Get on your dancing shoes!
The Senate race in Alabama is now a month old, but for a long time to come we will be celebrating the victory of Democrat Doug Jones of Alabama. This special election victory was not only historic in its importance but instructive as to the future of campaigning. It was also joyful, as shown in the photo below.
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Democrat Doug Jones' campaign headquarters on election night December 12, 2017
Jones' victory could mark the end of a dismal 150 years in Southern race relations. (See my posting at Alabama Is Still the Biggest Political News We May...) For the first time ever in the Deep South blacks and whites pulled together politically. For the first time ever they have a joint victory and are laughing together, hugging in joy. Until this campaign white racism in the Deep South, barred blacks from virtually all political participation. Here they and whites are partners!
Small wonder that Rachel Maddow has called this election "a miracle".
And it was a miracle. Whites and blacks working together for the same candidate! And the outcome was a miracle too. The Democrat — a quiet, unflashy district attorney — beat, Roy Moore, a Ruby-Red Republican in a Ruby-Red State.
Ironically this great victory was achieved through an old political practice: grassroots campaigning. Until the Jones' campaign, it had been virtually abandoned for forty years by the Democrats— even suppressed by the party's higher-ups who instead favored campaigns based on huge spending on TV ads.
For reasons I'll discuss in a moment, grassroots campaigning is what a political campaign should be. Unlike the sales pitch approach of a TV ad campaign, which solely depends on well-connected individuals raising big chunks of money and paid professionals creating ads, grassroots campaigning depends almost entirely on hard working volunteers going door-to-door. It's called "walking a precinct", i.e. a precinct commonly being an area of residences that share a polling place.
The precinct walker goes door-to-door identifying which voters are supporters so that these voters — every last one of them — can be targeted on election day in "get out the vote". Each of these voters will be nagged into voting, offered rides and babysitting.
Election day is harvest time. From the blocks you walked will come your victory. Never have I run a campaign or worked in one that door-to-door campaigning didn't win all the precincts walked. By contrast, we would lose an adjacent but unwalked precinct demographically identical to one we had walked and won. Precinct walking made the diference!
In Alabama the GOP outnumbered the Democrats statewide and also in a large number of precincts. Yet, against the odds, the Democrat walked the precincts and won.
Some commentators think the election turned on allegations Moore had messed with teenage girls. That is not an adequate explanation. After all, Donald Trump confessed on audio tape to grabbing women's genitals whenever he wanted to and apparently didn't lose one voter nationally after the tape of his boasting was made public.
That said, undoubtedly Moore's and Trump's transgressions lost Moore some should-be-GOP voters who just sat it out, far more Republicans staying home than usual in a special election. Normally it's the Democratic voters who don't show up for special elections. Alabama could thus have turned out quite differently. But even though some disheartened Republicans sat home, it was the surprisingly strong Democratic turnout that pushed Jones ahead.
And how do you get a good turnout of your voters in a normally no-show special election? I just keep saying it: with grassroots campaigning! With going door-to-door on behalf of a candidate. That visit to a voter's door is the most powerful of all weapons in politics.
Voters marvel that someone has come to their door. A real live human being cared enough about this candidate to walk the walk! That has great clout with a public that is sick and tired of paid TV ads, junk mail, and robocalls. Do you know anybody who actually watches political commercials? Doesn't everyone have a remote and know about "fast forward"?
For almost forty years I have been virtually alone in insisting on the value of grassroots campaigning. Back in the 1980s, as far as I know, the grassroots campaigns I ran were the last nationwide. The Democratic establishment systematically imposed the TV ad style campaign instead.
Why, you ask? They had ther reasons. Raising tons of money for TV justifies paying big salaries to campaign "pros" who also get a 15% commission on the ad buys. For their part the candidates get to ingratiate themselves with the wealthy contributors who will take care of them even after their days in office are over. There is also plenty of money for posh headquarters for Democratic party officials, big cars, drivers, conferences in posh places. And with all this there is also power and prestige.
Behold how the ability to raise big money for party candidates has given Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi her stranglehold on the highest Congressional posts in the party. She has clung to party power for half a century. She now has a dreadful 69% disapproval rate nationwide and is kicking 80 years of age (at 81 I get to note this). Nevertheless she's announced she's running for yet another term. For someone like Pelosi it's simple: TV ads = big money = power. And power is heady stuff. Apparently addictive. She'll still be running from her grave so as to keep her position of party power!
