 Good morning, everyone. Thank you so much for joining us today. Oh, we're gonna expect a lot more people trickling in, but we want to get going while we have all of this wonderful energy. My name is Holly Russon-Gillman, and I am a civic innovation fellow here at New America, and I've had the privilege to work with many of the people on this panel. This is not an ordinary group of people. This is not your average DC panel. This is truly an extraordinary group of people, and each of them in their own right are truly leaders in this space who have worked tirelessly with experimentation and different approaches, and they haven't just tried once and gone home. They have continually tried in different arenas to really make a change. So we have Hari Han, Associate Professor of Political Science at Wellesley College. We have Mark Schmidt, Director of Political Reform here at New America. We have Jeremy Byrd, Founding Partner of 270 Strategies and the National Field Director of the 2012 Obama Campaign. And we have Anna Berger, Co-Chair of the Gettysburg Project on Civic Engagement, former Secretary-Treasurer of SEIU, and a Consultant at ABA Action. However, beyond their bios, you know, as I said, they really are leaders, and as Professor Han quotes Marshall Gantz in her book, The Definition of Leadership as Accepting the Responsibility to Engage Others in Achieving Purpose in Times of Uncertainty. And as we look at the seeming and ability of our democratic institutions to reflect the will of the people, you know, this last week in a cute reminder, we need to continually assess how we can strengthen our democracy. And can 21st century civic participation really fulfill Tocqueville's idea of schools of democracy? As Professor Han notes in the end of her book, one danger in the shift towards mobilizing without organizing is that people become more segmented and isolated in their concerns, and the democratic skills and capacities are not cultivated. Can we bring about the transformative change necessary to strengthen our democratic institutions? I hope today's panel will inspire all of us in this room and those joining us online to really think about these issues. Without further ado, I turn it over to Mark Schmidt. Thank you, thank you, Holly, and thank you all for coming. I just want to open this up and really thank everyone who's here and thank Holly for reconnecting me to Hari Han, who I worked with years ago when I used to work for Senator Bill Bradley, and she worked for Senator Bradley right after he left the Senate and then in his 2000 presidential campaign. And she's always been one of those people that I think of like, you know, you always have that list of people that you want to kind of keep track of what they're doing. And, you know, whenever you come across them, you want to try to engage with what they're doing. When I think back to that era, you know, that late 90s, early 2000, I don't think we had a... I don't think we thought very much people engaged in politics. I don't think we thought very much in a very sophisticated way about citizen activism. I think we took a lot of it for granted. I think we, you know, sometimes it was sort of annoying or people we had to kind of capture. It was really not, you know, a lot of aspects of organizing were less developed than they are since. I've been thinking recently, I do a lot of work on issues of campaign finance reform and, you know, how the electoral process works. And like a lot of people, I've been really struck by research that really shows not just how money works, but how little voters really matter in the system. The research of people like Larry Bartels and Martin Gillins, where they're really comparing the attitudes of voters with the actual results of government. Beginning to think about like, you know, does the idea that politics follows the media and voter even matter anymore? Probably that's probably a pretty outdated concept. And beginning to think there are structural ways you can address that, but really what it's all about is that voters and citizens don't matter unless they make themselves matter, unless they are organized and engaged, continuously engaged, not just on a single issue. And, you know, the only way to overcome the power of concentrated wealth is through the power of concentrated people. And that's what this kind of effort is really all about. I think that few things, as I said, you know, 15 years ago is a really long time. And few things have changed as dramatically as the nature of organizing and activism. And thinking, I looked it up, it was just 10 years ago that Theta Scotch Post book, Diminished Democracy, came out, which highlighted that century-long shift from broad cross-ideological kind of community-wide organizations where people would encounter people with different views, as well as the same views, sometimes cross-class, sometimes not. But the integrated politics as part of a broader mission of civil society, how that shifted to single-issue groups where the relationship was a direct male relationship and people in much less face-to-face. Since then, we've moved to a totally different kind of organizing. Sometimes, I saw Dave Carp from GW in the room who wrote the book called The Move On Effect, where the organizing is online, but it's not necessarily single-issue, it's transactional, and it's continuous and has a different kind of engagement. Does that take us further in the direction that Theta Scotch Paul warned us about, or is it potentially something totally different? But you've also seen lots of innovations and changes that people recognizing that only face-to-face organizing really connects people. We've also seen tremendous, along with the decline of unions, we've seen a lot of innovation in thinking about how to connect and organize with workers, even if you're not connecting in the traditional way of organizing a workplace for the purpose of collective bargaining. And then, of course, in the campaign, in politics, and particularly in the to Obama campaigns, you've seen a totally different level of citizen engagement than we've seen probably since, you know, probably since the Goldwater and Reagan organizing on the right, maybe some of the, you know, less successful anti-war organizing of the late 60s. I'm always struck by, a few years ago, I found a quote from President Obama from 1995 when he was actually first running for office in Illinois, and he's quoted as saying, at that time, looking back on the experience of Chicago and the Harold Washington era and all of that, he said, what if a politician were to see his job as that of an organizer, as part teacher and part advocate, one who does not sell voters short, but who educates them about the real choices before them? And I think that's, to me, that was always been part of the vision of this. I always thought part of the vision of the presidency was not so much the grand bargain on Capitol Hill, but actually that kind of organizing, and I think that's, you know, had some successes and it's obviously had some ways in which that's really fallen short. So I'm glad that we have Jeremy here to talk about that sort of thing. So I'm just like to, you know, I really, Harihan's book, How Organizations Develop Activists, a really important study of some, you know, both general and very specific cases of how you take people from mobilization to deeper organizing. I'd love to want to hear her present on that and then we'll have comments from Anna and Jeremy and then we'll open it up to questions. And after the session, I think, you know, both Hari and Jeremy wrote the forward for Hari's second book, which is about organizing in the two Obama campaigns. And they'll both be here and happy to sign books. But even if you want an unsigned book, this one is available out there. And the second one may be also, okay, good, it is. Okay, so both books are available. Okay, without further ado, Hari. So thank you to Mark and Holly and the New America Foundation for hosting us today. And also for Jeremy and Anna for being here and being willing to offer your Canada comments. And also to all of you for coming, I'm really looking forward to the discussion that we have, exciting to see a lot of friends and colleagues, both old and new here. And I especially want to recognize sort of one person who's not in the room today. And that's my co-author on the Obama book, Liz McKenna. You know, writing the book with her was better partnership than I could have ever hoped for. And it's really the joint work that she and I did together that we're talking about today. So I don't want to talk for very long, but I just wanted to lay the groundwork for discussion. And I thought that I would start by just offering a few thoughts about why I wrote the book and what it was that we were trying to say in these books. And in some ways, it might be that you're asking yourself, like, how could anyone have anything important enough to say that takes combined total of 500 pages, right, to get it all out there? In this world of 140 characters or less, 500 pages seems like an awful lot. And I can't make any claims about how important the books are or they aren't. But I can say that really what we were doing is we were writing them in response to two trends that I and that Liz and I were both seeing in politics around the world when we first started working on these books a few years ago. And so the two trends really will, so first, as Mark alluded to in his comments, in the world of activism, it felt like the work that the campaigns and organizations, the work that campaigns and organizations do to get people involved in politics was getting increasingly complex, right? So with the advent of new digital technologies and the proliferation of viral uprisings like the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street, it seemed like there were a range of new tools that organizations and campaigns could use to get people involved around political issues and that in some ways these tools made it easier than ever to get people involved, right? But in the complexity sometimes it felt like it was hard to sort of see what the right strategies were, how to put these tools together with other strategies to get people involved in the way that organizations wanted. And the second trend simultaneous to that that we were seeing was that even as all these tools were proliferating, I heard a profound sense of powerlessness from the people that I was talking to, right? So obviously I wrote these books, you know, both of these books, we started working on them long before the movement around Michael Brown and Eric Garner began to emerge, but I think a lot of what we're seeing right now in response to those events is emblematic of a larger sense that power in our society is becoming increasingly concentrated. And so even as all these organizations felt like they had a range of new tactics and tools that they could use to engage people and get people involved, they were struggling with how to make it all add up into something bigger, right? And so these were the organizations that, you know, they saw the protesters in Tahrir Square topple the Mubarak regime, but then see the military come back into power in Egypt a few years later, or arguably around the Occupy movement, they were able to sort of occupy public spaces for months on end, but then weren't able to actually pass policy that ameliorated the economic inequality that they had set out to work on. And so it was really this funny paradox that I was seeing in the activists and the organizational leaders that I was talking to where on the one hand in one circle there was all this excitement about digital activism and the proliferation of new tools that we had, but on the other, there was this sort of sense among people who were working on the front lines, there was a sense of increasing powerlessness. And so these books in a sense really tried to work to talk to that paradox, right? And what we're trying to do in a sense is sort of saying instead of posing them as an either or, right, what we're trying to do is find a path towards making them a both and in a sense, right? And so the questions that the books ask in a way is how do we capitalize on the new tools and the information that we have to build the power that we need, right? Or another way of putting it would be how do we engage people in activism that actually builds power for the victories that we want? And so in the first book in How Organizations Develop Activists, basically what I do in this book is I report the findings from a two-year study comparing organizations that were really good at getting people involved in activism from those that weren't, right? And there are so many different things that affect what an organization can, whether or not an organization is able to engage people in activism that are outside the control of the organization. And what I wanted to do is see what is it that the organization actually does and does it matter, right? And what I found was that what really differentiated the best