GOTV - Part 8 - Specific Geographic Sites

by: Grebner

Wed Dec 22, 2010 at 22:59:37 PM EST

Because our GOTV programs lack long-term memory, we tend to treat everybody as if they live in single-family houses.  We phone, knock, leaflet, mail.  When we run into something anomalous - say a college dormitory - we just stub our toes on it.  Then we recover our balance, walk around to the far side of it, and continue sticking our leaflets under the doormats.  We figure  we don't have time or energy to spare on the "exceptions", not realizing that tens of thousands of our best prospects live in "exceptional" situations.  While we devote the bulk of our resources contacting people who are almost unaffected by our reminders, we skip the very people for whom the smallest push would produce the most votes.

This craziness arises from our desire to make GOTV so simple that the same program applies everywhere.  We assume we can divide the world into election precincts, which are spread on a spectrum from highly Republican to purely Democratic.  The simplest idea is that everybody in a given precinct can be treated according to the precinct's voting statistics.  A slightly more advanced approach allows individuals to be added to or deleted from priority lists if we gather additional information about them, say an ID obtained from door-to-door canvassing. 

But when you actually GO to a precinct, you don't discover a vast field of wheat in need of harvesting.  Instead of being uniform, it's a lumpy mess composed of widely varying situations.  A large assisted living facility.  A mobile home park.  A large subdivision of upper-middle-class homes.  A mid-scale condo complex.  The canvassers take their instructions, and do the best they can, but they may have little or no impact on many of the voters who were supposedly "targeted" - they either can't be reached, or the script is inapplicable to them.

It's not that we haven't previously discovered these "lumps" - the problem is we don't have any way to record information for the long term.  To get started we should build and maintain a database, starting with the largest lumps first.  We'll quickly discover various volunteers already know a great deal about these lumps - some of them have been dealing with them informally for years, but without real institutional support.  We ought to collect:

• Name, type, and location of the facility
• Number of beds
• Number of registered voters appearing on the QVF and the number of votes cast in a recent even-year election
• Information about policies toward political activities including voter registration and absentee application drives
• Names, contact information, and political sympathies of owners and/or managers
• Democratic volunteers who are familiar with the facility who can create a continuing link to it and its management
• Sympathetic residents who - even if they aren't useful as volunteers - can help by "escorting" outsiders past security, or signing necessary paperwork
• Tactics which have been successfully tried, including details of any required paperwork