5
BATTLEGROUNDS
It’s a term you’ll hear me and everyone else remotely connected to any presidential campaign use over and over—battleground states. And if it already feels battle worn, it’s worn out for a reason. Blame it on the Founding Fathers and our Constitution.
To win the presidency, you have to win the vote in the electoral college. The popular vote (total votes cast throughout the nation) is interesting, but as we learned in 2016, it’s almost irrelevant in the presidential election. There are no more important considerations than mounting a campaign strong enough to win enough of individual states to get to 270 electoral college votes.
Because of this, in a presidential campaign, you can sometimes feel like you’re running super-sized governor’s races in a few states more than you are a national campaign. You know ahead of time that some states are rigidly red, and others are truest blue; you pretty much know whether you can count on them to vote your way when the electoral college meets. While you can’t ignore any of them, the real battle is fought in the rest, what we now call the purple states.
So what is the cleanest definition of a battleground state? A state whose electoral votes really are up for grabs in a particular election. In true landslide presidential elections—the last one was George H. W. Bush’s in 1988—the electoral college results are so lopsided that no states could be identified as the ones whose narrow margins of victory could have gone either way and made all the difference. The winner wins just about all of them.
There will not be an electoral landslide in 2020. The battlegrounds will be the difference, just as they were in 2016. We could think of them as the tipping points in this election. They could swing either way. They’re the states that happen to make our close divisions as a society manifest for all to see. Eke out a victory over your opponent in enough of them in 2020 and become president of the United States. Or remain as president for four more years. How they fall will decide so much of our country’s fate in the coming years and decades. It can’t get more important than this.
In 2020, there are five, maybe six for sure. That’s all. There could be more—say Texas and Georgia become targets for the Democrat, and New Hampshire and Nevada for Trump. But these won’t be the tipping-point states–their 270th electoral vote—but they would be cushions: their 300th or 330th electoral votes. Let’s say there are four to six states that won’t be tipping-point states, but one or both candidates will decide to contest.
The other thirty-eight to forty states are done deals for one candidate or the other. Some (Hawaii or Mississippi) will be blowouts—sixty to forty or even wider for one of the candidates. The popular vote breakdown in some other states (South Carolina or New Mexico) might look relatively sort of close—say, 55 to 45 percent—but the losing side has no actual chance of getting to a win number in that state. Close doesn’t count in the electoral college. You get zero electoral college votes for losing narrowly. And if you lost the college narrowly—well, as they say, close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades. Only great pain comes from coming close.
I want you to have a little historical background with which to wow your friends at your next campaign house party. The battleground map in 2020 isn’t going to change much from 2016, but the electoral map has changed immensely over the decades. It’s not static. When you look at historical electoral college results maps on sites like 270towin.com, this reality is shockingly stark. One comparison says it all: in 1976—eleven elections ago—Republican president Gerald Ford (after taking over from the deposed Richard Nixon) comfortably won states like California, Vermont, and Washington, all bright blue states today. Democratic challenger (and winner) Jimmy Carter comfortably won West Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky, all rock-solid red states today. And you can take this to the bank: the battleground map in 2064—eleven elections from now—will barely resemble ours this year. States will transition from blue to purple (that is, battleground status) to red and then back to blue. A lot of this movement will be driven by demographics. In 2018, Beto O’Rourke, running for Senate against Ted Cruz and coming pretty close, showed that it’s just a question of when, not if, Texas becomes a battleground state. So that’s good news.
If you ponder more recent elections, the role and definition of battleground states comes into sharp focus. In 2000, Al Gore lost Florida by 538 votes, 538 votes that made the difference between a war and no war in Iraq, accelerating climate change versus fighting it. In 2004, George Bush had a healthy national popular vote lead, but Kerry came within 100,000 votes of winning the presidency.
The culprit was one state, Ohio, and Kerry’s campaign hit their number—they secured the total number of votes they thought it would take to win the Buckeye State, based on sound turnout estimates. What happened? Something we should fear this time as well—the Bush campaign pulled off one of the more miraculous feats in recent elections, building an organization in Ohio strong and deep enough to find, register, and turn out conservative voters in numbers few thought were possible. Kerry’s sure-bet figures did not keep up.
With the 2000 and 2004 outcomes freshly in mind, the Obama campaigns of 2008 and 2012 were bound and determined not to allow it to come down to one state again. Because of Obama’s appeal and strength as a candidate, our passionate and motivated volunteers, and abundant financial resources, we decided to put new states in play, including some the Democrats had written off or not contested in a long time. We wanted a large number of states in play, playing more offense than defense, giving us a much higher (that is, safer) margin for error. We prepared for exceedingly close races that could come down to a vote or two per precinct, razor-thin margins of victory and defeat. We could lose many of the states we, if not many other people, considered battlegrounds and still win the presidency.
