The Campaign Industrial Complex: GOTV Edition
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...
"We need your SLDs locked in by EOD Friday, and you need to have backup Captains ready and shifts in VAN"
GOTV operations are very strictly metrics-driven. Each cycle, there are scores of people who are poring over Excel or Google Sheets reports, building out reporting pipelines, pulling lists from VAN, etc. to track number of doors knocked, contacts made, and how many people are working every day of the campaign.
The timelines vary, but you will see GOTV campaigns broken out into a few phases:
There's a hiring phase where the campaign either brings on a bunch of temp part-time canvassers, OR Field Organizers are being forced to make between 200-300 phone calls each day to recruit volunteers. If you ever gave money to a Democrat, or volunteered for a Democrat, or signed one of those "petitions", you might be on the receiving end of one of these volunteer recruiting calls! Campaigns love free labor, but some will pay people if they need to. Either way the orgs are supposed to get a lot of people on board.
Then GOTV begins. There are "regular" days where people are going to knock doors and phone bank from a campaign office, and then there are "Dry Runs" where a series of satellite locations called "Staging Locations" are setup and massive amounts of work is expected to flow through them. Everything is broken down to the hour, with "shifts" of 1-3 hours being handed off to whoever will work them. There will usually be goals for # of doors to knock, contacts to make, etc. and they will be broken down by Precinct (which is the smallest geographic block in a voter file) or if it's a campus program, a dorm or student housing complex.
Finally, there's a "Final Five" or "Final Four" which is the run up to Election Day. There are no days off at this point, so burnout is common. People get "campaign crud", people get cranky, and yet somehow they are still expected to knock on an unreasonable number of doors in the three or four days leading up to Election Day.
Election Day is the final sprint to the finish. Whoever didn't vote early is supposed to be contacted again. Campaigns try to do at least two "passes" of their lists, which means they want to talk to everybody at least twice. As a result Election Day work typically starts at 5am or earlier as teams set up their Staging Locations, get packets / lists of voters ready, prepare phones, etc. for nonstop work until the polls are closed. Then there's an election watch party, lots of alcohol involved at this point, and then somehow people may be expected to come in and help clean up the offices the day after.
(Please be nice to the campaign workers in your life. They work too hard for too little $ and like all of us are exploited under this shitty economic system)
The key takeaway is this - These GOTV operations are ran in a very strict, structured manner. They are massive in scale, they all are ran the same way, and they are almost machine-like in their execution. They're also a TON of work for everyone involved. If we want to build a vanguard that can topple the Capitalists parties, this is what we're up against. These people are paid to make sure every lib in your neighborhood goes out and votes, and they will annoy the hell out of everyone until they do it. Does this hurt the party in the long run? Probably? Does anyone running these programs care? No, and why would they? These programs are what the donors pay for, and we all need to keep them happy to keep our paychecks
Mfw I write an effort post and get zero replies
Good post
Ty
"If it's not in VAN, it didn't happen"
Thousands of people are going to use a piece of software called VoteBuilder, also knows as VAN or NGP VAN. NGP VAN is the 800-pound gorilla in the rather small world of Democratic campaign tech. Everyone has to use it because there are no alternatives that do everything it does or in every state (in CA campaigns use PDI).
VAN is just a CRM system wrapped around a voter file. Depending on who is using it, you may be using the DNC's file, a state Democratic Party file, America Votes' file, or if you didn't get the Democratic Party blessing, "SmartVAN" which simply means your data comes from the data broker TargetSmart. Catalist is also a major voter file vendor that supplies data for VAN accounts.
VAN is one of those tools that people tolerate but don't love. Think Workday... for campaigns. It does everything from cutting walk lists to setting up phone banks to integrating with every texting tool under the sun, plus there's reports and everything is configurable but none of it is very user-friendly. Everything's been duct taped together to the point where there are random checkboxes in places they shouldn't be because some campaign asked for it in 2018 and now it's just there, confusing everyone else. It's that kind of software.
Recently NGP VAN got bought out by a company called Bonterra, which has some international investors / venture capital BS. In case you needed more proof the Democratic Party is a Capitalist party, here you go!___
"Why am I getting 10 texts a day asking the same questions?"
Welcome to the uncoordinated "Coordinated Campaign"
There's a large network of organizations that are doing Democratic GOTV work. Most of them do not, and cannot, coordinate with each other. There's legal walls in place that keep all of the c3 and c4 orgs from, for instance, working with the Democratic Party directly to spread out who canvasses where. That's why, if you're one of the "lucky" ones who are being targeted by these programs, you might have five people from five different groups all asking you to make a plan to vote.
There's a ton of overlap because of this lack of coordination. What orgs can you expect to see running these campaigns?
There's orgs like NextGen that are partisan campaigns. They fly in, do a bunch of GOTV work for typically the top-of-ticket candidates, and leave.
Then you have orgs like America Votes, which is a coalition of hundreds of local and statewide GOTV efforts across many states. This is a massive blob of c3/c4 organizing that is legally separate from the Dems, but doing a lot to get Dems elected. If you hear of orgs like Progress__ or Action__ or something like that they're probably under the America Votes umbrella.
Then you have the Democratic Party itself. Each state looks different, but there's going to be a Presidential campaign in at least every swing state for the election, and smaller operations in whatever the campaign considers "tier 2" or "stretch goal" states. This will typically be called the "Coordinated Campaign" and will either be ran by the Harris campaign itself or the state Democratic Party, or a different org spun up just for this campaign cycle. Again, tax and legal BS I don't pretend to know about drives these decisions. This is where you are going to see all of those "field offices" with the Kamala signs everywhere, the cardboard cutouts, and all the other jazz.
Ty for the effortpost, it was really interesting to learn about how the whole apparatus works!