Planting Liberally

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If you graduated from Harvard University, chances are you've received ballots for the upcoming Board of Overseers and Alumni Association elections. Chances are, if you haven't tossed the largely bland candidate statements out already, you're probably largely clueless about the candidates. Which candidates are progressive, which are stealth conservatives, and which ones are simply apolitical? It's difficult to tell.

I've had the same questions since I graduated college, and this year I decided to try something in order to help myself cast something like an educated ballot: I started Progressive Harvard Alums, a Facebook group which is, for starters, dedicated to discussing the candidates in this election. To get things started, I just posted a note analyzing the political donor data from opensecrets.org, for each candidate for Board of Overseers; I'll follow up soon with another post for the Alumni Association. After the ballots are cast in this year's election, I hope the group will grow into something a bit more long-lasting and general-interest - a hub for Harvard alums who want to make their university a more progressive place.

If you're a Harvard alum, I hope you'll join the group. If not, I encourage you start your own progressive alum group today! Even if you don't get to vote for university leadership, there are bound to be other ways you can make a difference at your alma mater.

Tonight I attended an Organizing for America phonebank. Together with other Massachusetts volunteers, I called voters in Maine to encourage them to call Senators Snowe and Collins and ask them to vote for a public option.

The event had all the trappings of a election-focused phonebank, except that our end goal was a bit different, and our failure rate (measured in refusals, and judging only from my own limited experience) was a bit higher. As I dialed, it occurred to me that effectively, we were learning to do something that the progressive movement knows very little about - lobbying Congress via mass mobilization. I thought I'd put down some notes about the lessons that I hope we'll learn from this effort, and my long-term view for this new style of governance.

Prologue - Progressive electoral campaigns

With the benefit of hindsight, I think we can look back at 2003 - 2008 as a period when the progressive movement learned to do something that no one had ever done before - create a modern, distributed, broad-based, successful electoral campaign infrastructure. The campaign machinery that progressives developed in that period was not the same media-obsessed, telegenic campaign of the Clinton years; nor was it only the product of offline, on-the-ground machine-based organizing that elected Democrats from Roosevelt through Johnson. Instead, progressive electoral campaigns in this era blended together offline organizing, broadcast media, and online organizing and activism.

But as distinctive as the role of online organizing was in progressive electoral campaigns, I think it was overshadowed by the broad-based, one-on-one, ground-game approach of those campaigns, which online organizing enabled. The ground game is nothing new in campaigning, but the degree of stranger-to-stranger contact in this wave of campaigns was unprecedented. Calling strangers on the phone, driving across state borders to knock on doors in a foreign neighborhood, and going to a house party without a familiar face in the crowd were not rare experiences for a lot of progressives. To be sure, there is a lot to criticize in some of these tactics, and friend-to-friend contact is far superior in many cases, but I think this brazen notion that a progressive campaign could just attempt to contact everyone was the defining characteristic of progressive campaigns.

Along the way, the progressive movement learned a lot about how to conduct such a campaign, and a lot of new tools and tactics were developed and perfected. The online house party, friend-to-friend fundraising, and modern voter file database systems were among the most important advances in this style of campaigning.

Learning How to Lobby

Now that we have consolidated power at the federal level, it's time to govern. The lion's share of governance work is lobbying Congress, but we have, essentially, no experience whatsoever in how to do that.

Allow me to qualify that. We have no experience whatsoever in lobbying Congress, from a position of strength, with the benefit of online organizing. Since 2000, our lobbying position has essentially been a defensive crouch, and the years 1995 - 2000 weren't all that hot either. The last time Democrats held so much power at the federal level, Google did not exist and the White House made a splash by giving President Clinton an email address.

Lobbying Congress from a position of strenght means we need to encourage Senators to vote for something, not against something. Lobbying with the benefit of online organizing means that we have the capability to include vast numbers of people in the lobbying process, in a way that is entirely unprecedented. Just as progressives learned how to massively expand the battleground and to engage lots and lots of people in an electoral campaign using web-based technology, I think progressives need to learn how to massively expand the conversation around important pieces of legislation, and to engage lots and lots of people in the effort to lobby Congress.

To be sure, progressives have lobbied Congress in the past. But to date, these efforts have largely been focused on the small lobbying effort that progressive interest groups can afford, and the public pressure we can bring to bear in the media and with rallies. We are, essentially, lobbying Congress like it's 1999.

There have been some very tentative steps taken towards incorporating online activism into lobbying efforts. Some of these, like the endless petition emails, are not particulalry inspiring or effective. Some of the most recent steps are, I think, extremely exciting and signs that we are slowly but surely learning how to lobby in an entirely different way. I'll mention them further on.

I think we are headed towards a new kind of lobbying effort, whose basic approach is to perpetually engage as many people as possible in making their views on important legislation heard, using all the traditional means of contacting Congress - office visits, phone calls, letters, rallies, letter-to-the-editor campaigns, and so on. And to make that effort possible, we will need to learn a few important lessons.