In 2008, our core battleground target list was therefore a long one: Nevada, Colorado, Montana, Missouri, Iowa, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, New Hampshire, Ohio, Indiana, Virginia, North Carolina and Florida. (And don’t forget the second congressional district of Nebraska, which joins Maine in awarding electoral college votes to the winner of individual congressional districts as well as to the statewide winning candidate.) Michigan, traditionally a battleground in this era, was conceded early by McCain, in a move that showed just how narrow McCain’s win path was becoming. They pulled out in September, and we ended up winning that traditional battleground by 15 points.
Our strategy worked. Fourteen battleground states, and we won all but two, Montana and Missouri, and even won the 2nd Congressional District of Nebraska, winning one Husker electoral college vote while losing the state.
That gave our first African American president 365 electoral votes (270 required to win). In the electoral college at least, a landslide. We won 67.8 percent of the electoral college while winning 52.9 percent of the popular vote. That’s what happens when you come close to sweeping all the battlegrounds.
By the way, I’m still royally pissed about the two that got away. I desperately wanted to color all of those states Obama blue. The battlegrounds become like children to a campaign manager, all precious in their own way, and you want them to be taken care of and come home to where they belong.
In 2012, we knew we were going to face a stiffer challenge and closer race than in 2008 due to an economy still recovering from the financial crisis four years earlier. Once again we believed we had to widen the playing field to put pressure on Mitt Romney to compete in as many theaters of political battle as possible, thus preserving a healthy margin of error for ourselves. Our core battleground list was smaller than the huge one in 2008, but still historically large: Nevada, Colorado, Iowa, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida. Michigan? In fits and starts, the Romney campaign claimed that it would contest things up there, making it a quasi battleground, I suppose, but there was little doubt in our minds (and more important, in our data) that the Wolverine State would be safely Obama blue again.
We won all of those battleground targets save for North Carolina, and yes, that outlier still rankles. President Obama secured reelection with 332 electoral votes. And there was no more important factor in that decisive victory—in both of them, when we outperformed our national popular vote margins in the battlegrounds—than our amazing volunteers who stretched what was possible for us through registration, turnout, and persuasion.
In 2016? A much different story. Trump won 306 electoral college votes on Election Night, 56.8 percent of them. While, as we all know too well, winning only 46.1 percent of the national popular vote. Which was a lower vote total than Romney received when he lost the electoral college decisively. Give this to the Trump campaign: they squeezed out every electoral college vote they could from their paltry national numbers.
Now we are near 2020’s campaign, and I can say with certainty that for us to have any chance of beating Trump in 2020, we will need even more effort from you, the volunteers, than we saw in 2008, 2012, and 2018.
There’s no time to waste moaning about everything that brought us to this crossroads. Obama demonstrated, quite recently, that we can win more than enough to tip battlegrounds over in the electoral college. The volunteers will be the key ingredient, and we will have a fight on our hands in that regard because Trump has large numbers of fiercely committed volunteers.
I’m not sure bragging that you could murder someone on Fifth Avenue without losing any votes is something to actually brag about, but to his base this is rock solid truth. I suspect Trump will come close to maxing out Republican turnout, which could be scarily high, meaning we have to match it and then some. The MAGA gang is not turning over the keys to the White House to the Democratic Party—that socialist hoard that believes everyone should have access to affordable health care—without an epic fight.
About a year before the election, as I’m writing this chapter, everyone is already focused on Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin as the three critical battlegrounds. These three were supposed to compose the “blue wall” that the Democrats could count on last time, but the wall crumbled, Hillary Clinton lost all of them, and here we are today, trapped in the rubble.
In 2020, those states will be political war zones. Add them to the twenty states plus the District of Columbia that Clinton did collect and our nominee wins with 272 electoral votes. The contest for the presidency may come down to block-by-block street fights in Detroit, Philadelphia, and Milwaukee.
However, we definitely don’t want the election to come down to a contest in only three states. That gives us a zero margin for error and takes far too much for granted about actual turnout in the so-called safe states. We win only two of those three states and we still lose. Definitely not OK.
We need to play offense elsewhere, expand the map, as the Obama campaign did in 2008, especially. Almost certainly, our nominee will target Florida. Win those 29 electoral votes (Obama did it twice, narrowly) and Trump’s odds slip to precarious levels. With Florida in the blue column, we’d only have to win one of the three core midwestern battlegrounds.
Some analysts believe Florida is already lost. Bullshit in my view. Hillary lost it by less than a percentage point, and Democrats Andrew Gillum and Bill Nelson narrowly lost their 2018 races for governor and senator, respectively. Note all the “narrowlys,” and of course Al Gore was a whisker away from winning in 2000. The battleground map does change from cycle to cycle, but one constant for almost a generation has been the Sunshine State—always a battleground and superclose at that. And let’s not forget North Carolina. The Democratic nominee has to look hard at North Carolina, a state Barack Obama narrowly won once and narrowly lost once. Although Hillary Clinton lost in the state in 2016, the state still elected a Democratic governor that same year. North Carolina offers a significant fifteen electoral votes. I hope it’s firmly in the battleground state mix.
