7
THE CAMPAIGN
As a citizen determined to deny Donald Trump a second term and thereby strengthen, if not actually save, our democracy, much of your impact in this election season will be accomplished on your own time, not through any formal channels. Not waiting to be asked, you’ll be asking the question, “What more can I do?”
Whether it’s engaging in one-on-one conversation with a friend or a cousin or a coworker who’s wrestling with the decision, working your own network to register and volunteer, engaging in debate and sharing persuasive content on social media, and/or donating money, your daily advocacy is irreplaceable.
And at some point—hopefully the day our nominee is clear—you will also work with and through the candidate’s official campaign. This is the operation that has prepared the literature and set up the phone banks and created the contact lists and linked everything to the GPS interface for the canvassing teams. The interface between you volunteers and the campaign apparatus is so crucial, it’s the subject of this chapter.
We know what the volunteers do for the campaign—nothing less than deliver the margin of victory, that is, the registrations, the canvassing, the recanvassing, the re-re-canvassing; if necessary, the rides to the polls, the actual votes. Now I want to consider what the campaign can and should do for you. The more you know, the better you’ll be able to evaluate what it is doing, and how you can help make everything easier and more effective. No matter how much of a sacrifice your personal work is, no matter how far you have come in order to help, no matter if you’re working in your hometown or a thousand miles away, it is essential that the campaign staff honor your time and commitment with the tools, data, materials, and culture to make it both a rewarding and effective experience.
I want this chapter to be useful for both volunteers and the campaign’s professional staff.
I started my career as a canvasser and organizer, and nothing I’ve learned has changed my own innate belief in the power of people to do their best and achieve great goals if the support staff and leaders give them their best too. The influence moves both ways. As a former community organizer, Barack Obama had reached this same conclusion, so he insisted that those who wanted to join our cause in 2008 were respected and valued. As did Michelle Obama.
In 2008, in both the primary contest against Hillary Clinton, with Obama the decided underdog, and in the general election against John McCain, a toss-up from the get-go, our campaign’s commitment to nourishing our grassroots volunteers was essential—indeed, it was the essential ingredient in victory.
We had put the volunteers first, and nothing changed for the 2012 reelection campaign. I don’t believe any presidential campaign in living memory has given more consideration to the experience of our volunteers. If our candidate called me from the road, or if I was traveling with him and he pulled me aside after an event, it was almost always about the same question. Not debates, not ads, not campaign strategy. He would be advising me that a volunteer or a local field organizer on our staff had told him they weren’t getting everything they needed. Maybe the data and lists were screwy lately, or there was not enough literature on hand, or not enough yard signs.
I might have said something like, “But boss, yard signs don’t vote.” This expression originated who knows where, but every campaign manager is tempted to invoke it as a way to save money with the nickel-and-dime stuff. My boss would invariably say, “So you’re telling me that with all the money we’re raising from the very people who are working so hard for us, we can’t make sure they get enough lousy signs to show their support? Especially for a volunteer who might be a Republican, and whose yard sign will send a message?”
And the signs would be shipped right away. For Barack Obama, the volunteers were how he charted his course. If we weren’t serving them first and foremost, we probably weren’t doing anything else as well as we could. Our Iowa caucus campaign team—this was in the very early days of 2007, about twenty months prior to the general election—decided to memorialize their approach by painting the words Respect, Empower, Include on our headquarters in Des Moines and subsequently in the dozens more local campaign offices we opened up throughout the Hawkeye State.
From Paul Tewes, our Iowa state director, on down . . . actually there was no “down.” The staff lived their inclusive motto every day. So did the precinct captains. So did all the volunteers who had been there from the beginning, as they welcomed those who joined up later. The Iowa kids were the most talented, selfless, driven crew I’ve ever been around. With all of them, there was a stirring belief in Barack Obama; in the need to turn the page from the Bush years; in the desire to make progress on issues from health care to climate change. The sum of their efforts became greater than the parts. Every Iowan who walked through our campaign office doors was treated as if he or she were the most special person in the world. Because it was true. It wasn’t manufactured. It was magical. And the caucus results reflected as much: Obama, 38 percent (more than twice what we’d started out with a year earlier); Hillary Clinton and John Edwards, 30 percent apiece, with Edwards a nose ahead of her.