Lobbying vs. Electioneering

Deval Patrick first started talking about converting his volunteer corps into a citizen-lobbyist corps in late 2005. Unfortunately, that effort turned out to be a flop. I don't want to delve into Massachusetts politics circa 2006, but suffice it to say that lobbying is very different than electioneering, and I don't think Patrick or his organization gave enough thought and deference to that problem.

From a mobilization point of view, running an electoral campaign is relatively straightforward. There's a clear objective (get more votes than the opposition); the tactics are well-known and performance is readily tracked (make phone calls, knock on doors); there is a clear deadline; and for high-profile campaigns, there is a built-in supply of volunteers, and, in many cases, there's a physical location where volunteers can actually show up and work. That's not to say that running a campaign is easy, but the structure of an election makes mass mobilization relatively simple.

By contrast, lobbying is devilishly tricky. The substance of the bill is constantly changing; there are a lot of hurdles, in the form of committee and cloture votes, and therefore many objectives; the tactics are rather muddled (even calling a Congressional office can be rather intimidating); the deadline is anything but clear, as floor votes can be delayed for any number of reasons; the media profile of a legislative item is lower than that of an electoral campaign; and there is usually no physical location where supporters of a bill can gather to support it.

What's more, the lobbying strategy is fluid and very tricky to pin down. In an election, the strategy is simple: get a lot of votes. But in a lobbying effort, the strategy is not at all obvious: should we try to persuade Republican senators to switch, as OFA is doing? Or should we try to create a Progressive Block in the Senate?

What we're learning

Luckily, I think we are already learning to adapt to this new terrain.

To begin with, we've learnt that a broad-based progressive lobbying campaign needs a clear goal, or a "line in the sand" beyond which compromise is not acceptable. Moreover, this line in the sand must be clearly grounded in progressive principles, in order to motivate the progressive base to get behind that goal. Because legislative battles have a lower media profile than elections, and because most people are not used to the concept of being called in order to support a piece of legislation, and because it's possible to water down a bill and kill it with a thousand paper cuts, the elevator speech for a piece of legislation is vital. We need to be able to explain to prospective supporters what we want and why we want it, and to have that explanation make perfect sense, in something like thirty seconds.

With regards to health care, we have done a reasonably good job, although improvements are possible. Our line in the sand is the public option, and there is impressive unanimity across progressive groups about that goal, but we could improve our communication about it. To begin with, "public option" is not self-explanatory; it only makes sense to someone who has been following the debate closely. Moreover, the reason we support it is muddled. The script I received tonight from Organizing for America, although not without its merits, claimed that we want a public option in order to provide "competition for the traditional health insurance companies". That's classic conservative framing, and it's not at all inspiring or easy to defend. (Who cares about competition when you just lost your COBRA, or you have a relative in intensive care and have no idea how you'll pay for it?) What we are really talking about is a public health insurance plan, and we want it because it will allow anyone to buy quality, affordable health insurance.

Another lesson learned is that the numbers we are shooting in a lobbying campaign are different than those we need for an electoral campaign. Success in federal elections is measured in the millions of votes. Success in a lobbying campaign is measured in the hundreds, or perhaps thousands, of phone calls. Consequently, we probably do not need the same scale of stranger-to-stranger contact that we need in an electoral campaign; a lobbying campaign should start as a base mobilization exercise, garnering phone calls from core progressive supporters and all of their friends and relatives.

On the flip side, the universe for a lobbying campaign is much broader. The only thing required to lobby Congress is a phone line, and preferably an address in the representative's district or senator's state. There is no voter registration deadline or age limit. That means that stranger-to-stranger contact doesn't need to proceed from voterfiles. Instead, it can use targeted commercial mailing lists, or relevant government databases. For example, it might be an interesting exercise to call through the business owners listed in an incorporation list retrieved from a secretary of state's office, in order to get support from small business owners. (Although actually, incorporation lists are rather over-used; other lists might yield better results.) For similar reasons, there are limitless possibilities in online outreach. For example, it wouldn't be too difficult for HCAN to craft a Google Adwords campaign targeted at people looking for information about health insurance plans online, and to encourage those people to call their senator to support a simpler approach to insurance.

Finally, lobbying is, in some ways, a considerably more tangible and concrete effort. An election is a mashup of a cult of personality and a six-degrees-of-separation story about progress ("if you elect me, and we keep our majority, and the speaker allows the bill to come to a vote, and we can convince the Senate to pass the bill, and we get it out of conference...."). But a piece of legislation can have immediate and dramatic effects on someone's life, and the storyline is much simpler and more direct. Such a storyline can become the exposition that comes after the elevator speech for a bill.

