A satisfying electioneering experience

With my busted hip, I did hardly anything on the grass roots effort to turn out Dem voters for the election -- except a little bit of texting for a couple of House districts in Pennsylvania. (Bob Brooks, PA-7, and Paige Cognetti, PA-8; both won handily amid the landslide.)

But I'm fortunate in the last couple of days to have had a chance to compare notes with a friend who was even more active on that UniteHERE (union-organized) text bank. And we agreed that, among many election persuasion and GOTV efforts, this method of reaching voters seemed one of the better ones we'd experienced.

Why so? Some thoughts:

• the approach to the voter by text ensured that those we interacted with had essentially agreed to talk with us by responding to an initial text. Presumably the system blasted out text approaches to every phone in the district. Or perhaps the recipients where selected by promising criteria like age and gender. In any case, our interactions were limited to those who responded to a text, who thus had indicated a willingness to engage. Probably 90 or 95 percent of people who got the initial text ignored it -- but the small residue were willing for interaction.

• texting volunteers were given persuasion scripts for responses, but were expected to use our good sense to amplify text conversations when needed; for example, if someone was particularly concerned about the rural health care, I was able to pull up newspaper examples of a nearby hospital threatening to close. The texting could start genuine semi-substantive conversations. And the texting medium gave us time to find a good response, something you don't always have in the moment at a door.

• a particularly successful set of text approaches included ones which attacked the incumbents our candidates were running against. "Tell me what Rob Bresnahan had done for you?" Recipients assumed we were supporting Bresnahan, when in fact we were eliciting their discontent in order to promote his opponent (Cognetti). This really got some of them talking.

• I don't know whether amid the scale of the victory of our candidates anyone is assessing how many of the people we texted with actually turned out to vote. It's certainly a drop in the bucket. But a drop is sometimes what you need and for this moment, this medium of voter contact seemed to work.

There's no question this was one of the more successful feeling election interventions I've done in recent cycles.