Michael Bersin’s lead paragraph yesterday is also the lead for this posting:
Eleven years ago I attended campaign management school. The lead instructor said, “Now, I’m going to talk about yard signs.” Everyone in the room eagerly leaned forward in anticipation of his wisdom about the proper mix of yard signs to 4 x 8s and their priority in the campaign budget. The instructor continued, “You only get enough yard signs so that you can plant them between your candidate’s home and their place of work. That way they think their signs are everywhere.”
The Obama campaign is putting its money (and time and effort) where that campaign instructor’s mouth was. They are forgoing signs and bumper stickers in favor of real work. I can live with that. I can even do some of the work.
The campaign’s final hard push to register voters is in its last two weeks now. (Registration ends on October 8th.) Last week alone, St. Louis area Obama supporters exceeded their goal of registering 2400 new voters and managed to sign up 3,492. And they’re serious about getting those cards to the proper authorities tout de suite. If you hand a blank registration card (available from any Obama office) to a voter and get him to fill it in, the office wants that card back no later than the next day. No later. And they will hand deliver the cards to the election board. They’re not trusting the U.S. Postal Service to deliver them to the right place and get them there quickly enough. These cards represent people’s precious right to vote, and they are guarded with care.
So much for the past. Now for this week, or what’s left of it. The campaign in Missouri is preparing to knock on the doors of 100,000 unregistered citizens in one day, this Saturday. The St. Louis Metro region alone is aiming to knock on 50,000 doors that day. They need your help. If you want to do a shift of door knocking on Saturday, great. Or if you want to help keep one of the offices organized that day, just offer. If you want to help get packets organized before Saturday, you’ll be greeted with hugs and kisses.
But do something. To help, go here and find a handy neighborhood Obama office that’s waiting to give you a job. Do it now. Because Saturday is upon us.
Be part of the solution, not part of the problem. To quote Michael quoting FiveThirtyEight:
…A lot of people aren’t going to like hearing this truth, but organizers recognize that the majority of people who walk into offices for yard signs are, for volunteering purposes – and this is a technical term – useless. In the majority, these people are not going to knock, they’re not going to make phone calls. Instead, they are going to throw the organizer’s incredibly precious, sleep-deprived time down a bottomless abyss of irretrievability.
That sleep-deprived organizer isn’t wasting his time on signs this week. He’s revving up for this Saturday, and he needs you. Here’s your chance to scare the b’jesus out of Republicans: go register people.
People knocking on my door never do much for me. I just politely say thanks I have some or whatever. When these people are political, I think isn’t that nice but I would never change my vote from Dem to Repug just because they dropped by. In fact I might think (like happened in Iowa in 2004?) that they were being paid to do this and were from out of town. Yard signs say “the neighbors here are endorsing this candidate”. If they’re your neighbors, that sort of gives permission for you to consider that person. If you are driving through another neighborhood, that still says “wow, look, seems like a lot of these folks like Mr. Whoever”. Sort of same thing for bumper stickers and pins. We are always having people we don’t know come up to comment on pins and bumper stickers. Some times to ask where to get them; sometimes to say “right on!”, sometimes to want to talk politics. If the Obama campaign is dumping yard signs, bumper stickers, and pins, I think they are making a really big mistake.
Yard signs v door-knocking is a false choice. Yard signs are important for a lot of reasons and the campaign that can get a lot of them put up is fortunate indeed.
Door-knocking–face-to-face contact at the door–is the most effective voter contact program that exists. This isn’t a hunch–empirical studies at Yale showed that visiting voters at their door increased voter participation by as much as 15%. It blew away every other mode of contact–tv, radio, phones and mail. The successful campaign includes all of these modes that are appropriate but suffice to say that when you go door-to-door for a candidate, particularly in your own neighborhood, your efforts really make a difference.
…so there, now I’m playing both sides! (snark)
I’ll be one of the ground-pounders this weekend, out of the Obama U.City office (McKnight and Olive) in St. Louis. The place was hopping even last weekend, when I went out for the first time. I found 5 supporters, 1 undecided, and 1 refusal out of the 24 houses I did by myself.
Andy
Alton IL
Enough already! Enough of ‘campaign management schools’ and conventional wisdom espoused as fact. (Let’s quit adopting the cookbook, tow-the-line methods of Republicanism.)
Here’s the facts from in the trenches–
(1) Yard signs have their place in some–not all–campaigns
(2) D2D and yard signs are not mutually exclusive choices
(3) Yard signs are useful in some races to pacify and solidify the believers and they may, in some rare instances, reinforce those leaning but lonely voters.
(4) Many voters expect them, but that’s insufficient cause to use them
With respect to the Obama Campaign, let’s admire their official focus on the ground-game, registration and GOTV. But , at the same time, why aren’t more county parties picking up the slack and handling the signs, buttons and bumper stickers for the Obama campaign? It’s a role they can easily serve, it would be appreciated by many local voters and it’s a very easy way to be visible, meaningful, and involved.