Off-year election: a testing time

There's an important election on November 5. If you don't live in Virginia, you might not have focused on this. Democrats have a chance, if they win a few more seats in the state legislature, to take a majority. That matters, because the maps the Republicans drew after the last census were thrown out by a federal court for constituting an illegal race-based gerrymander. If Dems win this year, they'll be in position to stop a repeat during reapportionment in 2021. (Yes, it just never stops.)

Sitting far away on an island in the ocean, there's not much I can to do help. But I took the chance to participate in one of the many expedients campaigns are developing to use the energy of far-flung supporters -- as much as participant research as anything else.

The Moms Rising Education Fund is working (without taking a partisan stance) to encourage infrequent voters to turn out in this election. They sent me five stamped postcards pre-addressed to five people thought unlikely to vote without a nudge. All I had to do was write short notes about the value of their vote and drop them in the mail. This wasn't demanding.

What does this sort of effort do in a campaign? I've written often about the gargantuan scale of volunteer effort necessary to make this kind of approach meaningful. (See this from the Obama campaign in 2008.) An awful lot of volunteer hours can yield a tiny number of votes -- though you want those votes. Contacting infrequent voters can increase their likelihood to vote, but research confirms that the effectiveness of contacts depends considerably on how close and personal that contact is. By far the best contact is the neighbor at the door, followed by a very well trained and competent canvasser, if possible from the same race or language group as the voter. Phone calls mostly are pretty ineffective, especially from remote paid canvassers. Direct mail, robocalls, and lawn signs probably do more to add to the profits of campaign vendors than to getting out the vote.

Sometimes novel methods can increase turnout. As long ago as 1994 in San Francisco, turnout phone calls in English had lost their usefulness. But language appropriate calls to voters most comfortable in Spanish and Cantonese seemed to go well and perhaps increase turnout. Anecdotal reports (and perhaps research I haven't seen) suggest text messages drove some turnout in 2018. I would expect that medium to lose its utility quickly if widely adopted. For a less skeptical view of texting, this paper leans on a concept the authors call "Noticeable Reminder Theory ." Trouble is, what if the random political text becomes just another bit of noise in an over-crowded information environment clamoring for attention? This has been the fate of most novel voter contact tactics.

Yet it remains the case that campaigns too often don't ever touch significant groups of voters -- often people of color or young people.

... Latino and Asian [naturalized citizens] are particularly potent additions to the electorate, with turnout rates that are often 5 to 8 percentage points higher than their natural-born counterparts, according to census estimates.

... Liking a party is one thing. Mobilizing to vote is another. Roughly three-fifths of foreign-born Asian American voters surveyed by APIAVote and AAPI Data said they were not contacted by the Democratic Party or the GOP before the 2018 election.

LA Times

You have to show you know people are there and part of the community if you want them to turn out.

So what do I think of the MomsRising postcards? Interesting. I hope this is being treated as a real campaign method which means it has two prongs: targeting and testing. Did we send our postcards to the right voters, the voters whose participation could have an impact on the election results? That's a targeting data question. More to the point, are these voters the subject of lots of other, more direct, forms of contact -- is someone knocking on their doors, leaving notes when they aren't home, calling ...? I sure hope so. Whatever tiny nudge a postcard gives should be supplemented vigorously.

Moreover, I wonder how MomsRising is testing this effort. Did they try different postcards with different images and messages? Will they go back and look at how many of their targets who received which persuasion pieces ended up voting? 2019 is a good time for trial runs for 2020. Were they able to track how many of the volunteers who offered to do this actually mailed the cards? I sure hope so -- and I sure hope they keeping track of who worked and who didn't.

We're all gearing up for the life and death struggle in 2020 ...

I voted - have you?

This was certainly the simplest San Francisco ballot I've confronted for many a year.

I voted happily and proudly for Chesa Boudin for District Attorney. He's the only one of the lot who would fundamentally shake up the office -- in a good way. When the old guy couldn't run for re-election because he'd pissed off everyone, whether left, right or center, it's time for big change. As a former Public Defender, Boudin will deliver a very different slant on law enforcement and prosecution. About time.

