Are you ready to make some calls? Swing Left Tri-Valley is currently offering “Virtual” phone banks every Saturday morning 10AM-1PM. Please find a schedule convenient for you and register at https://swingleft.org/group/swing-left-tri-valley/. And if you want to make calls during the week, please visit bit.ly/Call2WIN. A password will be provided upon your completion of our phone bank.
Let’s face it, most people do not like making political calls. If you have made calls for any electoral campaign, you may have been yelled at or got hung up. It is tough not to take it personally. You may not like political calls you receive so you do not want to do it to others, or since you screen your calls and do not answer to strangers, you think nobody is going to answer. Why do we keep calling when we can text?
Let’s step back and see how electoral campaigns are carried on. Electoral campaigns have 3 phases:
1. Clean the lists and identify supporters
2. Persuade those undecided
3. Get Out The Vote (GOTV)
In every phase campaigns have to make voter contacts. And studies show multiple contacts with different people and platforms enforce the messages. Also different age groups and demographics, as well as where they live determine which platform works best. Mailing is one-way communication and does not clean the list or identify supporters. Letters and postcards are not effective for persuasion either. So we need to knock doors, call and/or text to contact voters.
Under the Covid-19 Shelter in Place, we cannot knock on doors. However, people are picking up calls from strangers and talking to our callers. Humans are social animals and we need to express our feelings especially when we are under stress. So it makes sense that voters are answering phones more.
Swing Left Tri-Valley started to make calls in January. They were not for any Presidential candidate. Swing Left is candidate neutral in principle, so our calls were mostly nonpartisan GOTV. We called NC, WI, OH, GA and TX with multiple sources including the Reclaim Our Vote campaign (With the voice messages we leave, thousands of voters got information they deserve). These are our 2020 target states (more on our strategy visit our 2020 page).
As states postpone and combine primaries we decided to stick with ROV and to inform voters of color about ever changing voter regulations in these voter suppression states, because without help many could simply give up on voting and improperly filled out ballots could be disregarded (Atlantic article: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2020/06/voter-suppression-novembers-looming-election-crisis/613408/). Every vote matter and should be counted. (Oklahoma voters approved Medicaid expansion on June 30 by less than 1%-6488 votes.)
How effective is it? ROV made 79,000 voter contacts through phone conversations and voice messages before the June Georgia primary. 72%: 57,610 voters ROV contacted voted. Of those, 25,060 (43%) had not voted in the previous three primaries, while another 10,494 had voted only once in the previous three primaries. Providing critical information “how to vote” to voters of color work.