Long story short?
Sure.
He and his advisors are living in the present…maybe even a little into the future…when it comes to digital and personal contact with potential voters.
Why do I say that?
Read on.
From Politico (Emphases mine):
Here’s What Beto Could Unleash on Trump
He almost beat Ted Cruz. Could he take down Donald Trump? Inside the radical campaign strategy of Beto O’Rourke. By Sasha Issenberg, February 22, 2019
AUSTIN, Texas–With rain hammering outside, Zack Malitz stood in a warehouse space lit by strands of bistro lights and began to reveal the campaign strategy of Beto O’Rourke in exacting detail. Malitz, who was the field director of O’Rourke’s Senate campaign, is a tall 30-year-old with thick glasses and a haircut that over the course of an election season can drift inexorably toward mopheadedness. He laid out the exact numbers of potential voters the campaign believed it should try to reach, how many of those voters had a cellphone contact available, and–with a bit of arithmetic–a critical sum that would drive the campaign’s final push: the exact figure of volunteer phone-bank shifts he believed would be necessary to win the state.
This kind of granular campaign information is normally considered top secret, the kind of thing strategists guard behind passwords and fire underlings upon suspicion of leaking. If Malitz’s talk had resided in an encrypted PowerPoint presentation on a private server, it would have amounted to a creditable haul for a shift at the WikiLeaks home office. And if O’Rourke mounts a challenge to Donald Trump in 2020, that presentation may offer the purest encapsulation of how he might do it.
Yet Malitz was sharing it publicly, to hundreds of people who had seen an online call for supporters and decided to show up that day. It was September 15, less than two months before the Senate election, and nearly 2,000 people had registered for the stop on the campaign’s Plan to Win tour. More than 800 had ultimately traveled, through a rainstorm to a part of East Austin not known for available public parking, to attend.
“The plan to win is actually pretty simple,” Malitz said at the outset, his voice echoing from a handheld microphone. “Build a voter contact machine that enables thousands of volunteers in every single one of Texas’ 254 counties to have conversations with more voters across the state than any campaign in Texas history.”
For Democrats, that history was dismal. Malitz reminded his audience that the most recent presidential candidate to carry the state was Jimmy Carter, in 1976, and that no Democrat has won statewide office since 1994–the party’s longest losing streak in any state in the country. No Democrat running for Senate has come within even 10 percentage points of defeating an incumbent Republican in four decades. To construct a different fate in a midterm election, O’Rourke’s campaign would need to conjure 1 million votes from outside the current pool of active voters–in essence, create an entirely new electorate within the state’s borders.
This goal was so audacious that Malitz first had to convince his audience it was even demographically possible. He explained that the campaign’s data analysts had identified 5.5 million Texas voters who would be likely to support O’Rourke, but were not yet likely to vote in the 2018 election. The plan, he told his audience, was to go after every last one of them: at doorsteps, by text message and over phone calls launched by something Malitz called the Beto Dialer. All told, this would mean tens of millions of attempts to reach some of Texas’ most politically elusive citizens.
What was most radical was not the grandiosity of the rhetoric–lines about engaging everyone, especially nonvoters, are boilerplate in many Democratic speeches–but that a Texas Democrat could even have such a goal within his grasp. To meet it, O’Rourke’s campaign would need to pour fuel onto its already explosive growth, quickly adding thousands more unpaid callers, texters and block walkers to its ranks. The crowded rows before Malitz attested to the fact that O’Rourke could summon this level of volunteer manpower, but managing it all was a separate challenge. Building an organization of this scale might typically require months, even a year, of hiring and training field workers, then gradually seasoning them for new responsibilities. O’Rourke’s campaign had weeks.
“OK, so here we go!” Malitz exclaimed.
The mood swerved from TED talk to revival meeting. “If you’ve got space–a garage, your home, your business–that you’d like to donate for a pop-up, please stand up right now,” Malitz said. As people rose from their seats, Malitz summoned a round of applause–and then a dozen campaign staffers guided them to paperwork that would lock down their commitment. Then the same exercise for those volunteers who would manage a pop-up office or lead training for phone banks and block walks. Just minutes after having introduced his crowd to this mammoth project for the first time, Malitz had inducted hundreds of them into leadership roles.