organizations out there was that they combined what I call sort of transactional mobilizing with transformational organizing. So transactional mobilizing, it's about creating opportunities for involvement that get as many people involved as possible. It's about essentially it's like creating more efficient and more effective on-ramps for people who want to get involved to actually get involved in activism, right? It's about hitting your numbers. Transformational organizing in contrast is about creating spaces for people to transform their own sense of agency so that their motivation and capacity to engage in further activism grows. And what I found was that the best organizations out there, they didn't do one or the other, they did both, right? They created this space for transformations so that they could develop the depth that they needed, but then they also worked to make, also worked with a hard-nosed focus on numbers so they could get to scale, right? And that's how they developed the breadth that they needed. And so there's perhaps no better organization or campaign in recent years that has done that than the 2008 and 2012 campaigns and their ability to sort of combine both this transformational organizing with the transactional mobilizing. And as Jeremy knows sort of far better than I do, there's been a lot of inks spilled in telling that story of those campaigns. And we didn't necessarily want to add more to that ink, but what Liz and I found was that there are so many of those stories that were focused on the role of data and technology and the way that the campaign sort of used those. But they didn't tell the story of the 2.2 million volunteers who were working on the front lines and were able to put all that innovative data and technology to use on the ground when they were talking to voters. And so that's the story that we try to tell in ground bakers. What we want to do is sort of show how the work that they were doing on the ground was symbiotic with the data and the technology innovations that have been described very fully elsewhere. And so we describe the strategies that Jeremy and his team used to develop a sprawling network of 30,000 neighborhood teams led by 10,000 neighborhood leaders who really led the organizing in their communities in battleground states across the country. And so perhaps one way to describe the difference between the transactional mobilizing and transformational organizing is to tell you one quick story of Alex Waters. So Alex Waters was a field organizer in the Obama campaign. But before that, he had gone to college at the age of 18 thinking that he was going to be a professional golfer. And one weekend during his first semester in college, he had gone to a lake house with some friends. And he was standing at the end of the dock and his hat blew off his head and into the water. And so he thinks, oh, you know, the water is probably about 18 feet deep. I'm just going to jump in and get my hat. So he dives into the water. It turns out the water is only about 18 inches deep. And he was instantly paralyzed. He was life-flighted out of there. And his life changed dramatically. So fast forward a few years after that. And the Obama campaign is recruiting him to be a field organizer. And Alex, who's thinking about field organizers in the way that a lot of traditional campaigns think about it, said, are you kidding me? I can't be a field organizer. I can't dial phone numbers on a phone. I can't walk in neighborhood. I can't knock on doors. There's no way that I can do all the things that a field organizer can do. And Zach Davis, who became Alex's boss, said, Alex, you're misunderstanding. We're not running a traditional campaign here. We don't want our organizers being the ones hitting the pavement doing all the voter contact. If you're an organizer, what we want you to do is your job is to inspire commitment in your neighbors so that your neighbors are the ones talking to their neighbors organizing the community. So Alex's job as an organizer was instead to develop the leadership capacity of other people who lived in that neighborhood to turn them out to vote for Obama. And so Alex, in fact, went on to become one of the most productive organizers in his state, not because he was out mobilizing voters all the time, but because he spent his time developing the capacity of other leaders who did a lot of that work. And so Ground Bakers, what it does is it tells the story of how Jeremy and his team did that work. Recruiting and managing a network of volunteers is nothing short of hard. And so basically what we do is we describe sort of how they recruited, developed, and managed this network of volunteers. And really what they did was unique because they brought community organizing traditions that focused on transformational organizing and coupled them with electoral campaigns that tended to focus more on transactional mobilizing so they were able to get it to scale. And what how organizations develop activists does, they basically describe how organizations do it in a non-electoral context. So how do organizations that are working on issue organizing do similar kind of work, both organizing and mobilizing their activists? And so let me just conclude by saying that if none of what I said just made sense, then let me make a final pitch about the books to say that in addition to making excellent holiday gifts, the books can serve multiple purposes with excellent paper weights. They can be fans on a hot day. And as one of my colleagues who actually read how organizations develop activists allowed to his newborn son testified to me, he said it's also an excellent sleep aid for babies. Thank you. Anna, why don't you? So actually I read the first book and I would say you should give it to everybody for all of your friends because it's a great book. I hadn't tried it for any of the other reasons. I actually bought it long so that you can sign it. So I came out of the labor market and I've spent my life organizing workers to engage in a broader community around things that matter to them. And as someone who started as a social worker in a local where we were organizing social workers, I quickly realized that our members cared about all kinds of things. They did care about their contract. They did care about their workplace. But they also cared about war and peace. They cared about guns. They cared about LGBT issues. They cared about other issues. And the more that we gave them the ability to engage on those issues too while they were engaging around the other, meant that they were more committed. And so what I think was fascinating about the first book, I haven't had a chance to read the second book yet, but having spent a lot of time in the 2008 campaign where we had over 2,000 of our members leave their own communities to move into geographic areas where we were challenged in terms of grassroots organizing and set down roots for nine months at a time and work the same community so they could build relationships. I kind of lived that experience. And right after 2008, in the beginning of 2009, in SEIU, we were very hopeful that we could win healthcare reform right away, the Employee Free Choice Act, immigration reform. And so we looked at where we didn't have much capacity in states where we also had democratic senators and built out what we call change that worked, which was trying to build out grassroots organizations that were centered and built out of the communities in Nebraska, in Louisiana, in Arkansas, and other places where we needed to be able to build things and realize that people really wanted to be involved and really cared about the same issues. They just, we always fly over those states and never landed them to talk about them. Could we figure out a way of having people be able to have this opportunity to engage? My question for us all is, so that's great. In campaigns, we have a tendency now, we have a tendency to try to build out a relationship type of organization where people kind of have the opportunity to step up and learn and experience and engage in a much deeper way. And then the campaign ends and it's really hard, there's not the resources and the capacity. And so I believe that organization matters. Having organizational capacity matters. And when organizational capacity disappears, then it makes it really hard to keep that kind of activity going. And we have, and it seems to me that in the progressive world we have more resources that are willing to put money into that campaign around an election and the media at other times and that it's hard to build out organizations. And as organizations like Acorn, which has some capacity, are destroyed and the labor movement is under attack and is getting thinner and thinner, what other organizations are out there that can actually engage day in, day out so that people can, again, own our society, transform our country, have a country that actually works for all of us. So that's kind of my thoughts about this whole thing moving forward. Well, I'll just say a couple of things and that's I think a great conversation piece to start us off in the discussion with folks. First of all, I feel like we're in church. If you just came in late, you can come sit down here. You don't have to wait in the back. Or maybe that's an easy exit strategy to stand back there, so either way. So I just wanna say a couple of things. So first, when Hari sort of started talking about writing the book, I was incredibly excited about the project that she was undertaking and did everything I could to make sure she was given access to the people who really sacrificed so much in their communities on the campaign. And I did feel like there was a void in the literature, certainly. And really just even in the narrative of both the 08 and 12 campaign, there's just a lot of things I think that both reporters and politicos and really the campaign put out there that were very sexy, right? There was the incredible technology that was developed. There was the whole digital organizing that happened on the campaign, the amount of money that was raised, the small dollar. Those stories I think were really covered in precipiscated ways, or at least given some attention, not probably the attention that they even deserve, but, and there was a lot written about the kind of inner circle around the president on his campaign. But I didn't feel like there was a very good, there certainly wasn't a book out there that really talked about in depth what we really built. And when I would encounter reporters on the campaign, there were two sort of kinds of reporters, those who would come to Chicago and talk to the Chicago staff about what was going on and then go back to DC and write the article. And we could sort of paint what we wanted to paint for them and that would be kind of the article and it would be very much driven around the personalities of the campaign leadership. And then there were those who said, I wanna go to a battleground state, I wanna see the operation. And I don't just wanna be sent to the biggest headquarters, you know, I wanna be able to go around and really see the operation. I feel like those stories started to get at what we were really trying to build. What we wanted to build in the presidential campaign was basically a city council or a mayor's race in every single battleground state at the very local level and then have that go to scale. And it took, I think, the thing that's the most important to me is that the first thing it took was a belief that it could make a difference. If you don't believe that organizing works and you think it's something to keep volunteers sort of happy or maybe have some good press stories about it, you notice that often in the budget and that it gets very under resourced. More importantly, you notice in the campaign leadership that's just not how they run the campaign. When the president went to an event in Columbus, Ohio, backstage before the event, in previous years with presidential campaigns, the only people that that candidate would meet are donors and elected officials in the area. Keep the elected officials happy. Keep the donors happy. And this time when in 08 and 12, when the president went to Columbus, Ohio, people in that clutch were our neighborhood team leaders. We also had the donors there. We also had the elected officials there. But we saw all in every department of the campaign a belief that the people who were running the campaign at the local level mattered. We needed to invest in them. We needed to celebrate them. We needed to train them and that if they did their job, if we got them the message and train them on the message but how to tell it in a way that mattered to them, not on some sort of talking points that spoke just to the head but also to the heart and on values. And we empowered them with the tools, the technological tools, the digital tools and the office, the sort of bricks and mortar as well as an organizer to have a build a relationship with that they would be the best ambassadors of the campaign and that they