We’re organizing beyond the battlegrounds to win in 2018
By: Zach Fang, distributed organizing director at Let America Vote
There’s a prevailing swing-state mindset in politics today, where we focus attention and pour resources into key races and battleground states. That’s important, of course — you’ve got to go where the action is.
But oftentimes that emphasis on the battleground comes at the exclusion of passionate activists elsewhere in the country. Even if the fight’s in New Hampshire or Georgia, we must engage excited, capable activists in deep-blue California and even dark-red Wyoming.
That’s exactly what we’re doing here at Let America Vote, and it’s why I’m excited to serve as our distributing organizing director.
Building up our field operations in the battlegrounds alone risks leaving valuable activists on the sidelines. I’m heading up LAV’s distributed effort to make sure we’re leveraging Resistance energy everywhere, and engaging everyone to create political consequences for vote suppressors and win the argument for voting rights.
We’re making it possible for activists in every corner of the country to make a difference where their efforts are needed most. And by engaging them on a personal, one-to-one level, we’re building relationships that were previously only possible through in-person organizing.
Just like a traditional field organizer, our distributed team reaches out personally to everyone interested in volunteering, guides them through the process, and keeps up the conversation all along the way.
Every week our supporters across the country get a text message highlighting opportunities to get involved. Those texts aren’t just a one-off, though — they’re the start of a real conversation on how to, say, register high school students, make calls for voting-rights champions or host a Let America Vote House Party.
With this hands-on approach, we’re moving more activists up the ladder-of-engagement — from signing up for emails to receiving text updates to participating in Let America Vote activities to becoming a community leader.
Technology vastly expands the scale of this outreach. In traditional organizing, one organizer might be responsible for 150 volunteers; a distributed organizer can maintain meaningful outreach with 2,500 a week.
Let America Vote has offices in five states in 2018, and will be running robust field campaigns in all of them to support voting-rights champions at the legislative and statewide level. With our distributed effort, we’re augmenting that with activism opportunities in all 50 states.
We’ve seen successes already, and we know it’s going to pay off in November. This weekend we have over 70 people from around the country scheduled to make calls for Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams. Last week, we had over 200 people text us back asking how to get involved in our Cap, Gown, Vote! student voter-registration drive.
We’ll take another big step this weekend with our Voting Rights House Parties. These neighborhood get-togethers will take place all across the country– from Palo Alto, Calif., to Gadsden, Ala., to Washington, D.C. — and were arranged entirely through our distributed organizing effort. Attendees will hear from Let America Vote President Jason Kander and discuss ways to get involved in their own communities.
(And, oh by the way, if you’d like to host one, you can do so by signing up here.)
Winning the political argument for voting rights will take sustained political organization and activism. That’s going to mean registering thousands of new voters, knocking hundreds of thousands of doors, standing up to voter-suppression bills and making the case for policies that expand access to the ballot.
With your help, we can do that in our key battlegrounds and all across the country.