Campaign tactics: Bernie in Iowa

I'm a huge fan of David Weigel's wide-ranging, on-the-ground presidential campaign coverage in The Trailer at the Washington Post. Mostly the last thing I want is more email, but these dispatches are engaging and often catch whiffs of popular currents before more conventional journalists notice them.

But I was puzzled by his recent description of "the Sanders's campaign's new organizing tactic."

In Iowa during 4th of July parades (four of them!), as Bernie walked, greeted, and smiled, "campaign organizers" (does that mean staff?) followed with stickers and signs and their Bernie apps, trying to collect the names and zip codes of anyone who'd made contact with the Senator.

Weigel explains:

This is the Sanders's campaign's new organizing tactic, from a campaign that can't try enough new things. “Distributed organizing,” when it works, trains volunteers to do the work that used to be centralized by the campaign: contacting a voter who just happened to shake the candidate's hand could lead to a non-answer, a vote or a new organizer. Over two boiling summer days, the campaign signed up 1,004 voters along parade routes, all on the path toward a single goal: turning as many nonvoters as possible into Sanders voters.

I find the notion that this is some kind of novelty simply bizarre. In a retail campaign situation, it would be malpractice if campaign workers weren't chasing down those names. Bernie isn't going to get very many chances with the parade viewers.

And it would be further malpractice if the campaign wasn't finding and phoning and texting these people within 36 hours. Not enough staff to get that done? Fine -- recruit some of the new recruits to do the work. There's no better -- or more obvious -- way in a retail people-to-people campaign to lock in new supporters.

The Sanders campaign has announced that it aims to identify 25,000 volunteers in the Hawkeye state. Weigel says other campaigns call this "naive." I don't. In small scale races, which is what Iowa is, unless the campaigns are completely wasting the energy of supporters, you can usually discern who is going to win by the quantity of volunteers they attract. Successful election campaigns involve smart messaging and smart targeting, but they also also thrive on participation. More "professional" professionals than I neglect this aspect, but until you start running nationwide, and maybe even then, you need the people who will make the human contacts that bring out the vote. They are gold.

I'm still not throwing down for any of the presidential aspirants yet, and, as I always emphasize, I'll work to elect whoever wins the nomination. But I watch the tactical aspect of the campaigns with my usual curiosity and fascination. Maybe someone will invent something new ...