An old piece: "Sigh, the Election's finally over"

As another election approaches, and Barack Obama tempts us with running for President, I find myself in more conversations about electoral politics. And for some reason, I never posted this reflection that I wrote after the 2004 presidential election. I should probably write a postlude about how it took me another 6 months to get most of the money I was owed back, many staff never got their last paychecks, and how to date the organization I worked for is still in legal wranglings about people's pay. But here is the original - unedited, unrevised...

Sigh, the Election’s finally over!
Reflections from Ohio 11/04

How I got to Columbus
Last Fall, I started talking about the presidential election—wishing that there were a viable candidate with progressive values, looking for an effective anti-Bush strategy that didn’t dismiss the huge problems with Kerry, etc. Now, a year later, the election’s over, and like so many others, I’m trying to make sense of what happened and draw out what we can learn from it. In particular, I spent the last 2 months of the campaign working to turn out “young progressives & Democrats” in Columbus, Ohio, and I’ve been needing to reflect & write about the experience, and share it with folks.

As most of you know, I didn’t drop everything to go work on the election. Rather, I was leaving my youth organizing job of nearly 5 years (where we had done both electoral and community organizing for racial justice issues), spending the summer relaxing as a summer camp cook, and generally planning on taking a break. After that, why not go to a swing state? There wasn’t anything else that I could do with 2 months that could potentially have a huge impact on national and international struggles for justice.

Not that I deluded myself into thinking that I personally could make a Bush defeat happen, or that a Kerry victory would be a panacea for freedomfighters around the world—clearly, it wouldn’t. But at the same time, I knew that my electoral organizing experience could be easily put to use and that a Bush defeat would send a message of hope internationally, prevent further rollback of civil liberties & rights to organize, and open up space to organize FOR our values and not simply defending AGAINST everything the Bush administration might throw our way.

Kerry doesn’t stand for communities of color, working people, queer people, immigrants, or poor people here or abroad, but he would have been less destructive to our communities and our ability to organize. [Check out www.paitdb.org for a clear articulation of this]

So what did I want to do? Ideally, working with an organization that would impact the outcome of the election in real ways in a way that supported & built local leadership—or at least without disrespecting the local community. I knew going in that there were lots of big organizations (MoveOn, ACT, etc) that were centered in white, middle class, liberal or vaguely progressive politics (ie, not my politics!) that would likely “swoop in, swoop out.” There were a tiny handful of local community organizations that were doing local, long term organizing that also took on the election (SWOP, ACORN). Not surprisingly, the big swoop in orgs were the ones with tons of resources.

I landed at the Columbus, Ohio office of the Young Voter Alliance, an organization targeting 18-35 year old “progressives & Democrats” in 6 swing states that was not as well resourced as the biggies, but much better resourced than any campaign I’ve ever worked on. While it was a temporary organization, the staff in Columbus were local people who, I was told, were politically active and well-networked in the young, Black Columbus community, but they lacked electoral experience, which I had—perfect…or so I thought.

The reality was that the office was full of disfunction – set up for disaster as part of a system of electoral organizing whose drive for quantitative goals overwhelmed good sense, ignored racism, disrespected local communities, failed to develop new leaders, and ultimately lost effectiveness. Here I was, a white, outside organizer brought in to supervise what turned out to be an all Black (with 1 latino) staff & canvas team that had been given hardly any support, virtually no supervision or accountability, and incorrect or late paychecks.

I don’t think I can fairly write about the hell that became my life in September—it was a complicated mix of experience/inexperience, white/Black, poor management & misleading directives from above, in/competence, insider/outsider, Democratic/progressive/radical, truth/lies, closeted/out. We—the Columbus staff—were set up to fail in many ways when our state director left. We floundered in a system that did not support our left-of-Democrat politics, challenge racism or provide a supportive forum to work through race dynamics of our staff. After an incredibly challenging 3 weeks in which I increasingly contemplated packing up to be a canvasser in Florida, I began to cope by lowering my expectations and simply trying to accomplish something—anything that would get more Kerry voters to the polls. In order to survive, I had to give up on everything that I treasured –and know is possible--about organizing—including any idea of teamwork or accountable, fun, engaging, supportive work that would develop everyone’s skills & analysis for future fights. Thankfully, Ohio’s margin of error was larger than the potential increased impact we could have had had we been functional and effective.

A bit of context about Columbus & Ohio:
Ohio is 85% white, African Americans are about 11%, which leaves a tiny 4% mixed race, Native, Latino, and API—this wasn’t California! Columbus was slightly more diverse at 25% Black, 4% Asian/Pacific Islander, and 2.5% Latino. Columbus is the 14th largest city in the US, and is home a thriving (mostly white) LGBT community. Columbus is also home to Ohio State University—the largest university in the country with 58,000 students! Democrats run the city, but it has depressingly few organizing or social justice organizations, relative to many places in California.

