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WINNING LOCAL ELECTIONS:

Lessons and Strategies for Progressives



Introduction
Electoral politics has changed radically in recent years, and too often our tactics have not kept up. We’ve all worked incredibly hard, and weathered more than a decade of heart-breaking defeats, right-wing dirty tricks, and lack of direction in the Democratic leadership. It’s tempting to blame the right, the media, the voters, anyone but ourselves for this, but if we want to build on this year’s gains, we need to learn from our mistakes and develop more effective electoral strategies. Here are a few ideas to start the discussion.


1. Reaching Voters

Problem: Phonebanking & door-knocking is becoming less and less effective each year.
Two reasons: first, people are busier than a decade or two ago, working longer hours, home less often, and when they are home, they screen calls and don’t answer the door. Second, voters are far more turned off to electoral messages than before, due to sheer volume, overload, negative campaigns, and a general disgust with politics. The result is that they are harder to contact, and far more resistant to a message from a stranger or a flyer on their door. The traditional methods are failing, and finding new ways to reach voters is the single most important tactical shift we need to make.

Solutions: We have to begin reaching voters through their relationships, the people and groups they already know and trust, or can get to know.

A. Precinct leaders - SCCA’s “know your neighbor” program is the foundation. We need to find and recruit politically engaged people to become precinct leaders who stay active between elections and most importantly, personally known & trusted by voters in their precinct. Develop a precinct-based neighborhood newsletter to connect folks to local leaders.

B. “Virtual Precincts” are the diverse groups and institutions voters belong to. These include membership organizations like unions, environmental and civic groups, churches, schools, but also garden clubs, bowling leagues, support groups, play groups, and any context where voters know each other. At a time when most of us don’t know our neighbors, these are our real neighborhoods. We need to reach folks through these groups - formally, via newsletters, speakers, phonebanking, and informally, through word of mouth and personal outreach.

C. Personal Networks: “Adopt-a-Voter” - many voters won’t be reached through the above, but most people have at least one activist friend. We need to get these activists to “adopt” 20 or more of the less-engaged voters they know: casual friends, co-workers, hair-cutters, grocery clerks, and so on. They give adoptees literature, call them, invite them to voting parties, and make sure they are informed and vote.


2. Money - Getting our Priorities Straight

Problem: Key local races are underfunded while safe legislative seats soak up donor dollars
The primary contest between Pam Torliatt and Jared Huffman cost over two million dollars (about 2/3 of which was spent by labor & environmental PACs). Lynn Woolsey and Mike Thompson spent a combined $3 million this year in safe districts with no serious challenges; Wiggins spent nearly $300k, and so on. A tiny fraction of that money would have put Deb Fudge on the Board of Supes, but her campaign starved while incumbents in safe seats spent lavishly.

Electing Deb as a second Supe vote meant a potential for third swing vote from others on board, possibly shifting crucial county policy on land use, water, housing, etc, and setting us up to elect a solid third vote in 2 years. Pam and Jared are excellent, smart, progressive, and were competing for a safe Dem seat in a Dem-controlled legislature. It should have been obvious which race had more strategic leverage.

Solution: Developers will usually have more money than us. We have got to start concentrating our resources on the most strategically important races, particularly local ones, and stop spending on safe seats and lost causes. We need to educate major donors to think strategically, to focus down-ticket to local races. I suggest a campaign targeted to major donors and PACs asking them to match every dollar to partisan races with same amount to a key Supe or city council race.


3. Communication & Coordination - Working Together for a Progressive Slate

Problem: divided endorsements, late campaign starts, lack of coordination among progressives.
We need to speak earlier, and with a more unified voice, and try to avoid conflicting endorsements (Pam & Jared) and splitting votes with too many candidates (2002 Petaluma city council, and JC board race between Margaret Pennington and Steve Benjamin - neither knew the other was running). Developers seldom run too many candidates, divide their voice, or waste money in primary battles.

Solutions: We need to create a broad network of progressive groups to recruit and develop candidates, to decide much earlier on endorsements and support, and to try to unify those endorsements in order to discourage last-minute filings and competition among progressive candidates. I suggest:

A. Communicate - endorsing and donor groups start talking with each other and candidates for key races one year before filing deadline;

B. Slate - publishing an early ‘progressive voter guide’ listing the endorsements for each candidate and issue from the various groups, to give voters a clear, coherent message.


4. Naming Good Guys, Outing the Opposition

Developers have gotten away with greenwashing their candidates and confusing voters for far too long. Most voters don’t have time to follow local politics, or even read the daily paper (not that that helps much). We need to let them know who the real environmentalists are, and who’s a sham.

