What Could Year-Round Organizing Look Like?
By: Mark Gavin
Tags: Ohio, Democrats, Ohio Democratic Party, Democratic Party

The “Drop-in, fly-out” style of organizing needs to end. Organizers are often the face of the party wherever they’re based yet when statewide and presidential elections end, they’re the first out of a job. Without an organizer on the ground for 2 1/2 years, volunteer infrastructure is left to atrophy until a new organizer is hired to fill the void for the next statewide election. At this point, they are most likely going to meet a gauntlet of rejection from disenchanted former volunteers and have to start from scratch.

The way we fix this is through year-round organizing. But what does that look like?

Community Organizing

A clear way to win the communities that ODP claims as their base is to organize around issues they’re facing on a daily basis. When you get outside of the party bubble and actually talk to the voters who we rely on to deliver wins for us, they mostly sing the same tune: You come around every few years, ask me what I care about then ask me for my vote. Then you’re gone.

This idea that the Democratic Party is only out for votes is hard to combat when we only knock on their door to ask them to vote for our candidates. When we ask people what they care about, it shouldn’t be so we can check off boxes on our canvass script. Rather, it’s a chance to identify problems in their community and work with them to find solutions.

Local Elections

Next year, Ohio will have thousands of local elections from mayors, to city councils, to school boards. One thing that David Pepper and the Party has done a great job at is focusing on local elections across the state. We should double down on those efforts by rolling 2020 volunteers into these campaigns. Winning these seats not only helps us build a Democratic bench for the future but it also ensures that we have good Democrats elected throughout the state.

Allyship

The Ohio Dems has many allies across the left. From reproductive rights to labor to environmental justice. we can make these friends into true partners in the work if we join their campaigns during “off-year” elections. Providing boots on the ground organizing for these groups not only helps strengthen relations between them and the Party, but it’s also another great way to keep volunteers involved.

How?

The simple answer is that we need to prioritize organizing staff. The party always has some form of outreach but to maintain the infrastructure built during statewide election years, we have to have people who are based in the communities they’re serving.

More than that though, we need to reimagine what we see when we envision an organizer. Too often we think the answer is a recent college grad, often white and from a well-off family. We tend to ignore the wealth of life and organizing experience that already lies in the areas we seek to mobilize. We deny interviews based on access to transportation, age, education level, and- frankly- race. The best people to organize in these communities are the people from them. These exclusions water down the applicant pool which creates cultural barriers for organizers and potential volunteers.

ODP also has to always maintain some form of control over their organizing team. Even when presidential campaigns come into the state. Being able to keep familiar organizers in their community is imperative to continued volunteer engagement past Election Day.