(The second entry in an ongoing series on campaign strategy, data, and tactics for socialist political action)
After publishing our last article, the strategists of the successful Alex Brower for District 3 campaign talked as a group to make sure we were not revealing campaign secrets. We didn’t want to share confidential info about tactics or strategy that future opposition candidates could use against us.
But we couldn’t think of any “secret sauce” we were revealing. And besides some minor tactical details, we couldn’t think of anything we couldn’t share going forward.
This victory happened because we had committed volunteers working tirelessly to engage with voters, and had a party apparatus that complimented and organized this process.
In this article, we will share both soft and hard data about campaign volunteering. We will focus on what volunteers and campaign staff told us that drove people to spend hours phone banking or going door-to-door, and also share some internal campaign stats.
First, let’s get a sense of the scale of this effort. Every number here is the result of thousands of volunteer hours.
| Metric | Value |
| Unique Volunteers | 151 |
| Volunteer Shifts | 881 |
| Doors Knocked | 24,129 |
| Dials Made | 39,942 |
| Texts Sent | 58,127 |
| Emails Sent | 275,144 |
| People Canvassed | 4,506 |
| Yard Signs | 280 |
| District 3 4/1 Registered Voters | 26,433 |
| District 3 4/1 Voters (Total) | 17,231 |
| District 3 4/1 Voters (Common Council Race) | 15,294 |
Summed up, there were a total of 611 unique days of volunteering, and a total of 881 volunteer shifts. There were 17,231 people who actually cast a vote in the Aldermanic race, so that means we talked to ~26% of all voters, or ~17% of all registered voters. That’s a lot of people talking to a lot of voters.
What got volunteers out?
We asked people across the campaign – volunteers, staff, and even the candidate – why they volunteered or why they thought others spent their precious free time helping with the election. Here’s what we learned:
- Getting involved in chapter activities: People join the Milwaukee DSA because they want to make change, and near-daily canvassing events are a great way to get involved.
- Socialism: The average District 3 voter, in my experience, has a positive view towards Milwaukee’s Sewer Socialist past. At primary and general forums, the majority of candidates described themselves as socialist or socialist-adjacent. The rising popularity of AOC and Bernie – two self-described democratic socialists – helped too.
- The candidate: People loved Alex Brower’s record, his energy, and how he activated the local DSA chapter; and they wanted to help him win the election.
- Talking to voters: Going door to door is a unique opportunity to learn more about the district and what voters care about in their community. Some people really enjoy this.
Beyond what volunteers told us directly, the campaign had a few thoughts about what we did to encourage people to show up:
Bold Ideas at the Right Time
A sitting elected official asked Alex after the election how to get the canvassers we had. His answer was simple – you need to become a socialist.
Any volunteer could have spent their time getting paid, canvassing for Elon-funded Brad Schimel. We even met some of these canvassers when we were going door-to-door, and one told us they were paid $1/door. But people canvassing for the DSA campaign were motivated by the issues we were bringing up with voters and DSA ideology. We were eager to communicate our vision.
People want to see their vision of society becoming realized, and volunteering was the way they could take action and change the world to more closely align with the future they want.
The Milwaukee DSA campaigned on replacing We Energies with a municipal cooperative during a winter where people were getting sticker shock from their rising utility bills. At one house, a woman showed me her phone’s screen – she was on the We Energies site paying her bill on her phone as she answered the door. That made for an easy conversation.
It’s daunting to go door to door, saying we will try our hardest to change ownership of a ubiquitous company that constituents give money to each month. But volunteers would tell us that large goals like this are what drew them in to help, and discussions around these big ideas resonated with voters when we knocked on their doors.
Cultivating Canvassers
The typical phone bank canvasses voters by cold-calling their telephone numbers, but we had a separate operation specifically for calling volunteers to see if they could do some shifts.
At fundraisers and events, campaign staff would walk the room and get attendees to sign up and commit to some shifts. The day before or the day of shifts, they would be called to confirm they would be showing up.
Every call to action would lead to someone asking another volunteer a “hard ask” – asking if they could spend time knocking doors, phone banking, or coming to an event or fundraiser. This personal touch is missing in today’s era of algorithmic feeds and robo messages.
The DSA members were used to this – the “Power to the People” campaign has been going for a long time, and this campaign was similar to previous canvassing for municipalizing We Energies.
Some of the canvassers and campaign staff went through the DSA’s Milwaukee Socialist Organizer Class. This allowed people to grow from ideologically motivated individuals to active organizers in the community, and was invaluable for training for the campaign. There will likely be another iteration of this class in the future, for those interested.
Making it Fun and Valuable
It was so important to make volunteering a rewarding and social experience.
We met for canvassing at Rochambo, a coffee shop on Brady Street. People would come in early to chat, then directly before the canvas we would all do introductions, and after we would meet up again to debrief and talk about our experience with voters.
Normally canvassers were paired up to do turf together. This gave volunteers the chance to get to know each other better and form networks of connections through the group.
When someone got called and asked “would you like to canvas this weekend,” we wanted them to remember the comradery and community and say “Yes.” People like being part of an inclusive and capable team.
Empowering Collective Action
There was no hierarchy at canvassing shifts. No leader is above the work of another volunteer, and everyone did everything. People freely shared suggestions, and some of the most effective moments came from the combinations of multiple people’s ideas.
Some people would show up, never having canvassed before, but rose up to the challenge.
Committee meetings were open to volunteers and decisions were made as a group, even with people that were just joining for canvassing for the first time.
If someone made a claim or theory that others thought were wrong, another person would challenge it. We were kind, but there was a culture of making sure we were all on the same page.
Campaign Stats
Now let’s look at some breakdowns of canvassers based on internal statistics.
Note that this is only counting walking canvassers. I tried to run this analysis to include phone banking, but there were some anomalies in this data and I wanted to keep this simple – so these stats are just walk canvasses, and are not representative of all contacts.
This is total unique walk volunteers and total walk canvasses for each week, starting on a Monday. The blue / left axis is how many total door knocks were performed that week, and the red / right axis is the amount of unique volunteers that performed door knocking that week. So each color of bar is a different scale.
We can see a steady growth in unique volunteers over time, interspersed with anomalies from successful canvassing events.
The last week is short because it was only two days (3/31 and 4/01) vs the other bars which represent seven days. If we adjusted this to match the proportion of values to days, it would tower over the other columns – a ton of people came out to knock doors the days leading up to the election.
The weeks of 2/10 and 2/17 are high because of the 02/18 primary. There was a big canvassing push before the primary, and a lot of excitement around Brower getting the most votes than the other seven candidates.
This is a graph of the amount of successful canvasses each volunteer made. Note this is distinct from “doors knocked” since we knocked most doors more than once.
In this case the top 10 volunteers (top 12.5%) made ~50% of the total canvassing attempts. The canvassers with the most attempts are people more involved with the Milwaukee DSA and campaign; putting in hours long before the primary.
The pattern on the graph resembles a “power law” or 1/f distribution, characteristic of complex, fractal, and interconnected systems. It’s the same curve as the scaling of cities from largest to smallest, which words are used most frequently, or neural connectivity in our brains.
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Next time, we’ll finally stop talking about the election. We will dive into the Milwaukee DSA’s strategy to help with the day-to-day constituent services, and explain how we are channeling our people power into directly supporting our communities.
Are you looking for an opportunity to help your community? Join the Milwaukee DSA – we’ll find a way to get you involved.