And an exciting new core battleground entrant is likely to be Arizona, where Clinton came closer in 2016 than Obama did in either of his races. She lost the Grand Canyon State less than she lost Iowa and Ohio. The whisker Gore lost by in Florida was the whisker Kyrsten Sinema won by in a Senate race in 2018, and Democrats showed down-ballot strength throughout the state. Arizona is shifting demographically, with Latino voters becoming a more powerful force and suburban voters trending more and more Democratic. Win Arizona and its 11 electoral votes, add wins in Pennsylvania and Michigan, and our nominee can lose Wisconsin and Florida and we’ll win. That’s the math to remember.
And what a night to remember that would be, watching one Donald J. Trump deliver his concession speech on Election Night. Wouldn’t that be an amazing, amazing pleasure? What a motivation.
Or, in a fit of rage and denial, he doesn’t concede. I’ll take that too, as historically narcissistic and petty as it would be. Grace notes? Not how our current President rolls.
If the economy weakens in the year before the election, more states could easily be deemed authentic battlegrounds by the Democrat. Or once battlegrounds turn into safer Democratic territory. This happened very late in 2008, following the collapse of Lehman Bros. on Wall Street on September 15.
In 2020, Ohio and Iowa would be the most likely late-arriving battlegrounds. Both are still quasi competitive, so a weakening economy should make them full-blown competitive.
Georgia, believe it or not, may be a top target as well. It would take a herculean effort by the volunteers in the state to put together a winning coalition, but Stacey Abrams showed us the way with that narrowest of losses in her stirring gubernatorial race in 2018. The troops are waiting to charge if HQ decides to open up the Georgia front. And if it doesn’t? I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: you don’t have to wait for the campaign. Good things will come up and down the ballot.
Defensively, Democrats need to watch Minnesota carefully. Clinton won it by only 2 points, and it shares many demographic characteristics with its neighbors to the immediate east and south, Wisconsin and Iowa, which fell to Trump; it would be surprising if the Trump campaign doesn’t decide to make an all-out effort in the Land of 10,000 Lakes. They could also try to win Maine statewide (they won the northern congressional district in 2020, garnering one electoral vote), and they may decide to make a stand in New Hampshire and Nevada, if only to annoy us and drain some resources. It’s a chess match of sorts. Nobody has a bottomless war chest of resources, and decisions about where to direct time, money, and people are not made in a vacuum. If we’re pretty confident about a state, Nevada, say, in our case, but the Trump campaign decides to push hard, well, we can’t let them run completely scot-free and risk turning our steady 2-point lead into a dangerous dead heat.
In any presidential campaign, the battleground states suck up the lion’s share of the dollars—a subject I’ll return to in the following short chapter—but the most important currency in the battle for the battlegrounds is not money or campaign staff or even the candidate’s own time. It’s you and your time. I believe a successful presidential campaign is built on healthy connective tissue that runs from the candidate all the way down to the high schooler stuffing envelopes. It includes a presidential nominee who builds and inspires a talented and motivated staff; a staff in turn who recruits, inspires, and believes in strong local volunteer leaders; staff and volunteer leaders who welcome, train, listen to, and believe in volunteers; and volunteers who motivate, give strength to, and make the impossible possible for the candidate. Another virtuous circle in presidential campaign politics.
Given how close the battleground states have historically been and will definitely be again in 2020, your effort and those of your fellow committed citizens can flat out be determinative. What if in 2016 in Wisconsin the Clinton campaign had done all they could from HQ to win it and that effort was matched by a ferocious, well-supported volunteer effort? Well, I think we know. But that’s hindsight, which is worthless. We made mistakes in the Obama campaign despite our victories and no doubt our nominee in 2020 will as well.
The point is we need close to a perfect campaign to be run by the campaign professionals matched with a large-scale, effective, and intensive volunteer effort in the core battlegrounds. One won’t matter without the other.
Let’s dig into the battleground states. Some of you volunteers will be in residence while others will be pitching in from afar (which might not be very afar, maybe right across the state line).
Let’s start this discussion with those of you who do live in a battleground state (or have long desired to, in which case there’s no time like the present to finally make the move!) The first thing you want to do is let the campaign know that you exist and are interested in volunteering. You can easily do this through the candidate’s website. You raising your hand will be shared—in close to real time, I hope—with the staff and volunteer leaders who are already in place in your area. They’ll contact you. Make clear to them that you intend to be part of a winning effort. If you don’t hear back, and there’s an office address listed, just drop in. If they’re shorthanded, you might quickly get enrolled to start replying to other volunteers’ inquiries.
Be prepared to tell them what you can contribute. Think about this before you check in. What are you great at and like doing? Making posters? Cooking food for the other volunteers? Phone calling? Door knocking? Signing in people at events? Data entry? Can you help feed and house volunteers coming in from out of state? Do you drive and do you have a car? The point is we need help not doing just one thing, but a whole lot of things, by a whole lot of people to make this all work.
An important point that may not be self-evident: a campaign will make targeting and resource decisions based in part on the strength of the organization that they anticipate they can muster at both the state and precinct level. So signing up early signals to the powers that be in the campaign that they should deploy resources to your community. This is what you want, because you want to win.
