This buzzy new tactic is being touted as a silver bullet to help Democrats stave off disaster this fall, but it’s a bandaid, not a cure.
Imagine you are in charge of a legacy enterprise, a company that’s been in business for decades, even longer. You still have some loyal customers, but a lot of people loathe your product and the rest are indifferent. You’ve tried all kinds of ways to get more customers, including hiring new celebrity brand messengers, fancy TV ads, and sophisticated digital marketing that lets you target people individually. Still, you’re not getting through much, because people are bombarded with too many ads already. But now you’ve got a brilliant new idea for how you’re going to sell your product: you’re going to pay some of your customers to tell their friends about you.
In a nutshell, that’s the national Democratic Party today: desperately hoping a new marketing tactic called “paid relational organizing” is what is going to save it from electoral defeat this fall.
Check out this job listing from the Progressive Turnout Project, a key voter engagement group founded in 2015 that works to help elect Democrats up and down ballot by designing, testing and deploying “specialized voter turnout programs.” The group spent more than $78 million during the 2020 election cycle and is on track to spending a similar amount this time around as well. They are looking to hire state “relational organizing directors” for six key states: Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. Each director is supposed to manage eight “community mobilization managers” who in turn will have “at least 200 part-time Community Mobilizers per city” who will be “on boarded during the final weeks of the 2022 election cycle.” The pay is between $52K and $72.8K for a four-month stint, which is pretty good money in the world of political campaigns.
The idea of paying grassroots Democratic activists to do what ought to come naturally, that is, to talk to their friends, family and coworkers about the virtues of voting comes from the 2020 Jon Ossoff campaign for US Senate in Georgia. During its push to win the January runoff election, the Ossoff campaign decided to spend $500 a week for two or three weeks per person paying 2,800 community mobilizers, especially younger people, to tap into a special app that matched their cell phone contacts against the state’s master voter file and determined which of them were close contacts who hadn’t yet voted.
Davis Leonard, Zoe Stein and Josh Kravitz, three of the masterminds of that Ossoff effort, explained the program in great detail in a series of posts here on Medium. According to them, the campaign built a “relational network” of 160,000 voters in less than a month, and increased turnout by 3.8% among that group. They are careful to note that this effect didn’t just happen overnight, but was “a cherry on top of years of hard-fought progressive organizing in Georgia on the part of Black organizers and Georgia-based organizations like New Georgia Project and Fair Fight; and that our relational voter contact program sits firmly on the shoulders of the union organizers and communities of color who pioneered relational organizing as a means to build power and drive movements for social, economic and racial justice.”
There were a lot of smart nuts and bolts to the Ossoff relational program, and I’m not going to get into all the details here. Suffice it to say that the Ossoff team did a lot of thoughtful work to structure how its paid and unpaid volunteers engaged with potential voters, it worked hard to recruit community mobilizers who could connect with so-called “low propensity” voters because they themselves were less politically engaged, and it built an intricate framework for motivating and managing those mobilizers. To get paid, these folks were required to attend an introductory training, meet with their direct supervisor for ten minutes each week, share two social media posts on their platform of choice, and hit goals to mobilize their own networks.
According to Politico, paid relational organizing is “catching fire” ahead of the 2022 midterms among Democratic campaigns, with the Texas Democratic Party rolling out a paid relational program and the grassroots organizing group Red, Wine and Blue pitching it to its thousands of suburban moms. Ben Wikler, the Wisconsinite who is everyone’s favorite state Democratic party chair, told Politico, “What the team did with Ossoff in Georgia on paid relational constitutes a rarity in politics — a powerhouse new tactic that could affect close, statewide races. The biggest challenge for relational organizing has always been how to scale. Impact-per-voter reached is high, but getting to enough voters to shift election results has been devilishly hard. But a paid relational [program] has a way to dramatically expand the size of it.”
Inside the world of electoral campaigns, where the only goal is getting to 50% plus one, this enthusiasm for paid relational is understandable. Any tactic that can squeeze more juice from a stone is bound to attract the interest of donors desperate for anything that might pull more people to the polls — especially after the dramatic increase in Democratic turnout in 2018 and 2020. But it’s worth noting that, at least in the Ossoff case, the last-minute push to reach more potential voters was tied to motivating messages like a push for a $15 minimum wage, a New Civil Rights Act, a New Voting Rights Act, affordable health care, COVID relief, and other policies that would make a difference in the lives of ordinary voters.
Now, Democrats employing paid relational organizing are more like frackers using ever more extractive techniques to get a little more oil out of the ground. It may work in the short term but it doesn’t do anything to address the deeper problem, which is why so many Democratic voters are disconnected from their party and its candidates. Money can paper over the problem for only so long. Sooner or later, there has to be a reckoning. My bet is that reckoning is coming this fall.
Micah Sifry is a Medium columnist and the author of several books on tech and politics, including The Big Disconnect: Why the Internet Hasn’t Transformed Politics (Yet) and WikiLeaks and the Age of Transparency. He also writes a weekly newsletter called The Connector, where he focuses on movements, organizing and democracy. You can also follow him on Twitter at @mlsif.
Support this writing directly by signing up for a Medium subscription through this link. Get access not just to my writing, but to everyone’s!