At the same time Malitz was making his Plan to Win presentation in Austin, his deputy, Katelyn Coghlan, was reading from the same script in Houston to 354 attendees. Malitz had already given the pitch in Dallas and Denton, and was about to drive his Ford F-150, its backseat littered with Rockstar energy drinks and the Almanac of American Politics, to San Antonio to do it once more. Over events that weekend and the preceding one in Texas’ six largest cities, attendees committed to fill nearly 15,000 volunteer shifts.
Everything may be bigger in Texas, but when a three-term El Paso congressman set out to run for Senate the year before, there had been no reason to expect his campaign would reach such mammoth proportions. (It ended up with a staff similar in size to Donald Trump’s entire national organization in 2016.) For nearly a year, Malitz had been instilling in his team a relentless focus on growth at any cost, happy to trade away precision and accountability for scale. Along the way, they were happy to violate a number of shibboleths about how modern Democratic campaigns are supposed to operate.
O’Rourke is now on the precipice of running for president with “losing Senate candidate” as the most impressive line on his résumé. It was how he chose to run that campaign last year that sets him apart from his potential Democratic rivals. O’Rourke cast aside the hard-won heirlooms of Barack Obama’s campaigns: a vogue for data science, the grooming of a professional organizing class and a dedication to the humanism of one-on-one tutelage. Instead, his campaign followed principles that more closely resemble what Silicon Valley types call “hyperscale”–a system flexible enough to expand at exponential speed, paired with an understanding that getting big quickly can excuse and justify all kinds of other shortcomings.
In political terms, it amounted to a massive bet on a strategy of mobilizing infrequent voters instead of trying to win over dependable ones. National campaign strategists are paying close attention to how O’Rourke did it: Few candidates have committed as fully, if a bit recklessly, to the belief that a monomaniacal focus on large-scale turnout is the most powerful tool Democrats have to capitalize on their latent numerical majority in the United States.
—snip—
O’Rourke, who spent part of his 20s touring as a member of the band Foss, often spoke of bringing a punk rock sensibility to electioneering, and the valorized amateurism of the big-organizing approach fit well. The candidate spent much of his time behind the wheel of his minivan, often addressing voters live through an iPhone, a homespun form of travel that obscured a sophisticated online-fundraising chassis hidden beneath. “Driving this Dodge Caravan across Texas, it’s just us driving ourselves,” O’Rourke would say after one campaign stop in Midland. “There’s no private jet, no consultant, no pollster saying this is the message you have to say to this group or that.”
—snip—
O’Rourke dismissed his three kids to play basketball outside, killing the hootenanny vibe. Now in fireside-chat mode, O’Rourke talked a bit about the history of his El Paso home, his grounding in the “binational community” that spanned the Rio Grande to Ciudad Juárez, and the nine months he spent knocking on neighbors’ doors during his first run for Congress. “It was this beautiful, powerful, slow-building door-by-door wave that allowed us to connect with those whom we wanted to serve and represent. So I’m not going to ask you to do anything that I have not done,” O’Rourke said, as his wife, Amy, eased back into the frame. “Do not worry if you have never done this before. The days of campaign pros dictating how campaigns are run are over.”
—snip—
At the outset, Wysong planned around a modest statewide budget–“It felt like if we could get to $20 million, we could probably hang,” he said–that would require the field operation to be both very fast and very cheap. But O’Rourke’s dynamic digital presence turned out to be ideal for bringing in money. National party committees were still writing him off as too much of a long shot to fund, but small-dollar donors took to O’Rourke’s candidacy, especially as he associated himself with positions–Trump’s impeachment, abolishing ICE, likening the criminal-justice system to Jim Crow–that few other Democratic Senate contenders were willing to touch.
The campaign raised a remarkable $10 million in the second quarter of the year–more than twice what Cruz did.
—snip—
Malitz expected his field staff to sign up for volunteer shifts, instructing them “we will eat our own dog food,” and in that spirit several of his colleagues had come to the Hideaway that morning, as well. As she waited for the noon shift to begin, Emily Guzman Sufrin opened her laptop to monitor some of the conversations that volunteers were already having with voters. Sufrin’s prior job had been far from politics, as a curatorial assistant helping to put on the Whitney Biennial contemporary-art exhibition in New York, but she had grown frustrated with the small real-world impact she could have at a museum. She made plans to attend law school at the University of Texas, and while waiting to enroll, volunteered for O’Rourke’s campaign. Within weeks she was offered a job. Sixty percent of the field organizers that would be hired had never before been involved in an electoral campaign; three-quarters had not worked as a staffer on one. “We didn’t hire people with political experience,” said Malitz. “We just hired true believers who are brand-new to politics.”