If your time is limited or your availability fluctuates week to week, say so. Every hour counts, every task is vital—housing other volunteers, driving them around, driving voters to polls, the list is endless, really. And be realistic in your appraisal of your availability. Do all you can, but don’t overpromise. It’s not as if, after volunteering, you will magically have fewer work and family obligations.
Do all that you can, but be realistic and honest about how much of all that there can be.
In an election of this magnitude, when the only way we will win is with enough volunteer activity in certain states, many of us throughout the country—and the world—will be counting on you. Don’t add to that pressure by signing up or signaling you can do more than you can.
Speaking of pressure, the pressure on any presidential candidate is enormous. The pressures on the Democratic nominee in 2020 to rid us of the scourge of Trump? The weight the candidate will feel, the obligation, the unrelenting pressure—I really don’t believe the rest of us can properly imagine it.
Aside from the confidence you can provide those of us outside the battlegrounds that you are taking care of business, you should know you are providing comfort to our nominee, making her or him perform better and become a stronger candidate. I want to buttress this important point with a couple of stories from the 2012 reelection campaign.
After President Obama’s horrid first debate that year with Romney in Colorado—his first time in the ring with that opponent—after he had finally and totally accepted the scale of our defeat, his major observation to me in the Oval Office a couple of days after the debate was his disappointment in letting all of his grassroots supporters down. This was what he felt worst about. I don’t remember his exact words, but in essence he said, “Everyone’s out there working their hearts out, and now I’ve made it harder for them. I’m sure I’ve disappointed them as well. I care more about not doing that again even more than winning.”
Now, that sounds like an implausible line, written by Aaron Sorkin for President Bartlet in The West Wing. But it’s true and not a unique attitude for the man. Time after time, when we hit rocky shoals during those nine years, his biggest concern was how his volunteers would react. They really were his North Stars, the most important people in his political universe, and I think they understood this. It was an incredibly powerful connection, which was brought home to me in even starker relief a few days after the Oval Office conversation. We had decamped to the Homestead, a resort in central Virginia, to hold a three-day debate camp to prep for the second debate, to be held at Hofstra on Long Island.
Candidate Obama was much more dialed in this time, as were we all, hoping that the first debate had been nothing more than a probationary moment, if a dangerous one. The major impact was probably an acceleration of the movement back to Romney by voters who were always going to end up there by Election Day, but we couldn’t afford two lemons in a row.
At debate prep camp, candidates may take a break and go out and hold one event nearby in order to generate some press and social media activity and not be “dark” (no media coverage) for three full days. We suggested, and Obama readily agreed, that our one outing outside the camp’s confines would be to the campaign office near Williamsburg, Virginia, to meet with local volunteers and thank them for all they were doing.
While we felt pretty confident about keeping Virginia in our column, Romney was mounting a fierce challenge. It was going to be relatively close. We could not be too overconfident. After all, in 2008, Obama had been the first Democrat since LBJ to win the state.
A necessary quick flashback: for the first debate, the camp was held outside Las Vegas. We Obama staffers had not put much of a premium on these excursions in 2008, and neither had Obama. Four years later in Nevada, however, he kept pushing us to come up with ideas for cool things to do. In the end we toured Hoover Dam, which is an awesome place and was an awesome experience for him and those who went, generating some great photos. He was like a teenager wanting to get out of the house and clearly had a grand time for those hours, a much grander time than while actually prepping, with all of us staffers nitpicking his lame prep work with our own lame advice. It’s no surprise that his parting words to David Axelrod and me before he jumped on stage for the first debate, was a desultory “Let’s get this over with.”
Like going to the dentist for a filling, and it showed.
Now, back to the local headquarters in eastern Virginia during the second debate prep camp.
Obama brought pizza, laughed, hugged, listened, made some phone calls himself to voters, thanked and, I’m sure, motivated the couple dozen volunteers on hand whose work, multiplied throughout the fifty states, was going to determine whether he would be a one- or two-term president.
I know for sure these local volunteers in Virginia motivated the president because when he got back to the resort and we were getting ready for that night’s mock debate—a full ninety-minute sparring session with John Kerry, who had graciously agreed to inhabit and play the role of Mitt Romney, the Republican challenger in 2012—our man was full of clarity and purpose. He also said to me, “I was kind of nervous going to the office, because I just feel like I let them all down. But to a person, they said they had my back and they’d been working harder since the first debate. I told them I wouldn’t let them down in the second debate. They all said, ‘You better not!’”
You may not have a similar face-to-face with our nominee, though if you live in a battleground state, there is a fair chance you will meet the boss. But understand that it’s not just the registration numbers you are putting up that matter. It’s your spirit and commitment that are the real wind beneath the candidate’s wings.
Obama went on to convincingly win the second debate, even more so the third debate, then he decisively won on election night and earned the right to continue steering our national ship in a progressive direction. I am convinced that the trip to the local campaign office played no small part in our getting off the mat and turning the corner after the first debate. Those volunteers motivated him, inspired him, and he had them in mind when he took that debate stage in New York and beyond. And, by the way, we carried Virginia. Again.