The cutting edge

Although we are still taking baby steps in our attempt to facilitate broad-based citizen lobbying, I think there are some very exciting new tools which will be key in making this effort possible:

 

• Advomatic's Click to Call tool, which allows organizations to deploy an easy-to-use "call your senator" web-based widget on their website. The tool allows organizations to track calls, and doesn't require users to look up phone numbers or even make a phone call (Advomatic calls you, and then connects you.) I've used HCAN's Click to Call widget, and it is very, very slick.
• Crowdsourced public whip-counting, like Stand with Dr Dean. The technology behind this application is very simple - it could easily have been written during Dean's presidential campaign - but crowdsourced whip-counting is a great idea which allows the progressive base to lobby while doing something that's actually very important to the overall effort.
• FriendRoots is a new Facebook app developed by Max Gottlieb and announced on Dailykos a few days ago. The application allows you to locate Facebook friends who are constituents of (or whose home towns are represented by) swing senators on ACES and the health care bill, and to email those friends to ask them to email their senators about ACES and the health care bill.
• Tweet Your Senator is an interesting mashup just released by OFA; the idea is to send your senator a tweet about health care reform, and there's a tiny bit of magic which uses your zip code to look up your senator's Twitter username. This kind of tool, together with other Twitter-petition applications, has good promise for making the petition process a bit more public and viral.

The Future of Lobbying

Broad-based participatory lobbying is not easy to do, but I am actually very excited about it. For all the difficulties and challenges posed by this kind of work, it offers us a chance to really govern together, in a manner that is much more interesting than broad-based participatory electioneering. Although I didn't have a lot of success on the phones, some of my fellow callers were doing pretty well, and having some very interesting and valuable conversations with voters.

For the past few months I've watched the health care and energy bill debates with horror, partially because the degree to which Congress is for sale has been so readily apparent, and partially because the conversation has been so frustratingly remote, focused as it is on Washington.  For a long while it seems that there was really very little that could be done, and that we would have to sit back and watch as the lobbyists had a field day.

While I don't think that broad-based lobbying is the silver bullet that will stop corruption dead in its tracks, I do think it is a promising new approach to legislative battles.  And by engaging us in conversation about live, ongoing, tangible policy issues with our neighbors and friends, I think it brings us a little closer to the whole point of self-governance.

Tonight I attended one of the "house parties for change" organized by the Obama campaign. The house parties are meant to contribute to an ongoing conversation about what to do with the energy and structure that was the Obama volunteer organization.

If you think you've heard this song before, you're probably right - this was the question faced by Dean volunteers in the aftermath of his 2004 defeat, and there are similar, smaller-scale challenges faced by other candidates at the local level all the time. Dean's campaign operation ultimately became Democracy for America (DFA), and it and its far-flung network of chapters are still kicking. Given the founding conviction s of DFA - that progressives need to show up everywhere, and that voting is just the beginning of civic involvement - it wouldn't be too unreasonable to say that DFA was a prototype for the DNC's 50 State Strategy in spirit, although the mechanics of DFA and the 50 State Strategy are very different.

The problem of what to do with Obama's campaign structure is very different, for a number of reasons. One, Obama's campaign was much, much larger than Dean's. Two, in early 2004 there was a huge overlap between the netroots progressive movement and the Dean campaign, whereas the Obama campaign of necessity includes plenty of moderate and establishment Democrats, and no small number of Obama volunteers were Republicans. Three, and perhaps most importantly, Obama was in fact successful, he now has to govern, and his supporters have reason to expect that their priorities will be represented in the White House.

There are a few basic ideas running around for what to do with the Obama campaign, and they seem to include the following basic options:

• Supporting Obama. The Obama volunteers will become a support network for Obama's legislative priorities in Congress, and will presumably become a group dedicated to pressuring Congress and the media.
• Being active and possibly critical. The Obama volunteers will be called upon to stay active in, and to continue to sound off on, national politics. That could include commentary on change.gov or a successor website, conference calls with a randomly selected subset of Obama volunteers, MoveOn-style house parties, and other activities.
• Becoming active in local politics. Essentially following the DFA model, Obama volunteers will be encouraged to support other politicians in Obama's mold at the local level, thereby keeping the campaign going and turning volunteers attention towards a more local level.
• Service projects. Somewhat like the early version of the Edwards campaign (OneCorps), volunteers will be asked to take on local, mostly apolitical service projects - helping out in food pantries, conservation projects, etc.

There are strengths and weaknesses for each of these options, but I think the main complication is the fact that Obama will soon be president, and there is a limit to the amount of political campaigning he can do. At the same time, the email list is intensely Obama-focused; if it were to grow into an organization that became a hotbed of criticism of the administration, Obama could simply shut down the email list. Contra-wise, Obama can't just hand off the email list to a third party; or rather, he could, but a lot of list subscribers would unsubscribe, or stop paying attention.

This is a serious conundrum, but I think one idea which emerged from our house party tonight was quite interesting, and that was to use the house parties simply as a springboard for further policy-oriented conversations - or salons, if you like.

Here's one way this might play out. Every month, the members of the Obama email list are charged with holding house party conversations about some broad topic. Hosts could receive some basic informational materials about the issue, but attendees would be free to discuss other sources of ideas on the topic as well - articles, movies, books, whatever. Each house party could be charged with answering a set of questions, and the administration could commit to taking that aggregate response into account when crafting and directing policy. What's more, the topics could go on a six-month rotation cycle so that if an issue was discussed in February, it would come up again in August, and house party attendees would have a chance to give feedback on the government's performance on that issue. There could even be a chance for issue task forces to develop, in order to give more focused and frequent feedback on an issue in between the "spotlight" months.