In 2020, I don’t know whether our nominee will motivate people to the same degree Barack Obama did. But I do know our candidate had better insist that the staff treats everyone as if they are the most special people in the world too. Let’s hope this comes easily and naturally. Putting volunteers first—“Respect, Empower, and Include” or the equivalent—must be baked into the campaign DNA. It cannot be faked. And much of the motivation needs to come from the ground up—staffers pushing and pulling one another, congratulating and lifting up those establishing the right culture in their region and pointing out those who are falling short. It needs to be as easy and intuitive as anything in life so that you don’t even think about it. You just do it.
Logically, you volunteers are the first and most important customers of the campaign, coming before even the voters, because you are the connective tissue with the voters.
We can debate Amazon’s business model, but I hope our nominee’s campaign has the high level of consistent, excellent customer service as Amazon’s does. The few times I’ve had problems with Amazon, the interactions actually left me more impressed. They move fast, they rectify mistakes, and they trust their customers. It’s in the DNA of the company.
It doesn’t take long for any retail customer to get a reading on an unfamiliar store. Likewise, with you as a potential volunteer with the presidential campaign. You’ll know this outfit’s attitude toward you as soon as you begin the first interaction, in person, on the phone, or online. If it’s not genuinely welcoming, don’t hesitate to let them know directly, or even post your reaction or complaint on social media.
No one getting back to you? Not being prepared for the number of volunteers who showed up for a shift? General disorganization in the local field office?
Think about the snafu and suggest and help them change what needs to be changed. There is too much at stake to be shy about this. If they get this wrong with the volunteers, aren’t they likely to get it wrong with voters? I’m afraid so. And they will probably need your help fixing other stuff that’s wrong. From making sure there is enough water on hot canvassing days to making sure the office is decorated and organized in a way that is both inspiring and efficient.
I hope the campaign spends a lot of time in dialogue with volunteers, formally and informally, to understand what will be the most helpful and effective way for the office to help the volunteers do the work they want and need and are desperate to do in order to help elect a different president. In the private sector, they call this user research: really understanding at a fundamental and deep level how the customers are living their lives, how the organization or company fits into these lives and aspirations, and then how to generate the best experience and therefore loyalty.
Campaigns do the same thing regarding key voter segments. Too often, though, they don’t apply the same rigor to understanding their volunteers, learning more about their motivation, what drives them to want to be involved, what would make it a better and more effective experience for them.
The good news: the basic user research regarding the first customers for the Democratic presidential campaign is pretty clear—I’m sure you hear the same things I do. What do you volunteers want? You want to help save the country you love from further damage and embarrassment by expelling the incumbent. You want to work hard in that cause, you want an up-to-date tech campaign, and you don’t want your time and energy to be taken lightly, much less wasted. And given the stakes this year, you don’t think all this is asking too much.
Here are some clear requirements for making your volunteers’ experience as effective as possible. The list is anything but definitive, but let’s begin with the most effective ways to play offense, sharing positive content with a voter with doubts, and defense, fighting back against all the lies and smears. This is one critical set of tools the campaign must nail right now. By the time you’re reading this book (Spring 2020), I hope our eventual nominee has this in their pipeline. It’s getting late.
In this digital war, speed is of the essence. Above all, your response must be lightning fast. You see something ridiculous on Facebook or in an email chain, and you want to push back against it. You have a matter of seconds, literally, to find the responsive and persuasive content you need and copy and share it easily, and then move on with your day.
