GOTV - Part 3 - Resources

by: Grebner

Tue Nov 16, 2010 at 04:00:42 AM EST

If GOTV is an enterprise, in need of optimizing, we should search for methods which transform our limited resources into the greatest possible amount of output.

But volunteers make up a major part of our "resources", and they stubbornly resist being treated like "inputs" and insist on being treated like human beings.  Unlike a railroad carload of potatoes, if we treat our volunteer "resources" badly, they walk away.

The other major resource - money - comes with a web of restrictions on how and where we can use it.  Money provided by an organization almost always comes with legal or political strings attached.

You can think of my entire thesis here as an argument for breaking those strings (to the extent we can) in order to liberate the activity from excessive control by history and tradition.  We need to convince the people who control the money that they will never get their money's worth as long as all the details are dictated by people committed to preserving the old ways and afraid of change.  It's as if we need to fight the industrial revolution all over again. 

We might as well limit ourselves to thinking of two resources: money and volunteer labor.  There are other resources - low-cost or free office space, phone banks, office equipment - but they don't play the same role in thwarting change.  If we can figure out how to liberate money and volunteers from the grip of "what we've always done", I'm sure the folding chairs will take care of themselves.

I think the amount of money is relatively fixed.  Mostly, GOTV money comes from large organizations, not small contributors, and their budgeted contributions are relatively insensitive to the detailed plans of how GOTV will be conducted. The problem in the case of money is convincing the powers-that-be to abandon their blind reliance on robo-calls, or blind lit drops, or walking-around money, unless those techniques can produce verifiable and measurable results.  The Analyst Institute, building on the work of Gerber and Green, has begun to make real progress changing minds, at least at the national level.

The quantity of volunteers is a more interesting study.  Volunteers are simply not a fixed quantity; the supply varies depending on how much we need them and how well we treat them.  We all know many cases where somebody new in town looks up the local Democratic Party and tries to volunteer, but discovers that nobody ever gets back to them.  Or the only response is to be put on a list and invited to attend useless County Executive Board meetings where they listen to self-important elected officials deliver bad speeches.  Or they show up on time, and discover that nothing is ready when they get there, and the planned activity is a self-evident waste of their time.  I have no idea how many volunteers we'd have if we treated them well, but they'd probably be as plentiful as - say -  road-kill deer.  (To non-Michigan readers, that means "very plentiful".)

As I'll explain in later postings, we need to greatly expand the number of people we think of as volunteers, which will require spending more of our money on their recruitment, care, motivation, and supervision.  Instead of trying to line up volunteers to perform large amounts of mundane repetitive actions, we need to break down our needs into tiny pieces, and assign each piece to an appropriate person.  Some of the supervision of these tiny activities will be by other volunteers, but some will have to be by paid workers.

Let me give an example from last week's election, which prefigures some points I will make in greater detail later.  Let's put out of our mind the image of a person who contacts us offering their help, who is eventually assigned to lit-drop a 75% Dem precinct Sunday before the election.  Instead, think of a person ("Sally") whom we know is a Democrat and a solid voter, but has never had any deeper connection with politics.

Imagine that we phone Sally, and (working from computerized data) we discover she has two kids in their twenties and an elderly mother.  We can see the kids are rated as 20% and 30% likely to vote - in other words, they AREN'T likely to vote.  Her mom, who isn't in good health, lives in assisted care.  Our worker (who is himself a volunteer, but has been trained and is carefully supervised until we're confident in him) asks Sally if we could please recruit her to work with her daughter, son, and mom.  She gives us the son's and daughter's cellphone numbers, and we send along some campaign literature, which Sally promises to talk about with the kids.

We talk about her mom, and Sally says she'll do her best, but that mom may not be capable of voting absentee even with help.  We get Sally a pre-filled out AV application for mom, but we note in our database not to push too hard, because mom's not lucid.

This scenario is not at ALL unusual.  We never hear such details from our phonebanks, because they aren't expected to ask for, record, or use such information.  But it is precisely such detail that creates the real world - and which our current crude method grind down into interchangeable parts.

Obviously, in this scenario, it would be best if the same person continued to deal with Sally, not just dumping responsibility off on a random volunteer from the next shift.  It may or may not be possible to maintain the personal connection, but it should be a priority, at least in a case like the one I've described.  In other words, we need to recognize that having our phonebank volunteer contact fewer people is worthwhile, if we make better contacts as a result.

Eventually - let's imagine - Sally gets her mom to sign the AV application, and with considerable help from Sally actually cast a ballot. But only one of the kids shows up to vote on election day.  So the household, which normally has only one solid voter, casts three ballots.  Two months after the election, we mail Sally a letter, signed by her State Rep., thanking her for her help and specifically mentioning mom and the daughter.  "We're sorry Jim didn't vote, but only 20% of the voters in their twenties voted this year.  We'll hope you'll keep working with him."  We send letters to each of the kids, which they may or may not read, thanking one for voting and gently scolding the other.  We mail a thankyou to mom, which is a complete waste of postage, but we can't expect perfection.

Two years later, we don't need to "recruit" Sally; we just need to update our information, and continue to provide information, send preprinted forms, and so on.  Maybe the son's girlfriend has moved in with them.  "Does she talk about politics?  Do you think she'd vote Democratic?  Should we get her registered to vote?"  We rely on the insights by our local volunteer:  Sally.

Under the existing system, all our effort would be devoted to Sally, since we'd have a solid ID for her, but not on the kids, who never answer the phone and have never voted.  Mom is registered at the facility, where we can't contact her.  The kids wouldn't read mail, talk to door-to-door canvassers, or answer the landline phone.  So as far as a traditional GOTV is concerned, the only person to consider is Sally, so we'd remind her to vote three or four times, and mail her an AV application (even though she isn't 60 and won't use it.)  

Under the scheme I propose, we convert Sally into a volunteer and a resource, and we take advantage of her knowledge of household matters to turn out one or two extra votes in each election.  Her "volunteer activity" consists of conversations that would have taken place anyway, except we provide some crucial guidance and assistance with forms and information.  

Maybe two years from now, we ask Sally about her next-door neighbor, who seems to have stopped voting.  Have they moved?  Could Sally talk to them for us?  Are they aware they're still registered to vote?  Maybe we send a door-to-door canvasser to see what's up, and then report to Sally they claim they DID vote.  Maybe come election day, we suggest, Sally could invite them to accompany her to the polling place....