Gillian Flaccus/AP Photo
Voting by mail in Oregon, 2018
Campaign offices are closed. Door-knocking has stopped. Meet-and-greets are canceled. But the race for many candidates across the country goes on.
For any politician, shaking hands and kissing babies is second nature. But for insurgent candidates who rely heavily on community organizing and small-dollar donations, being visible and available to voters is crucial. The coronavirus, the preventive social-distancing measures, and the resulting economic insecurity mean completely transforming the entire campaign operations for grassroots candidates in the United States.
“We were planning for this phase of the campaign to be where we really began to ramp up,” says Missouri congressional candidate Cori Bush. “It’s almost like launching the campaign all over again.” Bush, of St. Louis, is a longtime organizer and pastor, and was a leader in the Ferguson mobilization in 2014. The coronavirus has stunted her ability to make face-to-face connections, which is her usual campaigning approach.
To make up for what would have been in-person events, the Bush campaign is leaning on digital tools to keep up her campaign’s momentum. Town halls are now on Facebook Live, and phone-banking with her team of volunteers at the campaign office is now a solitary task at home.
Grassroots campaigns across the country have taken the same tack. Alexandra Rojas, director of the progressive organizing group Justice Democrats, argues that these candidates may be even better suited than traditional campaigns to respond to such changes. She explains that most grassroots campaigns have younger candidates and staff members who are already competent in navigating online tools and accustomed to working with limited resources.
Another candidate for Congress, in Massachusetts, Robbie Goldstein, has become a double public servant, campaigning for office while continuing to work as an infectious-disease doctor. The Goldstein campaign has been preparing to convert to a pandemic-ready campaign since Goldstein first warned his staff of the news and data he was seeing from China.
“I have been talking to my campaign about pandemics and COVID-19 since the beginning of January,” Goldstein says. “We were having conversations about transitioning to a virtual platform and how to build up our digital space so people can follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, and making sure that we put in the necessary measures to still meet voters online.”
Goldstein transitioned campaign events to online platforms like Zoom, Google Hangouts, and social media platforms, as have candidates from across the country at every level of government up to the Democratic presidential candidates Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden.
“It’s hard, as an infectious-disease doctor, to hear what comes out of the president and out of the administration’s response to the pandemic,” Goldstein says. “I think in particular the response that we saw in January and February was disappointing for someone who has literally trained for a decade in how to respond to a pandemic, and I saw what was coming … It was very clear to those of us who have the knowledge and expertise that this was going to hit America hard.”
For higher-profile races, this time in quarantine could make the difference on Election Day. Senate candidates running against well-known incumbents, in addition to turning to their digital tools, are finding creative campaign solutions that work for their respective states.
In the Palmetto State, underdog Jaime Harrison will be up against Trump-adjacent Republican Lindsey Graham. Harris had a 46-county state tour planned, where he hoped to stop in untraditional locales to connect with voters, says his campaign manager, Zack Carroll.
Three weeks ago, the Harrison campaign had to transition the tour to a series of localized digital events. Carroll says that instead of being in barbecue restaurants and gas stations across South Carolina, Harrison is doing Facebook Live events that are planned to focus on one part of the state at a time.
A lifelong South Carolinian, Harrison has been conscious that not all of his state has access to broadband internet and elderly voters may not be as keen to connect with a candidate on Facebook. So they’ve switched to phone-in town halls as well, where Harrison can still take questions and make connections.
In Maine, Betsy Sweet, the Democratic challenger to Sen. Susan Collins, has been taking a similar approach. “I think part of what we’re saying is what I’d do if I was in the Senate,” Sweet says. At her social media events, Sweet says she makes the connection between Collins’s votes in the Senate, including those that challenged the effectiveness of the Affordable Care Act and a vote for the 2017 tax bill, and today’s uncertainty in Maine.
“They’re scared to death that they’re going to lose their income,” Sweet says of people in Maine right now. She has responded by helping in the community where she can and listening to people’s immediate concerns. But the financial difficulties of community members are likely to translate into financial difficulties for the campaign.
The ability to raise money has been seriously hurt by the coronavirus. In addition to the lack of fundraising opportunities, grassroots candidates cannot rely on the usual community support for small-dollar, recurring contributions as people’s jobs become less stable or are lost completely.
Compared to other campaigns that accept political action committee money or support from the ultra-wealthy, grassroots candidates begin at a disadvantage financially. Where another campaign may be able to immediately invest in digital advertising, promotional videos optimized for social media, and website improvements (à la Mike Bloomberg’s 2020 presidential campaign), most others will have difficult budget-allocation decisions to make.
“It’s not just because right now is looking a little bleak or a little rough. It’s because we don’t know what a month from now looks like,” Cori Bush says. “So for us, at this time, we wanted to be ramping up every month our fundraising. It should look better than it did the month before now. And instead we’re in a place where we don’t know if we’ll even look as good as we did last month.”
Many candidates with community-organizing backgrounds are returning to those roles. Some are using their campaign platforms to share information about how to support small businesses and nonprofit groups in their communities and diverting some of their fundraising to specifically help vulnerable citizens, like the elderly and those who have lost their jobs.
Campaigns also have to consider factors well outside of their control. Events and opportunities to connect with voters run by outside groups have not all transitioned online. And when it comes to balloting, basic details as well as election security are still up in the air.
Most remaining states in the Democratic presidential primary have pushed back voting. The U.S. has a decentralized election system, which means that these decisions happen at the state level, so candidates must prepare for different rules and potential rule changes.
Across the country, it’s unclear whether it will be safe to vote in person at the polls in the coming months. And not every state is equipped to accept the predictably high number of vote-by-mail ballots, through early or absentee voting systems (where, again, the rules differ in each state).
“Even though our primary’s August 4, we don’t know if everything will be straightened out and better by then to have the election that day. One of our municipal elections was pushed back form April to June: So if those aren’t able to happen in June, we don’t know what’s going to happen in August,” Bush says, of the situation in St. Louis. “Right now we really just don’t know. Vote-by-mail would be good in some aspect, but if we aren’t getting the information out properly and if we don’t have the right system in place to make sure that these elections are clean, then that would not be a benefit … It’s just so many variables.”
Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) sponsored a bill to institute mandatory vote-by-mail where there are isolation measures recommended by the state government. The bill would pay for the cost of printing ballots, prepaid postage for their returns, and the cost of high-speed counting machines.
This measure, however, will be harder for some states to implement than others. In Wyden’s home state, about 96 percent of voters already use vote-by-mail, which has been widely available for the last 20 years. However, in 11 other states, voting by mail must be done with a pre-approved excuse and isn’t used nearly as much.
“We don’t do this work because it’s easy. We do it because it’s hard,” Rojas says. “We have to focus on the things that we can control, so we don’t go crazy.”