You can always start with Googling or searching on YouTube or looking around the room for potential help. But the best way to accomplish this would be a simple app whose only function is sharing content for our distributed rapid-response army. There’s a way to create an easy, all-in-one interface, organized by issue (immigration, taxes, health care, education) and by medium (infographic, article, video, photo). For playing defense, the equivalent on this app would be an up-to-the-moment catalogue of all the latest lies, smears, and presidential insults that are flying across your phone and computer screen, along with the oldies but goodies. This would be a modern-day version of the Obama Fight the Smears website from 2008, updated for the smartphone era of politics.
This isn’t just a cool-sounding kind of idea I think is good to include in the book. It’s a dead-serious requirement for any modern campaign.
Does our candidate’s campaign already have such an interface? If so—and I hope so—make sure every volunteer can access it instantly on their smartphone or tablet. If the campaign doesn’t have this collated rapid-response rebuttal app for playing both offense and defense, can you make one? Some of you volunteers will be designers and engineers, and probably have better computer skills than the campaign pros. Use those skills. Come up with a prototype. See a need, jump in and fill the breach and help win the election.
The campaign must also have a version of this function on its website, easy to find and use, for those who prefer engaging in these knife fights on a laptop or desktop. And all other organizations that are engaged in the battle to defeat Trump—from NextGen to the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) to Planned Parenthood to the Sierra Club—should have similar tools on the specific issues their members care most about and will want to be most voluble on, offensively and defensively. Make sure everyone knows what all the links are.
You will need a printed cheat sheet that you can carry with you when canvassing, so you can look things up on the spot and inform your folks behind the front doors of the best links. Someone—or a small group—needs to be responsible for updating this material in almost real time. What could be more impressive to a voter than an instant source of information or rebuttal to some silly Republican attack that happened early this morning? A fast, efficient communications operation in the campaign may imply a fast, efficient communications operation in the new administration taking over in 2021. Man, you guys are on the ball! A may-vote citizen and/or a may-vote-for-a-third-party citizen might make that connection. Give them a reason to.
When supporters have an urge to share a good idea or good content with their social media network, or to respond to yet another falsehood, ten seconds is the longest it should take for them to do this. If it takes longer, many people will give up, and an opportunity is lost.
Ten seconds, you say? That’s a crazy standard to be held to. No, if anything, it’s too long. People are used to getting what they want, the answers they need, the content they’ve heard about instantaneously—in two to three seconds. And that’s the population as a whole, including senior citizens.
The younger the age cohort we are talking about, the higher the bar for lightning-fast speed. Remember the recent industry study trying to understand why millennial consumption of breakfast cereals was dropping precipitously? The number one reason wasn’t nutrition, cost, or taste. The number one reason was that eating breakfast cereal takes too long to clean up. Think about that. For my generation, Gen X, ease was the appeal. Shake it out of the box, add milk, eat, put bowl in sink, rinse bowl. But for a younger millennial, picking up food at Dunkin or a bodega is far preferable to the apparently complex and time-consuming process of eating a meal out of a box.
And Generation Z? Forget about it. Standing in a line even four deep is too inefficient for many of them. They’re going to order ahead so their mobile order is ready at the counter—warm, paid for, and disposable. A busy Starbucks or Peet’s Coffee has more than one designated employee working the mobile ordering line to keep things moving in the morning.
I go on at some length about this speed thing because I’m convinced it’s very important. The tools we all need to make the case for our candidate must above all else be as easy and fast to use as picking up your latte, ordering the Uber, shopping on Amazon, or booking a room or home on Airbnb. People who are busy helping out the campaign between all the other pieces of their lives will not expect—or accept—a jankier experience or interaction with our nominee’s website and apps than they get from the commercial sites they visit all day, every day. If you are finding that, don’t be shy about pointing it out, and better yet, suggesting ideas for improvement. We won’t win this election by ignoring areas for improvement that are hiding in plain sight.