could actually move votes, undecided voters to being supporters, unregistered voters to being registered voters to turning out and Democrats who don't typically vote into Democrats who would vote, that they could actually have a, make enough of a difference in their area if we added that all up in each of these battleground states that it could make a difference. And I believe that it fundamentally did. If you look at Florida as a great example where we registered over 400,000 voters in a state that was pretty close and you can see that if you look at it across the board. But the last thing I'll say before we turn it over is I also don't believe it's the only thing that mattered. I think it's about creating a holistic organization in which the organizing is an incredibly important part particularly in close races but in and of itself without a strong message and a candidate who was able to create a choice and give people that message, a fundraising organization that can allow you to actually do build the real grassroots organization. People think of traditionally grassroots means cheap and kind of under resourced but we saw it actually the opposite. We had to actually have the fundraising capacity and the digital program and the technology and the research department. All of that we saw as fundamentally important but at the end of the day all of those departments were doing three things. They were either helping us register voters, helping us turn out voters that were with us or helping us persuade voters and I think what Hari said about this tension between going to scale and doing it in a deep way that actually moves people is something that in her book and I think they do a good job of not just being cheerleaders of that but recognizing particularly in the 2012 campaign the challenges that created for folks and the tension it has on people at the local level to hit their numbers, go to scale but to do it in a way that has quality is not just about numbers on a spreadsheet and so I'm really thankful for you for taking on this project and like what I saw in The Good Reporter is somebody who didn't just come interview me but went out and interviewed hundreds of these neighborhood team leaders, core team members, volunteers, staffers and you'll see in her book the richness of those stories which I think tell more than anything in terms of the theory it's about those stories and you start to pick up on what really mattered to folks what made them do the work they did and the challenges that they had and that will be there both for issue organizing and in future campaigns. I actually want to ask a couple of questions before we open it up but Harri, I'd love for you to say a little bit more about what you see as the difference between good and not so good organizations in terms of their ability to do the kind of transformational organizing. Yeah, so. With or without naming names. Yeah. So I think actually the points that Anna and Jeremy made speak directly to that question which is that the organizations I think that do the best work at achieving both death and breath are the ones that aren't just focused on having sort of one strategy to get people involved, right? Like, oh, if we just set up this Facebook page or if we use the red button, not the blue button or whatever like all the different little things that we can tweak but really organizations that are set up to have at their core this idea of sort of bringing people in bringing ordinary people sort of into the conversation at every level, right? So it's like having the people backstage with the president. It's about sort of creating organizations that are focused on building people's capacity and everything that they do. So the difference that, you know one example that I saw in the research that I did for how organizations develop activists is I was looking at two organizations that were both writing letter writing campaigns and one of the, obviously they both wanted to get as many letters written as they possibly could but one of them sort of had the letter writing campaign sort of written where they wrote up they wrote up the whole template and all people had to do was sort of click on a few buttons, put in their name and address and the letter would get sent off to their local newspaper and so it made it really easy for a lot of people to do it but it didn't necessarily sort of build the capacity of anyone who's doing that letter writing whereas another campaign another organization that was trying to do a letter writing campaign also did the same thing but they did it in such a way where if you wanted to write a letter they would pair you with someone else in your community who also wanted to write a letter and the two of you would get together to sort of write that letter it could all be done virtually but they wrote it together and then they sort of developed some of their own capacities sort of like craft this letter they developed a relationship with somebody else and those relationships and those capacities then translated into sort of further work down the road so it extended beyond just having that one letter written and I think it's sort of taking that kind of long term view that the organizations that really seem to differentiate themselves were different than just the organizations that were focused on like just one election or just sort of one letter writing campaign or whatever it might be. Great. And I also, I want to ask Jeremy to say a little bit about the role of OFA outside of the elections and how do you maintain, organize, and it's the dream of every campaign to say we're leaving something that has some capacity and almost none of them do it, right? And here you have this thing that has that paradox of needing to be somewhat independent. I mean, it's driven by the people involved and how do you survive and sustain engagement out with a campaign vehicle outside of the campaign? So the first, my first boss in politics is a fantastic organizer, a woman named Karen Hicks who's done work with you guys and the first campaign I was really involved in at the presidential level and I was in New Hampshire working for Howard Dean and the first thing I remember her saying to me is on her first campaign, they spent $5 million in New Hampshire, which is a lot of money in New Hampshire, at least back in the day. And she said, you know, we ran a, you know, we spent millions of dollars, we put a lot of it up on TV, we hired paid cameras at the end, we ran a pretty good campaign, we lost and there was nothing left behind. We didn't strengthen the party, we didn't leave behind a trained group of organizers or activists or anything. And to her, she said, it wasn't so much the loss as that it was the loss combined with nothing left behind to build on. And I've thought about that in every campaign that I've worked on. If you, I think, run it the right way, get on the ground early enough and that's a huge part I think of modern campaigns is there's no shortcut to building a real organization and you can't do it in October of an election year and expect people to feel invested in, right? I mean, these are human beings, people that if you wanna invest in them, you gotta spend time. That's how you build relationships. And so we were successful in OA in the sense that when we were done, people still wanted to be involved. They felt like they weren't just involved for the campaign, but they wanted to see the things they cared about, acted on. But we were faced with the challenge of going from thousands of organizers and hundreds of offices in battleground states to dozens of organizers and a few offices in battleground states. And so we needed to rely in some way on our digital technology to maintain some of those relationships and have our organizing a little bit of a different scale. We were also challenged with the fact that a lot of what we were pushing people to do was in Congress and we were faced with, frankly, a party that's first goal was to make sure nothing happened in Congress, which is difficult because there has to be a theory of change for folks. On campaigns is simple. If I organize and this person gets elected and they get into office and they share my values much more than that person, that I can see why I would do that. On an issue campaign, it's much harder or working on issues. How does my active engagement going to make this thing happen and therefore be worth my time? And we struggled with that a lot early on and particularly as we started to really push our volunteers towards specific targets and as we've talked about a little bit, when Congress isn't working to state efforts to things that they actually can make a difference on, I think you see much more activism. But it took that investment in sort of thinking, people often think, and I'll shut up after this, that it's one or the other, that you either invest in long-term organizing or you do what it takes to win that election. And it's not, I don't think they're mutually exclusive. I think if you invest in long-term organizing, the short-term gain is better than just the sort of mobilizing approach alone. And you also get a long-term organization that you can build, but there's always gonna be this challenge and Anna really speaks to it of the resource discrepancy between a billion dollar or two billion dollar presidential campaign versus the kind of resources you'll have after that campaign. And that's, I think, a huge thing to talk about and how we sort of overcome those resource challenges. I just wanna add a little bit to that, because I think that it's one clear concern is what are the resources to be able to keep that going. But it's also, I think that as we switch from a campaign to working on issues, how do we do it in a way that's also grounded in the communities? Because when you're doing a national presidential campaign, people are involved in winning the president's, but they're also involved in doing that in their community and changing people's minds. And when it moves to a national congressional campaign issue, then it becomes everything what's going on in Washington. And we need to figure out a way of giving people the ability to organize in their community to make some change happens. Because the reality, I think, with the kind of Congress that we have, and now the Senate that we have, we're gonna have to make change happen in those states or when to lose those states too. And we have to figure out how to get into some of the states that we're not in and stay in those as well. Because, I mean, we won North Carolina in 2008 and look at the state of North Carolina right now. And so how do we actually try to figure out being able to give people the ability to self-generate their ideas and their campaigns and have the structure and support to help them do that too and not just try to only give them the support about what's gonna go on with the congressional vote? Let's open up. Holly, do you wanna moderate? We should have a mic coming around. Well, thank you. I think this has been a really interesting discussion at their bar and I think we've sort of teased out some of these tensions here that are really important between sort of the momentum, the energy and the resources that we see for elections and then how do we sustain this energy tap into these networks and make sort of advocacy change in communities and also provide some type of efficacy or some feeling of quick wins when campaigns are really long and really hard. So I think there's some really important intentions that we're just starting to explore so we wanna open it up for questions. Please just keep your questions very brief so we can try to have a genuine discussion here. Don't all Russia wants. Okay, up here in the front. Cheryl Gravy with the League of Women Voters. I'm curious about how we can build the capacity to have impact and trust when there's such a trusted deficit in government alone given the sort of national congressional framework. I mean, I think the state piece is important but how do you help people know that they can make a difference? Can I take a crack at that? Because I think that trust matters and I think the reason that I think that organization matters is I've experienced people who, the world's complicated. People wake up in the morning they're trying to get to three jobs, get their kids off to school, something's going on how do they make a decision about what's the right thing to do? And they do that based on who they talk to and who they trust and so if we can connect people talking about these issues on a regular basis it gives them a way of getting beyond knee-jerk reaction. A little story. I was in New Hampshire during the 2008 primary, presidential primary with a lot of our members who we had already come out and endorsed Barack Obama as a nominee. We were doing a lot of campaign work. I was there though for a general meeting and a woman came up to me afterwards and said, would I please talk to her about healthcare? And so we stepped aside and she said, her husband has lost his job, he was in