3

REGISTER

Registration—can voter registration really bend the curve toward victory, or is it just nibbling around the edges? Let me tell you one quick story about the campaign volunteers in one state whose voter registration work altered the national campaign strategy. The state is Florida, where both early public polling and our own surveys months before Election Day suggested that the Sunshine State was out of reach for Barack Obama in 2008.

Wrong.

He won with 51 percent of the November tally. Nevertheless, four years later, in the run-up to the election, Florida was considered again out of reach by many, including some in our own campaign. In fact, it was looking worse than had been predicted in 2008. In mid-October, some news organizations even declared the state out of reach for the president; Romney would win. These organizations therefore declared they would stop wasting their money on polling.

At the campaign HQ in Chicago and the White House in Washington, we once again had to decide whether to tilt at windmills (if you listened to the political chatter). But we started focusing on a different interpretation. Florida had a really fluid population (and still does), with people moving in and out all the time, large numbers of young voters crossing the eighteen-year-old threshold every year, and a large number of unregistered minority voters who were now eligible to vote. All in all, there was a huge target population of potential supporters, invisible (and thus uncounted) to the pollsters. We thought that if we could dive into this “target pool” with enough “human capital”—volunteers—to get enough registered we could adjust the electorate in our favor—winning the game we wanted to play, not the other way around.

The brilliant number crunchers in Chicago and their very cool software modeled the likely Florida outcome after being given different registration numbers. Good news: if we could register more than 250,000 from the favorable Obama cohorts, we could win in a squeaker, and in our winner-take-all system, 49.9 percent is worth squat, but 50.1 percent is as good as a landslide.

We knew we had an incredibly large and passionate grassroots volunteer base in the Sunshine State, and they didn’t balk at the numbers. They believed they could register that many people. They were adamant, and the candidate was tempted, but as an extremely logical guy, he wanted to make sure we were making a sound decision before we poured resources, energy, and his time into Florida. Now remember, he had led an extremely successful voter registration effort in Illinois in 1992 (the first Bill Clinton election) called Project Vote. He knew what was possible when a large number of unregistered or improperly registered voters are engaged by sufficient human and financial resources to get them properly on the voting rolls. Magic, that’s what.

Most candidates would have written off Florida as a lost cause in 2012, and they would indeed have lost the state. But with Obama’s experience in community organizing, looking at the election and the electorate in a fundamentally different way than the political class was accustomed to, he believed Florida was possible. When the question was put to him, he didn’t blink, “We won it once, we can win it again.”

Another factor, perhaps: Obama is extremely competitive, and only two Democratic presidents (Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt) have won Florida twice. He relished the opportunity to join them, especially because most of the political peanut gallery said it couldn’t be done.

It could be done. Tens of thousands of volunteers worked their asses off for almost a year of seven-day weeks and registered a ton of new voters. We entered the stretch drive of the election with more than 130,000 more Democrats than Republicans.

Air Force One was on the ground nonstop in Florida at the end—as we approached Election day, you could see the momentum on the ground, and Obama became confident it would be in his column again based on his “feel” of what he was seeing. It’s hard to describe, but a winning campaign with momentum at the end has a distinct, awesome feel.

We won with 50.01 percent of the vote, a 75,000-vote differential. Try to tell me the registration drive was not the difference.

So yes, registration matters. In our country, it is the necessary gateway to voting, which is the necessary gateway to winning, which is the necessary gateway to the change we seek. I agree it’s a tragedy that we don’t have automatic voter registration like Sweden has for eligible people, or even mandatory voting, like Australia has.

I understand that the battle to extend voting rights freely to all citizens, of all colors, religions, genders, and so forth, has been one of our challenges for centuries. It’s under relentless renewed attack right now by the GOP. But I’m also a rigorously pragmatic guy when it comes to winning elections. No whining about the electoral college and no whining about the voter registration laws. Let’s change them when we can, but we have to win in 2020 under the weight of them right now.