It’s clear by now that I hope you will be charging ahead on your own—don’t wait for the campaign—making the positive case, putting out the substantive arguments for our candidate and against Trump, punching back against the lies and Infowars crazy-town stuff with your own rebuttals. Of course this will be incredibly effective. But not everyone will have the time, the desire, or the confidence to do so. Their needs must be addressed. Here’s an idea: make it your job to circulate a weekly list of new links, new articles, and new arguments within your volunteer circle. Then they can follow suit.
So the first requirement: speed. The next requirement: accuracy.
I’m speaking now primarily about the various kinds of data and lists the campaign asks you to work with. All of it must be up-to-date and ready for action. Whether you are working from home, downloading a list of names and numbers of registration targets you are going to call in Florida; or have traveled to Michigan to knock on doors to get out the vote; or are sitting in a phone bank in Biloxi on Election Day, dialing registered voters in Philadelphia who have not yet voted—you want all that information, usually provided by the campaign, to be as deadly accurate as possible. We can’t expect perfection—voters change their minds, and there can be data-entry errors—but perfection should be the aspiration.
If you are calling a citizen and asking her to register to vote in Miami—and she registered two weeks ago, that’s a waste of your time, her time, and the campaign’s resources. If you are canvassing in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in October and two consecutive voters say they are voting for our nominee—and they told someone else from the campaign last week—it’s another waste of everyone’s time, and you may ultimately not have much of it to knock on the doors of two voters farther down the list who really are undecided. And we may have tested the patience of those two voters. Man, you guys are dropping the ball! This is not what we want them to be thinking.
If you call a voter in West Philadelphia on Election Day, start your pitch, and he says with annoyance, “You’re the second person who’s called. I voted at 8:30 am this morning!,” all you can do is thank him profusely, but it’s still a waste of time on both ends. But he did vote, so what’s the harm? Well, you made that call instead of another one, and it’s a likely sign that the lists, farmed out to people throughout the country from West Philly, have other errors in them too.
Nothing is more dispiriting for everyone—campaign staffers and volunteers—than when a group of canvassers returns to the local field office exhausted after hours out knocking doors—that’s good—but also annoyed because the voter data was inaccurate. It’s hard enough to find your time to donate in the first place. If you feel it was then a waste of time—you were talking to the wrong voters about the wrong issues and no one pays attention to what you have learned when you return to headquarters—it’s fair to expect that you may not come back.
The campaign should view its voter data first and foremost through how it will affect the experience their hardworking volunteers are going to have. Sending a GOTV mailer piece to a voter who already voted early, or delivering a “persuasion ad” on health care (an ad directed at someone who still needs persuasion) to a voter who wears a MAGA cap is a waste of some money. But what is far more precious is your time. The campaign simply can’t trade in incorrect and out-of-date information.
This standard must also apply to all the independent groups doing critical voter contact as well. Whether it’s Indivisible, NARAL, UFCW, or the Association of Flight Attendants, you don’t want your own members or those volunteering with your organization engaging voters based on dated information. There are technical fixes for all these problems, and you will have workers who can implement them, but you have to know about these problems in the first place. You need good feedback from your members. In fact, encourage it. Tell your volunteers you don’t just invite but welcome examples of bad data.
All of these groups should be working together to pool their data and update the information collectively and in real time. Sounds utopian, I know, but it’s totally feasible technically. We have these resources. Everyone wants to send Donald Trump packing, so let’s get it done.
So we have the fast and accurate requirements for information, and I would add to that a third one: it also needs to be as detailed as possible.
Let’s say our canvasser in Grand Rapids talks to a voter on the “undecided” list who truly is undecided and persuadable. She tells our canvasser she has not made up her mind. She’s wrestling with Trump’s character, and his tax cuts just made the rich richer, she knows this, but she’s also concerned our nominee will be bad for the small business where she works.