the hospital, they were on the risk of losing their house. She was trying to figure out if anything happened to her, how would they ever survive? Could I tell her will I would Barack Obama or really be better on this? And so I talked to her about it and she said, but she said on the internet they tell me that he's the anti-Christ. I mean seriously. And so we spent 20 minutes talking it through and why he wasn't the anti-Christ and his values and whatever. And she left and went on door knocking to get out the vote. And so if she didn't feel comfortable saying that to me and she felt safe that the union was a place that she could get accurate information and she would have never done that and she would have been splitting the line online. So I just think that we have to figure out and that doesn't happen by somebody knocking on a door one day. They have to build relationships. So whether it's in the workplace where you build relationships, it's whether it's in the community whether you build relationships, people do it through churches. How do we build out those organizations that people can build relations with people and talk about the critical issues of our day? Just to add one thing onto what Anna said, which is that I think the key question in a way is where and how do we create the spaces that allow for the transformation of people's own sense of agency, right? And I think agency has, it has a motivational component that includes trust like you're talking about. It has, there's sort of like it has a cognitive component you have to know like how to get involved but it also has a strategic component, right? Like you have to feel like what you do is gonna make a difference. And that's where I think people, like all the data shows that people's levels of trust in their sense of efficacy has sort of gone down and down and down. And as Anna said, like that kind of transformation it doesn't happen overnight, right? It happens through sort of building relationships. And I think one of the big questions that we have to think about right now is where are those spaces right now that we have in our society? So churches certainly are one of those spaces. There are some organizations out there that are doing a lot of that work but we don't have universal spaces like we used to. I mean, Mark, it has opening comments, reference this book that Theda Scotchpole wrote 10 years ago where she talks about the decline of a lot of those kinds of organizations. And I really think that this question that we're talking about right now is really at the frontier of digital activism, right? So a lot of the digital tools that have developed so far have been about making it more efficient and easier for people who already wanna get involved, to get involved. I think the question right now for digital activists is can we create tools that not only help people who wanna get involved, get involved but actually create tools that make people develop that sort of sense of trust or that efficacy or whatever it is so that they're more likely to sort of engage further down the road. I mean, I'm struck, it's interesting that the question came from someone from League of Women Voters because there really is that space where people who have different views talk to each other. I mean, that is something that that union hall, I mean, unions did that because people did come to a union with somewhat different views and had that conversation. And that's, I mean, for all the tremendous success of campaigns or things like Move On, they have a really, we're still not doing anything to recreate that space where the conversation happens among people who start with different viewpoints and maybe come out with different viewpoints than they started with. Yeah, I think that's a really important idea, sort of the sense of the echo chamber and ensuring diversity of viewpoints and that sort of is another attention that we've talked about here where Anna was face to face with someone who had a different view than her, but they had the trust to sort of work it out. Good morning. I'm so pleased that my good friend was here from the League of Women Voters. I was gonna use that as an example, but the American Association, the University Women has a diminished membership and activism. One of the issues we have is the millennials aren't as engaged as we might like them to be. I worked on the phone banks for the DCCC and I'm 66 and that was the average age of the person, people in the room, other than a few campaign workers from congressional offices. Seems to me we need those triggers, so to speak, to engage a broader cross-section of age groups and it would be good if you just address that specifically. Thank you. So the question is sort of what are the triggers that could potentially engage a broader set of people, such as millennials? I'll take a crack at that. So I think we, it's sort of common narrative about both 08 and 12, about the average Obama volunteer is skewed. People think that it was much younger than it was and the actual average age of a Obama volunteer was around 40 to 50 year old woman and they were the bedrock of our volunteerism. A lot of teachers, a lot of retired folks, a lot of just fantastic volunteers. Now we were able to engage more millennials, I think, than most presidential campaigns and I worked on both Carrie and Dean before that and that's definitely true in terms of the folks we were able to engage but it's not easy. Number one, I think some of the things that we learned is that, I think with all things, the first thing and kind of going back to what I said about the campaign is you have to believe that you have to sort of take all these stereotypes out of our mind. Millennials are not lazy, it's not that they don't want to get involved, it's not that they don't care. All these kind of things that people sort of keep on, young people, if you go into a campaign or an organization with that in mind, you're gonna fail. And well, no, I'm not saying you're saying that, the first thing is we have to believe, right? That we can actually and then we put a lot more resources into it, I was in Ohio in 2008, I think at Ohio State University, we probably had five or six organizers there in 2008, we tripled that in 2012, just on that campus, it's tens of thousands of people and we under-resourced that in campaigns and we do it a lot in midterms, part of it is a resource problem and so we end up having one organizer, if we're lucky at OSU, also covering other areas of the state and so we have to commit on the campaign side and I think with organizations to really putting resources into that and we have to talk to people about things that matter. In midterms, we often have, we're debating social security and other issues because we've decided before the campaign starts who's likely to vote and the media reinforces that and the pollsters reinforce that. These are the likely voters and these are the unlikely voters and you should think of yourself as an unlikely voter because no one's talking to you like a likely voter about issues that matter to you and we just create a habitual cycle around that and so I think we saw some campaigns in this midterm that I think have devoted more resources to millennials and talked to them about issues that matter to them and gets back to, I get involved in an organization or a campaign if I think it matters to me. I think they're speaking on issues that matter to me and they're giving me a way to get engaged, I'm much more likely to get engaged. That's a couple of thoughts but it's not an easy, simple answer to that question. I mean, Holly, you probably know some of this better than I do but the data on millennial involvement sort of shows that they are not getting involved in sort of traditional forms of participation but they are really involved if you look at sort of a broader set of ways in which they can get involved, right? And so basically that generation is crafting sort of a new set of tools and strategies for how they want to engage with their civic and political space and so in some ways I think part of the challenge is kind of organizations that are used to working in certain ways beginning to sort of think more broadly about what the best ways are to get a new generation of people involved. It is also I would just say giving people the opportunity to get involved in the way that they want to get involved as opposed to the way that we tell them to get involved and that's I think one of the ways that keeps people out. Yeah, I agree. I like that, that's an idea of could people sort of self-identify ways they want to participate? Okay, you and then. I have a question getting back to Hari's original point, the other side of dealing with the powerlessness and most of the successful examples that we've heard today are from a pre-Citizens United Decision landscape but given the fact that we're in a post-decision landscape, how do we, what is the effectiveness of mobilizing and activating when dealing with the empirical truth of powerlessness from the non-citizen impact on the electoral vote, the personhood of corporations but the non-citizenship of corporations? Sure. You know, since Saul Alinsky is a former and a famous organizer from the 1960s and he once said that there are two forms of organized power and that's organized money and organized people, right? And so, Citizens United made it a lot easier and certainly Mark knows, where he's done a lot of his work but made it a lot easier for money to sort of flood the system and I think that makes, in some ways that makes the challenge that we're talking about today even that much more urgent, right? How do you sort of develop the capacity for organized people to come in to provide a counterweight to that organized money that exists on both sides of the political aisle? And in some ways I think thinking about this question gets back to something that Anna and Jeremy were talking about earlier, which is this idea that, you know, in a lot of my research what I saw was that the organizations that were really committed to building, doing the depth of organizing that allowed them to build the power that they needed had to have a certain kind of patience and belief that that strategy would work, right? And so, one way to think about it is that if we think about in the electoral context, like if you look at the voter contact numbers for the Obama campaign in a traditional campaign it looks like a straight line, right? You start in, you know, June or whatever it is and you start knocking on doors and your voter contact kind of goes up and then it continues to go up in a straight line all the way up until November when the election happens. And the voter contact numbers for the Obama campaign look more like a hockey stick, right? It was pretty flat for a while then all of a sudden it skyrocketed in the few weeks before the election, right? And that flat line in the beginning was a time when the campaign had to be really patient with the fact that we're not getting the voter contact that we normally would expect to see, but that's when we're building the capacity. That's when we're developing the relationships and the teams and the leaders that are gonna be able to then do that work in the weeks before the election that we really need. And I think one of the challenges of doing this kind of work in an issue context is that you don't have the sort of North Star of Election Day in an issue campaign in the same way that you do an electoral campaign. And so organizations that are doing kind of advocacy have to have that same sort of patience with the hockey stick, right? Where it takes a while to build capacity before you can unleash that capacity, but it's not always clear exactly when that unleashing is gonna happen, right? And so just to respond to your question with Citizens United is I think it's really easy to get impatient at, it's really easy for organizations to get impatient as they see sort of the piles of money kind of flowing up, piling up on one side. And part of the challenge is letting the hockey stick kind of run its course in a way. Can I comment on that quickly? I do a lot of work on this issue. I think that there's a real, I think that we've actually done people a real disservice by everything being about it's Citizens United, we need a constitutional amendment, we need to stop all this stuff or else nothing else matters. I mean, Citizens United made some difference, we're not gonna have a constitutional amendment. We're essentially disempowering people. We're telling people that what they do doesn't matter. And the fact is people can be engaged as, some people can be engaged as volunteers, other people can be engaged as small donors. That is a legitimate form of participation in itself. When I was in high school, I did a lot of political volunteering. I don't do any now, but I could write a $20 check, I could write a $100 check. It's a different kind of participation. One of the, the other side of the story of the Obama campaigns was three million donors. Three million people