Friday, June 10, 2016

What works, what doesn't

To: FightBigMoney warriors

I don't know what works and what doesn't work.

This entry provides information that you may consider in thinking about the question for yourself.

A. Democracy Spring

Following its civil disobedience action in Washington DC in April, Democracy Spring is seeking to mobilize its supporters to undertake "outreach" to force Congressional representatives and candidates (and also state and local officeholders and candidates) "to choose a side: are they with the People or the plutocrats?" http://www.democracyspring.org/evfa.

This is being done by means of an Equal Voice for All Declaration, which Democracy Spring supporters are being asked to get their representatives and candidates to sign.

Democracy Spring promulgated a Forcing A Choice Toolkit to help supporters call, email, visit, tweet at, and put pressure on candidates/incumbents to sign the declaration. Tools for Log contact and log signatures are provided to enable Democracy Spring to coordinate the collective effort.

While the "outreach" may be made to candidates for state and local office, Democracy Spring's express  goal is to get Congress to act.

Weekly discussions on Slack have been set to be held on Thursdays at 8:30 pm. 

There was a first discussion on Slack last Thursday, but it does not appear there was a discussion yesterday.

There was, however, this below email that was sent out by Democracy Spring yesterday.
From: KC Martel, Democracy Spring <hello@democracyspring.org>
Date: Thu, Jun 9, 2016 at 6:39 PM
Subject: Join Us in Chicago
To: Rob Shattuck <rdshattuck@gmail.com>


Rob --
All across the country Americans are mobilizing at a historic scale, demanding an end to the systemic injustices that plague our country and it’s people. From Black Lives Matter to the Divestment Movement, from Democracy Awakening to Democracy Spring: grassroots movements are building power like no other time in recent history.
As the primary season comes to an end and the party conventions begin, The People’s Summit is bringing together activists from around the country on June 17-19. We’ll gather in Chicago with to build relationships and discuss what comes next for the democracy movement, and the movement of millions inspired by the Bernie Sanders campaign call to a political revolution.

The convening seeks “to bring together activists committed to a different kind of agenda: a People’s Agenda that can enhance and expand issue campaigns and hold all elected officials accountable to popular demands for justice, equality and freedom.” At a time of tremendous opportunity, Democracy Spring can be a key part of winning that agenda.
The People’s Summit is an opportunity for us to share our vision and strategy with a growing movement - and push the general election towards a referendum on the twin issues of voting rights and money in politics. We’ll also get facetime with candidates and incumbents - an awesome opportunity to gather more signatures for the Equal Voice for All Declaration.
Join us. If you are interested in joining Democracy Spring’s delegation register for the Summit by tomorrow Friday June 10th AND let us know you’re in! Financial support is available - so, don’t let finances be a barrier to your attendance!

Over the next week we’ll help prepare you for the Summit with messaging resources, housing & transportation tools, and ways to plan to reunite with fellow Democracy Spring activists while in Chicago.
Sign up here to join the delegation and get ready for the summit.
With hope,

KC & the DS Team
It is hard to know what to make of Democracy Spring's sudden scheduling of the foregoing People's Summit on a short one week notice for people to travel to Chicago.

One can speculate that Democracy Spring has second thoughts about how well the detailed "outreach" plan set out in the Forcing A Choice Toolkit will work.

Only time will tell about this.

In the meantime, important time is passing for fulfilling Democracy Spring's object to "make the 2016 election a referendum on whether we will have a democracy that serves the people or a plutocracy that panders to the 1%."

B. Whowillfightbigmoney.org

Simultaneously with Democracy Spring's outreach, there is a recently formed Whowillfightbigmoney.org organization, which is a coalition of ten leading reform groups. that has an agenda of "asking every candidate for Congress to tell us where they stand on our 13-point Fighting Big Money agenda, the plan to restore balance to our democracy and put We The People back in charge."

