Should I sign up to volunteer for a local congressional candidate?

August 21, 2022 11:07 AM

So it turns out I happen to live in one of the most competitive House districts in the US this year (NC 13th) and I was thinking of getting more involved in politics than normal given... everything. I already donated to the Democratic candidate and will do my own advocating near the election, but I was trying to decide if I should officially sign up with them. There are older questions about this, but does anyone have recent experience with signing up to volunteer using sites Mobilize?

Due to anxieties I have absolutely no interest in doing phone banks or in person canvassing, so I was wondering if officially signing up as a volunteer will do anything other than get my phone number and email on more spam lists than it already is. It sounds like another volunteer would probably text me to coordinate, but I'm not really sure what would be involved if I don't want to do phone banks or canvassing. I think I would probably feel LESS comfortable advocating for a candidate online if I was an "official volunteer" because of the implied bias so I only want to sign up if it would actually help in some way. I do think their digital presence could definitely be better as I only found out they were my candidate because I searched my address and happen to live one block from the district dividing line.

posted by JZig to Law & Government (8 answers total)

If you’re willing to text rather than call, a lot of campaigns are doing that now
posted by rikschell at 11:21 AM on August 21, 2022

In my neck of the woods, you sign up and someone gets in touch to see when you can sign up for a shift for canvassing or phone banking.

From my own experience, you can help canvas without talking to anyone- it's usually pretty helpful to have someone do the driving while someone else does the actual door knocking. Or you might be able to stay at the campaign HQ and prep literature or sign people in and out.
posted by damayanti at 11:24 AM on August 21, 2022

Rather than signing up through a site like Mobilize, I'd recommend getting in touch with the campaign directly (there should be a number on their website) and asking about the things damayanti mentioned above, and also postcard writing campaigns.
posted by maggiemaggie at 11:28 AM on August 21, 2022

My experience in flipping a very competitive house district in 2018 was that the candidate's team mostly needed bodies for text banking and in person canvassing (and yes, being a driver and not a talker was definitely an option for this). The local Democrats (in my case it was a county-level Democratic group) were more eager to have help with sign distribution, coordinating at local volunteer events, tech help, letter-writing to local publications, and micro-level turnout stuff like driving voters to polls and helping people get their absentee ballots filled out correctly.
posted by minervous at 11:31 AM on August 21, 2022

Seconding what everyone above said. Other than phonebanking and canvassing they need people to do other things -- texting (so easy!) and writing postcards/letters, lit drop, logistics, etc. If you can tolerate getting a few more emails, I'd encourage you to sign up with not just the campaign (which is working with DCCC), but also other independent orgs doing this work, the reason being that the style and organizational competence really varies, and you might find one much more to your taste. I'm in Portland but I ended up spending most of my volunteer time in 2020 with a couple of SF groups because I just loved how they ran their events. For example, NC-13 is one of Swing Left's target races.
posted by bread-eater at 12:31 PM on August 21, 2022

I've done text-banking. They'll have some sort of software that where you push a button to send out the texts and lets you select scripted responses to send if anyone replies. I would say of the people I texted, roughly 95% didn't respond at all, and of the responses, most were STOP (in which case they were removed from the list). There were a small number of positive responses or questions, and a smaller number of negative responses (and a handful of those were abusive). Nowadays, I think most of the texts probably get filtered as spam.
posted by amarynth at 12:56 PM on August 21, 2022

In addition to the above, some local campaigns here use postcards as a get out the vote (GOTV) tactic, so see if you could do that.
Also, contact your local Democratic Party office/organization, they often coordinate district-wide efforts.
One other thing you could do is to check with your local elections office to see if Voting Observers is A Thing where you live. It can be soooo helpful to the Dems to have Democrat observers, in addition to the usual conspiracy nuts, I mean Republicans.
And thank you!!
posted by dbmcd at 2:28 PM on August 21, 2022

I share your desire to avoid door-knocking or phone-banking. If you're the more literate type, you could write GOTV letters through Vote Forward, which has a current campaign for NC-13. Progressive Turnout Project also has a Neighborhood Letters campaign active in North Carolina (you'll have to scroll down the page to learn about it). I've worked with both organizations. In Vote Forward's case, they determined (through the magic of controlled experiments) that they turned out 126K swing state voters in 2020 who wouldn't have voted had they not received a letter urging them to vote. I know less about the Neighborhood Letters campaign because I live in Illinois, but the organization as a whole is solid and does good work helping activists like you make a difference.
posted by DrGail at 2:51 PM on August 21, 2022