Getting People to Vote

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Today, we’re diving into strategies for mobilizing voters and convincing them to support causes you care about. We’ll discuss what motivates marginal voters, the importance of a theory of change in politics, and how to effectively engage with elected officials and key issues. Plus, we’ll break down the tools of election season—canvassing, social media, texting, and phone calls—to help you make an impact during this critical time.

This is the audio version of the Incorruptible Mass podcast, season 5 episode 62. You can watch the video version on our YouTube channel.

You’re listening to Incorruptible Mass. Our goal is to help people transform state politics: we investigate why it’s so broken, imagine what we could have here in MA if we fixed it, and report on how you can get involved.

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Transcript

Hello and welcome to Incorruptible Mass. Our mission here is to help us all transform state politics because we know that we could have a state and a state legislature that truly represented the needs of the vast majority of the residents of our beautiful commonwealth. Today we will be talking about how to get people to vote and how to convince people to vote for things that you care about.
We'll talk about marginal voters and what convinces them. We will talk about having a theory of change in general for politics, not just getting people to vote, but also the way that you interact with your elected officials or with issues or whatever. And then we'll talk a little bit about, you know, canvassing, social media, texting, phone calls, all of that stuff that we do around election time because that's where we are right now. Election. 
And this is our topic for the day. Before we do, let me introduce my illustrious co hosts. I will start with Jonathan. 
Hello Jonathan Cohn. He him his, been active in progressive issue and electoral campaigns for a little over a decade now and joining from the south end in Boston.
Jordan plus cat.
Yeah it's Jordan Berg Powers. He him and I have working on elections for many decades and which isn't uh, just to say I just feel old at this moment but and I'm coming from Worcester, Massachusetts and for those of you to encourage you to watch it on the YouTube, I'm also joined by my cat Jane, who wants to appear in this podcast. 
Hopefully Jane will meow at least once.
I am Anna Callahan. She her coming at you from Medford, City Councilor here. Been – done a lot of work sort of around the country helping folks get elected to city councils.
And let's get on with our topic. So I think all of us have done, shall we say, we have canvassed a few times to say the least. I think all of us have done hundreds of hours of canvassing as well as organizing campaigns and understanding deeply how the different ways that you convince people interact with each other and their different efficacies and everything else.
So I think we are here to tell you guys to talk to people in person. That's the short story. But let's go ahead and let's first of all talk about marginal voters.
So hey, we're in an election where there's a lot of entrenched voters in the Democratic and Republican parties, people who are not going to be convinced and these swing voters, these people who haven't decided yet or who maybe aren't going to show up at the polls or might not. What is the best way to convince them that they should take the time to head to the polls. And Jordan, I think this is one of your favorite topics.
Yes, it's one of my favorite topics because a lot of times what we think is we need to like, double down on the sort of partisan messaging. And so what I like to remind people is that actually issues are really good ways in local elections to get people who are unsure about voting to actually go vote. So this is not for people who are like unsure who they're going to vote for. Although at this point, God help those people. 
This is for people who are not sure if they're going to vote. And you know, if, if you, let's take abortion, which is on the ballot in many important states, the ability of people to have a say, especially people to have a say over their reproductive rights and whether or not and when they get, they have, they have children.
And so, you know, that is a motivating issue for people. So if you, if you are, if like the reason you're voting for Harris or Trump is on that issue, that's baked in already. But there are a bunch of people who aren't sure they want to vote for Harris or Trump, especially Harris, and they're not sure about voting at all.
And trying to get them to vote in this issue that they're not sure about is not as effective as saying, do you care about abortion? Do you want that right? You need to go vote for that. And so the media only talks about presidential elections. They do no real coverage of any other level of government. And if they do, it's always horse race. It's not like a serious discussion.
Politico in Massachusetts is basically the like PR arm of the John Deaton campaign, like running his press releases, right? Politico Massachusetts. Politico, Massachusetts. But like, it's not like the issues he'll cover or how he'll differ or the fact that Elizabeth Warren had this like, has like a million small great bills about policy, like making it cheaper to fly and just stuff like that, right? So there's like real things that are policy wise that they're never going to talk about, but those are things people care about.
Those are like, the things that people want, are actually, they want to know that their politicians are working on. So those are the ways to get people. If you're, if you're starting, if you're thinking about where can I spend some time in the next few days, the next week or so on in the election, my suggestion to you, if you want to get people who are unsure about voting – not to persuade people – unsure about voting.
Really good uses of your time are with organizations that have longstanding relationship with people and the other is on ballot initiatives.  On issues which affect people on a day to day basis. 
Jonathan ideas for marginal voters? 
