2018-- Getting Voters Off Their Couches Will Be A Real Trick, Trump Or No Trump

-by Tom Sullivan

Off-year mobilization is tough anytime. But while Democrats here in North Carolina still have a statewide registration edge, unaffiliated voter registration is spiking. Getting voters to turn out will be especially challenging in 2018 because there will be no national or statewide races in North Carolina. Neither U.S. Senate seat is on the ballot in 2018. Congressional races will be the top of the ticket in the state's 13 famously gerrymandered districts. Republicans hold 10 out of the 13 seats. Fair redistricting in 2021 could make the rest more competitive for Democrats. But that means winning very local state House and Senate races to which many voters pay little attention.

Winning U.S. House seats here may help Democrats in Washington, but it won't do much for us in North Carolina unless those districts overlap state House and Senate seats where Democrats can field competitive legislative candidates who might benefit from coattails.

Getting volunteers and voters off their couches statewide will be a real trick, Trump or no Trump. Democrats prone to focusing globally on national and statewide races struggle when it is time to focus granularly on smaller districts. In rural ones where many legislative seats lie, county teams can be less experienced at campaign tech. And because party focus is always on short-term wins, there are never resources for longer-term infrastructure-building.

It is a perennial complaint in progressive circles that Democrats slack sufficient infrastructure for winning independent of having rock-star candidates to draw interest, donations, and volunteers. It's true. When a Barack Obama comes along with limitless money and boisterous volunteers, Democrats are hard to beat. The problem, however, is that campaign infrastructure appears overnight and disappears just as quickly when campaigns pull up stakes. If they show up at all where you live, state and national campaign teams expect to call the shots, leave little behind except unused office supplies, and state parties (as best I can tell) focus on immediate get-out-the-vote needs only, and then primarily in cities where the largest blocks of blue votes are. In 2-4 years, we start again from scratch.

Rural counties where big campaigns don't go are left to fend for themselves with little direction except in organizing precincts and pulling walk/phone lists. You'd go blue in the face holding your breath waiting for the cavalry to arrive with additional resources. And those places are where the state House and Senate seats are that Democrats need to win to flip state legislatures across the country.

Our county has the only Democratic state representatives and state senator west of Charlotte. What has made us successful is having campaign infrastructure that persists beyond Election Day. We built a progressive team. We have a plan. We know our jobs. We train our replacements. When one leadership team ages out, the next is ready to go. Know-how isn’t lost when the old team steps aside (and we do) to make room for younger blood. That inspires confidence in both volunteers and donors. When we ask prospective candidates to run for office, they have confidence we have their backs all the way to Election Day. When volunteer vans rolled in here last fall from Nashville and Memphis the weekend ahead of the election, Tennessee vols said they'd never seen anything like it. Not the first time I've heard that.

Volunteers persist year-round here. I left on August 9th to drive to Atlanta for Netroots Nation. I stopped by our party office on the way out of town. There were several cars in the parking lot. There were maybe 10 people inside doing organizing work in two different offices.

On a Wednesday.
In the middle of the day.
In August.
In an off-year with no federal or state races here.

That says something about the vitality of our team. The sad thing is it is so rare.

We build experience with each election cycle. To win here, we don't need marching orders from national campaigns that parachute in every four years. We sit them down and tell them how we expect them to work with us to elect their candidates and ours down-ticket. Imagine if every county in every state had that permanent foundation.

So I wrote a primer for teaching under-resourced counties typically not on the cutting edge of digital tech how to build an effective field campaign. It is intended for county-level party officers, not professional campaign geeks. No theory. No targeting. No messaging. It is not a magic bullet or magic beans that become a tower overnight, just teaching people how to put their pants on one leg at a time and tie their shoelaces, in that order. This is what Howard Dean meant the 50-state strategy to do, to build infrastructure from the bottom up, not from the top down.

For The Win is the field-tested nuts-and-bolts of how local parties can organize and coordinate a months-long, countywide effort to help national, state, and local campaigns win. On a shoestring. If it's in there, we've done it here. Sixty-six conversational pages, plus free tools and simple Office templates. They don't teach this at Wellstone. Over the next 6-7 months I hope to be exporting what we know to points east in my state. I'll be issuing an update in March for 2018.

We launched the online portion of this effort at Digby's place at the end of July. Requests come mostly from red states and red areas of blue states. So far I've had over 60 requests from Democratic activists (mostly) in 27 states, including from state party officers in a couple.

Because political campaigns are not just contests of ideas. They are contests of skills.

Can I get an Amen?



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Request a copy of For The Win, my county-level election mechanics primer, at tom.bluecentury at gmail.