Political campaigns are turning to Relational Organising - "80% conversations, 20% data". But is exploiting friendship for politics the right way?
It's new to us, and came to us through this newsletter, promoting their summer school. It’s called relational organising. Here’s how they define it:
Relational organizing is the only campaign method scientifically shown to significantly increase voter turnout.
It differs from conventional campaigning in that it involves outreach to friends, family, and others in your personal network rather than strangers.
Just as with conventional campaigning, outreach can be done through a variety of channels:
Face-to-face
Phone
Text
Social media
Email
But dig in for a moment, and we found relational organising regarded as crucial for the US Democratic Party, so that they can limit damage in their mid term elections. From Politico in April of this year:
Conversations with friends, family members or neighbors are more likely to earn a voter’s support than chats with a stranger at their front door, which is the traditional way campaigns have run paid canvassing programs in the past.
And an important test case for deploying the strategy at scale came out of the Georgia Senate runoffs in 2021 when now-Sen. Jon Ossoff’s (D-Ga.) campaign, flush with nearly unlimited cash but only two months to spend it, used a paid and volunteer relational program to get people talking to acquaintances instead of strangers about the election.
In particular, the Ossoff team hired 2,800 Georgians, specifically targeting those with little or no voting history themselves to do this outreach to their own networks. The campaign was making a bet that many of the friends and family of their highly political volunteers were already engaged in the runoff election, but that this group could expand the electorate with relational outreach into their networks — which were likely to include more irregular voters or non-voters like them.
The campaign folded this data into their vast field program, tracking conversations and whether those contacted had voted. They could even notify organizers, based on their own network, which voters were tagged as “only reachable by you.”
A post-election analysis found their efforts boosted turnout by an estimated 3.8 percent among the 160,000 voters targeted through their relational program. Ossoff and now-Sen. Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) won by 1.2 points and 2.1 points respectively, flipping the state and the Senate to Democrats.
You may have noticed the phrase above: “paid relational”. Yes, that’s when you are paid to spread the political word on a candidate among friends, family and peers (rather than as a stranger at one end of a phone bank of clipboard, confronting another stranger). We are a bit perplexed: wouldn’t the discovery that you were being “paid” to promulgate a candidate, destroy the “relational” part of it?
Nevertheless, as Mother Jones magazine points out, the rise of relational organising is more about recovering traditional activist techniques, than something brand new:
Word-of-mouth and community-based activism were the backbone of the civil rights, women’s rights, farmworkers’, and labor movements. Political parties once had their own local networking machines, for better or worse, facilitated by free holiday turkeys, reliable snowplowing, and government jobs for somebody’s nephew.
But in the second half of the 20th century, just as more Americans gained access to the ballot box, campaigns turned to consumer-based approaches like television advertising, and mass marketing became the primary way politicians reached voters.
As Madison Avenue and opinion pollsters continued to remake politics as a business, the people-based movements of the 1960s—civil rights, feminism, environmentalism—fractured into specific issue-based advocacy organizations in the 1970s, according to Johns Hopkins political scientist Hahrie Han. Direct-mail campaign tactics drew on marketing innovations, and armchair activists were encouraged to cut checks—not take to the streets.
Today, in the era of big data, microtargeted Facebook ads, and Instagram influencers, voters are widely seen as something to be activated, not people with agency. In 2018, Han and her colleague Paul Speer noted that campaigns had begun to use the abbreviation RP to refer to “‘real people’—as in ‘We have to find some RPs to stand behind the candidate,’” exemplifying “how professionalization of politics has turned ordinary people into pawns.”
“If people start to feel like they don’t really have a voice in democracy and they’re basically an interchangeable cog, then they disengage from it,” Han warns. “And that’s bad for democracy overall.” It’s ultimately self-defeating for campaign consultants, too. As voters drift away, putting together a winning electoral coalition becomes more elusive.
[Campaign manager:] “I like to say relational organizing is 80 percent field, 20 percent technology…Nothing replaces the actual human interactions.” Letting the tech do the work—say, by using a scripted text prompt instead of a message written by a friend—inevitably has a different effect. Suddenly the target voter is back to being a consumer rather than a partner.
“Part of the reason why this stuff is effective is because it’s authentic,” [says another campaign manager] “If you take away that authenticity from it, and you make people feel like cogs in the machine, then their enthusiasm isn’t going to be as strong. The recipients of the message are going to know it’s not real.”
This is fascinating material - but we wonder whether it potentially sows more cynicism among electors and citizens than even the top-down bombardment of political marketing. How much can trust levels really be increased, when day-to-day political systems are so broken and corrupt - and experienced as such by people?
We are trying to articulate the CANs - citizen action or community agency networks - as containers that can renew the social bond, by means of social envisioning, and the adoption of new tools for producing and deciding. That seems to us to require new, humane and flexible structures, than just harnessing the power of family, community and friendship to the same old frustrating and disappointing political system.
More on relational organising here. And if you want to sign up to the Smart Politics summer school, go here.