—snip—
[The Cruz] strategy relied on the assumption that it wouldn’t help Cruz to mount an aggressive defense of his record. “Our entire plan was to make it about Beto as long as possible,” said Roe. “Just let the guy go.” What shocked Roe was how readily O’Rourke obliged.
—snip—
When O’Rourke’s team released his Plan to Win in mid-September, with its bold ambition to remake the electorate by drawing out a million new voters, Roe studied it long enough to know he did not need to take it seriously. The numerical goal ran afoul of a Roe axiom to distrust round numbers on activity reports. (“Always add a 12 or something to it and make it look real,” one adviser had advised junior staffers.) “I think if they would have used a number that was more realistic, it would have meant more to me,” said Roe. That one integer, in his view, obscured a more monumental grandiosity. “The theory of his case is that he has to turn out Democrats and unusual voters, and the Republicans can’t turn out,” he said. “Our theory of the case is: We need every Republican to go vote.”
—snip—
A late September appearance in Austin with Willie Nelson, during which O’Rourke joined the headliner on several songs, drew a reported 55,000 people–more than either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump were reported to have had at any of their 2016 rallies. With an impressive roster of celebrity fans, including LeBron James and Béyoncé, it was not difficult to imagine O’Rourke replicating or exceeding the Austin attendance in a number of Texas’ large cities.
—snip—
Wysong decided to take the country’s biggest new political celebrity and effectively send him underground for the biggest weekend of the year. When O’Rourke began Saturday morning by turning on Facebook Live from a phone affixed to the dashboard of his minivan, the Dallas skyline was visible through the rear windshield. But the candidate said nothing more about his destination. “The band is back, we’re in the van, and we’re gonna go do some block-walking,” O’Rourke said, from behind a pair of garishly orange sunglasses handed out by the fast-food chain Whataburger. (A total of 46,000 people ended up watching this part of O’Rourke’s day on Facebook Live.) Joined by his wife and a pair of staffers, with his children and other family members trailing in another vehicle, O’Rourke never identified where in Dallas he spent the day canvassing; later in the day he drove to Plano, and knocked on doors there.
Only at night, after the final shift of the day had ended, did O’Rourke attend a public event, a Blockwalk Celebration at a Dallas record store, where field organizers would welcome those who volunteered on Saturday and try to recommit them for shifts on Sunday and beyond. The next day he did the same thing in Austin and San Antonio. It was a perverse manifestation of the mobilization-over-persuasion dynamic that had grounded much of the campaign’s strategy since its outset. The only way for local stations to feature the candidate on their evening newscasts that weekend, typically an obsession of communications staffers seeking a last chance to reach late-deciding voters, was to use grainy, message-free homemade video of him walking suburban sidewalks.
A few people in the field room kept a muted Facebook Live window open on their computers while tending to other tasks, occasionally sharing updates with colleagues on O’Rourke’s canvassing movements. “The beauty of what’s happening now is it doesn’t have any effect on the field operation,” said Malitz, “so we can do our thing.”
When the votes were counted on election night, the final tally showed O’Rourke had lost by just over 2 points. It was a far narrower margin than most pundits and handicappers had anticipated, which gave rise to a sense both inside and outside the campaign that even in electoral defeat O’Rourke could claim to have accomplished something remarkable.
Since Election Day, Wysong has been making the rounds of Democratic Party elites to discuss the 2018 campaign and whether it represents a useful foundation for O’Rourke to mount a presidential bid in 2020.
Total turnout was above 8.3 million, a number much closer to what would be expected in a presidential election than a midterm year. (More Texans voted in the 2018 Senate race than in the 2008 presidential election, although the state has had a fast-growing population over that decade.) “Did we accomplish historical voter turnout in Texas? Yes. Was it enough to put us over the top? No,” Malitz shrugged two days after the election, as his team was emptying out its offices before leases expired. “It’s politics in the age of Trump. Historical data only means so much.”
—snip—
Like I said…real grassroots.
I think that an approach like that can win nationally, but I don’t know if it can win in primaries. Bringing out “non-voters” is one thing, but brining out…and changing the minds of…registered Democrats is another thing entirely. They would almost have to persuade large numbers of habitual non-voters to register en masse as Democrats, and do so early enough to qualify as primary voters.
We shall ee.
Personally?
I think O’Rourke’s going for it.
Wishful thinking?
Maybe.
Sometimes dreams do come true.
Later…
AG