My just quick side comment, just thinking of that, that Jordan's comment about issues in media coverage just reminded of the media's constant desire for Harris policy proposals and then the fact that they don't typically spend much time at all covering any of them when they exist.
It's always like, I just remember years ago when a Globe Politics editor had commented about a gubernatorial race that they don't care about issues in the primary and only loosely in the general. Which I think, and I, and I do think that that speaks as well to what Jordan is saying is that at a certain point in the election cycle a lot of the media coverage is such that makes people just want to tune out entirely because of how much, how much like rising, like rising tension and noise as well as kind of incessant ads, incessant texts and all of that. And the ways in which I think that speaks to that with a ballot question, which is, with kind of ballot measures that can often be on very clear policy issues that people either support or oppose are things that can break through that, through that a bit, that it's a little bit, it feels less all consuming and can also drive, motivate people to where it makes the stake of what's on the ballot clear to them by bringing it down to a specific issue that they care about. Yeah. I do think when it comes to getting.
Oh, Anna, go. Oh, you finished. 
The one thing I would say as well, when it comes to getting marginal voters to vote, if somebody's not sure if they're voting or not, the best way of increasing the likelihood of them voting is actually just talking to them.
Yep. You can also somebody that you know, you can be like, oh yeah, hey, you know, I'm going to go before work. Are you going to go before work? Are you going to go after work? When are you going? The, as I like to say, the number one reason why somebody isn't voting for what you want them to is that you didn't ask them.
So before we move on to like the bigger sort of theory of change and getting change, I want to cover canvassing, phone making, texting, social media, all those things standouts. Right. Let's include, you know, Jordan, 
I love Jordan’s reaction – giving it away.
So we often find and it was funny because we were just chit chatting before we hit the record button about how people are like, well, I don't want to canvas. I just want to like stand there with a sign or I just want to like, you know, stand around in front of a grocery store and chit chat with people, you know, or they have other things that they want to do. And a lot of people, they want to send postcards or they want to, you know, do some text banking to someone they've never met or like these things that they would prefer to do than to actually stand in front of a human being and talk to that person and ask them for their opinions and tell them they would like them to vote a certain way and then ask them if they will vote that way.
Like that's canvassing, right? Knocking on their door. They like, they can't escape. And you know, I will start off with the quick thing that like canvassing is twice as effective as phone banking. Phone banking is many times more effective than I think texting is maybe next, which is, I don't know, dozens or hundreds of times more effective than social media. 
And then these standouts and other things, I don't even know what data, you know, maybe Jordan or Jonathan, you know, data on them. But like actually standing in front of a person – if you're not watching, Jordan has held up his hand like a big fat ZERO!
Standouts and the obsession with signs will always remind me of. Do you know the drill Pandell's tweet? 
No, no, wait.
Okay. I'm sure you've seen this. It's from this like often memeable online Twitter account Where it's Food, $200 Data $150 Rent, $800 Candles $3,600 Utility 150. Someone who's good at the economy, please help me budget this. My family is dying. 
And I always think of that when I, When you see of signs, because of the number of people who have left to their own devices would spend the entirety of their budget on signs. 
Yeah, I, I guess I'll just say really quickly about the statistics. So it's. So it's like door knocking is the most effective thing followed by, as you rightly said, phone banking. And it's decreasing but still effective. And then texting people you don't know has a zero ability. It does not in fact work. Texting people, that is known to the campaign. So they need to know, they need to have had an interaction with the campaign with you. It's called a warm text. So if you just text somebody who's never heard from the campaign and just text. It has no effect.
But if they're, if they're already in conversation in some way through a phone call, a door knock and something else, it is effective depending on like a lot of other factors. And then like, next up is. So for every, you would have to, you would have to talk to a hundred people on the doors to, to get the effect of one postcard. I mean, sorry, you have to, you have to send a hundred postcards to get the effect of talking to one person on a door. So it's a hundred to one.
It's like not even. And that's the most effective, most, most postcarding and letter writing campaigns have actually a zero effect because there, there's lots of reasons why they're, why we think they're effective or not. And there's some good studies about this.
I'm going to guess that they're also going down because everybody started doing them because they're, they have the allure of being involved with the election without doing anything hard. And so I'm going to guess that people in like Ohio or Florida are like, I've gotten three postcards. And I'm just, That's not going to have an effect. Like, I don't know for sure that's a theory. It's not a, it's not facts.
But I do know that it's. You have to, you have to send 100 postcards to get the effect of one door knock, of talking to somebody on the door. So it's just like, it's, you know, the, the way. And if you didn't see my zero, there is no study ever that has shown that standing around and doing nothing, it turns out, is an effective tactic. Standing around and doing nothing is always an ineffective tactic. It's a totally ineffective way.
