Field

Of course, once you have a file for a given state, the work is not over. Even keeping the file at its current state, let alone improving it, will be an ongoing process.

First of all, from the day it goes up, the data gets staler and staler. Ideally, every state in the union will be undergo the entire process frequently--especially for states with hot races in election years.

Aside from regular rejuvenation, however, a file can be improved upon through contact with reality. No matter how diligent the Secretary of State, certain problems on a file will slip through the cracks. People will move, die, or get convicted; phone numbers will change, or go bad; party registrations will be altered. All of these changes can be captured by a well-tuned field organization, and appended to the file, so that as election day gets closer the file can asymptotically approach perfection (this is a somewhat idealized picture; bear with me).

When volunteers go out and canvass neighborhoods or phone bank, they can verify if an address is attached to the right name or whether or not a phone number is good; they can also gather information that is simply unavailable from other sources, like a person's top issue priorities. All of this information is gathered, centralized, and scanned in, so that the state voter file is as up-to-the-minute as possible. In the past, this was done by hand (when it was done at all); now, the use of new technologies like computers, palm pilots and bar coding of responses has greatly increased the efficiency of doorknocking and other field techniques.

Once you've gone through this process, you should have a list with millions of entries, each containing personal and consumer information--ideally for every registered voter, and all non-registered adults.  So what can you do with it? Plenty.

Once it's compiled, the data has to be accessed.  Various people can be granted different levels of access--making the whole file available to any volunteer would raise serious privacy concerns, not to mention possibly giving access to rival campaigns or, god forbid, the other party.  For low-level volunteers, this access can be extremely limited, while higher-level operatives can be granted more generous permissions.  Broader access can be granted through a web interface like the DNC's Votebuilder, RNC's Voter Vault, or Catalist's Q-tool.  Using some relatively simple Boolean logic, you can create lists of all the people in a state, district or precinct who share certain characteristics--for example, you might want to find all registered black voters under the age of 40.  With a certain (ever-diminishing) amount of inaccuracy, this is a trivial list to pull.

As you can imagine, this is extremely useful.  You can use these tools to do everything from create walk lists for your volunteers to pull samples for polls or blanket a state with direct mail.  Which is why these files are considered so valuable, and why making them is big business--with big consequences.

The election was seven days ago and I'm starting to get emails from various organizations announcing their victories/contributions. This is not even close to a scientific assessment of the effectiveness of each group, but it's nice to give people a shout out, and it's a good look at what the youth vote world is saying about itself. We will see more rigorous assessments of individual programs as people like David Nickerson, Gerber and Green, etc. start crunching real data. And between now and the inauguration I plan to spend time talking to the major youth groups and writing up individual pieces on each organization's efforts. For now, here's a small taste of what went on in 2008:

Oregon Bus Project

• Bus Project Foundation registered 23,000 new young voters this year, increasing the Oregon youth electorate by 7 percent.
• Bus Trips knocked on over 60,000 doors this year, and is sure to have an impact on Oregon's 2009 legislature. This is double the number of doors per targeted district than in 2006. Quothe a razor's edge state rep candidate today: "I wouldn't be in this race if it weren't for the Bus."
• All told, 7 of the 10 candidates given 1000+ knocks of Bus volunteer support are winning their races, with one more too close to call.
• Trick or Vote was a huge success with 35% of the participants indicating that the event was their first political volunteering experience.
• We know The Bus Federation, working in five western states, has helped reach hundreds of thousands of doors with over 10,000 volunteer engagements.
• The 2009 (Oregon State Legilsative) session will see ten members age 35 and under -- the largest cohort of young legislators in state memory. Of the five new young legislators, two serve on the Bus' board of directors and four have volunteered extensively with the organization.
• After hundreds of thousands of Bus Project "Whole Ballot" contacts - the undervote dropped dramatically. Only 3% fewer votes have been tallied in the incredibly close Merkley v. Smith Senate race than in the historic Presidential race. Compare that to a 14% undervote from the top of the ticket in Merkley's tightly-contested primary race.