who were participating in the process in a way that they never had before. If we give people that belief that that would matter, then we have a different configuration of money and politics. And we can also create policies that encourage that. Like, for example, the New York City matching fund system that takes a $50 contribution, matches it six to one. So it's totally worth the time of the politician to go and ask for money from the same people that they're asking votes for. Rather than asking for money in a law firm boardroom and votes in the neighborhoods. And that's how we ought to be thinking about it. And I say, I mean, I'm glad we're done with the constitutional amendment and some of this nonsense that had only, all it did was tell people, nothing can be done. And when you tell people nothing can be done, don't be surprised if they don't do anything. Can I just jump in on that and then to quote the president, you know, the audacity of hope is important. I mean, if we, if we, I mean, we do know that voters really don't like the idea that corporations are spending all of their money to drown out our voice. I mean, that is an underlying there. We have to have a strategy. We have to have a campaign plan and an organizing strategy that people believe that by them getting involved, that they can take that on, that they can still have their voices heard. And I actually do agree that if we're all, if we always talk about how money's gonna drown us out, then people will stay home because we've already told them that's gonna happen. And I really do think that we have to change the way that we talk about it, change the way that we organize about it. But I also think that an organization, an organizing campaign isn't about one day, one election. I mean, we lose elections. I've lived through a lot of losing elections. I've gotten up the next morning and talked to volunteers about why we have to go into the next campaign or whatever it is. That's just like part of life. If we are never gonna, we thought we won it all in 2008. Guess what? We're never gonna get to that point. And so part of this becomes what is our vision of change? What is our theory of change? How do we do it in language that people in our community believe, understand and can get excited about and give them the space to be able to organize and get involved? And I think that would change things. Do you have anything to add on it? Well, I mean, just the point about small-dollar donors. 2012 did take place after Citizens United. And I think we had a belief early on that's gonna be really hard to compete. We competed. We actually were basically on parity on the right and left in 2012. It wasn't because we had the same level of unlimited donors, but it's because we built 3 million small-dollar donors and we built a real relationship with them online. We were honest to them. There's a great article written recently by a woman named Martha Patzer who was on the email team. She now works in my firm about the relationship building that's done through email. And it does get to some of this mobilization versus long-term relationship building. Folks believed that what we were saying was true. They saw the numbers and they felt like their $5 was gonna add up. And it's how we competed. So I agree that this is a big problem in politics. I mean, to do everything legally and otherwise to try to stop it. In the meantime, we need to run campaigns that says, look, we are going to lose if we don't bring enough people together, create a narrative around a candidate or an issue that really matters to people to get them to volunteer their time and their money. I think one of the things we did well on the Obama campaign is not treat them as separate folks. A lot of people are given $5 and knocking on doors. And so the relationships and the trust that they built with us was really important and that we were sort of honest to them that we let them in. We included them. We let them be a part of the strategy. And I think that got them giving more than they might have otherwise. And so just one follow-up to you said that they felt like it mattered. Was that because there was more transparency in terms of how the funding was being spent or what do you think that was about? I think a little bit. Part of it is transparency. One of the things that we believed at the neighborhood team level is traditionally, one of the problems with mobilizing campaigns is somebody comes in, they're given a packet. They go knock on doors. They come again. They gave you the packet. You say thanks. They leave. How does that relate to winning? If, on the other hand, they know that in their neighborhood they need to register 100 voters and they need to move 100 persuadable voters and they need to move 50 spractims that we don't think you're gonna vote to win. And that's, they really believed that, right? And it was true because we showed them the strategy and we said, this is what we need to win and let's figure out how to do it. So if knocking on doors of unregistered, voting age population list is working to get as 100 registered voters, let's keep doing it. If it's not and we should be going to the mall or somewhere else to find them, let's do that. So it wasn't about the tactics so much as the goal and the strategy. Same thing with the money. We were pretty open to people. This is what we need. This is how many people we need. If we're able to raise this money, this is what we're gonna spend it on and you're gonna be a part of that effort. And so I think we've gotta continue to make people feel like they're included in the strategy and the goals on the fundraising side as well. Thank you. So I want to pick up on the theme that Hari said about Saul Linsky's quote about organized money or organized people. Mark started with saying the question is out there. Do voters even matter anymore? You talked about that we target who the voters are. We call a lot of people unlikely voters. Campaigns were using niche marketing processes long before Citizens United came about. So that style of campaigning that was narrower and narrower had become a pattern. Citizens United was a game changer on the organized money side. It took years to put that strategy into play and to be successful. I wanna ask the question around whether now may be a time to take the long-term look on a game changer on the organized people side, which would be mandatory voting in the United States. So we would move back to a place and it would take us a long time to get there, but where virtually we assume that everyone votes and by definition it changes the game on the people side. I think it's a great idea. And I think that we've actually missed opportunities to expand voting rights at times because people thought we won, it wasn't the urgent issue. I think that's one of the most urgent issues that we have, which is how to make it easier to vote. Making, requiring people to vote instead is kind of like the flip. It's like, how is it our responsibility to vote? And that is a problem if we don't do it. It would be worth a campaign that even if it takes years. I mean, the thing I like about the idea of mandatory voting is that if everyone has to vote, then organizations and campaigns would then want to reach the entire population, right? And so instead of just reaching the people who they think are likely voters, as Jeremy was talking about, that they're gonna sort of, you know, want to reach everybody because then, because everyone is going to sort of cast a vote in some form. And so, you know, that would be an example of reform that actually creates incentives to sort of build the broader base that we were talking about today, in a sense. I think that, you know, that's exciting. I mean, the other just a little anecdote I'll say is, I know there are some towns in Italy that they don't have mandatory votes. Australia has mandatory voting, right? They have like 99% voting rights. In Italy, they don't have mandatory voting, but there are some towns that publish the names in the newspaper the next day of people who didn't vote. So public shaming is always in there. Short of being able to pass a lot of mandatory voting. There are actually 30 countries that currently have mandatory voting. Right, yeah. So can I just say a couple of things about that? I think this is the biggest problem in our democracy right now. And I know this isn't a partisan event, but I can say whatever I want. So, I will. We have one party right now that wants more people to participate in one that doesn't. The one that doesn't is spending millions of dollars on laws to make it harder for people to vote, harder people to register. The registration and voting laws in Texas are abysmal. The fact that you can't register somebody without getting deputized by a county in which you have to show up at 9 a.m. on a Monday, maybe once a month when they do the training, otherwise it's a felony. If you register your mother to vote in Texas without going to this silly training that they barely put on, you have committed a felony. When you go to vote, you can't use your student ID, but you can use your gun license. This is completely designed to make it harder for specific people, minorities, young people, and people who vote Democratic to vote. It happens all across the country. And it is a systematic effort from the Koch brothers and others to make it more difficult for people to vote. So even talking about mandatory voting, when we're just trying to talk about keeping things in place, like early voting that was put in place in Ohio in 2005 by Republican legislature to deal with the abysmal lines in 2004 that they're rolling that back every single year, it's a huge problem. And we are gonna have an oligarchy if we continue to have the kind of rates we have with voting. If you made over $150,000 in 2012, your turnout rate was 80 plus percent. If you made under $20,000, your turnout rate was in the 30s. And it's in part a systematic effort by one party to make it more difficult for people to vote because their issues and their policy platform doesn't appeal to the majority of Americans. It does appeal to the majority of midterm voters in 2014 and 2010. It doesn't appeal when more people vote like in a presidential year. To me, there's not a bigger problem in politics than voting rights and voting access and we need to do something about it. So what we should do is in blue states, in states where we have a blue or red, in states where we have state houses and governors who believe that more people should participate in the process, we should do everything to make it easier for people to vote. We should let people who are 16 and 17 be automatically put on the registration rolls. We should have as many early vote days as possible. We should have weekend voting. We should have online registration on a website that doesn't look like a DMV site, looks like a site that somebody who is a millennial knows how to use and isn't turned off by in the first second. The fact, that's just one last thing. If you had to come to this event today, if you had to 30 days ago, print out something from a DMV-like website, fill it out, put a stamp on it, mail it in in order to be registered to then participate in this event, none of you would be here, none of you. And that's how we treat voting. We've got to change it. Sorry. I think some people would come for this. Okay, David. I wouldn't, I wouldn't. No, I'm just kidding. I think mandatory voting's fascinating. I think it's interesting whether you would, you have to have a none of the above option if you had mandatory voting because I think the right to not vote is in there. I'm sort of, I've written in favor of the constitutional amendment guaranteeing the right to vote. Heather Gerkin read something the other day that made me a little bit doubted, but I do think having that shared understanding of that the right to vote is a real, you may think it's in the constitution, but it isn't. I think that might help you at least with some kind of doctrinal certainty. And I also think, as much as there are these voting wars to use Rick Hazen's phrase and things like texts are outrageous, I do sometimes in a room with voting administrators, election administrators from both parties who actually are committed to increasing participation. And they're better on some things like online registration than on other things like voter ID. But there is a common, there is like a shared professional commitment, not shared by all secretaries of state for sure, but by some that I think we are able to do, at the same time that things get rolled back, other things get expanded a little bit. So I'm not entirely hopeless about our ability to move towards a general sense that we expect people to vote. There's a great book that just came out about the evolution of the one person, one vote decisions in the Supreme Court in the 50s and 60s, which basically this entire country had nothing close to one person, one vote. Every single state was, not gerrymandered the way we think they are now, but the rural population