GOTV - Part 2 - Ceremony versus Enterprise

by: Grebner

Sun Nov 14, 2010 at 19:13:51 PM EST

Human activities can be classified in many different ways, depending on what you want to analyze.  If we think of GOTV as primarily a "ceremony", it's easy to see the roots of many failures and inefficiencies.

[Note - My GOTV essays, plus many more, are collected under Technical Politics]

Imagine a wedding consultant told the bride:

Let's drop the band and go with recorded music.  We can cut 50% from the budget for centerpieces, and go with the cheaper bridesmaid dresses.  With the $8000 we save, we can send 200 more invites, meaning roughly 40 more people will attend and 70 more people will send gifts, worth an average net of $120 each, after losses on returns.  You'll be ahead almost $10,000 - and nobody will really notice the changes. 

 That's exactly the kind of advice a business consultant would give a business client who was facing an equivalent sales event.  But what sounds perfectly sensible in business would be completely bizarre applied to marriage.

That's because a wedding is a "ceremony."  It has no discrete output measures.  If we say a wedding plan is "improved" we probably mean better color coordination, better acoustics, or greater comfort for guests.  Decisions are guided by aesthetics, local custom, personal taste, family tradition, or whatever.

With no measurable outcome (the married couple ends up married, and the guests end up drunk, under all variations) there is no objective reason to prefer one arrangement over another.  In response to changing prices and technology, the ceremony changes very slowly, dragging its heels for decades or even centuries, struggling to preserve traditions whose causes have disappeared and are long forgotten.

Enough about weddings.  My topic is GOTV.

For some reason, GOTV, as conducted in Michigan in 2010 by Democrats, is almost entirely ceremonial.  There are a few faint voices for change, as some responses to my previous post observed, but those voices have few hearers, and no real little impact, at least so far.

When decisions were made by Democrats in Michigan this year - as opposed to Democrats in other states, or by Republicans here - there were heated discussions of colors, times, parking, scripts, and a thousand other things.  But it would have seemed bizarre to try to assign specific potential non-voters to each volunteer, letting them know there would be follow-up to see if those people actually cast ballots or not.

The result of running GOTV as a ceremony, rather than an enterprise, is the wasteful allocation of resources, perseverance in methods that are known to be ineffective, and failure to turn out tens of thousands of easily motivated Democratic voters.  

In order to "improve" GOTV in the sense of "helping elect Democrats to office", it's not enough to participate in the arguments already being held - we have to break up the current system and replace it.  We need to agree that our efforts can and should be evaluated by objective data and scientific methods, that we will insist on creating feedback loops and individual accountability, and that the old decision-making structures have to be pushed aside.  

None of this will be easy, but we know it's possible.  For one thing, Democrats in other states have begun to make the change.  For another, it appears the Michigan Republicans have already begun the transformation.  We have objective data that shows the impact.