You always want to play the game on the most favorable possible field, that is, the largest number of possible supporters. In political campaigns, there are only two ways to grow any candidate’s numbers. One is convincing swing voters of the rightness of your cause. They’re going to vote, and maybe they’ll vote for you. The other is registering new voters who you think, based on a variety of data and demographic factors, will support your candidate or party. These folks aren’t sure they’re going to vote, but if they do, it will be for you.

Assuming you have a halfway decent candidate—and the Democrats will have a better candidate than that in 2020—I’m convinced that getting these might-vote people to the polls is actually the easiest path forward. Not that it’s easy. It’s hard, but persuading fence-sitters is even harder, in my opinion and experience.

Can we register every conceivable supporter, especially in battleground states, for the Democratic nominee? Of course not. But while perfection is impossible to achieve, that needs to be the goal, and first things first with the people who might vote: make sure they are properly registered and understand the rules of participation.

Consider this scenario. Let’s say over the course of a sixty-day period, five thousand volunteers in Michigan were each responsible for just four new registrations. That’s twenty thousand new Michigan voters, which is double the margin of votes by which Hillary Clinton lost Michigan last time. Each volunteer’s five people might have turned the tide in 2016. That’s how I ruefully look at it. Make sure your five are registered for 2020.

History has taught the Republicans some dangerous lessons they are trying to weaponize against Democrats and our democracy. The smaller the pie, the bigger their meal.

Their avowed goal is to make it as hard as possible to vote. Automatic voter registration in the blue states is awesome, but in the red states the Great Purge continues (see Georgia, 2018). Their strategies are infuriating and indefensible, but we have to fight our way through the land mines they are laying. The long-term solution is to maximize election reforms and protections in blue states and win back control in more red states. Then we can stop all these insidious efforts to make it harder to vote and actually change things to make it easier to vote. But in the meantime, we have an election we must win this year.

The potential voters are there, but all the money, all the data, all the grandiose ideas about what’s possible as it relates to registration doesn’t matter a whit without having the volunteer horsepower to get it done. Let’s concentrate all our energy on creating a volunteer army of enough size, skill, and fortitude to reach the numbers we need. If you don’t raise your hand to help, we’re trapped in the world and the electorate as it is today—the one that produced President Trump.

So let’s get to fashioning a new electorate, the best one possible.

First make sure you yourself are registered. Yeah, I know. You have that covered. But check. Go to a site like votesaveamerica.com to make sure all is proper, correct, and ready for 2020. If you have moved, inter- or intrastate, and have not changed your registration, do it right now! If you are a college student and a nonresident in a battleground state like Florida, Wisconsin, or Pennsylvania, register in that state.

This is your right, and you are spending most of your days there. You’re sure your precinct voting location hasn’t moved in twenty years? Confirm, please. Legion are the stories of veteran voters thrown for a loop on Election Day when it’s no longer there. Most voters probably recover and vote a provisional ballot that gets counted later, but what if it’s six thirty, the polls close at seven o’clock, and people throw up their hands? It happens.

Now what about your friends? I’m sure you think that everyone you know is registered and knows where to go, and you therefore want permission to skip this section.

Permission denied. I guarantee you’re wrong. Somebody isn’t correctly registered. Perhaps you can forget to check in with Uncle John if you are pretty sure that if he votes at all, he would pull the lever for Trump. Otherwise, make a comprehensive list of friends, family, neighbors, colleagues—especially if they’ve moved recently—and triple check that they are registered, and at the right address.

Posting your own confirmed status on Facebook is fine, and it may remind people to check theirs, but take the time to talk with them directly, whether it’s the new person on your floor or your old gym friend. Some may roll their eyes or get annoyed at your obsessiveness, but if you are the reason just one or two people do register or reregister—well, it’s just incredibly important. Feel free to be a pest.

But an educated pest. When someone in your immediate crowd has a question, be ready with the answer or at the least, be a source that can provide the answer. Take a few minutes to know the rules where you live. Where do you find these rules? Online, with voting-resource sites like brennancenter.org or log on to your local elections department or state Democratic Party websites.

Throughout the country, the registration laws are a patchwork, driven by state laws and practices. Fifteen states and the District of Columbia have now established automatic voter registration, though it’s via the DMV, so all the potential voters without a driver’s license are not automatically registered.