No one gives a sh. Oh, sorry about that. No one cares.
Their children watch this podcast! 
No one cares that you stood around and like, they're like, you know, and like, with a person like you can. There is some like, small things that if they've never heard of somebody and they see the person's name, they're like marginally more likely to maybe vote for them?
But like, that's like, you can just like literally just like putting aside in the yard is. Does better. It's a better use of your time for that than anything else.
It's like the worst. Oh God. It's like, I don't understand why people do it.
So anyway, so there's just like, you know, and so just to parlay that into the other thing we're going to about to talk about is just like it this, like this is a, you know, you need to have a, like what are you doing? Like we need to do things that actually affect people. It's just not effective to just like be in our algorithmic silos because it's. Algorithms are telling us.
The other way to think about it too is like social media also has not, there's not a study that says that people have systematically talked to people over social media and through those one to one conversations changed an election. There's not that study out there. And I always think about it like this, like I listen man, when I get like 100 people to retweet me or like, like my post, oh, that high, that'll last you a couple of days, like you're just like, look at this, look at my, look at these, look how many people.
And like that's just three days of door knocking. That's three afternoons of making phone calls. I can touch the same number of people.
And those people who have liked my posts already sort of agreed with me and the other people maybe did it and now I'm educating them about something I care about. So like it's just like it's, it's great. Like I understand the allure of it.
It has, you know, you're like that one uncle you'll argue with and they'll be like seed the like tiniest of ground and you'll feel awesome about it. But like that's not, actually, like it's not that we shouldn't do those things. We should, it's how we talk to each other. The more that we talk to each other, the better off we'll be. I, I do think social media is a critical part to all campaigns because it's where we, it's the, you know, it's the play, it's the modern commons. But like we overestimate our ability to affect it.
Like if you, if you're a digital content creator that has thousands of people like yes, please do talk about it. But if you're like a regular person, like let's like you should not be oversell how many people actually. 
And I just want to be clear for people who are listening, if you send a tweet and it re reaches a hundred people, that is not the same as talking to a hundred people at the doors.
No, it's people who follow you. So they're already in your bubble, they're already in your algorithmic Bubble. Right, Right.
Great. I would love for us to talk about the kind of bigger picture. So, like, how do we get change more broadly? We've just been talking about the elections because here we are, we're in an election and how to convince people, you know, in these last few days.
But, you know, that all fits into our theory of how do we actually get change at the electoral level on issues on, you know, parties, candidates and all these things. And how does this conversation that we're having fit into this question of having a theory of change? 
I think this came a little bit out of frustrations where we hear people saying, like, well, you know, I'm, I'm not going to bother to vote now because they're, they, none of those people did they, they're not doing what I want. And it's like, well, did you, did you ask them to, you know, what did you do? So let's, let's have those stories come on out and jump into this.
The one thing, and I feel like Jordan can riff on this better than I can, is my general attitude toward making change, that I like to say that 90% of politics is just showing up because in many things, like, that's ultimately, it speaks to the value of things like canvassing and talking to voters and actually having that difference, as well as in terms of volunteering. It's like, I want to say one thing that I've commented to people who are like campaign campaign staffers is how, like, one of my only asks of campaign staffers is that once they stop being a staffer, they be some future campaign’s reliable volunteer. Because that's so rare. 
That having people that everybody loves, many people feel very strongly about campaigns, and that feeling strongly so rarely actually channels into doing things and having changes on the, like being able to change the outcome of any election requires actually, as well as in changing what happens after the election, of course, this is important.
Requires that constant showing up. 
Jordan. 
Yeah, I'll just, I'll just say again that I just, like, I get frustrated that people are like, oh, like this thing didn't happen.
And then I'm just like, but what did you do to effectuate it? What's your plan? Like, what's your plan to effectuate the thing you want to happen beyond complaining about it? Like, you know, so one of the. It really doesn't matter what you like, what change you want to make happen. There is, in fact, no way to do it without talking to people in a systematic way, preferably with other people, to effectuate that outside of the Outside of the ways in which corporations have created bubbles for us. And distraction. 
You need to cut through the sort of faux partisanship distraction and the algorithms that keep. That keep discussions about things that matter out of people's social media feeds.
And the only way to do that is to talk to them directly in systematic ways. And so, like, I get frustrated when people, like, they have real complaints about the world, but then the thing they do about it is complain about it. And I'm just like, well, what did you do? Are you in the arena? Right? Like, are you in the arena? I have.