This approach would, I think, neatly sidestep many of the thornier issues involved in keeping the Obama organization alive. It is political without being essentially campaign-oriented. It allows Obama to gather support and feedback, but it is appropriately open to everyone. Most importantly, it gives the Obama volunteer network something to do, and an ongoing set of opportunities for involvement and action.

There is still the not-insignificant problem of how this operation would be managed. Would it be run from within the government, as an essentially non-campaign operation with the White House's official support - and would that mean that emails gathered through the operation could not be used for campaign purposes? Or would it be essentially a shell for the 2012 campaign, and therefore a non-governmental entity which requires its own fundraising arm? This question is a bit thorny, but I actually think either answer would work out fine in practice.

I'm curious to see what becomes of these house parties, although I'm a bit dismayed that the campaign's progress on this question has been so slow, and that the communication about this problem appears to be very top-down. Unfortunately, I've also heard this song before in Massachusetts, when Deval Patrick promised to keep his campaign organization involved in governing post-election. Although there was a lot of hay made about the idea early on, and a few citizen task forces convened, the effort eventually fizzled. Here's hoping that Obama is more successful in this part of the transition.

The book launch for Dispatches from the Religious Left is coming up on Tuesday, Oct. 14.  In anticipation of the event, I'm running a series this weekend on a few essays from the book.  Yesterday I wrote about PastorDan's essay on the role of the Religious Left (PastorDan responded here), as well as Rev. Debra Haffner and Timothy Palmer's essay on a theology of sexual justice.

The third part of the book is dedicated to "getting from here to there", and is a bit more nuts-and-bolts-oriented than the first two parts.  It includes the essay my wife and I wrote on new media, which focuses on helping religious organizations find their voice online.  However, since that material is probably pretty familiar to many blog readers, I'm instead going to focus on the contribution by Frederick Clarkson (who is also the editor of the book), titled "Three wheels that need not be reinvented".

Fred's main argument is that the Religious Left must get more involved in electoral politics.  By way of contrast he points to the Religious Right, which actively participates in party primaries, registers voters, and maintains high-quality voter lists that persist from one cycle to another.  All of these ingredients help the Right exert power far beyond its numbers, and Clarkson argues that the Left must respond in kind in order to realize its vision.  His chapter profiles three progressive political organizations in Massachusetts, and offers them as organizing models for Religious Leftists.

The first organization is Neighbor-to-Neighbor, a statewide organization whose goal is to register voters in low-income communities in order to boost turnout and elect progressive representative.  The organization has a "Working Families Agenda" which it uses to engage and register voters throughout the year.  At election time, these efforts are reinforced by personal contact.  In this way, Neighbor-to-Neighbor keeps its constituents engaged across election cycles, and is able to build a high-quality voter list which forms the basis for electoral efforts.

The second organization is Progressive Democrats of Massachusetts, an alliance of volunteer-run chapters throughout the state.   PDM was founded in the wake of Robert Reich's unsuccessful bid for governor in 2002.  Reich's run was a rallying point for progressives in a very un-progressive year, and in some ways helped pave the way for Deval Patrick's dramatic upset victory in 2006.  PDM's goal is to elect progressives in Democratic party primaries - which, in many areas in Massachusetts, is really where the election is held, since voters overwhelmingly back Democrats in the general election.

The third organization is MassVote, née BostonVote.  MassVote encourages non-profit social service agencies to register and mobilize their constituents, in order to build support for their programs within state government.  The organization has developed an innovative set of resources to conduct this kind of registration and mobilization at low cost, and within the rules for electioneering by non-profits.  This last point should be emphasized: the organization doesn't encourage its member agencies to engage in partisan activity; instead, agencies do non-partisan voter registration and education work.  That work brings more progressive voters to the polls, and elects progressive representatives; but that's incident to the target voter population, rather than the result of any particularly partisan activity.  (Disclosure: A few years ago MassVote was a prospective client for the company I worked for at the time.)

Clarkson wants the Religious Left to adopt some of these models and integrate it into its own work - while following IRS rules.  As MassVote clearly demonstrates, it is possible to create a progressive electorate without stepping outside the boundaries of 501(c)3 regulations, simply by targeting non-partisan voter registration, mobilization, and non-biased education efforts at progressive voter populations.

Fred's essay is a good starting point for prodding religious organizations to participate in electoral politics.  However, I think the Religious Left will need to build some infrastructure - both theoretical and organizational - in order to realize this vision.