By contrast with TV-based campaigning, grassroots campaigning is cheap. You just need a little storefront headquarters, a HQ phone, volunteers' computers for printing handouts, and a couple of hundred bucks in seed money to get the first round of bumper stickers and campaign buttons. These campaign items will pay for themselves when sold for a dollar or two to volunteers and voters. In fact, bumper stickers can help pay the rent. Need more money? Have a fund-raiser barbecue dinner and get the firefighters union to cook the food. Charge the attendees a modest amount. Have games and popcorn and beer. Make it a family thing on a lovely fall evening in a park.
I remember a local, rich wanna-be Congresswoman who was in the Pelosi mould. She scolded me : "Why do you bother with those $5 dinners? I can call ten people and get them to pay $1000 each for tickets to our fundraisers. That's $10,000!"
She didn't understand. I wasn't raising money. I was raising people. I didn't need the big money. I needed precinct walkers and other volunteers to get out the vote. Paid workers are no good in a campaign. Their support and efforts aren't sincere and the voters can tell.
[Here ends part one of this posting about grassroots campaigning. The second half tells why it was suppressed by Democratic leadership in fsvor of just spending big money and how it is now coming back because of Alabama. The second part is titled "Grassroots Campaigning Is Back From the Dead Because of Alabama."]
Pelosi and other Democratic operators hated me. My successes without big money gave the lie to their claim that big money was needed. I was threatening all that money, all those perqs! In grass- roots campaigns, power could no longer be bought just by raising money. To save their marketplace they tried to shut down my little headquarters or get our signs removed by the police. I'd even get anonymous threatening phone calls at 1 a.m.
That sounds frightening but actually it was fun! Fighting bad guys is my idea of a good time. And these were the bad guys.
Under the mismanagement of Pelosi and her like, the Democrats lost the presidency, both houses of Congress and most of the state legislatures and governorships. We are also teetering on getting a solidly conservative Supreme Court. Plus the GOP has been able to control redistricting and thus gerrymander future contested elections virtually out of existence. Further — the worst sin of all — in 2016 Pelosi and her chums failed to get candidates to run in a number of Congressional districts that were winnable. This not only gave a bunch of Republicans a free ride but freed up GOP money to be spent in other races. With a "leader" like Nancy, who needs an enemy?
But that's over. On election night in Alabama, the victorious Doug Jones credited his victory to his grassroots campaign.
And Tom Perez, the new head of the Democratic National Committee, said he was so impressed with the grassroots campaigning in Alabama that all of the DNC funds for the race had gone into the grassroots effort. Even more heartening, Perez pledged that he would support grassroots campaigning all over the country and that he would be sure that there was a Democratic contender in every single House race nationwide.
Grassroots campaigning is now alive and well. Not only will Democrats start winning again, but something even better will happen. People will have a chance again to experience community.
There is so little of community life in our present society that people love grassroots campaigning. The headquarters becomes a second home, a place to hang out. They bring their kids. They bring sandwiches and coffee makers. They have parties and play baseball together when not working the precincts. Some go on in politics and run for office. Some marry other volunteers. All become better, more knowledgeable citizens.
The skills of grassroots have value beyond political campaigns. I had learned how to rally people to fight for all manner of things: exposing some of Nixon's early dirty tricks, getting housing for farmworkers, instigating a federal law prohibiting mass detention without due process, working to end the Vietnam War, saving historic buildings, stopping the ruination of farmland by development and the pollution of world-famous trout streams, protecting Native American spiritual places. I even got some conventional benefit, being one of the first four women to hold an executive position in California state government. In that job I got to buy about a billion dollars worth of beaches, redwoods, historic sites, Lake Tahoe. Remember the Godfather's house at Tahoe in "Godfather II"? With state funds I bought that for the people of the state of California and all who come to visit.
And when I finished all this work, I walked away, unlike Nancy Pelosi who never turns it over to younger people.
I am delighted the torch is passing to yet another new generation. (If Nancy Pelosi would just let go of it!)
Please take up the torch. Please take up grassroots campaigning. I may write a little how-to booklet and make it available through this blog or my Facebook page. But please don't let the flame go out. Don't let money run politics. Let the people do it.
I promise you you'll have the time of your life. And will also make this a better America and a better world.
Hurrah for Alabama and the good people there who made so much happen.
Now let's go ring some doorbells!
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