A. Earlier, clearer, more unified endorsements by trusted organizations and individuals (see slate above)

B. Independent expenditure committees to “out” the opposition by revealing who funds them and what they really stand for. Not smears, just factual revelations. The piece on Poulsen & Faber obviously worked, because they finished out of the running, and because the PD squawked so loudly. More of the same, please, and maybe an expose on Herb Williams?


5. Defining the Issues & Managing the Media

We need to be more effective at framing the terms of the debate, proactively defining the issues and the protagonists, and managing media coverage of our campaigns. No simple solution to the PD problem, but we can develop stronger relations with the Boho, weeklies, and alternative publications. We can also make better use of new media - web, email, flash- to reach younger voters. Mass distribution of well-made campaign videos & info on low-cost DVDs is a huge, as-yet unexplored tactic. The right is also way ahead in the use of detailed demographic profiles for ‘market-segmenting”, fine-tuning campaign mailers, calls, etc. to specific interests. Combined with in-depth polling on issues and values, this could make our messaging much more effective.


6. Letting Go of the Democrat Label

So you’re proud to be a Democrat? Great. Now get over it.

Four out of five US voters have little or no party loyalty, and do not vote a straight party ticket. (See recent Governors race.) In the last 12 years in California, registered Dems have declined from 49 to 42%, the Reps from 37 to 34%, while the number of decline-to-state voters has shot from 10% to nearly 19%. Most voters do not strongly identify with a political party, and many dislike and distrust parties, politicians, and the whole political process. When they get fed up with Republicans, they vote for Democrats, but not out of any ideological stance. Partisanship doesn’t win local elections.

The real battle isn’t between Dems and Reps - it’s corporate interests vs. democracy. Most local issues don‘t fall into the simplistic left-right model, and outside of activist circles, “Democrat” is not always shorthand for “good guys”. We need to speak to people’s real social and economic needs if we are to be relevant to their lives and worthy of their votes.


7. Building our Base: Infrequent & Non-voters

The conventional wisdom is that we have to fight with the right over the last slice of the electoral pie, the ‘swing voters’. Wrong: we need a bigger pie. Half the eligible voters never vote, and another quarter of them do so only sporadically. The majority of these folks agree with us on the issues, but they are alienated from the political process, which is intentionally designed to suppress turnout (favoring Republicans). We have to give them reasons to vote, and to trust that their vote counts.

A. Outreach to infrequent and non-voters - through adopt-a-voter program (above), registration efforts, and selective targeting with key issues.

B. Outreach to new and prospective voters - we can identify people who have moved, are becoming citizens, or are turning 18 in the next year. We need outreach programs tailored to each group, to register them and introduce them to local political issues and organizations.


8. Growing a Movement: Keeping Volunteers, Developing Leaders

Every campaign I’ve seen has had to build its volunteer base from scratch. GE-Free Sonoma kept track of the thousand people who volunteered with us - their contact info, what they did, and so on. We created this database as the beginning of a long-term effort to build a base of people who care and are willing to get involved. (Again, the right is way ahead of us on this.) To succeed, we need to do several things:

A. Start sharing data. There are reasons for feeling proprietary about our lists, but we have to find ways to get beyond that so that we can build from one election to the next.

B. Train and retain volunteers. When people are shown how to be effective, they have a better experience and stick around.

C. Develop leaders. Mentor, encourage, support volunteers to take on responsibilities, learn tasks, recruit others, lead.


9. Fixing the Election System

The Republicans didn’t steal the 2006 election, perhaps because they want to divert attention from the issue of voting fraud, or stick the Dems with the war, the deficit, and the economy going into 2008. However, the system is still broken, and we need to fix it if we want to win elections. This means paper ballots and public software to count them, no more voter purges or mass challenges, no more long lines or dirty tricks to keep Blacks and Hispanics from voting. We need monitoring to assure clean elections, and high-profile trials with long sentences for those behind the vote fraud. And we need to fight for universal registration, public financing, ranked choice voting systems, media access, and other reforms.


10. Building a new politics of empowerment

Many GE-Free volunteers had never worked on a campaign before. We lost the election, but we made a huge difference in the larger fight, and our volunteers came away with a sense of having made a difference, of actually having some political power. That is why they will get involved again on other issues - they have gone from passive consumers to active, engaged public citizens. That is the basis for a long-term movement to reclaim democracy; nothing less can succeed.