“the deciding factor is “not the margin of error but the margin of effort”

Friends and comrades are deploying to battleground states that will be determinative in this year’s Presidential race

Harris will win the popular vote, as Biden did in 2020, but the undemocratic electoral college means that the election will come down to a few thousand votes in states like PA, MI, NEV, AZ, GA and Wisconsin. Therefore, the anti-MAGA majority needs to be motivated and mobilized to vote. The always insightful political analyst Michael Podhorzer keeps saying that the deciding factor is “not the margin of error but the margin of effort” That means that the difficult and often distasteful work of phoning and door knocking is crucial to victory.

Guidance and insight for this work comes from a remarkably surprising place: a Danish Sociologist named Rasmus Kleis Nielsen. In 2008 he embedded himself in two Congressional campaigns: New Jersey Democrat Linda Stender and Connecticut Congressman Jim Himes. Hours of door knocking, phone banking, letter writing and observation of the mechanics of a campaign are reflected in the most evocative description of my own experience in on the ground electoral politics. The book is peppered with episodes describing phone calls, encounters on the doors, or discissions with campaign staff and volunteers.

The book describes three important factors necessary to understanding the “Ground Wars”:

1. Temporary Infrastructure – In the earlier days of “machine politics” there were permanent functionaries at the local level, often patronage jobs, who functioned as frontline communicators. Today’s local party apparatus is called into being for a fixed time leading up to the election, often including a primary contest and then the general. By definition and necessity these short-term positions are filled by recent college graduates and folks who can afford committed short term employment.
2. Coalition forces – There are the official campaigns of the Party and then there are the Independent Expenditure (IE) operations and the work of organizations like labor unions. The IE work cannot cooperate or coordinate with the campaign by law, and the unions are forbidden from using paid staff and resources to reach anyone but their own members – a limited pool when unions represent only 6% of the private sector workforce.
3. Volunteers – Every campaign wants volunteers en masse but coordinating them and dovetailing their often spotty and uneven efforts with that of paid staff is very challenging. Sometimes they think they “know best” and they can be a major irritant.

“… pain in the ass prima donna second guessing the work of the campaign structure”

I thank my longtime friend Henry Hardy from Greenfield, MA for turning me on to Ground Wars. He will be deploying to PA for 5 weeks during the general election. He said the book helped him to avoid becoming a “pain in the ass prima donna second guessing the work of the campaign structure” I came away feeling the same way after reading the book.

I have worked elections every two years since 2016 and as a long-time labor organizer have had certain criticisms of campaign functioning involving basic training and logistics issues. Campaign staffers with little direct experience to lean on train up door knockers, and phone bankers on endless scripts that will not last a minute out on the hustings. Logistics planning can also often be lacking. In 2022 I drove 21 miles for a literature drop in Fullerton, California at 5:30 AM and found out I was the only one there and that the staffer who had sent me there had forgotten to tell me that the drop had been called off. I have learned however to keep my mouth shut in most instances, and Ground Wars was a big help for my psyche in avoiding carping on the campaigns.

Here is Henry’s brief excellent roundup on the book:

“This is a great nitty-gritty description of the contemporary “ground war” in American electoral politics. Nielsen likes to refer to it as “personal political communications” because he likes to view it as one of the main political media (along with direct mail, broadcast/cable advertising, internet advertising, social media communications, and free media coverage). He sees it as making a comeback since the early 90s (volunteer activity up from 2% of the adult electorate to 4%), and as working (estimates one in every 14 door knocks brings an additional voter to the polls). He also makes it clear how boring and stressful the work is for most involved, consisting as it does almost exclusively of cold-calling and door knocking to persuade the persuadable and get the “lazy faithful” to the polls. He also does a great job of outlining the complex improvised organizational “structure” of the ground game, which (in order to be most effective) requires the coordination of various parties, campaigns, allied activist groups, and differently motivated volunteers and wage workers”

It is not too late to get a copy of Ground Wars to read at night after a long day on the doors beating Trump and fighting for democracy. 

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For more on working and working on the elections, read the series on the Stansbury Forum:
Why I Keep Coming Back, There Are Many …, and Knocking The Doors #1: Working in CA45th CD

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