in every state had massively greater political representation than the urban population. Some states were better than others, but it wasn't north-south, it wasn't anything, it was totally across the board. And those decisions were a close run thing. Like if Justice Frankfurter hadn't been incapacitated, we would not have the concept of one person, one vote. Just like a basic concept that is really fundamental is these things aren't built into the American system and we have to find a way to build them in. Sorry? I just wanna add really quickly that, I mean, I totally agree with the point that expanding voting rights is absolutely fundamental to what we're doing, but just as a counterpoint to that, I wanna argue that that's not a replacement for also doing the work of getting people to wanna get involved, right? And so voting, I mean, it is true that, I mean, I'm from Texas, right? So states like Texas are abysmal, okay? And that's where I grew up. But there's also like in a lot of states, voting now is easier than it was three or four decades ago, right? We have more early voting, we have more states that do mail-in voting and do motor voter and all these kinds of things. And we haven't seen an increasing voting rights, right? Because we not only have to make it easier for people to vote, we also have to make people want to vote, you know? And I think that like, so expanding the laws is one half the equation, but the other half is getting people to want to vote. But we did see an expansion in presidential. Yeah. From 96, which is the lowest ever, to 08 is a huge, I think it's a 10-point jump. That's a big deal. Yeah, I really, I just want to second what Hari said. I think we need to look at it as like a civic ecosystem so that we are expanding pair of political activity and finding other ways for citizens to engage in their political sphere so that the day after the election, they sort of understand what their agency is. Places like Canada are experimenting with civic lotteries. There's a lot of experimentation that I think as the US, we really have not been at all trying, including things like mandatory voting. The man in the back over there, and then we'll take those women and then up here and then we'll call it a day. Yes. Okay. I'm glad you said what you said, Jeremy, because I wanted to ask about the Republicans. What is your sense, the whole panel, of where they are in terms of community organizing? I'm thinking particularly about the Tea Party and about evangelicals. They're gonna read your book. They're gonna read both your books if they haven't already. No, they are. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. They've already spent a great deal of time in the last two years trying to catch up on data and on technology. And some of them are committed among the people they try to mobilize to their version of community organizing. And I think it's important to have a sense of what the other side is doing. And I just wondered what your sense is. What are they doing right now? I mean, I can't speak to what the Republican Party is doing right now, but here's a story that I can tell you that might help. So there's a great book by sociologist named Ziad Munson called The Making of Pro-Life Activists, where he goes and he studies 80 to 100 pro-life activists. And these are the people who are on the very front lines of the pro-life movement. So these are the people that are standing outside of abortion clinics, harassing women that want to go in and things like that. And he sits down, he does these like four hour long interviews with them where he sort of says, how did you get to the point where you spend your time standing outside this clinic protesting in the way that you do? And what he finds is that of the people that he talked to, I can't remember the exact number, but it's over half of the people that he talked to were either pro-choice or they had no views on abortion when they joined the pro-life movement. So, and that's really striking, right? They didn't join the movement because they had some commitment to an issue that they wanted to enact. They joined the movement for a variety of other reasons. Some of them had just gotten divorced. Some of them had just lost a job. They had moved to a new community. They had a young kid. You know, things that sort of changed in their life that made them want to sort of develop a new set of relationships. They happened to develop them with people who were in this pro-life movement and that politicized them over time so that a few years later they're standing outside the abortion clinic protesting abortions. And so I say that as kind of a long answer to your question, just to say that I think that there are organizations on the right that have been doing this kind of combined transformational organizing and transactional mobilizing for a long time. The NRA is a really good example. Certain pro-life groups have done it. A lot of churches create those spaces for that kind of transformational work that we've been talking about. And so that infrastructure in some ways is already there on the right. Now I think that you are right that they're struggling to sort of figure out how to integrate that with the electoral work in a way that the Obama campaign was able to do that they have not yet quite figured out how to make. But I don't think that they are absent of those spaces in any way, shape, or form. Can I just add to it? I mean, the other part of it is they're tearing down the organizations that we have that have that capacity. So they have identified the fact that organization moving people into campaigns has an impact. And so whether it was the attacks on Acorn, the attacks on the labor movement, the eating away of workers' rights across the country is part of their strategy to weaken us as they take what we're doing and build it into their campaigns. A few years ago when I was at SCIU we were trying to, we think how we worked and how we enabled people to be engaged in our union. And we went out and looked at other organizations. And so we looked to move on to the world but we also went to mega churches and they have a whole organizing campaign strategy. They bring people in. They have even easy opportunity for them to engage. They have the Starbucks and drive through at the church. They have the opportunities for the kids to hang out and do whatever. They have all this stuff that brings people in, gives them a sense of community and then engages them about issues. And so we need to figure out how to expand what we're doing as opposed to just try to figure out what they're doing too. Yeah, I mean, I thought another way that we thought we could, another, an interesting way to have done this panel that we talked about a little bit was have somebody either comes from within or who has studied some of that conservative organizing. I mean, Vanessa Williamson who wrote the book about the Tea Party with David Scotchball or Matt Beretto from University of Washington, those folks. Part of that story of organizing is obviously, some of it is reaching people's identities in ways that are other than their political identity. Part of it has also been creating something that's both radically outside of the Republican Party and organized structured politics at the same time that it's also totally inside. And that's what I think those scholars have really struggled with is how do you read this? Because on one level it looks like basically the Republican Party at the same time that a lot of Tea Party had a very strong identity of like, we're not about the Republican Party. In fact, we think some of them suck. And you know, it's kind of, I mean, it's kind of remarkable that it's kind of remarkable to have the level, the expansion of a Republican majority in Congress at a moment when Republicans in Congress, approval is at about 15%, and it was below 10% until very recently. And doing that inside-outside really, really helped with that political work. So I mean, that's a pretty remarkable organizing story of its own. Different people organize in different ways and we're not just talking about human nature here because people are different. Oh, just real short, I think community organizing is not a left or right issue. And Ralph Reed, I disagree with him on basically everything. He's a good organizer. He's a good organizer. And the NRA is a model, you know, it's a very strong, powerful organization that people feel connected to and invested in and they've done a fairly good job of organizing. I don't think we see it at the RNC and at the National Party level yet. We didn't see it in 08 and 12. We saw some mobilization, but not deep level organizing like we saw when Bush mobilized churches and other groups in 2004. And we'll see what happens in 2016. Yeah, in the interest of time, I'd like to take these questions sort of popcorn, if you don't mind. Actually, Holly, I think we can go to 11.15. I think that's... You guys are okay with that? I think we had it Mark for a little bit. Okay, then you can just speak. Brookings and Wellesley College, Hari is my colleague, so I'm thrilled to come and listen and learn and support her. She's fantastic, by the way. People have talked about the millennials, churches, et cetera, which makes me think about another demographic group that may be under stimulated and underutilized in a lot of ways, especially for political purposes, which is the elderly. And I'm thinking, especially because I have in-laws who are in their 90s, healthy, and they are in... Many live in retirement communities, or now you have more and more structures where people in their 55 and over group, I'm hitting their soon, are going into these enclaves. So I'm thinking about the layout of their residential life, whom they come into contact with, and that they're more or less segregated in their own little community. And yet this is a group that has less access to digital knowledge technology and just sense of creativity about it. Are there ways to, or are there people who are working on or targeting this population to help mobilize them, to help educate them about the use of digital technology? Because this is a group that actually could be put to work in very productive ways. And as we all know, they represent a very powerful lobby group in different fora. Yeah, that's a great question. So I can't answer that specifically, but I do know that historically, the biggest thing that made the elderly become more active in politics was the creation of social security, right? So when we created social security in Medicare, then what happened was that the elderly all of a sudden had a stake in politics that they didn't before. And whereas they used to be a group that people thought would not really get involved, in the 20th century, they became a group that actually is pretty actively involved. You know, on this question of the relationship between elderly and digital technology, I know that there are some organizations out there that are working on that and trying to engage people, but it gets back to the challenge, I think, of what Anna was saying before, is that you sort of have to meet people where they are, right, and in some ways it kind of speaks to, I think, the challenge that a lot of organizations face about sort of tailoring the kind of ways in which they engage people for different populations, depending on where they are in terms of technology, in terms of motivation, in terms of skills, you know, and so on and so forth. Well, I'd just say on the campaign side, you're not running a very good campaign if you're not doing work in retirement communities. I mean, it's a population that tends to have high, relative to the rest of the population, participation rates in campaigns. And I was actually just working, my good friend Michael Blake just took on the sort of insiders in the Bronx and won a pretty great state rep race of their, and he's in the legislature, and he just, he went to every retirement community in his district and they have the highest rates of turnout, and he developed relationships with them, and then he went back after he won and thanked them for getting him into office, and that's the kind of work you have to do on campaigns to engage folks and go where they are, ideally develop leadership within each community so that they can help you with folks who are still undecided and have those conversations. So I do think it's an important part of any modern campaign where you're doing real organizing is not to, not to leave that community out for sure. And they're gonna show up on your list as likely voters. So you're gonna need to make sure you have those conversations. And as we live longer, there are more years for them to be involved. And I also just, we do have to meet them where they are. I have two sisters who are both retired. If they had to do it digitally, they would not do it. They do voter registration. They do other kinds of things. There's just certain blocks for them that I haven't even been able to overcome with them. Not even Anna, wow. That woman and then