For starters, we will need to create and promote what I call a "theology of participation" - an argument that democratic participation by our congregations is not just ok, but in fact necessary.  Many liberal congregations are already committed to social justice in a variety of ways, so I don't think this will be a particularly hard sell.  On the other hand, some liberal congregations are also instinctively allergic to politics in the pulpit, and congregants might become incensed at anything which appears to violate the spirit of separation of church and state separation.  Religious leaders who want to register and mobilize their congregations should be clear about a few key points: first, that democratic participation is a profound act of bearing witness to one's value system; second, that it is a way to support the church's social justice mission; and finally, that the congregation is not endorsing any party or candidate, and that it is up to individual congregants to decide which candidate or party will best support social justice.

On top of this theology of participation, congregations will need to layer a set of practices to encourge participation.  These practices begin with voter registration drives.  They also include basic education, especially for local elections.  Congregations should ensure that their members know when the election is as well as the meaning of various offices on the ballot is.  Finally, within certain boundaries, congregations can help their members learn about the candidates who are running for office.  This last step will require a great deal of delicacy, as it's entirely easy to cross the line from voter education to candidate endorsement - even without intention.  Some congregations may want to eschew this step entirely, or may want to simply encourage their members to obtain a copy of the ballot a week or two before the election and to educate themselves.  (Or to organize their own ballot parties.)

On top of this level of activity within congregations, the Religious Left should build organizations which can aggregate this activity and harvest the results across election cycles.  Congregation-organized voter registration drives should be harvested into long-lasting and well-maintained voter lists.  Those voters, in turn, should be engaged about important issues year-round, and should be targeted for mobilization at election time.  This kind of work is too far outside the mission of individual congregations.  And it is not particularly well-suited to single-issue groups like the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice.  So new, multi-issue issue groups will need to be built.

In some ways, this three-tiered approach to voter registration and mobilization - beginning with theological foundations, proceeding to routine practice, and culminating in aggregation and professional cross-cyclical efforts - is just the beginning.  As a movement with a broad commitment to social justice, the Religious Left can, and should, be heavily involved in building progressive power outside of the voting booth.  In particular, the Religious Left should incubate labor organizing and community organizing efforts; leaders should encourage their congregations to support these organizations in meetings and on picket lines, and should offer meeting space or other resources where necessary.  Not only are these efforts non-partisan, but they are profoundly faithful acts of social justice, which will have a strong foundation in the theological tradition of the vast majority of Religious Left congregations.  (Indeed, many liberal congregations are already doing this kind of work, and have been doing it for a long time, much to their credit.  I'm merely arguing for more of this kind of work, and for liberal congregations to be more pro-active in seeking out and supporting this kind of capcity-building social justice work, where it makes sense.)  In most cases, this kind of work will ultimately result in more power for the progressive movement, but that is just the natural result of empowering marginalized people, rather than an explicit act of partisanship.

Fred Clarkson has been arguing for a more electorally engaged Religious Left for a long time.  He's seen the Religious Right's efforts to build power in Republican Party committees and primaries in person.  The kind of voter registration and mobilization efforts he advocates for - and many others - are long overdue.

There's an interesting drama unfolding this morning on the blogosphere, revolving around the nasty interaction between the Barack Obama campaign and volunteer Joe Anthony, who built the 160,000-friend strong Barack Obama Myspace page. It looks like Obama really screwed up here, being unwilling to pay Anthony a fairly minor bit of cash in exchange for control of the strongest existing Myspace campaign community. TechPresident has much, much more.* MyDD has a very interesting take:

Yea, $49K to deliver 160,000 supporters; that's .32 cents each for opted in and engaged activsts. A bargain. [The amount was actually up to $44K] $50,000 is what it takes to advertise on the Liberal Ad Network for two weeks. It's a minor expenditure in the grand scheme of things.

Moreover, asks Micah Sifry on techPresident:

If it weren't for the hundreds of hours put into sites like MySpace by passionate volunteers like Joe Anthony, would the folks at MySpace even have anything like an Impact Channel? The only reason campaigns and advertisers are taking sites like MySpace seriously is because they have millions of users; shouldn't the volunteers who help draw the crowds to these new online town halls get some kind of compensation beyond a little modest recognition from political professionals now and then?