Young Democrats

• YDA contacted a record 150,000 young voters in eight key states. Thousands of Young Dems mobilized their peers all over the country.
• Over 1,300 paid canvassers, street teams, and volunteers worked to get out the youth vote for Democrats up and down the ballot.
• Our Young Voter Revolution campaigns targeted young voters and members in all 50 states but focused on Arkansas, California, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Utah, and Virginia.

Head Count

• Its 2008 voter registration campaign yielded 105,697 registrations, constituting the largest event-based voter registration campaign in the United States.
• The group more than doubled its voter registration total compared to the previous presidential election by registering voters at more than 1,000 concerts and staging extensive online and college-based initiatives. Of all the voters HeadCount registered this year, over half were age 24 or younger, and three-quarters were under the age of 30, establishing the organization as a leader in galvanizing the
  youth vote.
• HeadCount fielded street teams in over 40 cities and sent volunteers on the road with 10 different concert tours.
• HeadCount registered 53,475 of its total voters at live music events.
• HeadCount worked directly with several colleges and fellow nonprofit organizations to register another 28,598 through co-branded activities. A New York City “Street and Subway Canvass Blitz” staged with partner New York Public Interest Research Group netted 10,161 registrations. An additional 15,546 registrations came from colleges and universities who teamed directly with HeadCount to stage voter registration drives on their campuses.
• The highest number of registrations was generated on the Dave Matthews Band tour – 8,420 in total. Dave Matthews Band’s website and email communication also generated an estimated 10,000 additional online registrations, by far the largest of any HeadCount artist or media partner.
• The artist that helped generate the largest number of registrations per concert was Jack Johnson, averaging 257 registrations at each of his solo concerts (even more at festivals).
• “Touring Teams” traveling with bands racked up over 18,000 new registrations, nearly 40 percent of the concert total.
• HeadCount got more than 50,000 concertgoers and music fans to “Pledge to Vote,” creating a massive database used for Get Out the Vote purposes.

We talk a lot here about the importance of field work and peer to peer campaigning as the gold standard for getting people to the polls. But what exactly does that mean and why, in the day to day operations of a campaign is it important? How does it work and how does it fit into the internal workings of a well-run campaign?

If you've ever asked yourself these questions, you need to go read this piece at FiveThirtyEight.com explaining the importance of "voter contacts":

The other day, after Jonathan Martin wrote a piece that suggested John McCain’s field campaign was moving up closer into competition, we wrote that if Martin’s reporting is accurate with McCain's numbers, the state of the organizing race is now something more like a 35-to-1 edge for Obama rather than the 567-to-1 edge it held earlier in the summer. That’s not a field office edge or number of organizers edge, that’s the voter contacts edge, and both ratios are absurd.

Despite publishing an inside scoop on Obama’s Ohio numbers, our piece didn’t make much noise. But it’s not because the numbers aren’t shocking – they are – it’s because reporters and most people don’t really understand how to put voter contacts in context. Marc Ambinder will note that the Obama campaign has “preternatural self-confidence" about its strategy, but that confidence has to come from some type of hard data.

So let’s explain what voter contacts are, and what they are not. A voter contact occurs whenever someone from a campaign – organizer or volunteer – collects information from a voter about candidate preference or indecision, party preference (strong, lean, independent), or important issues to that voter in making the ultimate choice between candidates. A contact would ideally get an answer on all these questions to qualify as a contact, but even if the voter is only able or willing to give some meaningful data feedback, that counts. It takes about 4 attempts for every 1 contact, or roughly 25%.

Every bit of information gleaned helps the campaign make choices about how to target these voters for further messaging and GOTV. A strong Obama supporter will be targeted for volunteer work, early voting and/or GOTV. A strong McCain supporter will likely be ignored. A voter who describes herself as normally a Republican but who is undecided in this race and has health care as a critical issue will be targeted with persuasion mail pieces and/or person-to-person contacts about each candidate’s health care positions and voting records.

