The Campaign Industrial Complex: GOTV Edition

Intro

Pic related. It's me.

I have to come clean. I'm a lib-for-hire. I need income, and what do you know, it's campaign season and I know how this works... so here I am getting paid to "get out the vote" for this year's elections.

I'm not going to provide details, and I'm not going to say anything that can pinpoint who I work for or where I work, for obvious reasons. I'm also not going to divulge any "trade secrets" or screenshots of things like VAN, again because I need to keep this job...

I'm writing this partly to clear my head, partly to reckon with the lib job I have, and partly to help educate my comrades on some lessons they can learn from this part of electoralism. Some of this will be disjointed because that's how my brain works. If you have any questions about campaigns drop them in the comments and I'll answer to the best of my ability.

Why care about this?

The Democratic (and I assume to a smaller extent, GOP) "industry" makes up a decent chunk of economic activity in a handful of states every two to four years. A huge chunk of groups with millions in funding swoop in, hire up hundreds to thousands of people at a time for temp work, then lets them all go in November.

As leftists, we should understand how this niche within Capitalism exists. This can help explain why some people in this world act the way they do: because their paycheck depends on it. There are material realities behind "having high, high hopes for a living".

These are not GREAT jobs, but for a lot of people they are better jobs than what they have access to during off years. I know of someone who was thankful for their Field Organizer role because it helped them cover the bills in the way their fast food jobs didn't.

There's also a psychological factor at play with these campaign jobs. A lot of Field Organizers are coming into swing states from out of state. They are college-aged, idealistic, and taking a semester off school to do a job that is often 6-7 days per week and stretching to 70+ hours per week when it's time for "GOTV". Imagine being told the thing you just spent your entire October working for is a sham

We act like a c3 during VR, then switch to c4 work for GOTV

Like most industries, the campaign industry comes with it's own unique insider vocabulary.

c3/c4 - This is a legal status for IRS purposes. Long story short, c3 groups can only do non-partisan work, while c4s can do more partisan type campaigning. c3 work might look like issues campaigns, nonpartisan voter registration drives, or general voter education mailings. They can't talk about candidates and can't take stances on issues in a partisan manner. c4s can do those things.

Some big orgs have both c3 and c4 organizations. Planned Parenthood is the one that comes to mind immediately.

VR - Voter Registration. By law some states require this work to be non-partisan, so a lot of orgs tend to do this regardless of their tax status. This typically boils down to running tables in public spaces or walking around with a clipboard in busy areas to find people to fill our a voter registration form. The forms are collected, details are then copied into VAN for contacting these people later, and then they are counted up and sent to the local boards of elections.

GOTV - Get Out The Vote. This is what you're about to see all over the country, but really in just a handful states (PA, WI, MI, NC, GA, NV, AZ). People are going out door-to-door, or making phone calls, or doing "relational organizing", or a few other ways to basically get you to talk to them about "making a plan to vote". There's some studies showing that doing these things increases voter turnout by enough to be worth pouring Scrooge McDuck swimming pools of money into doing every election. Talking to a voter in person and getting them to create a "plan to vote" is considered the most effective form of GOTV and is the one you'll see starting anywhere from 1-3 weeks from now depending on the election calendar in your area.

Note these are NOT persuasion attempts. They don't work. There's some mild talking points that canvassers have to read off, but they're told to move on if there's any resistance to the script. Turns out you can't change someone's ideology based on their life experience by knocking on their door...