There's a fascinating question here. MySpace gets the ads, the music deals, the TV deals, and all the income associated with that. But all MySpace is doing is serving as a software provider and host. There is a second half to the value of MySpace, and that's the community formed there by volunteer users. Is there a possibility here, for MySpace and other social networking users to band together and form a union which demands just compensation for their work? Possibly. The tools for organizing such a union exist right there on the site. All an organizer would have to do is start up a "MySpace Workers" page, put together a well-sized community, and organize a strike, or a similar job action. And find a union which would have their bargaining unit. That's all, nothing to it! If you can't catch the snark, let me state it clearly: starting a union for social networking "workers" is hard work, and it's the kind of thing which an enterprising union should really look into. SEIU seems the most likely organization for this kind of innovative approach, but CWA might be a good candidate also. Of course, an enterprising liberal entrepreneur could also try to organize such a union. Here's another intriguing approach, for liberal entrepreneurs. Why not create a social network where compensation is built into the model from the start? The network will give users some amount of money for each friend they add, or for each blog post they write, or each group they start which has a large number of friends, etc. Compensation can be based on the ad revenues projected to be raised by that kind of activity, of course. Could this kind of network - with sufficient features and a friendly user interface - compete and even beat MySpace or Facebook? Perhaps. (Incidentally, for the techies amongst us, it's possible to bootstrap such a site using the Facebook API, though I haven't really picked apart that set of tools.) If such a site was started, I'd love to see some kind of bargaining unit built into the site from the start. It would be a fascinating experiment in Internet-age unionism. Any takers? * Full disclosure: I am an independent contractor for TechPresident. Update: Here is another way of looking at this whole episode. Form a social networking consulting firm, and offer a package to campaigns - $50,000 in exchange for an active, engaged, 200,000-person strong social networking page. See how many bite. The package can always be adjusted down for smaller campaigns; for example, $10,000 for a 40,000-person page for a statewide candidate. The firm can also perform ROI analysis to determine how much "bang for the buck" the campaign is getting, in terms of ActBlue donations or volunteers generated from such pages. I bet the return would be pretty good.

Reading Mike Connery's timely post on the demographics of social networking sites (see also the DailyKos diary for some excellent commentary, particularly with user "Molton"), I'm beginning to think that there is a great deal of value in studying social networking sites. That's actually a fairly obvious point, so I'll expand: there's a great deal of value in studying how they are being used by campaigns and other political groups.

Jack Carter, though he looks to be in a pretty tough race, has broken a lot of new ground in the online campaigning world. So has Mark Warner. But are they doing a good job or not? What kind of practices can they borrow from local political groups? What can they contribute?

Social networking sites have a lot of potential, but could easily be a big waste of time. Here's a simple example: my DFA group could create a Facebook account, look for liberals in our area, and email each one of them directly to ask them to join our group. Alternatively, we could strike up "friendships" with other community-group accounts, like the group for people in Cambridge. Which is a more effective use of a volunteer's time? What's the best messaging approach? Etc.

Moreover, these questions spill over into non-political groups and organizations like churches, unions, and media. Is there a good way for them to find people on social networking sites?

This post is more about questions than answers, but someone, I'm sure, is going to have to find the answer to all of this. No doubt the New Politics Institute is working on it for the political point of view, but we may need to expand our horizons and think about how we can use social networking sites to bring people into all sorts of liberal ideological conversion machines.

If you live in a major metropolitan area, chances are that there's a large transient population - students, young professionals, living-out-of-a-hotel consultants, etc. This population is a significant challenge to local political organizations: they're not likely to be interested in local politics, they're probably too busy getting settled to get involved in politics, and even if they do join your group, they're likely to leave town in the not-too-distant future.

Local political groups and affiliated organizations can turn this challenge into an opportunity by writing guides to their city from a liberal perspective. Such a guide will not only welcome newcomers to the city, but will have many tangible benefits for the groups who put it together.

A guide to your city is a simple booklet with helpful resources for people who are moving to your city or have recently arrived. It should list:

- How to find an apartment
- Basic information about transportation
- Good places to shop and get food (be sure to highlight local liberal businesses, including independent bookstores and coffeeshops, co-op grocery stores, etc.)
- Information about the local religious scene, especially including liberal churches which are welcoming and inclusive
- Information about the local liberal scene, including pointers to your local Drinking Liberally and DFA groups
- Local websites, blogs, newspapers, TV or radio stations that newcomers may find helpful or simply entertaining - including, of course, any such media which has a liberal slant
- Information about how to register to vote, and how to get involved in the local Democratic party

Of course, this list is just a starting point. It may be necessary to modify it on a case by case basis.

The main goal of these guides is to help newcomers to your city get settled as easily as possible, and to make them feel welcome. An important secondary goal is to help newcomers get settled into the liberal scene, defined broadly - help them find liberal media, liberal stores, liberal religious congregations, and of course, liberal political groups.

Publishing a liberal guide will have some real benefits for your group:
- You will have an easier time recruiting newcomers to the city, to make up for the inevitable fact that some members of your group will leave your city
- You may be able to sell ad space to liberal businesses, and use the guide as a fundraising mechanism
- The guide will facilitate outreach and communications with other naturally allied groups in your area
- Some of your less active members may find this kind of project fun, and it will open up volunteer opportunities for them that don't involve sitting in a meeting; and it will tap graphic design, web, and writing skills
- It will be easier to motivate newcomers to your city to go to the polls and vote, come election time
- You will get a warm fuzzy feeling knowing that you are making your city a more inviting place

There are more amorphous benefits to be had as well: you will bring more people into the liberal movement, by making liberalism an attractive lifestyle, building on the efforts of Drinking Liberally; you will also make liberalism a more viable business model, by driving more revenue to businesses who choose to prioritize liberal values (such as unionization, environmental consciousness, etc.); you'll increase attendance at liberal religious groups and reader/viewership for liberal media; and you will increase cohesion among liberals in your city, as a community forms around the media, religious congregations, and businesses you choose to highlight.