This agenda, and the tactics and strategy being deployed by the new organization (see the organization's Who Will Fight Big Money and EmpowerEveryday People? toolkit), seem cut from the same cloth as the agenda, tactics and strategy Democracy Spring is currently pursuing (described in Democracy Spring's Forcing a Choice Toolkit).

In the first Democracy Spring Slack discussion, inquiry was made about Whowillfightbigmoney.org.

An answer was given that WhoWillFightBigMoney is a campaign backed by MayDay and several other orgs that had a degree of overlap with MayDay's own existing wok on targeting incumbents, and that could be the reason why MayDay has removed the Congressional focus from their own site, to avoid work duplication. As to the similarity of WhoWillFightBigMoney, it was said there were a few key differences between the approaches that make them distinct and worth simultaneous pursuit, to wit, MayDay (and now WWFBM's) process targets **incumbents** exclusively whereas DemSpring targets candidate. Additionally, FightBigMoney questionnaire with checkboxes, which is be filled out by incumbents, has a different bar for participation than DemSpring's simpler sign-on declaration. Also, though MayDay is a member of DemSpring steering committee and supports the nonviolent direct action approach of Democracy Spring, the MayDay/WWFBM's approach doesn't include a mechanism to hold their incumbent supporters accountable, which DemSpring does (i.e., nonviolent direct action.)

At the moment, it is hard for an outsider to have a sense of what Whowillfightbigmoney.org thinks will be the effectiveness of its "outreach" program.

C. MAYDAY

Today, MAYDAY posted on the Democracy Spring Slack discussion page this:
MAYDAY.US’s reason for removing the directory of members of Congress from our website is because we have looked at past successful US social movements and have decided to learn from that success. We are no longer focused on Congress, so that page was sending the wrong message. A new, more strategic page is launching soon.
We support candidates for local, state, and Congressional office who are committed to enacting small-donor elections.
In US social movements, national policy—either through Congress or SCOTUS—changes after a critical mass of states pass reform. National voting rights for POC, marriage equality, etc. did not change until states led the way.
Congress doest not lead, it follows. So we determined that the quickest—and only—way to pass reform at the national level is also to pass reform at local and state levels, where it’s desperately needed.
Whether it’s affordable housing policy being set at the local level, renewable energy standards at the state level, or tax policy at the federal level, we will only fix it all if we start at local and state levels and then pull national policy in the right direction.
The money in politics movement is making a fundamental error if we stay focused on trying to get Congress to pass effective reform before leading the way at local and state levels. And of courseMAYDAY.US was one of the groups making this error. We have expanded our focus and have decided to pursue the most strategic avenue possible.
This decision has nothing to do with WhoWillFightBigMoney—while we are endorsers of that campaign, we are not actively working on it. They are not active in primaries, which is also a strategic problem considering the gerrymandering of most districts.
If we want to win, effective tactics—like non-violent direct action including GOTV—must be in service of an effective strategy. The Kochs and ALEC and other big money interests are focused on local and state levels for a reason—that’s where policy changes are led, and that’s where they get a return on their investment.
Will we be as smart as the Kochs, ALEC, and big money political machines? Or will we let them keep winning?
D. Is anything going to work?

The above could make FightBigMoney warriors wonder what, if anything, is going to work, and further whether the organizations have much confidence in their respective agendas and efforts.

Other information can be adduced here, in the form of things that have been presented to the organizations and that they have not taken up.

One thing which has been presented that the organizations have declined to take up is the tool of tweeting banks. (A template for tweeting banks is set out at Template for Congressional districts.)

A second thing that the organizations have been unresponsive to is a strategy of trying to tap into the energy, enthusiasm and high profile of the Sanders Presidential campaign. I have been pushing that idea for a year (which can be tracked through many blog entries, including Proposed messaging re: Congress; A campaign statement for Sen. Sanders; and To Berniecrats). The organizations have registered no interest.

Possible explanations for the foregoing are that the organizations do not believe the tool or strategy would be effective, or that the organizations do not have the resources to pursue the same. Either explanation would be relevant for FightBigMoney warriors who are wondering what, if anything, will work for advancing their agenda.

