While Lisa Blunt Rochester sees things in this country as basically peachy, most of us know that we are in the midst of a crisis. Many DL readers realize that the current situation demands that we take a wholly different approach to politics and elections and that we cannot rely on languid, laissez-faire “leaders” like Lisa Blunt Rochester to formulate that different approach.
Rather, we need to step up ourselves and move the ball forward where we can with new ideas, new methods and new practices that can flow over and around obstacles like our congressional delegation. I see evidence of this flow in organizations like Delaware United, Justice Democrats and Network Delaware. These groups are not organized around a campaign or candidate, but around keeping energy and activity up between elections. They basically ignore the useless cogs like LBR in a way that I wish I could.
Similarly, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez sketched out a new approach when noting that our swing voters are not “the middle” but people who never voted before. This fresh insight, although it seems obvious, is a bit of a revelation. But is it a revelation that we can make practical use of? I wrote the post below just after the mid-term elections. I’m revisiting it now because I wonder about the feasibility of using this “AOC scale” in the next election. I know many DL readers are also active in local campaigns, so I’d really like to hear from you in the comments.
What does ID’ing swing voters that are not “middle” but “passive” really look like? Did this sensibility animate any local races this past cycle? Which ones?
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What would it take for Democrats to stop chasing the mythical “center” and start putting some real energy into activating voters who would be inclined to vote for Democratic candidates on election day, but stay home instead?
My sense is that instead of “left, middle, right” we’d end up with a scale that looked something like this*.
0- Anti-Interested
1- Clueless Affinity
2- Passive Interest
3- Light Voter Level Interest
4- Semi-Regular Voter
5- Engaged Voter
6- Activist
The key would be to nudge everyone [every decent human, that is] up one notch on the scale. This has happened in the past, but it has always been ad hoc. The Obama campaign, for example, moved scores of voters on or two notches on the scale. [Likewise, the horrible Clinton campaign kicked millions of Ds down two notches.]
Also, Trump has worked to turn Dem 4’s (Semi-Regular Voters) into 5’s (Engaged Voters) and 5’s into 6’s – but is the pipeline being fed? Or are Dems like Carper, Pelosi, and Schumer intentionally stopping up the wide end of the pipe with garbage?
We can’t afford to continue to rely on ad hoc events to move people up the scale. It needs to be an ongoing program.
*I know that campaigns use a 1-5 scale for GOTV efforts and when canvassing. This is similar but more interested in the likelihood of voting, not a gauge of feelings about a particular candidate.
