advice for my speech this evening?

[cos]

My friend Jesse Gordon is running for Cambridge City Council. His announcement party is this evening and I'm one of the speakers - I have five minutes, right after Jesse. I'm going to talk about how campaigns work, and how volunteering fits in. My theory is that a lot of people who support candidates would volunteer more, if they understood what a campaign does and how what they do fits in. I think a lot of people who do volunteer for a campaign and spend a day or two canvassing, come away feeling like they haven't done a lot of good, and are less motivated to return.

So, help me out. I basically know how campaigns work. I volunteered a bunch of times for campaigns before I understood, so I remember some of the things I didn't know. And I've talked to people about it. But I'm sure there are things I'm missing.

What do you find mysterious about campaigns, particularly smaller ones for local/state office?

Have you ever volunteered for a campaign, even for one day? What value did you think you were giving? What did you know about, and what did you wonder about, how your work fit in?

(Oh, hey, if you know anyone who lives around here, send them the link, and if you're here, come!)

Comments

[mattblum.livejournal.com]

I started volunteering in political campaigns when I was eight years old. At the time, all I did was hand out fliers urging people to vote for Chuck Robb for Governor of Virginia.

I worked on a whole bunch more campaigns for the next ten years, including many local ones (for the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors, for instance). The work I did ranged from stuffing envelopes to going door-to-door to writing database applications for keeping track of donations to calling people up on Election Day to remind them to vote to (pretty much every year) standing outside the polling place handing out pamphlets and such. Not knowing much about Massachusetts politics, I gave up doing that when I went to college, and then picked it up again to work on Sen. Kerry's campaign website in 1996. After that, I didn't do anything much again until last year, when I worked on the Kerry campaign in Virginia.

Even when I was in high school and didn't have that much time to devote to the campaigns I was working on, it really felt good to be part of the political process, even if in small measure. It didn't feel so great when the candidates I was supporting lost, of course, but the feeling when they won made up for the losses by giving me a feeling that I had, in a small way, changed the world. Even if you can't change the whole world at once, you can at least change a part of it, and who knows what might happen if you do?

Huh. I actually sounded kind of idealistic there, didn't I? I may have to give up my Offical Cynic Society membership if I keep this up. <grin>

[cos]

I never knew you had a cynic society membership in the first place :)

As someone who has volunteered for a lot of campaigns, do you have any suggestions? things that you wish other volunteers would know about campaigns, so they understand how their effort really does make a difference.

[mattblum.livejournal.com]

I think people need to understand that every vote is important (though I think that, after the 2000 Florida debacle, most people know this), and that it would be an awful shame to lose a vote when a little more effort would've gotten it. You never know what will get someone to vote for your candidate--most times, you won't change anyone's mind about the issues, but you can inform them so they know that your candidate agrees with them. Or, especially in local elections, you can inform them so they know there is an election to vote in. A person who doesn't vote is almost as bad for you as a person who votes for your opponent.

Everyone knows that campaigns are fueled by money. You have to have signs, bumper stickers, pamphlets, buttons--not to mention office space and phone lines and such. Campaigns are fueled by money, but they're driven by volunteers. Signs don't put themselves up, envelopes don't stuff themselves, and people hate being called by computers (and computers that call people cost money!). Even if you only help a little bit, that's a little bit someone else doesn't have to do, so they can do something else, so more gets done. Since no campaign anywhere, ever, has done as much as they wanted to do, it's important that you do as much as you can.

That's why every volunteer is important.