The time frame for the question of "what will work" is especially problematic. My effort seeks to accomplish something by November 8th of this year. Democracy Spring and Whowillfightbigmoney.org seem to be eyeing a new Congress acting in 2017. MAYDAY's time frame currently is at least two or three years, and probably much longer.

To undertake and keep up their fight, FightBigMoney warriors need confidence that what they are doing will have effectiveness. This blog entry suggests that confidence is hard to come by. I solicit statements of confidence from others.

Tuesday, June 7, 2016

What kind of warriors are we?

Yesterday MAYDAY posted
MAYDAY, MAYDAY: Representative Walter Jones (R-NC) is in a hotly contested race to keep his congressional seat. Rep. Jones is the ONLY Republican in Congress who co-sponsored the Government by the People Act -- we can't afford to lose a crucial ally like him. If you live in NC, go VOTE. If you don't share this post with your family and friends to remind them to vote in tomorrow's primary.

The Congressional district Walter Jones is running in is the North Carolina 3rd Congressional district. The Twitter hashtag for this Congressional race is #nc03. Go to #nc03 and take a look at the tweets there.

After you look at #nc03, then go to #fightbigmoney, and/or #getmoneyout, and/or #democracyspring, and/or #democracyawakens. These are where campaign finance reform warriors hang out, and you could say they do a lot of hoo-hahing there.

There is nothing wrong per se with campaign finance reform warriors hoo-hahing on their hashtags, but they need to appreicate that such hoo-hahing on #fightbigmoney, #getmoneyout, #democracyspring, and #democracyawakens is largely being heard only by other campaign finance reform warriors. In other words, these hashtags are echo chambers.

Is that all campaign finance reform warriors want, to live in echo chambers?

You'd have to ask Walter Jones to find out for sure, but I think he would have appreciated campaign finance reform warriors to have found ways to tweet for him on #nc03.

Hopefully Walter Jones will win his primary today in the North Carolina 3rd Congressional district, and campaign finance reform warriors who failed to tweet for him on #nc03 for the primary election can have an opportunity to tweet for him on #nc03 in the general election.

In the California 12th Congressional district, Preston Picus said yes to #DeclareForDemocracy. See CA12 tweeting bank. I see tweeting for Preston under #CAPolitics, and there may be other hashtags that provided exposure of Preston to voters in CA12 but #fightbigmoney, #getmoneyout, #democracyspring, and #democracyawakens are not among them. I have no idea what Preston's chances are today, but you can't say campaign finance reform warriors have done much for him.

For Zephyr Teachout in the New York 19th Congressional district, the primary election day is June 28th. See https://ballotpedia.org/New_York%27s_19th_Congressional_District_election,_2016.

The Twitter hashtag for Zephyr Teachout's race is #NY19.

What will campaign finance reform warriors do for Zephyr Teachout? Will they tweet on #NY19? Or will they stay in their echo chambers of #fightbigmoney, #getmoneyout, #democracyspring, and #democracyawakens, and be isolated from voters in NY19?

There are many 2016 Congressional races for which the same questions can be asked of campaign finance reform warriors. Will those races be identified and will campaign finance reform warriors tweet using relevant hashtags?

Right now the campaign finance reform organizations do not appear to be providing leadership about this for their grassroots warriors. We can all hope that will change.

Sunday, June 5, 2016

DemSpring and whowillfightbigmoney.org

Can DemSpring and whowillfightbigmoney.org get together better for voter "outreach"?

A. Whowillfightbigmoney.org "outreach"

"Outreach" would seem to have two components of (i) communication to, including response back from, candidates, and (ii) communication to voters.

Whowillfightbigmoney.org seems to be making good progress with its website and getting "outreach" to Congressional candidates going.

Its "Tweet to" and "Email to" buttons on individual state pages (see, e.g., http://www.whowillfightbigmoney.org/alabama) for voters to tweet to and/or email to the candidates in their Congressional districts are very useful "outreach" tools for communicating to and getting response from candidates.

