A DIFFERENT KIND OF TRAIL: THE CAMPAIGN

I’m in a room on a narrow bed.
A giant football twists above my head.
A young boy’s jersey hangs from the knob.
It’s all part of my volunteer job.

Dawn is breaking over Missoula. It’s still dark but I am already astir. I have been walking and making phone calls for the candidate who has hired my son to do something my son just loves to do – get out the vote for a candidate he believes in. I don’t normally do these things unless someone else believes enough in the candidate to offer me a place to stay. After all, it’s Montana – not even my voting STATE much less precinct - yet.

Well, I guess it’s better than last year. Last year I flew up to Whitefish, in the Flathead Valley of Montana, for the last four days of the electoral cycle on my own money to help (for free again) my son who was the Field Organizer of a campaign of a very nice and passionate Democrat for Montana State Legislature in an tight race in a swing district. He was able to get ‘volunteer housing’ – a virtually empty old house being completely remodeled. At least the remodeling had progressed far enough that it had a working shower and a working toilet.

I slept on a mattress spread out on the bare subfloor but the fact that my son had me walking and phoning pretty much all day every day made up for my less than luxurious sleeping arrangements. Dan wasn’t too worried about finding fancy digs; when my son is on a role, he would sleep on top of a desk to get the person he believes would make the perfect legislator, mayor, judge, (fill in the blank here) elected.

My son is what is known in polite circles as a ‘political consultant’ or in bigger campaigns a ‘field organizer’. FOs are usually twenty-somethings who migrate from campaign to campaign, usually for low pay, in order to make this democracy work.  Doesn’t matter which party, the job and the pay is about the same. My son happens to work mostly for Democratic candidates, being a Democrat himself, but he’s not opposed to working for someone with another affiliation if he thinks the person is right for the job. But the thing with being a Democratic FO – you get to play the awesome ‘ground game’ that the Democrats have been building for the last 10 years.

The ‘ground game’ is not really a secret. The leading political reporters and pundits have written a lot about it. The rules are simple – get a person elected by knowing your base, working the undecideds and doing this with clean statistics, voter lists and lots and lots of volunteers who make phone calls to every single potential voter on those lists – more than once. That’s how Obama won  - twice; his ground game has been the best the Democrats have ever played.

The key to a good ground game, just like a football game, is to have a really good coach who is your campaign manager and strategist. The campaign manager for local campaigns strategizes about where the voters for his or her political candidate would come from, calls the plays and recruits volunteers by the bucketload.  In larger races, the recruiting is done by Field Organizers. If the candidates are running as a Democrat in a partisan race, the FOs are given the keys to the winning kingdom – a slick electronic voter database called VoteBuilder, nicknamed VAN. VAN is the increasingly specific list of voting behavior of certain voters within specific political districts. And it’s a powerful tool for Democratic organizers.

I used to be fond of saying I agree with Will Rogers who always said he wasn’t a member of an organized party – he was a Democrat. In the past, if you eliminate highly questionable machines like Chicago’s Daley regime,  the Democrats in my humble opinion have been anything but ‘organized’. So I can barely rap my head around the fact 1) the Democrats are amazingly organized and 2) they actually have a slick anything.

But Missoula municipal races are nonpartisan, run according to rules for nonpartisan races. So what is a candidate’s capable (and may I add good-looking and single in Dan’s case) Campaign Manager to do without the VAN, his or her most reliable tool in the toolbox? In my son’s case, he went after (from the County Recorder) the publicly available list of folks who vote in municipal elections.

I think most people know that the elections soliciting the highest number of votes are the National elections – particularly when a President is being elected. US House and Senate races are pretty high profile, too, in the off-year but municipal races have the lowest voter participation of all elections. Do most people REALLY care about who their mayor is? Maybe in big cities with a lot at stake but smaller towns have the benefit of usually knowing the candidates. If Tom and Mary are both good people, regardless that Tom sports a tat and Mary sometimes can get insufferably long-winded, they are not likely to spend much time prior to filling out the ballot to make their decisions.

But Missoula is just big enough that personal familiarity is just as likely as not likely. So for Dan’s candidate, it comes down to the group that may be the most dedicated voter in the world – the ones who consistently vote on school board elections. That’s an elite group of voters. Most of them even actually study the material, if any, that the candidates have put together to sway votes their directions. Particularly in a year in which there are no National or even State elections at stake.

So my son writes the scripts, trains the volunteers through role-playing exercises and then maybe walks with them or phones a few people for them for a bit until he is sure they are not too nervous about questions for which they have no answers. It’s always okay in door knocking or phone calling to say “Gee, I don’t know that but I can certainly have someone get back to you.” (With our society being very hard on people who ‘don’t know’, admitting you have no answers can be quite daunting.) Heck, from a Campaign Manager or FOs point of view, it’s a second chance to talk to the voter. Score!

But, no matter how well-trained and passionate the walker or caller is, school board voters are the well-informed group that says very politely, “He sounds really good and I will definitely look carefully at his website and written material once my ballot (mail-in type only) gets here.” Geez, no pushovers in this crowd. So Dan has to rely on his most capable phone bankers to get the word across. His candidate CARES about being a judge. He WANTS their vote. He wants it so much he has published his phone number on his website and on his printed mailers or door hangers. That really IS impressive to a lot of folks who are used to the increasingly remote relationships they have with their elected officials.

I guess by now you are wondering why a slightly more than middle-aged mother would suffer a twin bed covered with sheets stamped with tiny little footballs on it that a young boy has willingly agreed to give up for his Dad to spend my days walking or phoning for a candidate from whom I may never actually benefit. Yeah, well part of it is I trained my son to be political and I am having to live with the consequences of that. I also taught him to look at ALL the candidates before coloring in the little circle because the right person may not be the most obvious. But I also have a sense that I am watching a unique democratic play from a front-row seat being directed by an increasingly capable director who continues to sharpen his skills and knowledge with every single election.

At some point, I really believe my political son will decide that HE wants to run for office. HE will be looking for some slightly disheveled, smart strategist willing to work for little or nothing just because he or she believes in democracy and the person for whom they are working. I hope some other son or daughter’s mother steps forward to help her child in my child’s race. And I personally pledge to find them some decent ‘volunteer housing’ if they come from somewhere else in order to give my son the chance to make his particular piece of the world a better place. Heck, if (when) my son runs, I may be able to give them my own bedroom because I’ll most likely be sleeping on a cot in his campaign office. The desk, I’m sure, will be already claimed by his campaign manager.