There are. The one thing I try to never, like, the one thing I take very seriously is, like, when somebody has a theory of change and they're trying to effectuate it. I don't, like people say, like, oh, do you believe they did that thing? And I'll say, well, at least they're trying.
Like, at least, like, like, at least they're like, you're not going to get a criticism from me about that. But I just have. I just think I'm so frustrated with so many people who have such big feelings about the world, but they're not doing the simple things to effectuate power or change in those.
In those things. I've started to call it like, white sense, like, white nonsense. Like, it's just like you the privilege to imagine a world where the effect of what's happening is, like, it'll be okay. It'll be either way, because the reality is it probably will be for you. 
But like, marginalized folks like myself who have experienced the world as marginalized people, you'll find, are often the most pragmatic ways of thinking about politics in the world. Because we don't have the luxury of imagining it will be okay.
It's not currently, it won't be. And it won't be for our future. And like, that's just.
And it's just a real frustration. Like, again, if you have a clear. If you have big ideas and you are doing things to effectuate them that aren't simply making, you know, for the gram, like, for the Instagram, right? Showing up to something where people already agreed with you to talk about how they agree with you for the sake of it being on Instagram, so you can tell each other how you agree with you.
If you do, if that's what you're doing, don't like, you're not doing something effective. But if you're thinking about how do we make change in a way that's like, actually, these Things, talking to people, making phone calls, changing media, you know, postcarding, when it matters, right? Like all those things, like that's a real theory of change. So that's my hope to listeners is like go out and do something that, that actually actuates the values that you have.
And I will jump in just a little bit and say it, like, not just we're talking very specifically about elections, but there are also, you know, things outside of that if you, you know, like you shouldn't be complaining that your elected officials didn't do something if you did not reach out to them and maybe ask some friends to reach out to them as well. 
So I, you know, I am not a big believer in lobbying because I think that, you know, it doesn't have as much impact as I would like it to have. But you, you can't, you also can't not do it, right? It shouldn't be the only thing that you do in your time doing and you shouldn't rely upon that solely and assume that like if you just lobby then things are going to work out.
But I think one of the best things that you can do is to have a social group where part of your social, the mission of the social group is actually to do something involving electoral politics and change in the world and whatever that might be. There's tons of these groups, including one that we have right here, which is a Progressive Mass, but there are a lot of, a lot of groups that you can join, even just a group of your friends where you can be having an impact on electoral politics and be having fun at the same time. 
Yeah, I just want to say, just to your point, Anna, because I think people, I always tell people electoral politics are where change gets to confirmed or die, but it's not where change happens.
Change happens. Talking to people about issues, about the things that matter to them about their lives. That's where change happens. It happens through organizing. And that is actually different from electoral change, which is transactional, transactional by nature. I want to vote for you to get power.
But to get power, if you want it to get power to do the things you care about, then you need to do the issue organizing, the progressive mass organizing. You need to be doing things that talk about the things that affect people on a day to day, maybe a ballot initiative for raising two and a half prop override, whatever it is.
Like get off the thing about actuating the issues and the change you want to make. Yeah, I totally agree. Sorry. Agree completely. 
Oh, I'm sorry, I was muted. Jonathan, you have any thoughts or does everybody have last words before we wrap it up for today? 
No, I'll just note that my general attitude that I have kind of tried to adopt for campaigns, that I'll say that I strive to strive to, for voting and for volunteering, is to not make other people do my work for me.
That if I want to see an outcome, then if I prefer one outcome over another, I should vote for that outcome. And if I want that outcome, I should do at least something to help make it happen. 
Because, And I think that that's always a good, like, like the philosophy so that it's not like putting the burden of making that happen on other people, knowing that not everybody will have the same, not everybody has the same amounts of free time because of different kind of life constraints, et cetera. So that amount of how much investment one can even make in that varies person to person. But of that at least doing what you can to create the outcome that you want to see.
Absolutely. Well, gang, we hope that everyone has a good last few days before the election. Do your best to take it in stride.
Do, do the work that you can and not get too stressed about it. Doing the work is actually a great way to relieve your stress as well. So certainly that's, I think, what all the three of us do.
And, and if, if, as long as there's no final, final words, I will just say that you can always donate to the podcast. We have a link right below. You know, it really helps us get the word out to more people and we're incredibly grateful to the folks who do donate to us occasionally or regularly.
We have both. And on that note, yes, Jonathan, 
My parting comment is that I want to give a shout out to Jordan's cat, who has had more helpful commentary than the vast majority of television pundits. 
[Laughter]
And in fact, I wish the television pundits would sound more like that cat. Complete silence.
On that note, for the comedy routine we’ll see you all next week, thank you all. Bye.