As to the "outreach" component of communication to voters, I am sure whowillfightbigmoney.org desires to find ways to get as many voters as possible in a Congressional district to come to the whowillfightbigmoney.org webpage for the district.

I have advocated the use of tweeting banks as a way to get voters to go to/ come to a webpage.
Yesterday I created this AL06 tweeting bank (AL06 being my Congressional district}, and I have included this language and link to the Whowillfightbigmoney.org Alabama webpage:
For information about where Rep. Gary Palmer and David Putnam stand on fighting the corrupting influence of money in politics, go to http://www.whowillfightbigmoney.org/alabama.
The tweeting bank can only generate voter traffic to the Whowillfightbigmoney.org Alabama webpage if people tweet in the tweeting bank. I am trying to get that to happen. but don't have success to report as of yet.

We can all want for whowillfightbigmoney.org to develop ways to get voters to come to their website.

I hope they promote the use of tweeting banks. We shall see on that and about any other ways that are developed to get voter traffic to the whowillfightbigmoney.org website.

B. DemSpring's "outreach"

DemSpring's outreach, in communicating to candidates, is to get them to sign the Equal Voice for All Declaration. The Declaration is on a separate website, and candidates who have signed are reported at http://www.equalvoice4all.us/signed.

At this time, I don't believe DemSpring has any webpage with "Tweet to" and/or "Email to" buttons for voters to use to send tweets or emails to their candidates asking them to sign the Equal Voice for All Declaration.

In terms of "outreach" to voters to get them to ask candidates to sign the Declaration, DemSpring has not progressed much on that front. I have advocated tweeting banks to DemSpring, but they have not responded to that idea yet. We will have to see what DemSpring develops on the "outreach" to voters front.

C. "Outeach" to voters

I think both whowillfightbigmoney.org and DemSpring need to develop "outreach" to voters much more.

"Outreach" to voters would seem to be very labor intensive if there are not funds to pay for the "outreach." "Outreach" to voters to be accomplished by volunteers is going to very hard to come by, and I think whowillfightbigmoney.org and DemSpring will have a much better chance of accomplishing meaningful "outreach" to voters if they combine their efforts.

I think it is strongly to be recommended that DemSpring and whowillfightbigmoney.org get together better on this.

Saturday, June 4, 2016

AL06 tweeting bank

 TWEETING BANK FOR ALABAMA 6th CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT TO #DeclareForDemocracy





TO: As many voters in the  Alabama 6th Congressional district (regardless of political affiliation) as we can tweet to

This message is being tweeted to you individually.

We who are  tweeting to you are both in and outside the Alabama 6th Congressional district. We share the belief that the American voters should use the 2016 elections to force Congress to confront, before Nov. 8, 2016, whether it is corrupt or not, and to pass reform for voters to consider in November. To do that we want all Congressional candidates to demand publicly that Congress address this before Nov. 8th, so that voters can take into account what Congress does (or does not do) in casting their votes in November. For more information, please see 2016 Congressional candidates' Declarations.

We are calling this citizen effort #DeclareForDemocracy. We want the Presidential candidates to promote #DeclareForDemocracy.

We want as much publicizing of #DeclareForDemocracy in the nation, including the Alabama 6th Congressional district, as possible.

We hope to send individually directed tweets to thousands of voters in the Alabama 6th Congressional district, which tweets will have links to this page.

If you come to this page and want to help us do even more tweeting to voters in the Alabama 6th Congressional district, please follow the guidance provided below and join in the tweeting.

We of course want Rep. Gary Palmer and David Palmer, who are running in the Alabama 6th  Congressional district, to know about this, so we have tweet buttons below for sending a tweet to the candidates. The tweet that will pop up for you to send will read:
@____ Demand the current Congress address its corruption before Nov. 8th. #DeclareForDemocracy. http://2016candidatesdeclarations.blogspot.com/2016/06/al06-tweeting-bank.html



For information about where Rep. Gary Palmer and David Putnam stand on fighting the corrupting influence of money in politics, go to http://www.whowillfightbigmoney.org/alabama.