If you live in a battleground state, you have a front row seat to history. But why not leave the stands, jump on the field, and help make that history? If your state is called for Trump and lights up red on the big TV maps, the one thing I’m sure you don’t want to feel is that there was more you could have done.
One decision to make right now, as you game out the level and intensity of your involvement, is whether you have the time and are willing to develop the skills to play the critical role of neighborhood leader or precinct captain. Accepting this responsibility means you will meet some awesome people, all bound together by a common cause, convinced that our country can be better, must be better, and good people of all kinds need to make it so.
Can one election really signify all that? You tell me. Tell me how you will feel on election night if that childlike sociopath in the White House is empowered to give another victory speech, his hatred and misogyny and racism ratified for another four years, or if his second inaugural address infects your phones and computers, your kids, our country and our world, and promises four more years of his bile and stupidity.
Now contrast that with how you will feel if instead you celebrate as a thoughtful, mature adult Democrat lays out a new program to help working people of all races and genders, and who promises to appoint progressives to the judiciary for eight years, who returns the nation to an aggressive stance combating climate change. I’m sure you want to do something to make this happen. Imagine you are not just doing this but leading it, and dozens of other volunteers in your neighborhood.
Reflecting on the Obama years, I believe we were successful in part because for those years the members of our team contributed not just the best work of our lives but were also our best selves. There is no professional feeling like that in the world, and it can be oh so fleeting. For five or six months this year, as a leader you have the opportunity to do your own best work and know that it counts, selflessly going to work with like-minded people to build a better future for your family and all our families.
At least twenty hours a week will be necessary for fulfilling your leadership obligations, so make sure you can make that work. If you can make it fit with all your other obligations, seize the moment. Raise your hand to be a local team leader. You’ll work in partnership with the local field organizer from the candidate’s national campaign and a few other leaders, covering a territory that could be large geographically or tiny, depending if it’s rural or urban, and comprises a few hundred people, give or take, depending on the actual precinct numbers.
That staffer and you—from similar or if you’re fortunate, very dissimilar backgrounds—will have each other’s backs as you make history together and, quite likely, form a lifetime bond.
Let’s get hypothetically specific. You live in Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, population fourteen thousand, and our nominee’s campaign has crunched the numbers and decided it needs 140 votes out of your precinct to add to the 1.6 million total votes they’ve predicted they need in order to win the Badger State.
This win number, as it is called, will reflect registration goals, as we have seen, and be based on the demographic composition of your precinct. How many new registered voters are required? (The registration “universe,” in campaign lingo.) How many truly persuadable voters do you need to convert? (The persuasion universe.) Who are the sporadic voters in your precinct who will vote for the Democratic candidate if they vote at all? (The turnout universe.)
If you know Chippewa Falls well, you might even be able to help supply some of that data. If not, you’ll be more reliant on the campaign. Either way, this is how, in rough-and-ready terms, national campaigns work at the local level. This “universe” jargon may not be all that clear at first glance, but it gets superclear and real when applied to the precinct level. You need to register thirty new voters, work a persuasion universe of fifty, and cajole a universe of forty low-propensity voters to cast their ballots. Hey, it suddenly seems doable! You can deliver these votes.
You’ll need help—and the help is all around you. You will start with names the campaign has from people in your precinct who have already signaled they want to help in the general election. You’ll have volunteer leaders and volunteers from the nominee’s campaign in the Wisconsin primary. You could well be one of them.
The local Democratic Party will have a list of reliable volunteers. Organizations like NextGen, SwingLeft, and your local union will also have names of people who have worked previously in local efforts and/or signaled their desire to get involved in the general election. The candidate’s campaign will supply contact info on people in the Chippewa Falls precinct who have donated but not volunteered. These are hot leads, and it is up to you or your designated volunteer recruiter to call, text, or email the request that they sign up for volunteer shifts. And/or what other tasks would they like to take on? Do they like to work in groups or alone with their computers? Everyone’s got a role to play.
And of course, you’ll reach out to your network—all the people you’ve been pestering to register, and your own social network—and build your own core volunteer cadre to supplement the campaign’s lists, and work out from there.
It will be the campaign’s responsibility, through your field organizer, to ensure that you and your crew have the facts and materials you need—most important, correct and actionable names in the registration and turnout and persuasion universes. What’s “actionable” in this context? Real names of real people with real contact info and real data on where they stand in the election.
All this then becomes data that needs to be updated in real time as you gather new information: which issues most concern these specific voters; if new voters, will they perhaps need follow-up to support their commitment to turn out, and will they require help getting to the polls? Keeping those records up-to-date is a key job for a volunteer with basic computer skills.
The office should also supply brochures, window posters, yard signs, door hangers, e-cards for Instagram, whatever else you need to get the job done. If you think another tactic would work with a certain voter but you don’t have what you need, ask for it. If they don’t have it, find or make it yourself.