Anna over there and then up here. Thank you. Quick question on organized labor and use of digital technology. Can you provide any specific examples of how groups, organized labor, SCIU, or others have used digital technology to organize workers? And then also if there's any kind of non-traditional organized labor groups that you've seen like worker centers that may have some interesting examples. I mean, you know, at SCIU, we realized that we needed to figure out better ways of communicating and connecting people. And so we actually brought people in, recruited people to look at how we were organizing. And we realized that even if we were trying to do digital organizing and traditional communications at the same time, that they were sometimes in conflict with each other. And we had to free them to engage differently without 12 layers of lawyers and blah, blah, blah. It was like the emancipation proclamation when we said go off and organize. And so I think that there are more and more unions that are doing that. But you always have to evolve. And the question now is how do you not just try to communicate with people digitally but how to enable people to connect with each other digitally so that they can in a sense form different kinds of community. When you think about what other organizations, well, one little example, when years ago we wanted to, we were doing a convention in San Francisco. We wanted to make healthcare the major issue. We wanted to organize this wild idea of organizing actions, why we were doing a bridge walk in San Francisco with actions across the country. So we put together a toolkit, we went online, we partnered with MoveOn and others. And then we ended up having them not only in 50 states, but we had them in all kinds of communities where people who were not connected to the union took our toolkit and crossed a highway bridge because there was no water in their community or whatever because they wanted to be part of this thing that's larger. So I think that there are places where we've experimented with that. In terms of alternatives to traditional unions, Coworker is a new organization that is trying to give people the tools to self organize and provide them the support. And it's all online. So you should go to look at Coworker, I think it's co-worker.org. Michelle Miller and some of the work that she's doing, some of the work around domestic workers organizing, the multi-generational stuff, are all ways of trying to give people an opportunity. I would just go back, however, to say that we need organization to make the other side deliver. And so we're not gonna just build out by online digital communications. We need structural work too and somehow we need to figure out a way of building that out and expanding the capacity and not expect that people are just gonna somehow miraculously connect to each other online. Great. And then that woman and then that man. Hi, Dave Carp, George Washington University. I wanted to surface one tension and get your thoughts on it, not between mobilizing and organizing, but between organizing and advertising. Because I think it's noteworthy that the one campaign that has done organizing well is also the most well-resourced campaign that had enough money to sink into organizers for a long term. I've been amazed at how many campaigns are still spending so much money on TV. This is not just electoral campaigns, this is Tom Steyer too. Just sinking money into TV, even though fewer and fewer people are actually watching TV live and therefore interacting with the ads. And so I'm curious in terms of the challenges of scaling up, what data needs to be provided to advocates within campaign organizations to actually get the organization to invest in organizing instead of just sinking money into advertising? I love your question. So it's a fantastic question. And the reality is most people can't tell you the impact of a TV advertisement on voters, but everybody's scared to not do it, especially when your opponents are sinking millions of dollars in into it. It does matter, right? The overall narrative, right? And how people are perceiving the campaign does matter and TV plays a part of that, mail plays a part of that, digital advertising plays a part of that. But a couple pieces of your question I think are super important. One is what's the breakdown of that, right? What's the mix of that? And I work with a lot of campaigns now and particularly work with other consultants who've been around for a lot longer who really don't like the mix that I would prefer in terms of how I think the money should be spent because I think too much of it is spent in advertising that we don't know whether or not it's having an impact. That said, I do think it's an important piece, right? I think sometimes we put too much there. And I think particularly we haven't gotten sort of all of the people that are making decisions to recognize the importance of digital advertising as a mix of the overall advertising budget. I still think we spend too much on traditional TV and not enough on digital and not in a smart enough way in some cases. So I think we still, people are still watching TV. TV ads do have an impact. Question is how big is that impact and what should your mix look like as you're developing these campaigns? And I think we're seeing some movement in that but I think we're behind the times. And this is on both sides, right? Republican or Democrat, I think people are really struggling with how much of the advertising budget to put into digital and how much of their overall campaign budget should be dedicated solely to advertising versus all the other ways in which we wanna communicate to people. So we got a long way to go, I think, to totally transform that. And I would just also say that we should look at the financing involved in media. And I have lots of friends and colleagues who are now in that area of work. I think we need to change the way that we pay for it. And if we change the way that we paid for it, we would do less of it. But we have strong advocates who are always wanting, we have to do the next ad, the next ad, the next ad. We have to do this media buy where they profit off of those media buys. And it is that candidates who are in the campaigns who are afraid if they don't do it, they could lose. And a lot of the analysis that we need to do about proving what's effective and what's not effective doesn't get done because we've sunk all of our money into the TV buys that are generating incredible return for the people who are doing the ads. So I just think we all dance around that and we need to take it on, both I would say as a party. And I would think that the next presidential candidate, the next nominee would be somebody who could play a big role in how we transform that by changing the way that they're willing to pay. Just sort of quickly I'll just add on the data question that you asked. So first point is I think that the question is not only how do we get campaigns to sort of invest in organizing and not just advertising, but also how do we get them to invest in the kind of high quality organizing that like years of field experiments have shown work better than some of the low quality organizing that goes on in a lot of campaigns. That's sort of one way to expand your question. But the second thing is in terms of the data that people would need to see is I think one question is how do we legitimate a different set of outcomes that help us understand the sort of value of doing the kind of high quality organizing that we need, right? So right now they're sort of like a very narrow set of metrics that a lot of campaigns will look at that sort of incentivize them to do sort of really kind of short-term focus kind of strategies, you know, whether it's advertising or low quality organizing or whatever it is. And I think one of the challenge for people like me who sort of study this stuff, sorry, is to think about sort of how you legitimate a broader set of outcomes and demonstrate the value of if you hit these targets, they're gonna have payoff down the road. I say one last thing. It's all about money flow. So if you don't believe, A, if you're not willing to take the risk early and you don't believe that you can raise the money later, what happens with campaign managers is they wait to spend the money. And as the money comes in late, the only thing to do with it late is put more money on TV and get a lower return on your investment, by the way, because the points are cost more. So, I mean, and probably a ton of reporters in this room are watching this, you know, all the nasty articles about Obama's spend in summer of 2011, you know, and all the sort of consultants in DC that said, you know, you're spending way too much too early on field organizing, well, Messina and others and Plough and others knew that you're not gonna be able to spend that money later. If you don't invest it early in the organizing, the high quality organizing isn't gonna happen. So you have to be willing to say, we're gonna build a campaign and a message that's gonna bring in that money later. We're gonna see that money coming in online and through our fundraising later. And we know we can spend that on advertising when it really matters, but we have to invest larger percentage and have less of a cash on hand early on to invest in that high quality organizing. And I think that's where a lot of people get mixed up. It's not that they don't wanna do it. So they're afraid they're not gonna have the money later for the advertising and get six to one, seven to one, 10 to one outspent. And so they don't invest early in organizing and then they're kind of stuck in this place of, you know, low return on their investment. Can I, I know Jeremy said he was saying the last thing, but I wanna, I wanna run another thing. This is also a function of the role of independent spending and billionaires, whatever they're doing. If you're a billionaire, you love the idea of like that you got an ad. You might even write the ad yourself. You have your own opinion about what message is gonna sell. You think it's awesome. It's all in your control. It's there. That's what you wanna do. You're not, I mean, the campaigns have gotten smart about the money actually. Both the major campaigns have cut the 15% in one way or another, but the billionaire's still paying the 15%. So that's what, you know, they're super appealing to a political consultant. And of course they wanna do the advertising and then it piles up and piles up. I mean, it would be great if some billionaires said what we really should be doing is investing in long-term organizing. Not even, not even part, doesn't even have to be super partisan organizing, but just helping to rebuild some of this civic culture that get people engaged. I'm from, is this on? Oh, hi. I'm from the National Democratic Institute. We work with civil society organizations and activists around the world. And I was also a field organizer in Colorado in 2012. So yay. And anyway, I was curious if you had given any thought about how the sort of the tools and the methodologies and the strategies that you kind of found to be effective in your research and also in your work, how those could be applied to sort of new democracies around the world that don't necessarily have the same norms and expectations for how representative government should work. Yeah, so I don't have data from that particular part of the world, but I have thought about that, like since the book came out, I've been talking to sort of more organizations like yourselves that are working around the world. And I think it's, I think that I'm gonna sound a little bit like a broken record, but I think that there's a same fundamental question that exists across new democracies and sort of established democracies like ours, which is sort of where the space is where people have that transformative experience of developing their own agency, right? Like where is it that people learn to be citizens? So being a citizen, I think, isn't something that you're born with, it's something that you learn. And in the United States, we had a lot of those kind of spaces in the past, and right now I think we're struggling to find what those spaces are now. And I think that's true in new democracies also, right? So particularly for countries that are just transitioning right now, part of the challenge is where are those spaces where people learn the skills and the motivations and the capacities of citizenship? And creating that is the kind of work that organizations like the ones that we're talking about or political campaigns can do. And part of the challenge is figuring out how to sort of train them and create the conditions that make it possible for them to do that work. I was in Cambodia last spring doing some work and they're launching a program that's called Sister to Sister, which is identifying women and trying to give them leadership opportunities, not necessarily just in politics, but whether it's in their workplace, in their community, in voice. And it's