The author prepares for Trick or Vote in 2007

Pop Quiz Time:

1. What is the single most effective way to mobilize voters?
   a) Visibilities
   b) Sitting on a couch and bitching
   c) Talking to ‘em face-to-face
2. What holiday always immediately precedes Election Day and has a built-in tradition of door-knocking?
   a) Halloween
   b) The 4th of July
   c) Festivus
3. What does everyone love?
   a) Rick Rolling
   b) Costumes!
   c) Voting
   d) All of the above

All of us who work in the field of youth engagement face big competition. The biggest competition we face – for volunteers, for attention – is not from one another’s organizations either. It’s from the Wii (which is sweet) and the bar scene and friends and loved ones. Our biggest challenge is overcoming that noise and building a politics that is fun and exciting and relevant to people’s lives.

That’s what makes Trick or VoteTM so freaking sweet. It’s the Best Way on the Best Day.

It’s actually such a sweet idea it doesn’t even really need an explanation. But here it is in a nutshell: Get some people who are a bit too old to trick or treat (go as young as high school and as old as the retirement home for your recruitment), rally ‘em in costume, meet in a centralized location, train these folks to canvass effectively, and knock some doors.

In short, we combine a cultural more (knock doors on Halloween) with hard-minded political research (knocking doors is an effective voter mobilization tool).

The result?

• More volunteers. In Portland in 2004, 850 canvassers assembled for the largest mass canvass in the history of the state. By all accounts, this year will be even bigger.
• More virgin volunteers. Out of that same crowd in Portland, more than one-in-three were first-time political volunteers who came out of the woodwork for a program well-suited to help our fellow citizens lose their voter virginity.
• More conversations. On Halloween evening, people are home – either waiting for trick-or-treaters or getting ready for their parties. They’re even prepared to open the door. And they’re definitely ready to engage in a conversation. All of which means that we don’t just hit more doors, we hit more doors in a more effective manner.
• More voters. Do the math -- more canvassers, more conversations, and more doors? More people are hitting the polls.

The Bus Federation wants to take Trick or VoteTM national this year – and we can do it with your help. If you’re part of a local or national organization that is serious about doing Trick or VoteTM, get in touch soon so we can coordinate our efforts. Contact Alex Aronson at the Oregon Bus Project @ 503-233-3018.

Just looking for a project for the fall and think you could pull off a kick-ass Trick or Vote in your hometown? Or even just want to assemble 15 of your closest friends and friends-of-friends and friendly-friends-of-friends’-friends and go hit some doors? Drop us a line. I swear to you, you’ll be glad you did.

Major props, by the way, to our friends at the Bus for this innovative program -- Trick or Vote is their brainchild.

Answers to the pop quiz: 1-b, 2-c, 3-a

Matt Singer is the CEO of Forward Montana, dedicated to training, mobilizing, and electing a new generation of progressive leaders. Forward Montana is a charter (get it?) organization of the Bus Federation.

In conversation, the President of one of YDA's state chapters raised a really interesting question: What would happen if campaigns stopped putting money into the senior vote and redirected that to youth?

It's a provocative question. Campaigns tend to spend no money on young people "because youth don't vote," and they expend a large share of resources reaching out to the "reliable" senior vote. When you think about it, it's a little ass-backwards. Voting is a habit and seniors tend to be full-on addicts in their turnout rates. If we stopped spending money reaching out to them and encouraging them to get to the polls, would they turnout anyway? Probably. It seems highly unlikely they would quite voting cold turkey. Couldn't that money be better spent reaching out to people whose voting habits are not so "reliable" and whose partisanship is still up for grabs?

It's not an all or nothing proposition. You don't need to stop spending ALL money on seniors, but perhaps adjusting the proportion spent on seniors and that spent on young people might yield better returns on investment overall? What would happen if half the money spent robo-calling, direct mailing, and door-knocking seniors went to contacting young people?