What follows is my personal evaluation of the campaign. Not surprisingly, the organization never did an evaluation…it also ran out of money and all staff & canvassers ended up with a reduced final paycheck, despite all our long hours & hard work…such was the end of the campaign!

Here’s the good of the good:

• We reached nearly 20,000 young, progressive voters. Our official numbers say that we knocked on over 30,000 doors from July through October, reaching 14,000 young people at the doors and an additional 5,000 at colleges, high schools, barber shops, clubs, and buses. They were overwhelmingly Kerry supporters (about 83%), and their main concerns were the economy/jobs and education (followed closely by healthcare, terror, and the war).
  
• The energy was incredible! Everywhere people were talking about the election. Tons of folks who we talked to had never been into politics, never voted, never volunteered—but they were voting and/or volunteering in this election. This goes for our work, as well as the general climate in Columbus, and nationally—from what I hear from other folks.
  
• We reached out to young people where we’re at, with a youth-specific message. In addition to traditional door-to-door canvassing, we had “non-traditional” canvassers talking to young people at school, on the buses, at shopping centers—at all the places where we hang out when we’re not home (which, of course, is most of the time). We then integrated this list with our street-by-street precinct lists to remind them to vote.
  
• Resources! Wow! We had several paid staff, functional technology, fun free stuff (wristbands, buttons, water bottles), and we spent over $2,000 each week on paid canvassers. It’s refreshing to work in an environment where you have plentiful resources to do the job.
  
• National Cross-Group Coordination America Votes was a big roundtable of 33 national organizations that had never before come together—including ACT, MoveOn, Sierra Club, etc. For the most part, each member group worked on its own with messages specific to its constituencies, but we all worked from the same massive voter list, which was accessible on the web. Then for election day, all the turf that we’d all been working for months was divvied up. Coalitions are never easy, and this one was rife with power struggles, lack of coordination, and too centrist for my tastes, but just the fact that these big national groups came together and actually pooled member lists, resources, and even turf on the final days was unprecedented.
  

The bad—the campaign was far from perfect!

• Lack of long term goals, vision, and resources. Phenomenal resources poured into this election directed at short term organizations, including the Young Voter Alliance, with little eye towards building for the future. First, you can’t win elections in a 2-10 month campaign—we need to do the slow, strategic, deliberate work of educating, developing leaders, building organizations, and fighting for justice. But even within a short term campaign, you can leverage the resources to develop leaders and support local groups for future struggles. Unfortunately, the 527s were too shortsighted to make even this simple investment in solid training of canvassers & local staff.
  
• Blinded by Whiteness: Racism & White Democrats, as usual…From what I saw, the 527s failed to hire from, reach out to, or create messages for the constituencies most impacted by Bush’s policies—including poor and working people, communities of color, immigrants, and the GLBT community. These communities, though widely acknowledged as key to a Kerry victory, were largely ignored by the overwhelmingly white pro-Democratic organizations. In Columbus, YVA was the only organization doing serious on-the-ground canvassing that had a majority Black and working class canvas team. Our messaging wasn’t particularly targeted at these constituencies, but at least our face-to-face contact was actually peer to peer in communities that we knew would vote our way if we could get them out to vote. Beyond simply ignoring the significant African American community and the smaller Somali, Latino, and API communities, I heard about a national office that actively suppressed creative and strategic efforts to reach out to Columbus’s Muslim community, and I never saw literature in a language other than English, though it’s entirely possible that local (and underresourced) groups had fliers in Spanish, Somali, or Vietnamese.
  
• “Semi-organized Chaos”. The 527s were rife with disorganization & inefficiency, including YVA. I’ve done elections before—they’re not all that complicated, but you wouldn’t know that if you stopped by most campaign offices on any given day. Voter lists weren’t ready on time, canvassers weren’t paid right, a macho culture of long hours resulting in poor decisionmaking, running out of materials….these were true of YVA and most organizations I ran into, and it sapped away the morale of canvassers, staff, and volunteers. Sure, some amount of chaos makes sense in a whirlwind short term fight—but the level that we experienced in this campaign was incredibly frustrating because so much of it was unnecessary and prevented lots of work from getting done. Worse, it frustrated many excited new volunteers for whom this was their first political involvement.
  
• Restrictive tax law paralyzes. Tax law is set up with so many categories—each with it’s own restrictions on collaboration and what you can say. 501c3s, 501c4s, PACs, 527s, the Kerry Campaign, the DNC—yikes! It’s set up to paralyze us & prevent us from working effectively together (and yes, to regulate campaign contributions). In particular, local, permanent non-partisan 501c3s couldn’t get any of the millions of partisan dollars to do electoral work—just one of the many ways that local groups were marginalized in this election.
  