Your success—and the joy and satisfaction you get from leadership—will come in part from hitting your numbers in Chippewa Falls, which helps our nominee win Wisconsin, which in turn helps defeat Trump and wins the presidency. But I promise that you will also derive equal joy and satisfaction from the people you work with and meet—the human side of the effort.
You will become the face of the campaign in Chippewa Falls, even more so than the candidate. For this reason alone, you need to inspire people. Listen to them. Treat them well. Laugh with them. Understand that no two of us are alike, no two volunteers, no two voters. People may sign up to volunteer in the beginning because they are inspired by our candidate, and the stakes in this election are so high. But they will likely keep coming back, and perhaps working even harder than they imagined—because of you.
Now what about the 90 percent of you—give or take—who don’t live in a battleground state? You will have a deep impact nonetheless, in large measure thanks to your social media networks, which don’t recognize state lines and will penetrate deep into every state (the subject of chapter 2). The positive content you share on your social media platforms, and the pushback against the lies about immigration and health care you post, will penetrate deep into every state, including the battlegrounds, reaching swing voters and your compadres whom you have now persuaded to register and vote and have also armed sufficiently to become their own content distributors. You know the drill—but it’s not a drill. It’s the real world.
So if you live in Wheeling, West Virginia, or Fresno, California, or any of the other states that are probably settled affairs in the electoral college, you should feel that you are playing a helpful and constructive role in the states that are in play. Beyond the winning proposition that is social media, your financial contributions can fuel the campaigns in Wisconsin and Florida (more on that one shortly). And there are of course direct ways to engage in battleground state activity from beyond that state line.
Your ability to travel to battlegrounds to help out in the closing months and weeks will be dependent on a lot of factors. Do you live close enough to drive or hop on a bus that our nominee’s campaign or a progressive organization is chartering to head across state lines? Can you find the time, given work and family schedules? If you have kids, can you arrange for child care or can you take them with you? It’s a great experience for kids, especially if they are into the election. And when you are knocking on doors, you’ll get a more interested and friendly reception if you are doing so with your ten- or twelve-year-old at your side.
If you live far enough away that you need to fly or take the train, can you afford the ticket or have the loyalty program points? What about lodging? Do you have friends or family in the area whom you can stay with? I hope that our nominee sets up a program that identifies supporters in battleground states who are willing to have out-of-state volunteers stay with them, defraying the need to pay for a hotel room. Of course this can also be a great way to make a new connection and share stories and motivations about your activism and the election. Only you can answer those questions, but I would suggest that if you have an interest in being in the middle of the action, begin working through those questions now and making a plan to make it work.
Out-of-state volunteers have a storied history in presidential politics. In 1960, John F. Kennedy’s large family and supporters from Massachusetts fanned out to key primary states and then the battlegrounds in the general election, vouching for his character and leadership and answering voters’ questions directly about their concerns with his age and Catholicism.
Bill Clinton famously employed the “Arkansas Travelers,” a potent group of friends, family, and supporters to make the case for his candidacy in the primary states and general election, engaging in door-to-door and phone activity, generating helpful local press coverage in those key media markets about why folks from Arkansas felt so strongly about Clinton’s candidacy that they would travel to New Hampshire and Ohio to spread the word.
George W. Bush had large contingents from the big state of Texas making the case for him in his historically close win over Al Gore in 2000, and helping to drive up Republican turnout in his tough reelection fight four years later.
In 2008, the Obama campaign used the power of the internet, on full display in presidential politics for the first time, to “scale” a focused effort highlighting the need for supporters to travel to battleground states, recruit volunteers, and/or do what they (or we) could to help with logistics and cost. Buses from the Bay Area of northern California rolled east to Reno, Nevada. Buses from Birmingham, Alabama, traveled down to northern Florida. We tried our best to make sure that when these amazing volunteers who traveled hundreds if not thousands of miles from home to Nevada or Florida or Virginia or Colorado, they were welcomed with open arms.
Maybe not wined and dined, exactly, but well taken care of. They were expected, and the work they were asked to do was well-organized, smart, and meaningful. We felt so strongly about the value these long-haul travelers could provide our campaign that we pushed all those on our email list to consider signing up to travel. Tens of thousands did, some for a day, some for a month. It was amazing to watch the commitment and energy these amazing citizens brought to the effort.
One natural question you may have: How useful is it to have some stranger from Los Angeles engaging voters in exurban Wisconsin? Well, of course no two voters are exactly alike, and neither are two volunteers, so it’s difficult to accurately predict how each conversation is going to go, but it can be quite effective with those Democratic voters who may not vote and others heavily negative on Trump who are considering the third-party option.
Let’s say you and a friend have driven to Philadelphia from Syracuse, New York. You let the campaign know through an online sign-up form that you will be there for the third weekend in October. You are asked to show up at the campaign office on the north side of Philadelphia at ten a.m. on Saturday. You arrive on time and find yourselves in the company of dozens of other volunteers, both local and those from out of state.