We hope our canvasser is prepared with an effective pitch about all the ways our candidate will help small businesses; we hope the canvasser seals the deal, but that’s hard sometimes. Maybe the canvasser is not all that prepared on the issue. Either way, the next step is critical: the canvasser needs to capture the details of the exchange and feed them into the voter database as explanatory notes. Back at the office, someone will key in this feedback and that voter will start seeing ads about our candidate’s plan to help small business in her mailbox and on her phone.
But you, the volunteer, can also zero in on this voter. Get into her hands more information on what seems to be her key concern. Who should do this? Your friend who runs a small business sounds like a good idea. Have her write a note or send an email to personally address the issue from the small-business owner’s perspective.
This mechanism for following up should be SOP, but it won’t happen without the richness of those explanatory notes. It’s tragic if we lose this voter because no one takes the time or has the technical means to put on the electronic record the incredibly valuable and specific information about this torn battleground voter, so the campaign never finds out what would get her off the fence and into our corral.
How do the volunteers access the voter data? Through the electronic tools provided by either the campaign or one of the progressive organizations. By definition, just about, the tools delivering it are as important as the data. In the old days we used mimeograph machines, stuffed envelopes, and dialed phones. Ideal today—mandatory, I’d say—is a single app that works seamlessly on the smartphone, tablet, laptop, or big-screen office computer. It can be used by anyone authorized to interact with voters on behalf of the candidates. Download a list of target voters onto your phone when you’ve created a free hour in your life. When you auto dial a given voter, the correct script to use pops up on the screen. Maybe your exchange concerns registration, or follow-up on an issue involving the voter (he’s thinking third party), or follow-up concerning a key issue of concern reported by a canvasser three days ago (the “small businesses” voter) issue. Whatever it is, the app has a one-stop link for recording the important and relevant information from the conversation, which is then fed back into the campaign’s servers.
Tools, data, and support should be at your fingertips when you are canvassing. If Waze can direct you through traffic jams in Los Angeles and El Paso, surely our candidate’s campaign can provide equally accurate technology that directs canvassers on a walking route, hitting the target doors, skipping the others, feeding you the pertinent information about this house call as you walk up the sidewalk, then recording your results instantaneously and easily as you walk back down the sidewalk. What a huge leap in efficiency and accuracy from the old ways—a significant motivation for the digital natives to return again and again.
I know—some volunteers will want to work with a more traditionally analog interface, making their phone calls from paper lists or from names and numbers on their laptops, or canvassing off printed maps and with paper voter lists. This will be less efficient on the back end, but that’s okay. I hope our nominee enables volunteers in this way too. This election will likely be incredibly close. Can the campaign afford to turn away anyone’s offer of help? No. It should supply them with whatever material they feel comfortable with. Plus, a printed map never crashes or runs out of battery life! We have to meet volunteers—young or old, hip or vintage—where they are, just as we seek to do with important voter groups.
Only a firm and unshakable commitment to funding the field operation will pull this off. Which may seem obvious, but the campaign’s commitment to you, the volunteer, will be tested from day one. There is always pressure from HQ to underfund the grass roots in order to feed the media budget. This is true in just about every campaign, large and small.
But the decision about funding the airwaves or the ground game is a decidedly false choice, just as the choice between focusing on “persuasion” voter targets or turning out the vote in the Democratic base is also false. Set your goals, then allocate your resources, not the other way around—that’s the better approach, for both political campaigns and businesses. A business wants new customers, wants to retain old customers, wants to disrupt itself (R&D), wants a stable workforce, wants to make money. Based on these basic elements, funding choices have to be made, and those choices reflect the company’s highest priorities at any given time. Amazon, Facebook, Airbnb, and many other internet start-ups famously put the emphasis on bringing in new customers. Thanks to venture capital, they didn’t need to worry about actually making money. That could come later. Sometimes, much later.
