💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › ray-valentine-canvassing-is-not-organizing.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 13:48:22. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Title: Canvassing is not organizing
Author: Ray Valentine
Date: February 12, 2020
Language: en
Topics: Elections, anti-voting
Source: https://organizing.work/2020/02/canvassing-is-not-organizing/
Notes: Ray Valentine argues that the skills built in canvassing for an electoral candidate do not translate to organizing workplaces or tenants

Ray Valentine

Canvassing is not organizing

If, like me, you have decided to spend a lot of time in leftist milieus

or you encounter highly politicized people online, you have probably

heard a lot of talk about canvassing and phone banking over the past few

months. As the Democratic presidential primary nears its climax,

thousands of volunteers are out knocking doors or making phone calls or

sending texts to encourage voters to support their preferred candidates.

Friends of mine are making “Bernie Journeys,” trekking to Iowa, New

Hampshire, and South Carolina to evangelize for the political

revolution, lovingly documenting their canvassing experiences on social

media and even fundraising to cover the cost of their trips. Even more

people are knocking doors closer to home, and some dedicated democracy

enthusiasts are even working to support candidates for local office.

Since I am a contributor to Organizing Work, you will probably not be

surprised that I am pessimistic about the prospects for achieving

significant social change at the ballot box. My less sectarian friends

have tried to persuade me to look for a positive side to the left’s

enthusiasm for Bernie Sanders and other candidates. They argue that

whether these campaigns win or not, and whether or not left-wing elected

officials are able to pass progressive reforms through America’s

dysfunctional political system, they help build a movement. As Chris

Maisano writes in Jacobin, Sanders’ “army” of staffers and volunteers

“will not forget what they learned when the campaign comes to an end,

and the relationships they establish now will likely feed into future

organizing efforts both inside and outside the electoral arena.”

But what if that army were better off forgetting the lessons of the

campaign trail? Election campaigns are built on particular forms of

activity, which I do not think are usually relevant in other contexts.

Sure, all things considered, it is better for leftists to get out from

behind their various screens and learn to hold eye contact long enough

to have a three-minute conversation with a stranger. But volunteer

canvassers on political campaigns learn skills and expectations that

they have to unlearn to be effective organizers in their workplace or

apartment building.

I have volunteered for plenty of candidates, and I will almost certainly

do so again, if only to wipe the obnoxious dead-eyed smirk off my city

councilman’s face. I have seen how these things work and how they differ

from what I have needed to do organizing tenant associations and

workplace committees. Canvassing and phone banking requires you to give

a fairly short, scripted sales pitch as quickly as possible to a huge

number of people you will most likely never see again. Quantity of

interactions is usually prioritized over quality. It’s a low percentage

game, and canvassers are trained to move along quickly to the next

person, especially if a respondent isn’t receptive to the message of the

campaign. You need to cover your turf, and getting into an argument with

any given voter just isn’t worth your time: if someone supports the

other guy, you wish them well and move on to greener pastures. From the

perspective of a campaign, one vote is as good as any other. Meanwhile,

canvassers and phone bankers are relatively interchangeable, and it’s

easy to show up intermittently for an afternoon of outreach without

having to give your life to the struggle.

An organizing conversation is very different from canvassing. It’s

mostly about asking questions and listening to the answers, being

totally present in the conversation, picking up small cues and going

deep. Unlike a canvasser, an organizer needs to keep going back to the

same people and build up a working relationship with them over the long

run. An organizer at a job or an apartment building or some other

bounded constituency can’t always just move on. To win a majority of

people over, you need to identify and convince existing social leaders

who influence the people around them and can be a massive obstacle if

they oppose you. That means shying away from conflict and disagreement

is impossible. When those leaders are resistant to being organized, the

organizer needs to confront their objections head-on, get real, and try

to persuade them no matter what. An organizer depends on building close

relationships with a particular set of individuals, because organizing

means asking people to make sacrifices and take huge risks — with their

jobs, their livelihoods, their homes — which you can only do once you

have won their trust.

The nature of canvassing matches the incentives that exist in electoral

contests, and I don’t think campaigning could be improved by grafting on

organizers’ techniques. Social science research suggests that virtually

all forms of campaigning, from ads to direct mail to direct door-to-door

outreach, are mostly ineffective at changing voters’ minds. Almost all

voters are strongly partisan, and vote on the basis of deep-seated

identification with a political coalition. The real value of campaigns

is in turnout: activating the voters who are already predisposed to

support your candidate, who you can usually identify on the basis of

some demographic markers. Given the scale of the electorate and the

short lifespan of a political campaign, it doesn’t make sense to invest

limited resources in the dubious proposition of changing voters’ minds.

Canvassers get accustomed to having short, semi-scripted conversations

with strangers, most of whom are non-committal but polite. Most people

don’t like to start fights with strangers, and regular voters tend to

view volunteering for campaigns as an admirable thing to do, so

interactions on the doors tend to be pleasant, unchallenging

experiences. Volunteers virtually never return to the people they have

canvassed, so they never really have to see whether their efforts to

persuade people worked or not. Organizing is different: to organize you

need to know where people stand. Organizing requires you to pierce the

veil of social graces, to “stop being polite and start getting real.” If

you take collective action at work, you’re putting your livelihood on

the line and the only meaningful protection you have is the support of

your coworkers, so you better know for sure who you can count on. A

polite, non-committal “yes” is worse than useless when you’re trying to

count how many people are going to march on the boss.

In my experience, people with a lot of election campaign experience show

up to organizing with an expectation that things will work the same way.

They are uncomfortable (understandably!) with digging deep into

strangers’ hopes and fears, being vulnerable, and really pushing people.

When they have to work with people over the long run and experience the

extreme difficulty of moving people to action, they get discouraged,

especially when they realize that early, shallow interactions don’t do

much to move the needle.

Leftists might be better off unlearning the lessons of electoral work,

because these encourage habits of mind that are a real obstacle to

organizing. When left-wing activist groups want to try their hand at

“base building,” they tend to gravitate towards doing things that

resemble electoral campaigns, like gathering petition signatures through

not-very-narrowly targeted canvassing or outreach in public places.

Investing in meaningful organization that can exercise real social power

within a particular social or economic institution (e.g. by workers who

share a workplace and collectively manage that production) is much less

common, and I’m not sure that the former leads to the latter on any kind

of straightforward path. The techniques of political campaigns are

designed for a particular purpose, and that purpose is not organizing

the working class to wrest control of social institutions and emancipate

itself.