The person in charge—maybe from the campaign, maybe a volunteer leader—explains that the focus for that day is to reach out by door and by phone to a universe of possible voters who the campaign believes are no risk to vote Trump, but a huge risk not to vote at all.
Maybe they’ve told a campaign volunteer directly that they’re unsure about voting; or the campaign has not been able to confirm that they have pledged to vote; or they have registered for the first time so we have no voting history for them; or they are registered but have not voted in the last couple of elections; or they may have moved and therefore have a new polling location but probably don’t know where it is.
You and your friend listen to the boss’s introductory explanatory remarks and learn that you will be given a list of voters and a map. These could be downloaded on your phone with a walking route laid out just for you. Just follow the blue line. Here’s hoping the best tech is fully operational during this cycle.
Let’s say there are twenty voters. The campaign believes these are all voters who support our candidate, but you and your friend have to make sure they materialize in actual votes.
It’s time to head out.
A good percentage of the doors you knock on will remain unopened. Of course it is a just a couple of weeks before a historically important election and almost everyone will know what you’re up to and why you’re ringing the doorbell.
But maybe they’re not home, don’t hear the door, pay no attention to politics, hate politics, aren’t going to open the door for a couple of strangers if this visit is not preceded by a text from someone they know.
But eight people do open their doors. Eight out of twenty is a good haul. Through these conversations, you’ll get a variety of critical data and have important conversations that you’ll report on. The campaign will take in the new data, and take appropriate action to follow up.
Let’s say four of the voters say they are definitely planning on voting. At your urging, they share their plan for when they will vote, where, and how they will get to the polls. Great. You can report on them as four votes that the campaign can believe are now in the bank.
Two of the voters are not sure if they are going to vote. The first voter says something like, “I hate Trump. But getting somebody new in there won’t really change things. I’m busy and really don’t have time for politicians. I doubt I’ll vote.”
This is your moment! You may decide to ask this potentially crucial voter what issues matter most, then explain our party’s position on those issues, whether it’s taxes or border security or anything else. You’re prepared. You stress the differences between our candidate and Trump. You may say something as simple as, “If you hate Trump, do you really want to live through another four years of him?”
More quickly than you might believe in the beginning, you’ll get a feeling for these conversations with your fellow citizens. You’ll know whether it’s best to go on the offense or the defense, or maybe someone just wants to talk about what’s going on in their lives, about how this election will affect it. And you’re prepared to talk with them for as long as it takes—this could be the most important conversation of your outing.
Let’s assume that your engagement—whether on offense or defense—has an impact and this guy says, “I guess you’re right. I’ll do my best to vote. But I can’t remember where I go to do it.”
Pennsylvania has not enabled widespread early voting options, so most voters will need to show up at the polling place on Election Day. Boom! You just happen to have the polling location for this precinct right there in the canvassing app on your phone and written on your clipboard.
“You vote at George Washington Carver High School, down on W. Norris Street. Polls are open from 7 a.m. to 8 p.m.”
“Thanks. I went there. You from around here, by the way? We just all call it Carver.”
“Nope. I’m from Syracuse, upstate New York. Because New York is definitely going to vote for (ID our candidate, of course), I wanted to help somewhere where it’s a jump ball. Pennsylvania is the main reason Trump is president. He won it last time. We have to make sure he doesn’t win it again. I’ll be thinking of you up in Syracuse on Election Day, hoping you can make it to the polls.”
And of course you will leave this voter with a card with the polling location. That exchange has a very good chance of sticking. On Election Day maybe it’s raining, traffic is bad coming home from work, this voter needs to run an unexpected errand for a family member, so it will not be our candidate who gets him to the polls. It will be you. He told that woman from—where was it? Syracuse—that he would vote, and he will.
Now let’s say the other unsure voter conversation follows about the same script, though maybe you need to help her check if she reregistered after a job move. And you need to talk her through her disappointment after Clinton lost in 2016. That loss produced a lot of discouraged attitudes, and for some a sense that they don’t recognize the country anymore, which means Trump will win again. You get her to a good place. She’s voting.
The last two of the eight voters who do answer the door that Saturday afternoon are 100 percent sure they are voting, new information that you will capture and feed into the campaign’s data blender. But you learn an even more important piece of information: both of these individuals are leaning toward a third-party candidate. The first thinks both major parties are corrupt, and she wants to send a message. The second’s favorite candidate in the primaries lost, and now he can’t get excited by our candidate—he disdains Trump, would never vote for him, but he’s not excited by the Democrat.
It’s your moment again! In both cases. Listen carefully to what these two critical Pennsylvania voters are saying, then use your heart and your head to determine the best approach. The one common denominator is they’re not voting for Donald Trump. You may share some of your own concerns about our nominee as you learn more about their concerns. Such sharing leads to a more genuine and therefore effective conversation. Your core message to each of them: You don’t like Trump, and there’s only one way to get rid of him. Vote for the opposing major party candidate. Simple as that.