A substantially important element of this work is that it targets young people predominantly, with an eye towards bringing youth into the liberal movement and keeping them involved. In large part turned off by the traditionalist religious right, young people today are more liberal then the rest of the country by leaps and bounds. Accoring to a Spring 2006 survey by the Harvard Institute of Politics, 57% of college students identify as liberals, while 31% identify as conservatives. Among the general population, those numbers are 21% and 33% respectively.

Political scientists believe that a person's ideology and voting patterns do not change much after a person turns 30. So if we can "freeze" the liberal identification advantage among today's college students for 10 years, we will have scored a major, major victory in making our society more liberal. The development of liberal guides is one way to cement the advantage we currently hold among this generation - as recent college graduates move about the country and settle down in new cities, they will find it easier to remain liberal because the people welcoming them to the city are liberal.

If you are thinking it's a good idea to put these guides online, you're absolutely right. Fortunately, there's an open source software package, OpenGuides, which helps you put together exactly such a website. I haven't yet tried it, but it's worth taking a look.

Where I live (Cambridge, MA) we are working on an effort to put together "The Liberal's Guide to Cambridge". Our plan is to release it in September of this year, to coincide with the time of year when many new students come to the Boston area to study. Once the guide is ready to go, we'll pull together a coalition of grad student groups, DFA groups, Drinking Liberally, and who knows who else, for a launch party. I'll report back on the results.

In the meantime, if you have any thoughts or suggestions, or know of similar efforts in other places, I'd love to hear them!

(I originally thought this up in the aftermath of Katrina, and posted about it at the time. I've tinkered with it a little bit since then, and I think it's worth a second shot, with high gas prices again in the news.) The gas price crisis we are now facing is not likely to go away soon, and it is a burning and deep problem for millions of people. As Democrats, I think we can turn this crisis into an opportunity - to lead, to build community, to "be the change we seek", and to improve our own electoral chances. We can become a party of carpoolers. The Democratic Party should take steps to set up carpools among registered Democrats, in as many places as is practical and useful. At the simplest level, this could take the form of a county Democratic party calling through the registered Democrats in the county and asking them if they'd like to participate in a carpool to save money. Figuring out the logistics will no doubt be an issue, but the heart of the matter is that we can use our political tactics (phonebanking, voterfile management) to solve this immediate, tangible problem for potentially millions of people. At a broader level, such an effort could be led by the Democratic National Committee, working through its network of paid organizers throughout all fifty states. The DNC could hold a special fundraising effort to fund this effort, by selling, let's say, "DNC Carpooling Bonds", or something like that, for $20 / month. The DNC could also ask participants in the carpool program to chip in a little bit of money as well, to help pay for the operation. What are the potential benefits?

• each carpooler will be pulled in closer to the Democratic party, and will feel more allegiance to it.
• we will be making a statement that Demcorats are socially responsible, that they work for a living, and that they're not rich elites.
• we will build social ties among Democrats
• we will incentivize being a Democrat: left-leaning independents and moderate Republicans will be encouraged to jump ship, if for no other reason than the purely material benefit of lower cost of living
• this action doubles as a protest against irresponsible Republican policies. the press release writes itself.
• friends who carpool together, vote together. if we have the email/address/phone number of each carpool group, their local GOTV organizers can call the carpoolers a few days before election day, and say, "don't forget to vote on your way home from work!" heck, we could even imagine GOTV captains within each carpool, or something like that. i can't possibly imagine a car full of registered Democrats, now a bit richer thanks to the hard work of their party, forgetting to vote on Election Day as they drive home from work.

What are the costs?

• obviously, this could be a huge resource drain
• politically, if we don't get the message quite right, we could look kind of impotent (i.e. we can't win in Congress, so we have to go outside the system)
• if we really put a dent in the number of commuters in the country, we might actually contribute to lowering gas prices, which would of course help bush's approval ratings

It's possible that the Democratic Party might not be the best vehicle for this kind of effort. For example, in many ways labor unions or an extra-union outfit like Working America could be better suited to the job, especially since in many cases the locals have ready access to a large number of people who are all commuting to the same place every day. Or it's possible that some sort of partnership would work best. Another point is that we need not go about this effort in the low-tech way I described above: it's entirely possible to put together a pretty decent carpooling web site and to open it up to registered Democrats. The problem with that is, I'd imagine, there are more safety concerns, and a better chance of the system going awry somehow (electronic mapping technology is unfortunately far from perfect.) There's no reason to shoot the moon the first time out of course: it's possible to get such a program off the ground with a relatively small-scale effort, based in a single city where carpooling is likely to be a success. But I think it's an idea worth trying out.

