(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Building A Better Turnout Machine, A Key to Success in 2024 [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2024-02-24 Practice makes perfect. One of the biggest advantages that Republicans have over Democrats in GOTV (Get-Out-the-Vote) is that the GOP has a cadre of professionals who participate in Get-Out-the-Vote efforts year after year, perfecting both their individual and collective efforts. We don’t have that. Consensus Electoral College Battleground Map I’m a big believer in professionalism in political campaigns. Most Democratic campaign staffers aspire to be something else: government staffer, candidate or campaign consultant. Or think of a campaign as a cool break from school or a job. A sabbatical. I’ve met very few who think of campaigns as a career — something you see on the GOP side. That’s not really going to change. You can’t force Democrats to make a career in politics (by which i mean campaigns) but you can encourage those who have worked “behind the curtain” to stay connected and devote some time in their future to helping Democrats win. But Hope Springs from Field PAC emphasizes the importance of GOTV from the beginning. If you’re only going to volunteer once, volunteer on Election Day. Or during GOTV. Prioritize the Final Push, even as you volunteer other times. We don’t have a professional cadre, but we do have volunteers, and we have incredibly experienced volunteers to boot. And i’d argue that our grassroots allows us the opportunity to match the GOP professional cadre during the Final Push. 2024 Senate Battleground Map IOW, the grassroots will make the difference in who wins and loses in the Fall. And that is especially true as the job market remains strong. In both Ohio and the NY-03 Special Election, Hope Springs from Field volunteers knocked on doors every day of the week during the Early Voting period. And there was a reason for that. The U.S. Census Bureau has reported the share of home-based workers has more than tripled since 2019, resulting in almost 19 million more Americans working from home. As expected, we saw improved contact rates as Election Day drew closer. The fact is that direct voter contact is not independent of campaign media advertising, at least not totally. Voters are more likely to talk to canvassers when their entire environment is surrounded by campaign messaging. We’ve known this for awhile, and it is the reason why, when Hope Springs has taken on responsibility for GOTV in an area, we “take control” of a certain number of yard signage so that we can surround an area in which we were canvassing. On Long Island, we had control of 48 yard signs that we moved so that they were scattered throughout the four corners of the area where we were canvassing. And people notice. “His signs seem to be everywhere!” voters would tell us. More importantly, once people get used to the yard signs being “everywhere,” they don’t seem to notice when they get moved. It’s a weird trick on the mind, i suppose, but voters would drive by these new signs that popped up around them, and then we’d knock on their door and even make calls to the homes where no one was home. And that was just what we were doing. The campaign and other Democratic orgs were making their own appeals to drive out the vote. Before i dive more into what Hope Springs volunteers did to drive out the vote, i do want to emphasize one thing Democratic and progressive voters should remember going into the primaries. Democrats do best when the ballot represents our diversity. Voters are more responsive when they can see themselves on the ballot, people who look, talk and think as they do. I don’t know the magic sauce to create a diverse general election ballot that represents all the diversity amongst our coalition, but i do think it is something we need to think about when we go vote in the primaries. Here’s the thing: we don’t win (across the board) because we have one or two incredibly charismatic candidate(s). Barack Obama had terrible coattails. We win when Democrats and leaners see themselves on the ballot. Women, Hispanics, African-Americans, Asian & Pacific Islander, etc — the more that our general election ballot reflects our incredible diversity, the more likely we are to win across the board. Hope Springs took on the responsibility for canvassing and getting out the vote in the “heel” of the NY-03, in Bethpage, Levittown, Farmingdale, Massapequa, North Massapequa and Massapequa Park. “That's MAGA country,” Tom Suozzi said. A “really tough area.” A perfect proving ground for outsiders, people who weren’t scared off by the vaunted reputation of the Republican machine there. As i wrote over and over, Nassau County Republicans have what Politico called “a robust field program.” Now i wouldn’t have said that we had a “a robust field program,” but we did have a relentless one. Starting January 13th, we have volunteers and organizers out knocking on doors every single day through the election. We knocked on 300,824 doors (in general, more than once, so it’s not 300k unique doors), talked to 39,649 voters and ended up starting Election Day with 16,733 voters we thought would cast their ballot for Suozzi. In MAGA country. And the results showed. Suozzi didn’t just win in Democratic strongholds, but held his own in the rest of the district: Democrat Tom Suozzi won the 3rd Congressional District special election by dominating in traditionally Democratic areas from Port Washington to Plainview, and faring better than expected in the Republican-leaning communities of Levittown and Farmingdale, a Newsday analysis of election board data shows. “’Even in areas that we didn’t do well in, we picked up more votes than we would’ve thought,’ said Jay Jacobs, state and Nassau Democratic Chairman.” Even Peter King, a vice chairman of the Nassau County Republican Committee, admitted: “She didn't do as well in the red districts as she should have, and he did better in some of the blue areas than we expected.” We attacked their strengths, not by persuading Republicans to vote for the Democrat (although this happened), but by making sure that our voters turned out. And our voters, in the areas where Hope Springs was leading GOTV, faced a relentless push to reach them and get them to the polls. Relentless. (I call it nagging, but relentless is a nicer term.) Hope Springs from Field PAC has been knocking on doors since 2021 in a grassroots-led effort to prepare Electoral Battlegrounds in what has been called the First and Second Rounds of a traditional Five Round Canvass. We are taking those efforts to the doors of Democrats and unaffiliated voters with a systematic approach that reminds them not only that Democrats care, but Democrats are determined to deliver the best government possible to all Americans. Obviously, we rely on grassroots support, so if you support field/grassroots organizing, voter registration (and follow-up) and our efforts to protect our voters, we would certainly appreciate your support: https://secure.actblue.com/donate/fistfulofsteel Hope Springs from Field PAC understands that volunteer to voter personal interactions are critical. We believe that in-person voter contact that is interactive and