all built around an organizing model of going into communities, door-to-door, building out relationships, giving people skills, connecting them. And so I think that there are initiatives, but I would say that organizing is organizing, whether we do it in the Bronx or whether we do it in a remote community in Cambodia. Yeah, when I first got into organizing, I once had a seasoned organizer who sort of taught me that people are people, are people are people, right? So it turns out that people are people, right? And so the kinds of questions that we ask here are, certainly the context matters, but in the end, organizing is organizing, so. Everybody knows who NDI is, by the way. Yeah. From the interest of time, I do want to just get these last questions, that man, that woman, and these men over here, over here in the purple. So just please popcorn your questions. And we do want to make sure you guys stay to buy books. I had the pleasure of working with Hari when I was running digital innovation at Sierra Club, and now at Action Sprout, where I dealt with some ad tests around how much should be put into digital recently. But I was really interested in, there's a tension with mobilizing and organizing, also around issue selection and being really audience centric. You know, it's really hard to engage people when you're trying to convince them that the thing you're working on is the thing they should care about. And I was wondering if you could speak to that tension as well. Hi, Ethan Fry from the Ford Foundation, worked with Liz on the Ohio campaign in 2008-2012. So thanks for your remarks. I wanted to pick up on two themes I thought emerged, that breadth and depth are not actually in conflict, but can work in concert, and also a sort of decline of civic institutions. And sort of in the moment we're in right now, with the mobilizations around Ferguson and Staten Island, I'm curious what you see as sort of with millennials coming less from the union, less from the church, and more so from the hashtag, where organizations can build their institutions around moments like this, and what you see as some of the challenges for the future of our democracy, as young people don't approach this as much from a union, where their identities are shaped in very different ways. Great, who I'm going to call and that'll be a very meaty, good discussion. These are all fantastic questions. Hi, Lisa Rensstrom, another Hari fan, worked with her on the Sierra Club work. Love to hear your opinions on the, what I think is some really great things happening with the climate march, the frontline communities, really leading that work and that actual physicalness of that march, and how, well, just how those organizations are now seem to be expanding into a really multi-issue, multi-issue bringing in advocates, activists from a variety of realms. And then Lee, you have a final quick question. All right, I'll make a final quick question here. Lee Drummond, a fellow here at New America. And I want to ask whether organizing around elections and organizing groups that do kind of long-term activism are compliments or whether they're intention, I guess, or whether they support each other, because I've come to worry that too much energy is being focused on elections and that kind of one of two things happens. Either you elect your person, Barack Obama, and then you feel like, okay, well, we've got Obama in the White House, we can just go home and go back to our lives, and you put so much energy into trying to do that, you're exhausted, and then people just kind of go away from politics, or you lose, and then you say, well, we lost, nothing can be done, we've put all our hopes and dreams into this one person, and they lost, and therefore, well, we're gonna go away because, Harry, this hockey stick metaphor, which you ramp up, you get really excited about this, one thing, you put a lot of attention to that, but that becomes a short-term goal, and whether that detracts from longer-term organizing, or, alternately, it supports it because people get involved, and then they care, and then they get channeled into other things. A lot, a lot of stuff. You guys ready? Let's do it, yeah, Harry. Okay, so quickly on each of them, so on Mike's question about issue selection, so one of the pieces of research that I think I've learned the most from recently is work on how you change people's minds, so things about people who are climate deniers, or people who don't wanna vaccinate their kids, or people that don't believe in evolution, things that have a large body size of the evidence yet, we have this group of people who don't believe it, and how do you change their minds? Well, the research shows that it's basically impossible to change their mind by throwing more science at them, or throwing more information at them, because a problem is not one of information, it's one of identity, right? And the way that you change their mind is that you make them see that, you know, I can be a hippie mom from Berkeley and vaccinate my kids, and it's okay, right? Or I can be a, you know, a church-going, evangelical conservative in the South, and still believing climate change, and it's okay. Like people, their beliefs are so tied to their identities that it's not about changing minds, or persuasion so much as about changing identities. And so on this question that you're asking about, issue selection, you know, I think, you know, so I don't know of a lot of research on that particular question, but I think the question is sort of how do organizations digitally sort of build relationships with people so that they begin to sort of shift their sense of identity in a way that they're open to hearing about issues that they may not necessarily care about, which is, you know, obviously a much harder challenge than getting people to sort of pay attention to an issue they already care about. And then on Ethan and Lisa's question, just about sort of the moment they were in, and both around the climate march and around, everything going around on Ferguson and Staten Island, sort of how we build this moment into a movement. I think, you know, and Jeremy and Anna can probably speak to this a lot more than I can given their experiences as organizers, but the questions around these moments that were in around both of those issues, I think, is really about sort of, you know, how do you create a structure to harness all the energy into sort of an a movement that can build power, right? How do you develop a strategy that harnesses all these tactics together to sort of, you know, move it forward? Like, right now it is true that there are all these people coming together around the people's climate march, you know, or around Black Lives Matter, and, you know, right now it's kind of like a thousand flowers bloom, right? And for it really to sort of become a coherent power movement, I think history tells us that there needs to be some kind of structure that's gonna sort of move it forward. And then this last question, Lee, about elections versus issues. So that's, there's a group of people that are working on what's called Integrated Voter Engagement, which is this question of how do we sort of do electoral work in a way that complements and reinforces the base building work that goes on year round, as opposed to seeing the electoral work and the base building work as being an either or kind of work. And so I see two people from PICO here, and I know that in their Let My People Vote program, like they tried to do it, there's a lot of other, Florida's New Majority has tried to do it, you know, there's a lot of other organizations that are trying to do their work where what they're trying to do is do the base building work in a way that builds their electoral program, but that's not the end I'll be all, right? So that it continues beyond the elections that win or lose, there's a narrative that can be told regardless of what happens in the election, so. So I'm gonna try to merge the questions, it's supposed to go in. I think that it's not moment versus movement, it's there are moments that people get engaged and how to turn them from being engaged for the moment into being engaged long term. I think that it really is hard, you know, that when I was doing some work trying to figure out how we could be more effective within SCIU, we looked at lots of organizations, and at the time Move On was really following their members, it was kind of like, what issue would they move on, and then they would move them on that issue, and we actually in the union had to grapple with issues where people disagreed. So we had to figure out ways of engaging people around a tough issue to figure out whether we could get the overwhelming majority, but to believe that that was the direction or where we should go, and so, you know, and I think about the war in Iraq when our union came out in opposition to the war. We did it through dialogue and discussions where we had people challenge each other's thinking when we came out around marriage equality very early. We did it because we put people in the room who could acknowledge that it was okay to be a church goer and believe that people could should marry whoever they wanted, but it was through conversation and discussion and sharing people's stories so that they experienced other people's stories. So I think that organizations where people can engage across ideological lines, across, you know, coming out of their own little narrow world to experience other things and share each other's stories moves things, which is why I think that organization is important, whatever those structures are, that enable people to be empowered for the moment to get involved in something that they care about and then translate that into building a sense of community with others so that they can learn and challenge each other and move in a different kind of direction is important. And I worry that our funding mechanisms actually undermine organization development and organization stability because we're funding from campaign to campaign. So the final thing is I worry that we spend so much money on trying to get out the vote as opposed to engaging people about the critical issues of our day. And I'll do one plug, you know, Hari and Holly and I are all involved in a project that's called the Gettysburg Project and Civic Engagement, which is bringing together movement leaders and Dave is also involved, I'm trying to get anybody else here, but it's bringing together some movement leaders and some academics together to collaborate over three years to try to do deep diving and exploration, to do learning and to do experimentation, understanding what we're doing right now is not creating the kind of country one-on-to-be. And I think we need to collectively do more of that because if we were just trying to figure out how to survive on the election day, we're not gonna get to where we need to get to. I don't drink too much coffee. I'm gonna really have to go to the bathroom, so I'll keep it short. I'll just keep it to Ethan's question. I think in the organization piece that Dan just talked about, I think our organizations also have to speak to the moment and not just be about building themselves up, but be about achieving the ultimate results that they're trying to achieve. And I think we spend a lot of time, particularly in DC, thinking about how we're gonna fund the next Black Tie event to fund the next Black Tie event to become relevant. The question is, how are we relevant to the people we're trying to serve in our organizations? And I think these moments really are the point. Are we actually serving? Are we actually in the non-electoral space speaking to our members, our constituents? And if we're not and we're just strengthening our organizations so we can do more fundraising, it's not worth it. So I think we really have to really take a critical eye as organizations to say, how are we really speaking to where people are and are we being relevant to where they are and where they wanna go? I think the only question I'll take on is the issue selection question because I've always been interested. I feel like there's a problem where very often the issues that get framed as important are the ones that work well with low, with just ordinary organizing, like basically issues that canvas well. So you'll have people stop you on the street out here, you'll have people ring your doorbell and it's Keystone XL or it's, years ago was basically drilling in the Arctic as the environmental issue. On campaign reform it was just the constitutional amendment. Why? Because it canvases well. You can do it in 30 seconds on a doorstep. And that drives how issues get framed in ways that get you away from what I think are sometimes the bigger issues, both in people's own lives and in the broader public policy. And I think we ought to really, I hope we can kind of find ways to get away from the tyranny of things that canvas well. Well, I hope you all enjoyed this as much as I do. Big round of applause for our exceptionally panelists, all of them.