We hope you agree with our #DeclareForDemocracy citizen effort.

Thank you.

GUIDANCE FOR TWEETING IN AL6th CONGRESSIONAL DISTRICT
A. General
This tweeting involves a non-standard use of Twitter, namely, the sending of very large numbers of individually directed tweets to Twitter users you don't personally know. A ground has been staked out with Twitter for this method of tweeting. See letter to Twitter @Support.
For questions or discussion about this tweeting, go to Google group topic Congressional district tweeting.

B. Your tweet message
For your tweets, we suggest the following tweet messages, but feel free to compose your own (hopefully your tweet will have a link to this webpage).
Tweet for AL06 candidates Gary Palmer and David Putnam to #DeclareForDemocracy. http://2016candidatesdeclarations.blogspot.com/2016/06/al06-tweeting-bank.html
C. Persons to send your individually directed tweets to
The object is to find hashtags and twitter accounts which show a lot of twitter users in the Alabama 6th Congressional district (see this map) that you can send your tweets to. If a person's twitter profile indicates the person is in the Birmingham metro area, that should suffice and don't be bothered that the person might be in the 7th Congressional district (in which most of the City of Birmingham is located).
Do not worry about redundancy and whether others participating in this tweeting bank may also be tweeting to the same person.
Here are suggestions of "follower" lists to find people to tweet to:
https://twitter.com/GreaterShelby/followers
https://twitter.com/OTMJ_Life/followers
https://twitter.com/HomewoodHigh/followers
https://twitter.com/TrussTribune/followers

D. How to send your tweets efficiently
In doing your tweeting, you are repetitively sending the same tweet message. This can be done very efficiently. Get the tweet message on your mouse clipboard, go to the follower list or hashtag listing you are using for your tweeting, start with the first person on the list you want to tweet to, and do this:
1. Right click on person's Twitter name.
2. Choose "open in new tab"
3. Go to the new tab.
4. Click on the "Tweet to" button.
5. Paste the tweet message in the box.
6. Hit the "Tweet" button.
7. Close the tab, which takes you back to the list
8. Go on to next person, and repeat above steps.
You should be able to send 30 to 40 tweets in a half hour. Send as many tweets as you are willing to. Don't worry about any duplication that you think may arise.
If you are using a hashtag listing, be careful NOT to send your tweet using the "reply" button. Instead, send a clean, new tweet by right clicking on the person's Twitter name as specified in instruction 1 above.

Friday, June 3, 2016

Targets for DemSpring "outreach"

Whowillfightbigmoney.org and its partners are tweeting Representatives and candidates who have said how they will #FightBigMoney. I am following up with tweets urging the supporters of these Representatives and candidates to start tweeting banks. Embedded below are some of these tweets and more will be added to this entry.

DemSpring should find ways to target DemSpring's "outreach" to these Representatives and candidates and their Congressional districts.

To whowillfightbigmoney.org tweeters

I see from the #FightBigMoney Twitter hashtag that, in the past couple of days, a fair number of people have tweeted to their Representatives in Congress (or to candidates for Congress) this:
If elected, what will you do to #FightBigMoney? http://www.whowillfightbigmoney.org
The tweets I see include tweets to Representatives in Congress (or to candidates) in Pennsylvania, Maryland, Illinois, Ohio and Indiana.

You who have been tweeting, together with whowillfightbigmoney.org, should consider whether your impact can be greatly expanded if you start tweeting banks in individual Congressional districts (or states).

The potential expanded impact is both publicizing the issue to voters in the district (or state) and also recruiting them to send their own tweets to the Representative and candidates in the district (or state).

To get a better idea of how a tweeting bank works, please see this Template for Congressional districts, and for a specific example see FL23 tweeting bank.

I like the open ended tweet message you are employing of "If elected, what will you do to #FightBigMoney?" At this juncture, that seems superior to a tweet message which asks whether the Representative or candidate supports or will support particular reform legislation.