At least thirty-eight states have online registration. A few clicks and you’re registered. More and more states are allowing seventeen-year-olds to preregister. They will be registered automatically when they turn eighteen. Twenty-one states, including Wisconsin—Wisconsin!—have same-day voter registration, meaning you can register and vote on Election Day. To be superefficient, though, I would encourage you to get registered earlier. Some jurisdictions allow you to become a permanent absentee or mail-in voter at the time you register to vote.

If it all sounds complicated when you look across state lines, it is. One simple standard would be awesome. But you only have to worry about your state. So that’s simple.

Now it’s time to extend your reach and up your game! Once you’ve confirmed everyone in your family and social circle and softball team and pottery class is registered, it’s time to consider a wider impact. And I have great news. There are a lot of different ways to bring in voters eligible to depose Trump, so you may want to join existing groups or efforts.

Your local Democratic Party, community groups, national groups like the NAACP, Indivisible, and NextGen will be deep into registration efforts. Check sites like mobilizeamerica.io for local groups looking for volunteer help to register voters. They’ll put you to work. You’ll probably go through a short training session or be assigned a seasoned registrar to work with the first time, depending on the state. At any given time, they may be running a campaign at a block party, a shopping mall or local festival. You might be asked to sit in a booth at an event and help registrants with the forms. You might even be asked to walk around a neighborhood, canvassing, hitting doors of the unregistered.

Or bite the bullet and strike out on your own, perhaps with some friends. Set up a table at popular local events, or a private party. And don’t worry about whether you will get traffic. You set up a card table with a sign that says, “Want to Beat Trump?” and people will stop. Oh, they will most definitely stop. But there’s a lot more to it than that. You’re taking on a big responsibility, and you have to see it through. You may need permission first, so contact the site where you want to set up shop.

Be prepared with paperwork—you need voter registration forms, obtained from—well, you have to know where. Know all the rules in your state, and make sure it’s a state that allows you even to work as an agent helping people fill out forms on the spot and delivering them to local election officials. If you can’t be an agent, simply have forms available for people to complete and turn in themselves, and have cards ready to hand out telling them where to send or turn in the forms. Maybe you want to spring for prestamped preaddressed envelopes. Also have a laptop available with internet or a smartphone so that people can check their registration status, sign up to register on the spot, and check the current location of their polling places.

Obviously, if you’re working for an organization, those good people will probably gather the registration forms and file them for you. They’ll provide other support. But however you proceed, I can’t say it too often: never doubt how your individual effort can make a profound difference. Even more so if it gets others to act. Always be ready with information for people who stop by and want to volunteer to defeat our racist president.

Which leads into. . . .

Storytelling. As encouraged at length in the preceding chapter, amplify all that you are doing. Changing your registration because you moved? Take a picture and post it on Instagram. Going door-to-door registering voters? Do a quick Facebook live between doors, especially after you’ve registered someone, capturing how the experience makes you feel. Working a community event? Capture through picture, video, or word the experience and link to how people can join you. Is there a neighborhood newsletter or block organization that might cover your efforts?

Is there a local TV station that needs content, such as you talking to students at the local high school? In the fractured media and information environment, you simply never know when you will reach an important target voter or potential volunteer, or when your simple tweet will get retweeted by someone with ten times your followers. That’s the upside of our hypernetworked social media world—use it!

If enough of you are doing your own individual storytelling about the import, means, and activities to increase voter registration, the frequency and intensity will both reach people we need to register as well as motivate others to volunteer, then all of a sudden you reach the scale you need in your precinct and state and that we need in our country.

It also just feels damn good to help people participate in their democracy at a time when the white patriarchy would like to make it harder for people who don’t look and think like them simply to exercise their franchise.

Registering won’t get you to victory if our people don’t then vote. Much has rightly been written about some of the challenges the Democratic turnout operations faced in places like Detroit and Milwaukee in 2016. In 2020, our GOTV (Get out the Vote) operation has to be better. This critical issue receives a chapter of its own later, but we have to start here, at the most fundamental level: registering citizens who will vote to Dump Trump if we get them to take the first step of becoming eligible.