As I mentioned in my last post, I’m working for a few progressive campaigns around Minnesota. One that I just pushed live is for Marcus Harcus, a progressive activist in North Minneapolis. Marcus is a smart politician with great policy ideas and a lot of youthful energy. Plus, he’s just an overall nice guy and family man. This campaign is important to me not just because Marcus is a good friend, but because he’s running to be my representative, and I think he’d reflect my values well. He is the face of the changing Northside. Good luck, Marcus!

I’m currently building sites for a few progressive campaigns, and I’m happy to announce the launch of the first of these. I recently did a little identity freshening for the Joe Bodell for Minnetonka City Council campaign site. Joe is a strong progressive who is maybe best known as one of the founders of the Minnesota Progressive Project. I got introduced to Joe and his campaign via Tony Petrangelo, another MN Progressive Project contributor and fellow web developer, who suggested Joe’s site could use some work. Check out the result of my handiwork at joebodell.com.

Westerners thought that they could have consumer democracy: they didn’t have to participate in it except at election time, when they would vote for parties and platforms paid for and produced by someone other than them. Coke(tm)/Pepsi(tm) politics – you have a choice, you can choose either Coke or Pepsi! Politicians aren’t paid by you (their salaries are the least part of their real income) why would you think they care about your concerns?

You don’t pay for politicians or politics. This is the Facebook rule: if you don’t pay the freight, you aren’t the customer, you are the product. Politicians compete for the money and favors of the rich, and what they sell is the ability to wrangle you: to pass the austerity bills, to cut the benefits, to privatize the jewels of the public system, to force through the multi-trillion dollar bailouts. They control government for the benefit of the rich.

(emphasis by me)

So many people want politicians to be making less money, to relinquish the public salary they’re provided with. This might make sense, given the vast, vast wealth of our current political class, but it’s extremely short sighted. If we want politicians to answer to our demands, then they need to share our concerns and problems. They need to be part of the middle class. Which means they need a comfortable middle class salary, and a comfortable pension when they’re done serving (so they don’t start pandering to future possible employers while in office, deciding policy based on personal gain). It’s really quite common sense, when you think about it from the standpoint of rewards and motivations.

I can understand people’s hesitation to do volunteer work like phone banking or door knocking. It can be intimidating to have that direct contact with strangers, especially when you’re feeling like you’re intruding on those precious few moments they have to relax and spend time with their families. And it’s true, you are being an intrusion. But, based on my experiences last night, simply acknowledging that can make a difference. I didn’t run into any particularly hostile people, but I did bump up against a few very convicted conservatives and people who just didn’t want to talk. In those cases, I simply apologized for bothering them, said thanks for their time, and ended the call. You let it roll off your back, and instead take pleasure in the couple of people you get through to who already support what you’re doing, or, in those rare instances, discover for the first time that they support what you’re doing. A job like this is partially about voter persuasion, and it’s good to keep that in mind. I often imagined I was explaining the issues to a good friend, and tried to keep the conversation chatty when the person on the other line seemed encouraging of it.

I’ve been reading Get Out The Vote by Donald P. Green and Alan S. Gerber, and there are some experiments documented in that book that really influenced my thinking about how to run a voter contact campaign. For example, volunteer phone banks are often more successful than commercial/professional phone banks, but only if you have volunteers who are enthused about the campaign and willing to engage with the people they’re contacting. The script actually matters little; it seems that making the contacts feel like their opinion is important and that someone is listening is what really matters. Additionally, good volunteer phone bankers can create one vote out of every 20 completed calls, which is among the best conversion rates of all the various voter contact methods tested (such as leaflet drops, TV ads, election day festivals, etc), not to mention it is perhaps the cheapest and most efficient. And, from my perspective, quite a good use of a Tuesday night.

It looks to me like it’s now a three-way race between Bachmann, and the two major candidates who didn’t compete in the straw poll: Perry and Romney. And in that race, I don’t see how Perry doesn’t win the nomination. Perry perfectly blends Bachmann’s and Romney’s strengths, while mostly avoiding their weaknesses. He appeals to the base and to the business class. At the end of the day, though, he’s a gun-toting evangelical fundamentalist governor of Texas, and if memory serves, we just said goodbye a president with that story.