I also like the approach I have taken of asking incumbents and candidates to demand that the current Congress address the corruption issue before Nov. 8th. I think this can engender even better opportunity to make the 2016 elections a referendum on the corruption issue.

The webpage for a particular Congressional district that tweets sent in the tweeting bank will link to can be on the whowillfightbigmoney.org website and can tailored to exactly what whowillfightbigmoney.org wants the webpage to say.

One alteration to the tweeting bank webpage format exemplified by Template for Congressional districts and FL23 tweeting bank is that there should additionally be "Tweet to" buttons for each of the Representative and other candidates which the reader can click on and which causes a tweet to pop up for the reader to send on the reader's Twitter account.

Although "Tweet to" buttons do not currently appear on the foregoing two links, you can find such "Tweet to" buttons on MAYDAY: Tweet and shout at #MD08.

I hope you who have been tweeting, together with whowillfightbigmoney.org, will decide to try out tweeting banks in individual Congressional districts to see whether they expand the impact of your current mode of tweeting.

DemSpring-FightBigMoney-Slack discussion

DemSpring had its weekly Thursday Slack discussion last night per its Forcing a Choice Toolkit.

The DemSpring Slack discussion covered various aspects of the effort to contact candidates/incumbents, including the mechanics of spreadsheets to record contact information, contact logs; targeting/prioritizing candidates/incumbents versus just getting as many signers as possible; and information and questions about specific contacts that had already been made.

This guidance was given:  
Right now, there is no systematic way to track support on specific bills other than looking up who is co-sponsoring what. That’s not really the point of the EVFA Declaration though. We want to force politicians to take a side on the core fundamental reforms that the democracy movement is unifying around: voting rights, citizen-funded elections, and overturning Citizens United. We want to make 2016 a referendum on whether or not candidates will fight for that reform so that we have a credible mandate going into 2017 to get it passed.
Also it’s worth noting that the four bills we’ve identified thus far are not the be all, end all. The more we build and demonstrate collective, organized power, the more we will be able to credibly demand and win. Doing outreach with the EVFA declaration is the first step to making candidates and elected officeholders choose which side they’re on. Those that side with us in principle can then be pushed to support the final reform agenda. Those who refuse will be increasingly isolated as candidates are forced to join the democracy movement in order to be reelected, resonate with their voting base, or avoid being labeled as a pro-corruption, establishment candidate. 
It was brought up that MAYDAY had recently revised its website to abandon totally the Congressional level. https://mayday.us/  It was asked why this had happened, and what bearing did it have relative to DemSpring effort at the Congressional level, It was pointed out that, up until a day or two ago when MAYDAY made the website revision, MAYDAY had up a list of about 189 members of Congress committed to reform, and now that list had been taken down from the MAYDAY website. It was queried why DemSpring effort did not start with the MAYDAY work that had already been done and build on that.

Also it was mentioned that the very recently formed whowillfightbigmoney.org was also now embarked on a similar exercise as DemSpring.

An answer was given that WhoWillFightBigMoney is a campaign backed by MayDay and several other orgs that had a degree of overlap with MayDay's own existing wok on targeting incumbents, and that could be the reason why MayDay has removed the Congressional focus from their own site, to avoid work duplication. As to the similarity of WhoWillFightBigMoney, it was said there were a few key differences between the approaches that make them distinct and worth simultaneous pursuit, to wit, MayDay (and now WWFBM's) process targets **incumbents** exclusively whereas DemSpring targets candidate. Additionally, FightBigMoney questionnaire with checkboxes, which is be filled out by incumbents, has a different bar for participation than DemSpring's simpler sign-on declaration. Also, though MayDay is a member of DemSpring steering committee and supports the nonviolent direct action approach of Democracy Spring, the MayDay/WWFBM's approach doesn't include a mechanism to hold their incumbent supporters accountable, which DemSpring does (i.e., nonviolent direct action.)


With the Slack discussion that took place as described above, the above links that were given for consideration before the Slack discussion did not come up in the Slack discussion.