A few days ago, I wrote a post regarding the three waves of supporting local progressive groups: software support, resource guides, and in-person mentorship. Since then, many people have suggested a number of existing guides to organizing local political groups and reforming state Democratic Parties, and I wanted to put them all in one place. Also, I spent some time looking at the "Democracy for XX" site for each state in the country (unfortunately, this didn't take too much time, since some states don't have a DFA presence.) In some places, like Oregon and Colorado, there are excellent, very well-done grassroots guides to organizing and reforming the Democratic Party. In others, there isn't much along those lines, or at least not much thatn I can find. Part of the point of this post is to encourage liberal reformers in each state to start putting together these guides to organizing and reforming on the ground, and to promote those who have done so. Each of the people involved in putting together the guides before have selflessly committed themselves to helping others take action. These guides are chock-full of great ideas, tips, and general information, and the volunteers who have poured effort into the guides should be highly and loudly commended. Without further ado, here's the list I've drawn up: Blog Posts NUTS AND BOLTS SERIES: Parts 1, 2, and 3 Taking over local parties Grassroots 101 - Parts 1 and 2 Grassroots in Action series: Parts 1, 2, 3, and 4. Online Books The Citizen's Handbook: A Guide to Building Community Think Precinct Action Guide from Democracy for Colorado State Guides CA - California For Democracy Tools DC - Lobbying 101 at DC for Democracy FL - Reform Florida DECs MA - http://www.buildingthedemocraticwing.com/ OK - Feet on the Street - Energizing and Activating the Democratic Base (warning: PDF, takes a while to load) OR - Democracy for Oregon Blue Book TX - Precinct Organizing guide and a TON of great stuff at http://www.democracyfortexas.org/, including "left overs" from DemocracyFest WA - Precinct Organizer's Handbook and Washington State Election Encyclopedia (which appears to be down at the moment) Training Academies DFA Training Academy Camp Wellstone George Meany National Labor College The list above is only a start, and if you have other suggestions, please add a comment! Or better yet, go to http://www.plantingliberally.org/OrganizingGuides. I've set up this page as a place where anyone (who has registered on the site) can make changes, add resource guides, etc. In the next few weeks or so, I hope to make it a little easier for non-technical folks to add resources, and add comments for each resource. For now, we can use this as a jumping off point.

(Cross-posted at MyDD)

With the dramatic rise of small political groups in the last few years (particularly Democracy for America) coalition groups, there is an increasing need to serve the needs of these groups, and to help them run more efficiently.

The first wave of efforts to serve these groups were a round of technical fixes, anchored by Civic Space Labs and Act Blue. These efforts were, and continue to be, enormously successful. They have provided free, easy to use tools that help small groups develop websites and donate to candidates on line.

The next wave of efforts is an attempt to make these groups operate more smoothly and efficiently offline. The first inklings of such efforts are diaries on well-trafficked liberal blogs, especially DailyKos and MyDD. Here are some examples:

• NUTS AND BOLTS SERIES:
  • http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/3/25/6381/64913
  • http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/4/2/92522/47381
  • http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/4/16/65329/4337
• Taking over local parties - http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/4/7/101030/4329
• Grassroots 101 - http://www.mydd.com/story/2006/2/26/1443/62720 and http://hudson.mydd.com/story/2006/2/3/13850/50322
• Grassroots in Action series:
  • http://www.mydd.com/story/2006/4/6/202734/9021
  • http://www.mydd.com/story/2006/3/21/205144/725
  • http://www.mydd.com/story/2006/3/8/195029/9708
  • http://www.mydd.com/story/2006/2/26/115024/540

In a short while, someone will put all of these great resources together in the form of a booklet or online resource center, and that resource will become incredibly popular among DFA organizers, Democratic committee chairs, and other similar groups of leaders. Hopefully, a few good liberals will make a lot of money because of it. Most likely, this wave will include a "second-and-a-half"-th wave wherein local organizers from across the country can swap resources, tips and ideas with one another. To some degree, resources like the DFAMeetupHosts Yahoo group and the MassDemsGuide Yahoo groups are already making this wave happen.

The third wave will be, hopefully, a range of professional services to go the extra mile and really study these groups and offer critical assessments of what they are doing wrong and what they are doing right. I don't want to say "consultants", because that word is to some degree damaged goods, but that's what they will be. They won't be slick, jargon-headed business school types, of course; they'll be local organizers who have earned their opinions and expertise the hard way - by getting their hands dirty, succeeding at what they do, and earning the respect of their peers.

I think that this third wave will herald an enormous leap forward in the power and efficacy of these groups, and will be one of the best investments in a long time in the infrastructure of the liberal movement. But where will the money come from? No small political group, by itself, can afford the cost of a consultant; moreover, the benefits of a consultant are primarily non-financial from the group's point of view, and certainly are not enough to compensate the original cost.

Instead, I think the liberal investor class will have to, in the short run, finance the development of small political group consultants. The good news is that the investors could pay for these consultants "at cost", without having to bear the usual consultancy expenses of marketing and that sort of thing. The other good news is that these consultants could probably be relied on to donate parts of their generous salaries to other liberal causes, in particular the groups where they made their bones and the candidates near and dear to their hearts.

It's not too clear to me whether we could, or even should, get to this third wave of small political group development without going through the second; but that is how I imagine the next couple of years of small political group dynamics playing out.