A political campaign does not have the luxury of playing that long game, calibrating and adjusting all the angles over many years. It has a very short time period in which to maximize performance and win an election. In the discussion of the battleground states, I took us into the sausage factory to see how campaigns make the crucial decisions, how the “win numbers” are developed, how resources will be allocated among the various expense categories. One of those categories is the volunteers’ grassroots ground game. The budget for each potential battleground is unique, and the percentage allocation formula for all states won’t work because expenses vary by category from state to state. Obvious example: overhead costs and media buys will all cost more in Florida than in Michigan.
After that background, this point: far too many campaigns want to think the grassroots work, the campaign’s field operation, can be done on the cheap. Even a well-funded campaign, even a well-funded presidential campaign will often try cannibalizing the field operation money in order to beef up the advertising budget to reach swing voters. This campaign may hire fewer paid campaign field organizers than they originally planned, meaning each organizer is responsible for a greater area as measured by geography and voters. This would mean that you, a volunteer leader, will have less access to your organizer partner, whose attention and workload may be spread too thin, making your job harder and making it more difficult for the campaign to reach its organizational goals in your area.
Skimping on the budget may mean the campaign will pay to open fewer offices. Fewer everything—yard signs, literature, pizza. You name it. Everything gets squeezed. Potential volunteers will have to travel a longer distance to reach a local field office, providing a disincentive to volunteer at all. Fewer volunteers means fewer voter contacts, which means you may end up with fewer new registrants, fewer persuadable voters converted at the doors and on the phones, and ultimately, fewer voters who turn out on Election Day.
To me, what’s crazy about this skimping—and should be frustrating to you should it happen in your locale—is that the decision to skimp does not result from a debate about the number of votes the grassroots field operation needs to produce to get to the win numbers in the state, the region, the precinct. That’s settled. No, the decision comes all too often from a belief the one element the campaign can risk starving is the ground game. The belief rests partly on the fact that it’s hard to measure what your opponent is spending on the ground. Meanwhile, both sides’ expenditures on TV, radio, and digital are public. If the campaign is being outspent in those mediums, especially if it’s getting outspent heavily, or if it believes that turning the tables and outspending the opponent on the media front will gain a decisive advantage, it becomes incredibly hard to maintain discipline and stick to the original plan, keeping the grassroots funding wholly in place. Great will be the temptation to buy one more ad rather than support one more volunteer, to spend more on screens, less on screen doors.
We call that robbing Peter to pay Paul. Perhaps the ads do gin up some additional “persuasion” targets who may pay dividends on Election Day, no guarantees, but likely more votes are lost by not having the resources in place to execute the registration and turnout strategy fully.
Such was the situation for Team Obama in 2012, when unlike in the 2008 race against John McCain, we were getting badly outspent by the Romney campaign over the summer as Romney exited the primaries and built out for the general. Don’t get me wrong. Thanks to the generosity of our donors, we were raising funds effectively, and at the end of the campaign would reach our finance goals, but sometimes you just get outspent no matter how well you do. The culprit was mainly the “outside game,” those supposedly independent efforts supporting the candidates. The Republican super PACs were flooding the airwaves and computers with negative ads, while our equivalent outside resources were anemic and not closing the gap. Many Democratic donors—understandably but frustratingly, in my view—had and still do have a revulsion toward funding super PACs. They consider it too “dirty,” a game played by Karl Rove, Sheldon Adelson, and the Koch brothers, not by clean and pristine progressive donors.
There was no magic $100 million sitting around to solve our problem that summer. In some markets, including Orlando and Des Moines, we were getting outspent two to one, which made a lot of us more than just a little uncomfortable.
Our staff and consultants on the creative and paid media side of the house were treating this as a DEFCON 1 alert. In the absence of the magic pot of gold, or even just a plain vanilla surplus, they demanded that we raid the field budget so we could survive the advertising onslaught. This painful situation created one of the most important calls of the campaign, and the one I’m probably proudest of.