Let’s say you have some success with voter number one. She says she’ll think hard about swallowing her distaste for both major parties and vote for our nominee. The second voter remains steadfast in his refusal to vote for the Democratic candidate despite participating in the Democratic primary.
Both of these really important data points will now ascend into the cloud, and the campaign will deploy resources—advertising on the internet or through the mail and perhaps one or more person-to-person contacts with another volunteer, hoping to lock in voter number one and see if anything else can be done to unlock voter number two.
At the end of your shift, you can look back and count two voters who were disinclined to vote but now report they will. One leaning third-party voter may well be back in our column. Three voters in the whole big state of Pennsylvania in this whole big country of ours. How can that be worth the trip to Philadelphia from Syracuse?
Back to some simple math. Let’s say on that Saturday 5,000 other canvassing volunteers in Pennsylvania recorded similar outcomes—an average of three voters in which our campaign could be more confident. That’s 15,000 total. And the same results are reported on Sunday. We’re at 30,000 for a weekend. And there are five weekends in October leading into 2020. That’s a total of 150,000 voters we now feel more confident will be casting ballots to award Pennsylvania’s must-win 18 electoral votes to our nominee.
Now, not all of these voters will follow through, and some were likely going to vote the right way anyway. But that universe of 150,000 voters is more than three times the margin Clinton lost Pennsylvania by in 2016. So yes, your trip from Syracuse was worth it. It was most definitely worth it.
If you believe fervently in beating Trump, and you have the time and means to travel to a battleground state, shame on you if you don’t. That’s a strong statement but a true one. You need to get fully into the fight.
On the other hand, you don’t have to leave Syracuse to have a meaningful impact on the outcome of the election in the core battlegrounds.
Phone banking and texting into the same cohorts of voters in Philadelphia can result in acquiring the same data and intelligence, but locking in supporters of our nominee, that happens at the front doors.
Now, I’ll be honest. There’s no substitute for a person-to-person contact. I’d choose that over phone or text anytime. But it’s certainly an important additive ingredient, and for sure there are voters who won’t answer the door (or it’s hard to get into their building). Digital contact, or even old-fashioned snail mail, is the only way to reach them.
You can help with the long-distance contacts from nonbattleground states in two ways.
Directly or in coordination with the DNC, our nominee will probably rent office space throughout the country for this very purpose: providing supporters who want to make a difference in the battlegrounds directly a place to gather to do so. The big cities will definitely have designated banks. Just Google “Nominee phone banking Seattle” or “Nominee campaign office Los Angeles” or go to our nominee’s website, which should have an easy-to-navigate page for finding the local office nearest you. Farther afield, even a small local campaign office or the local headquarters of the Democratic Party will likely be set up with a phone bank. If that system is organized properly, you should be able to work with the same fresh lists of target names, based on real-time data, that are used for door-to-door canvassing.
The second option is to make the calls from your home using a list from the campaign, or attend or host a phone-banking get-together, with everyone on hand dialing into the same state, having a shared experience and a shared impact. Host one yourself. You know I think that’s a great idea.
Don’t get discouraged by hang-ups! Yes, you are telemarketing, but for a worthy cause, remember. You’ll experience the same low-contact percentage of those canvassing on the streets—you’ll find people not answering, whether cell or landline; not wanting to talk, saying they are busy; or being downright rude—but you will get through to some voters, and in every shift you work you will connect with a few people, and there will be enough others like you reaching out to target voters, day after day, month after month to yield a massive, positive, cumulative impact.
On the phone, you will have many of the same conversations you would have had at the front door. You will need to listen, most of all, but don’t miss any opportunity to commune with these voters, try to gently persuade, impart important information about the voting process in the voters’ state and precinct, whether this be early voting details in Florida, same-day voter registration in Wisconsin, or polling location details in Pennsylvania.
The campaign should also have some nonphone ways to help out in the battleground states. You may be given the option to write postcards to certain segments of voters, maybe new registrants in Detroit, congratulating them on becoming a first-time voter and assuring them how important their vote is to your family in Greenville, South Carolina.
You could be writing notes to voters in Miami who the campaign is convinced would support our nominee if only they’ll actually turn out. You could write a very personal message about what this election means to you and your family, why you think their one vote in Florida could make all the difference. Florida should be the easiest venue for making this argument convincingly. I hate to sound like a broken record (if you remember vinyl) but if just 539 more Floridians had voted for Al Gore in Florida in 2000 . . .
I hope the campaign also adopts a program to allow supporters throughout the country to send notes to the precinct captains and neighborhood team leaders in battleground states, thanking them for their leadership on their behalf. Love a volunteer leader today!
A note from you in Boise, Idaho, to a volunteer leader in Elko, Nevada, saying you just wanted to thank them for all they are doing, you admire their commitment so much, all of the campaign’s supporters throughout the country are rooting for them to succeed and win their area and their state for the Democrat. Such a note can get them to push through this tough day and give them motivation to have a better one tomorrow. It’s hard work and they are doing it on behalf of all of us. They’re the true heroes in the battleground states in this supremely important election.