams of Organizers who went out and met people, talked to them and sent back contact information with notes about personal information.
Then teams of typists and writers would take that personal information and type up thousands and thousands of individualized letters to each of the people the advance team met, and follow up with more letters!
In today’s computerized world, this would be even easier, but somehow I doubt anyone is personalizing their voter identification to this level.
Filed under: Friends and Allies, electoral politics, general, leadership, local campaigns, organizing, politicians, schools-of-thought
It’s Election Time! Do-or-die days for a lot of Organizers out there. In fact, this is the only time that some political professionals actually do any organizing. Though in my opinion, electoral organizing is some of the lowest grade, lowest skill development organizing out there. At least, as it exists today. Back in the days of real machine politics, a person could find a meaningful place doing meaningful work in candidate campaigns, but these days no one trusts the average joe to do anything but grunt work, and the staffs don’t care about anything but news media and ad buys.
It’s not unusual for me to bemoan the fact that elections are the time of the greatest civic action among the citizens of the country. I think it’s a little irrational. You can put your energy into trying to get some man or woman elected, and you never know what you’re going to get. A candidate is a complicated mess. You can end up with a Bill Clinton, who surprises everyone by taking away welfare as an entitlement program. Or you can end up with a George Bush, Senior, who pushes the biggest tax increase anyone remembers.
Still, though, people think it’s do or die, and people who never participate in politics and never volunteer for causes get out there and work for candidates.
Not to criticize them, I think it illustrates something about organizing.
The smart Organizer knows that if you want to turn people out, if you want to build a base, you don’t do it with a good issue that people care about. I mean, you can turn out a lot of people that way, from time-to-time, but if you want to build something lasting you try to build leaders, instead. You do this, because you know that people will consistently do something that someone they view as a leader asks them to do. Leaders are consistent people. People follow people they see as consistent, that they can count on.
People don’t trust issues. They don’t know what they are going to get out of an issue. They don’t know if there is fine print somewhere, or if someone is pushing an issue for ulterior motives.
A lot of times, they don’t understand issues. They find them confusing. They see loopholes. Or they fear the loopholes they don’t see.
But people understand other people, and they will follow other people. They want to do the things people they have come to count on advise them to do.
That’s why I think it makes sense that people get more excited about elections (which may or may not have some sort of direct payoff to people down the road) than they do in issue campaigns (which often have very clear payoffs to certain communities, if they succeed). Elections are for candidates and candidates are people and that just works in better with folks at a gut level.
People make more sense to other people than issues. That’s why the average person who may or may not get involved in politics is more likely to contribute some time to a campaign effort than to issue activism.
It may not be ideal, but it does correspond with human nature. As Organizers, we are interested in dealing with people as they are, not as we wish they were or – worse yet – as we believe they ought to be.
Black Democrats convened in Detroit this weekend to talk about Black voter turnout and Black candidates. It’s great that so many Black people are running, but my favorite line was the part about advancing the Democratic vision for America.
What vision?
Voters aren’t irrational. They often don’t vote because they say it doesn’t do any good. Politicians and activists decry this stance, saying that if you don’t vote you can’t complain. They should listen, though. Voters realize that there is no real, credible alternative to the GOP, which has a very clear vision for itself. Why invest the time and energy into voting when you’ve got nothing to vote for?
The article never articulates any sort of vision, but it does end breathlessly excited about the prospect of some very powerful Black legislators gaining a lot of power for the Black Caucus if the Democrats retake the House.
Bully for them, but what are they going to do with that power? Do they know?
Today’s Chicago Tribune is saying that economics is an election issue, once again. I haven’t heard a candidate willing to address the real problem, though. It’s diminishing buying power among working people. Our economic indicators have failed to keep up with the times, because once upon a time expanding economies realized expanding wages and expanding buying power.
Now wages are flat and buying power is dropping.
It’s going to take a willingness to go after the very rich. It’s their fault. They’ve managed to roll back laws from the first President Roosevelt such that the Trusts are back and the richer are getting better and better at accumulating wealth.
Wealth is finite. Anywhere it accumulates means someone else is getting less. The poor obviously are not doing better, but now the midde class is suffering too.
The problem is, how do you organize them? With people working more and more in order to keep up or hold onto their job, how do they find time to organize and vote meaningfully?
The Unions are trying a few different approaches, all of which are laudable (America Votes, Working America, Communities United), but I don’t think anyone has hit quite the right proverbial lick on the guitar of civic action just yet.
