Staying in Touch Post-Election

by Patrick Ruffini :: May 24th, 2007 9:57 pm

Over at her blog, Adrienne made this comment about the need to build and sustain a grassroots organization long after the election is over:

A good example of this is to contrast the Dean Model and the Bush/Cheney Mobilization Plan. The Dean Model established relationships with smaller target groups. Correspondence was written by real individuals and supporters were engaged through open communications, such as a blog. Members were motivated to not only campaign for their candidate, but to also volunteer and participate in community programs. The Bush/Cheney Plan, however, used grassroots tactics but through top-down communication. Individuals were organized, but no sense of community was achieved and the movement fell apart soon after the election, whereas the Dean campaign reorganized into Democracy for America.

I can sing chapter and verse on why our model was better. Lateral communications (or community building amongst supporters) is a worthwhile goal in itself, but often gets confused with what it takes to do GOTV in the final days of an election. That’s when you want a unified message, and you don’t want canvassers coming up with their own talking points. The end result of that strategy is Dean in Iowa.

But in the run-up to the election, in the times between the Super Saturdays, the W ROCKS events, the Test Drives for W, and the 72 Hour Plan, community building was a tremendously important part of cementing and solidifying that grassroots army. At those moments, the Bush Grassroots Machine was something to behold. Over 500,000 Americans attended a Bush house party organized on GeorgeWBush.com. At its height, we were able to organize 8,000 parties to the Kerry campaign’s 5,000. The parties themselves were composed about half of folks whom the host had invited, and half from other supporters nearby who had heard about the event via email or the Web. And people did meaningful actions at these parties, like send voter registration postcards or go door to door using targeted walk lists. It was frickin’ awesome.

Did we sustain it? Well, that’s a fair question. The Bush list did continue on at the RNC. We did parties. We activated the base on key issues. That’s a greater continuity of effort than we saw on the other side. Terry McAuliffe famously boasted of wanting to bring all the Democrat candidate email lists in-house to the DNC. In the end, not one obliged, not even John Kerry. He kept his own list, blasted to it regularly during the 2006 elections, and as Chris Cillizza has been fond of harping on, that 3 million list alone was probably the only reason he could be considered viable for 2008.

That said, I do think this was a teachable moment. I think we could have been even more successful if GeorgeWBush.com had been kept active, and all volunteer community-building been kept alive under the Bush brand name. That is, after all, what people signed up for in the first place. People who would never even consider aligning with a political party will sign up to follow a candidate. Why not leverage that as long as possible, preferably for the duration of his Presidency? I think this should be the model for whomever wins in 2008. (It would still be paid for by the national committee, and not some ersatz re-elect group.)

This brings me to another best practice that applies to every single out-of-cycle Senator, Governor, and safe-district House member. Stay in touch after the election! You should be sending an email to your list about every month or so, updating them on your legislative accomplishments, and proactively using the list for advocacy. Though he’s only up in 2008, Dick Durbin ran an online petition for Barack Obama in 2006. Eric Cantor is unlikely to be seriously challenged in his Richmond-area district, but he’s building a relationship with conservatives nationwide through his No Amnesty petition. This is smart, smart, smart.

We all saw how the Presidential candidates waged campaigns in waiting through their leadership PACs last year. The Internet effectively drops the marginal cost of that kind of activity down to zero. A small-state Governor or Senator looking to run in 2012 or 2016 can transcend their limited footprint in the national media by building a name for themselves through blogging and issuing calls to action that redound to the benefit of the cause.

And remember: this isn’t all about the loosey-goosey kumbaya community-building that Republican political operatives remain (to some degree rightly) skeptical of. This is a strategy to get you names. And eventually money. It puts you in a stronger position for re-election. By the time six years are up, well over half the names on your email list will have gone bad, so you have to find ways to get them to re-up in the interim.

If you’re a Senator up in 2010 or 2012, there are easy things you can do right now to sustain the volunteer community that elected you, and ensure they are there for you next time.

Tagged: community online politics strategy volunteers

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