volunteer-driven is key to success in 2024. But we need your help. This was one of the small group of suburban battleground districts that flipped from blue to red in 2022 and gave Republicans control of the House. Now it has flipped back. The result indicates that this district — and potentially others with similar mixes of red and blue — are still in flux and aren’t necessarily ready to stick with the GOP. Many of the same districts will be back in play in the 2024 race for the House majority, giving Democrats a boost of confidence heading into the fall. Surveys show President Joe Biden is unpopular nationally and in battleground territory, but a host of recent off-year and special elections don’t indicate that it’s translating at the ballot box, a theme the Biden campaign has pointed out. Will presidential election-level turnout give Republicans the boost they’ve been looking for? NBC News' polling over the past year has found Biden doing better among more engaged voters who showed up in both the 2020 and 2022 elections but more poorly among the rest of voters. Engaged voters does not mean engaged citizens. And there are reasons to think that GOTV will be more important this year than in the last two presidential elections. First of all, we may have forgotten that Democrats really didn’t canvass in 2020 due to COVID and GOTV was lackluster in more than a couple of swing states. Biden won regardless, but that lack of direct voter contact did hurt Democrats in the House (especially) and down ballot. Historically, turnout fluctuates in unexpected ways. 2024 may be no different. Despite the high emotions on both sides, we may very well see a drop-off in turnout that has little to do with the candidates. [...] So voter turnout has increased for two straight elections. In U.S. history, there has only been one span when turnout managed to increase for three straight elections — from 2000 to 2004 to 2008, and that occurred after a steep fall-off in 1996. We all expect another “rematch” election. There have been three “rematch” elections since the fundamental switch to the popular vote in the Electoral College: 1892 (Grover Cleveland vs. Benjamin Harrison), 1900 (William McKinley vs. William Jennings Bryant) and 1956 (Eisenhower vs. Adlai Stevenson). In each one, turnout dropped the second time around and only in 1892 did the challenger win. In three other cases, where a previous losing candidate won the nomination — 1908, 1948 and 1968 — turnout dropped from the last time they were on the ballot. Many of us believe that 2024 is the most important election of our lifetimes, not because Biden is such a great president but because Trump represents an existential threat to America. But what is different this time is January 6th provided concrete evidence of what Trump was capable of, his criminal indictments demonstrated that he will not stop and Democrats have continued to win elections since, in defiance of history. Moreover, Reproductive Freedom has been on the ballot in seven states since Roe v Wade was overturned. In every case, anti-abortion groups lost. While this wasn’t as great a factor in NY-03 as in those cases, it is clear that abortion continues to influence electoral results. The Alabama IVF Ruling only reinforces that. Reproductive Freedom is on the ballot in 2024. In 2023, Hope Springs took on GOTV responsibilities for the November “special election” in suburban counties where we had been canvassing since 2022. In large part this was because, in our normal canvassing of Ohio’s suburban counties, we had identified 136,761 Reproductive Freedom or single-issue voters, women and men who told us they supported the Constitutional Amendment or Reproductive Rights. Now we didn’t set out to find Abortion voters, we ask whether there was a “single issue that will determine how you vote.” We just happened to have that data, collected as part of our normal canvassing process. And in Ohio, that data became useful. We fully expect data to be essential in our GOTV efforts this Fall, as well. As ABC put it: “In a highly polarized political environment like the one we're in, election results may be determined more by changes in turnout patterns than by changes in partisan preference.” Identification, motivation (or persuasion) and mobilization is more important than ever. Democrats remain a political party anchored by the major urban areas, but our expansion into the suburbs is increasingly key to our success. Turnout rates tend to be “higher in suburban counties than in urban and rural ones.” Over the past several years, turnout slumps in major cities have been a cause for concern for Democrats. But at the same time, surging turnout in the suburbs — which have become bluer as they've grown more racially diverse and as college graduates have moved toward Democrats — seems to have helped offset this. Though suburbs are certainly not monolithic in their party preferences, even small leftward shifts in these areas have benefited Democrats — particularly as they've been accompanied by, or perhaps helped drive, high turnout. With this trend continuing in 2023, it seems safe to say suburbs will remain a major political battleground for years to come. Hope Springs from Field PAC did not set out to organize in suburban counties, per se, that is simply where the need was. That’s where the vacuum exists. And because many of these suburban areas are, or were, Republican historically, that is where our experience was needed. While most GOTV efforts have traditionally been “directed towards high-propensity voters,” Hope Springs expands beyond that because we understand that Democrats must always be expanding the electorate in order to win. We can never sit on our laurels. 2023 Hope Springs expenses We will start up our Issues Canvass again in March, and will expand into Maryland in addition to the 11 states we organized last year. Our biggest expense remains the Voter File. But it is also a fixed cost. That won’t change as we raise and spend more money. Printing literature is our second largest cost. Printing and mailing out our Post Cards to New Voters is our third major cost and paying the fees for ActBlue is the smallest of our monthly costs. Hope Springs is a seat-of-the-pants grassroots-driven operation. We don’t have employees and we realize that to formalize and professionalize this effort that will have to change. We spent less than $70,000 last year because we raised less than $70,000. We still haven’t paid for all the literature we distributed in Ohio and Arizona last Fall. If you are able to contribute to our efforts to protect Democratic voters, especially in minority communities, expand the electorate, and believe in grassroots efforts to increase voter participation and election protection, please do. We need your help: https://secure.actblue.com/donate/fistfulofsteel You can follow that link for our mailing address, as well (for those who would rather send us a check). Thank you for your support! This work depends on you! [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/2/24/2216314/-Building-A-Better-Turnout-Machine?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=latest_community&pm_medium=web Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/