Category Archives: Models

Examples we can productively study

The Canvassing Imperative

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Of course we can do politics at a distance through all kinds of dreary media: direct mail, tweets, television advertising, robocalls and other poor substitutes for direct citizen action.  But there’s a better option.

In the age of video politics and social media it may come as a surprise that political canvassing survives as a vital way to connect with voters.  Though for many it may seem like a stretch to actually show up at someone’s front door and ask for their support, thousands of Americans are comfortable doing it.  Canvassing is a proven way to increase a candidate’s chances.  One study indicated a 10 percent increase in the likelihood a voter will show up on election day if they have met someone from the campaign.

We have over 500,000 elective offices in the United States. Most are for small districts, featuring local candidates who cannot afford TV buys or big campaign budgets. The solution?  Put your supporters, friends and family to work going door to door and asking voters for their support.  It’s always been an important feature in American political life.  This humble approach is even credited with Barack Obama’s impressive presidential win in 2008. The former Chicago organizer seemed to remember a thing or two about mobilizing neighborhoods.  In that year thousands were mobilized for a street by street effort in key states, spreading enthusiasm from one front porch to the next.

When insiders talk about a good “ground game” this is partly what they mean.  It’s no wonder that the emerging wisdom in campaign strategizing is to put less money into video ads and more into organizing recruits to knock on the doors of the still undecided.

Social media and face to face canvassing share the common thread of a more interpersonal approach to political persuasion.  The canvas in particular is a hopeful exercise in direct citizen to citizen action.  By comparison, candidates who phone in a plea for support via robocalls seem positively lazy .

Two recent developments are reminders of the importance of canvassing. One is a new book by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes on the failed 2016 Clinton campaign.  Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton’s Doomed Campaign lays part of her defeat to the fact that her staff did not follow the Obama playbook of fully committing to get-out-the-vote efforts. Of course neither did the victor’s campaign.  But Donald Trump in 2016 was an outlier in so many ways that it is risky to view his path to the White House as a bellwether.

The second development comes from recent reports that some of the parties fighting for dominance in the French elections are trying out American-style canvassing. The tradition is deeply entrenched in Britain, but not across the Channel in France, where talking politics at the front door of a stranger’s home is considered unusual.  But it reflects a feature that motivates so much effective canvassing: an urgency at the grassroots to do something to stave off an election disaster: in this case, what some fear could be a Trump-style victory by far-right candidate Marine Le Pen.  Whatever the outcome of the final vote on May 7, the result is good for democracy in France.  More citizens will have engaged in meaningful contact with their neighbors on a vital question worthy of their effort.

Few householders are hostile.  And most seem surprised that someone cares enough to show up.

Of course we can do politics at a distance through all kinds of dreary media: direct mail, tweets, television advertising, robocalls and other mechanical means that are poor substitutes for direct citizen action.  But all are disembodied, remote and impersonal.  Only social media come close to rendering an impression of direct contact with others we know.  And even that is partly an illusion: something short of a genuine conversation with a  neighbor in real time and space.

A modern canvasser should not expect a cakewalk.  Many doorbells will not be answered. And some campaigns send their workers to the wrong houses (a micro-targeting challenge that is never easy).  But few householders are hostile.  Most seem surprised that someone cares enough to show up.  And all seem grateful that the canvasser isn’t launching into a lecture about eternal salvation.

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Knowing by Seeing

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             White House Meeting of the “Freedom Caucus”                     

The eye has now fully extended its dominance over the ear, occasionally with interesting results.

The idea that some people are “visual learners” is an old one.  But this observation has special relevance in our age where more media content comes to us in packages meant to be seen as much as read.  What this means in its simplest form is that to see is to know.  We  understand something as meaningful if it comes to us as an image or in a visual frame.  For example, there is new research that indicates that anti-smoking warnings on cigarette packages that include graphic pictures slightly increases the willingness of smokers to quit.

There are obvious and sometimes crippling disadvantages to the idea visual knowledge. Pictures are usually poor at capturing ideas: one reason that local television news often lives up to the dismissive phrase of a “vast wasteland.”  “If it bleeds it leads” is the old phrase that suggests the narrow focus. But for the moment let’s be more positive.  As various visual theorists have reminded us, “presentational media” have the advantage of no “access code.”  We don’t have to be literate to understand feelings and impressions given off by photographs or images.

Appropriation of a visual meme can equal stealing a sacred text.

Television as a pervasive daily presence has certainly played its part in making us ocular-centric. This shift dates from the 1950s, when it became a household necessity.  The new screen in the living room meant that family life would be changed forever. A second milestone in moving toward the visual was the consequential decision by Apple’s Steve Jobs to borrow (steal?) a Xerox research lab’s idea to use graphical interfaces for computers:  what we know as the colorful icons and “windows” that present web content with store-window vividness.   Add in video recording, DVD’s and easy-to-use cameras, and the transition to visual formatting of content was complete.  Especially for younger Americans, the eye has fully extended its dominance over the ear, to the extent that people will sometimes accept bad sound even while they watch super high definition video images.  It’s no surprise that the recent Pepsi ad campaign trading on the images of protest looked bad to so many people.  Appropriation of a visual meme can equal stealing and co-opting a sacred text.

People with good visual acuity can sometimes see what the rest of us might miss. That was surely the case with many readers of a 2017 New York Times column where Jill Filipovic asked us to take a closer look at a recent White House photo of a meeting of the “Freedom Caucus” members of the House of Representatives.  Vice President Pence posted the photo (above), proudly noting that deliberations were underway to replace the Affordable Care Act. No woman appeared in the photograph. What Pence saw as a fitting representation of orderly deliberation Filipovic understood as a representation of unabashed sexism:

For liberals, the photo seemed like an inadvertent insight into the current Republican psyche: Powerful men plotting to leave vulnerable women up a creek, so ensconced in their misogynistic world that they don't even notice the bad optics (not to mention the irony of the "pro-life" party making it harder for women to afford to have babies).

Filipovic went on to argue that that this male power play and its image was evidence of a powerful misogynistic streak. And we can only applaud her ability to see what some of us otherwise might not have noticed.  Reproductive issues are only some of many other concerns that uniquely affect a woman’s health.  White and well-heeled men have been occupying dominant decision-making roles for so long that we may not “see” the gender majority excluded from the room. Thanks to her sense of visual acuity, the group’s decision-making monopoly and hypocrisy looks even worse.