It was the first Saturday in September and I was in Iowa with President Obama, who was speaking on a farm in Dallas County, surrounded by hay bales. I hopped on a conference call with Jim Messina, our campaign manager in 2012, and David Axelrod, my partner in crime and our senior strategist. We had to make a decision—do we stay the course, or do we cut back the field budget, especially in expensive states like Florida, Ohio, and Virginia?
It’s no fun getting outspent by your competition in marketing and advertising dollars, whether you are marketing a candidate or a car service or a face cream. You know your opponents are reaching people critical to your success with more messages, and you have to assume, smart messages. It hurts. But for Messina, Axelrod, and me, it came down to two things—the numbers and our Obama campaign four years earlier. In Florida, as explained earlier, registering tens of thousands of voters in Miami-Dade County was critical to having any prayer of winning the state. In exurban and suburban Ohio, we had to have door-to-door, neighbor-to-neighbor, almost-around-the-clock contact with persuadable voters. In the Hampton Roads area of Virginia, we needed the ultimate turnout to ensure a win there. And we knew from 2008 that none of this would happen if we didn’t believe in the power of the grass roots—and not just belief but backup for that belief by funding it fully. So we decided to accept getting outspent in media, at least for that period, and take our chances with our volunteer troops on the ground.
After Obama finished speaking and shaking hands and doling out hugs and high fives to the Iowans in attendance, he made his way to “the Beast,” as the presidential limo is called by the Secret Service. We were on our way to . . . somewhere. The roadshow becomes a blur. I had walked over to the limo, anticipating his arrival, but was still on the call. He saw me on the phone, pacing around and looking intense, as he shook the last few hands of the local volunteers who had helped out at this event. I was pretty much always on the phone, but when I finally jumped in beside him, he asked sardonically, “Were you dealing with a real problem or talking Philly sports with someone?”
Obama did not have much interest in the minutiae of campaign budgeting decisions, but given what I thought was the import of our situations and the decision we had to make, I filled him in.
He asked, “How long was your call?”
“About forty-five minutes.”
“Well, that’s about forty-four minutes longer than it had to be. We’re here because of the grass roots and will be reelected because of the grass roots, so don’t mess with that.”
In retrospect, it really was that simple, I guess. We had gotten all tangled up in analyzing or second-guessing other people’s strategies, and had lost sight of our own North Star for almost three-quarters of an hour. That clarity of mission and purpose is what we need this time. All of us will need it, most importantly the candidate who proclaims the sanctity of funding the grassroots operation, the campaign team who receives it loud and clear and then provides to everyone in the trenches everything you will need to be successful, whether you are an infrequent volunteer or a precinct leader.
If you are asked to volunteer, asked to give your time and talents, and constantly assured how important it is, the campaign must then honor and respect your commitment by making sure the grassroots campaign is resourced fully and effectively, even when it’s tempting to cut some budgeting corners.
Many campaigns will ask for money, promising it will help pay for field organizers or local offices or supplies for local volunteers. If you are one of those contributors or fund-raising targets, and you see the grassroots efforts undernourished, give, yes, but also lift your voice. Point it out, even complain.
If you, a veteran precinct captain in Wisconsin, tweet at the nominee that your team is working hard but with fewer resources than you need, fewer than you had in the Obama campaigns, I promise your warning will get the attention and discussion it deserves.
We have an election to win: one of the most important in our country’s history. A lot that has affected the race has already happened and much more will continue to happen that is beyond our power to control. The state of the economy. Pandemics. Mass attacks, foreign or homegrown. Tensions or outright conflict or war. The quality of the campaign Trump musters.
But there is a great deal of importance that we can control—we, the volunteers and the official campaign apparatus. The volunteers can control our commitment, our effort, our enthusiastic and infectious joy in the endeavor. The campaign can control the quality of the tools and data and TLC they bring to the party. Let’s hope they also bring some serious joy to this serious task—anything hard is easier when it’s fun too.