• Kerry Fever. No groups that I know of took a critical view of Kerry/the Dems or sought to have real conversation challenging his politics. Some hands were tied by tax law, which made “Democrat” a surrogate for “Kerry.” For instance, our literature said “I’m Young, I’m a Democrat, and I’m Voting.” Why not “I’m a Progressive”, or “I’m for justice”? There are many ways to make it clear that we needed to vote for Kerry this time, but the Democrats don’t actually represent our values—the only groups that made this argument didn’t actually have the resources to reach large numbers of voters.

On the Aftermath:
I’ve tried to read the many articles out there—hard to do when there’s a 2 year old to play with, or friends to cook for, or a novel to read. Indeed, my reaction to the election was to take care of myself—wanting to understand what had happened, but also knowing that a month of recuperation would be worthwhile from a longterm, movement -building perspective.

From what I’ve read and conversations, here are a few things that stick out:

• More people didn't vote than voted for any candidate. I still believe that progressives are a majority, but our folks don’t get to the polls. Many are disenfranchised outright due to immigration status, criminal record, or age. Many others don’t vote –we need to reach them, organize them outside of election time and for elections.
  
• Voter Suppression was rampant and real. There’s lots of info out there about touch-screen machines, counting “glitches”, long lines due to lack of voting machines, voters wrongly given provisional ballots or flat out denied their vote, absentee ballots that never arrived…. The danger that I see in this is two-fold—first, people, especially in communities of color, immigrants and poor folks, were wrongly disenfranchised , and second, many first time voters, particularly people of color and young people, feel their votes were not counted and may not vote again because of it. Yet the notion that the US is a functional democracy is so strong that it blinds much of mainstream white America to the reality of our failed system.
  
• This election politicized people. From young working class African Americans in Columbus to my parents’ upper middle class, middle aged white friends—this campaign drew people into political action who had never before considered it. Our challenge now is to continue creating opportunities for political engagement—something that most election-focused organizations unfortunately ignored during the election and now after.
  

Where do we go from here?
Strategically, we need to think long term—20-30 years rather than the next election—which is what the Republicians have so successfully done to get them to this point. We need to:

• Draw out lessons learned for electoral work. Never before has there been field campaign of this scale, yet we still lost. We need to study what happened and how to be more effective at short-term electoral work, and figure out how to do long term organizing that can also impact elections—or how to shift electoral resources to those who are focused on the long term work.
  
• Build institutions so that we have an organized base, vision, and strategy 20 years down the road, as the Republicans have so successfully done over the past 25 years
  
• We need to present a moral alternative—I’m horrified that we’ve lost the frame on “moral values,” –who amongst us DIDN’T vote on our moral values—valuing life, health, housing, respect?
  
• We need a unifying theme/vision (that's not just anti-bush). We on the left are too divided by issue & constituency
  
• Most importantly, we need to organize for the long haul. We need to build organized groups of people who take collective action for justice who will come together for elections, against wars, for immigrant rights, etc. We need to invest in the under-organized communities like Columbus for the long haul. Elections organizing will never substitute for long term leadership development and community building.
  

Where do I go from here?
One of my main reactions to the election being over is that I can get back to the “real” work of organizing to build power and develop leaders in oppressed communities. It was incredibly difficult to spend my time on a campaign that had no long term vision and missed many opportunities to utilize short term resources to support longterm capacity building. I’m glad that I went to Ohio. I know that we had an impact on the election. I’m hopeful that some of my co-workers will find fulfilling and non-dysfunctional political engagement. I learned more than I wanted to about just how messed up organizations can be. I enjoyed seeing fall colors for the first time in 10 years. I appreciated the friendliness of Midwesterners and could see living in a place like Columbus some day—certainly the organizing needs are huge! And I’m happy to be home in the Bay Area—back in my community as we try to make sense of the political landscape and collectively create strategies to move us closer and closer to a just world. Let’s talk!

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"Paradoxically, elections become less significant the more we invest in them. If we build a powerful movement outside of the electoral arena, then we have weight that can be felt directly or indirectly at election time. If we spend our time working within the parameters of the voting system then when the elections come we will have little leverage (and what we have can be guided into harmless channels). It is interesting to note that when we have had powerful mass movements the elites have been desperate to bring us into the electoral system....
Elections, like negotiations, are an indicator of the existing balance of power. If we can keep them in perspective and organize around the issues that impact our people with the vision that a better world is indeed possible (and certainly more viable than the current one) then we can nurture movements strong enough that, come elections, we will have shaped the options and our choices will mean something. "
- Ricardo morales