Conversely, if we did see a big drop-off in senior turnout under such a campaign, doesn't that speak to the importance of doing outreach to ALL demographics? If less resources and contacts means a smaller senior vote, the same is true of young voters. You can't claim they're unreliable and not worth resources if the very act of withholding resources is what drives down their turnout numbers . . .

It would be interesting to run this as a field experiment in a super-safe Democratic seat. I don't think we will, but it would be a good piece of data to have.

This is probably the best "news" piece I've seen about how Sen. Obama is turning out young voters in record numbers. It's not just technology and it's not just star power. It's a real commitment to field organizing, and making sure that young people are targeting their fellow youth. In other words, it's all about the peer-to-peer organizing.

This is the real message that needs to get out there because this is the strategy that campaigns, the DNC, DCCC, and DSCC need to learn if they want to replicate Obama's successes in down-ballot races.

The program will air on Current TV tonight at 10pm Eastern. You can also grab it here.

Zack Exley has a must-read piece posted to Open Left about how the campaigns - specifically the Clinton campaign - is grooming the next generation of field organizers.

Seriously, this is mandatory reading.

Music for America relaunches today as a local, Seattle-based organization sponsored by the local chapter of SEIU.

I’m sad that MFA has shrunk so much, but hopeful that the folks in Seattle can maintain a vibrant music/activism scene and pioneer some best practices that others can replicate in cities across the country. Good luck y’all.

I’ve got a whole lot more to say about the general decline in concert-based electoral activism (with some exceptions) even as political statements and activity from musicians are becoming more acceptable than at any point in over a decade. It will all be in an article I wrote for WireTap, hopefully to be published in the next couple weeks.

(And yay on SEIU for supporting young voters and cultural outreach).

So today I want to riff a little on numbers 35-39 of my youth vote theses:

35. Culture is a progressive's natural advantage.  We should use it.
36. 95% of the people in these constituencies won't ever care about politics as much as you do
    
37. Asking them to participate in hard core political actions (canvassing, phone banking, etc.) as their first introduction to politics is doomed to failure and low conversion rates.
    
38. Politics must be made relevant to the life of a person if you want them to participate and make civic participation a habit.
    
39. This means there must be a ladder of participation providing substantive involvement for people at multiple levels of engagement.

Culture is a progressive's natural advantage.  From Hollywood to Madison Avenue, the creative class leans heavily democratic.  Most often, that translates into money for campaigns, or a pretty face on the trail.  Rarely does it mean employing the natural talents of that segment of the base.  We see it when campaigns hire political consultants to manufacture stale, uninspiring ads while guys like Bill Hillsman get locked out.  This is as true on campus and among young professionals as it is among the "adults." Yet if you look at the work of someone like Michael Moore, or watch An Inconvenient Truth, creative use of media (old and new) can be one of our biggest assets.  Considering their media consumption habits and the growth of new outlets for that creative energy online, this is doubly true when reaching out to young people.

I don't mean to traffic in stereotypes - there are certainly exceptions to what I'm about to say - but in general, political involvement on campus and among young professionals typically draws membership from a specific type of person: (ex)poli-sci majors and aspiring politicians/staffers/policy wonks.  The volunteer and leadership opportunities in youth activism are similarly limited: donate money, canvass, phone bank.  

I fully understand that democratic youth groups are under enormous pressure to justify their existence to the party and to political operatives.  That means they need to quantify their work and produce tangible results: voters registered and GOTV'd; doors knocked and phone calls made.  Volunteer efforts are generally focused like a laser on producing the highest numbers possible in those categories.  But that leaves a lot of people who (understandably) don't want to participate in those activities out of the Party.

It doesn't have to be that way, and I worry that by not reaching out and involving these folks while they are young, we're making more work for ourselves (and shooting ourselves in the foot creatively) further down the line.  These lost volunteers have a lot to offer, and Democratic youth groups, and the progressive movement generally, need to make an effort to expand the scope of what it means to volunteer to include the types of activities and talents that these other people who are left out can offer.