Planning for victory by @BloggersRUs

Planning for victory

by Tom Sullivan

The psychic cost our acting president takes on the country (and the world) is its own kind of national deficit and a drag on campaign planning. We will never get back the time and money spent litigating clearly illegal administration actions, the time spent debunking the lies and insults, the attention wasted trying to unravel and process unhinged comments and daily, petty cruelties. There are human costs mounting even now to mitigate, but there also opportunity costs to giving attention to tweets that should be spent on laying the groundwork for victory in the coming battles.

Matt Ford tracks the psychological toll the stress of "Trump's gnawing hunger to be at the center of the daily news cycle" takes for the New Republic. We writes:

Wasting time is a defining feature of Trump’s presidency. He is fairly adept at frittering away his own days, spending an indeterminate number of hours languishing in front of the television, simply to watch cable news coverage of himself so he can then offer comments about it on Twitter. But when it comes to wasting the time of everyone around him, the president is without peer. Trump’s haphazard style of governance forces journalists, lawyers, and government officials to expend innumerable hours on doomed initiatives and errant tweets. His corrosive effect on American politics forces Americans to devote far more hours of their life to thinking about him than they should. All of this amounts to a tax of sorts on the national psyche—one that can never be repaid.
It is time progressives cannot afford to waste.

We tore out the nasty carpeting in the Democratic committee headquarters here last weekend after our monthly planning meeting. Funds are secured to replace it now so the space will be ready for the flood of volunteers in 2020. The air conditioning units that died in 2016 are gone, replaced this summer with efficient new ones. Such investment is unthinkable most places. Where would little county committees get the money?

I tell this story in my trainings about how good planning builds on itself:
You all know these guys. They show up every presidential election. You’ve never seen them, don’t know their names. All they want is a yard sign. But if at your storefront they see volunteers arriving for a phone bank, signs bundled and staged to go out, people with clipboards headed out to canvass? I’ve seen this multiple times: People who are never going to knock a door or pick up a phone get their signs and – unprompted – pull out a checkbook and ask, "Who do I make the check out to?" And leave $100.

Because they can see with their own eyes your team has got it going on. And they don’t even know what It is. But it smells like victory and they want a piece of it.
Bridget McCurry has no money. She also has a regional call center she carries in her trunk and can set up overnight. She built it from parts. Much of it donations or from the Goodwill store. Thirty laptops running Chrome, with cheap headsets, mice, and a customized VoteBuilder interface developed by a high school intern who went on to Stanford University.

Bridget McCurry is, shall we say, unorthodox. She’s beyond thirty-something. She calls volunteers her Kings and Queens, makes them glitter name badges. She claims 80-year-olds teach 70-year-olds in five minutes how to run Crowdcall, the customized VoteBuilder tool. She makes phone-banking easy. She makes it fun. And she is relentless. Volunteers don’t come back to make calls for candidates. They come back to make calls for Bridget.

And she didn’t write a grant request or start a nonprofit or launch a Kickstarter. She. Just. Started. She built this with virtually no income, but with drive, passion and creativity. If you are waiting for money before planning your Get Out The Vote program, you might be doing it backwards.

Democrats as a party let local infrastructure languish because their approach to campaigns is too top-down and too campaign-focused. Even Obama's vaunted turnout machine was the most top-down "grassroots" effort ever seen. County committees in many places are so under-resourced and demoralized they have forgotten how to win if they ever knew. Across the country, local committees cannot even maintain Facebook pages, let alone websites. State parties make it hard for voters to find their local organizations.

Not long ago, New York state Democrats listed chair names, street addresses, and maybe a phone number for many county organizations. (They have since improved.) An organizer said at the time, "I don't think Andrew wants us talking to each other."

It's even harder for a voter to make contact in Louisiana.

Grinding teeth to nubs over tweets won't fix that. Donald Trump won't likely defeat himself. Progressives spread countless pixels complaining about the lack of proper infrastructure for fighting the right's messaging. What we miss is how much winning comes down to mechanics and logistics and to just getting started. As for money, if you build it, the money will come.