None of the other offices are really contested unless you live in Supervisor District 5 -- where you can support Dean Preston for a City Hall more attuned to tenants and the bottom 80 percent of us.

Even the ballot propositions are kind of humdrum, by the standards of a city which voted on whether to name its sewage plant for George W. Bush. A quick list of what I did.
Prop. A - Affordable Housing Bonds. Gosh, yes!
Prop B - Name of a city department. Guess this is okay.
Prop. C - No, No, No. Juul's attempt to save its addiction machine. Even these drug dealers who put it on the ballot have given up on this one, but they'll probably be back at the state level.
Prop. D - Traffic tax. Sure, charge Uber and Lyft a little something to aid Muni.
Prop. E - Affordable Housing for Teachers. Gosh, yes!
Prop. F - Campaign contribution disclosures. Yes.

The undead just keep on coming

It happened every year. My mother owned some shares of stock in the Phillip Morris corporation; at Christmas, the tobacco company would send her a beautifully wrapped package containing a selection of packs of their cigarette brands -- Winstons, Newports, Marlboros, etc. She was charmed and loyal. Smoking was a habit she'd picked up as a teenager in the 1920s. It branded her as mature and modern -- oh yeah. This was before the 1964 Surgeon's General Report which stated unequivocally that smoking caused cancer and numerous other diseases. By then her generation was hooked, as were many of my generation coming along a little latter. The stroke which eventually killed her certainly had damage from decades of smoking as a contributing cause.

So I can't say I was happy to see versions of this in the business sections of major media:

Philip Morris and Altria Are in Talks to Merge
With Altria’s investment in Juul, a combination of the tobacco giants would dominate the international market for e-cigarettes. The tobacco giants Philip Morris International and the Altria Group are in talks to reunite, the companies said on Tuesday, in a deal that would combine the most popular brands of both traditional and electronic cigarettes.

... The number of cigarettes sold in the United States fell 3.5 percent in 2017 from the previous year, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The e-cigarette market was worth about $11 billion in 2018, and it is projected to surpass $18 billion by 2024, according to a report from Mordor Intelligence, a market research firm.

... “This is very dangerous for public health,” said Matthew L. Myers, president of the Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids. “There’s a real concern that a strengthened Philip Morris poses an increased threat to tobacco control measures both in the United States and around the globe.”

The zombies just keep on coming. ...Meanwhile in San Francisco, the zombies are fighting for their lives and their business plan to hook yet more generations.

Juul Spending Money Like A Drunken Sailor To Overturn E-Cigarette Ban
It’s terrible timing for the electronic cigarette manufacturer Juul that lung illnesses believed to be related to e-cigarette use have just been reported in 14 states. These 94 cases of still-unsolved lung illness tied to vaping come less than three months before San Francisco votes on Prop. C,  a November ballot measure meant to undo the San Francisco vapor product sales ban, and sponsored by the vape company Juul.

But Juul has an important weapon to sway voters ⁠— a whole lot of dollars. 

Juul has spent more than $4.5 million on their measure to defeat the vaping ban according to campaign filings at the San Francisco Ethics Commission.

Juul is promoting its drug delivery system through the misleadingly named "Coalition for Reasonable Vaping Regulation." They claim, falsely, that Measure C would protect people under 18 from their addiction machine. Expect to drown in lying direct mail, ads, and door hangers until November. No on C.

George considers a geographical

The little boomlet touting a run by current San Francisco District Attorney (that means he's our head prosecutor) to unseat the incumbent D.A. in Los Angeles illustrates one of my principles of political observation: these people nearly always look better, more desirable, when they are farther away. Sometimes even ones who didn't look so good when they were close by seem to improve when their careers carry them to new heights.

Within a day last week, I came across three articles trying to explain what retiring D.A. George Gasçon would bring to a challenge to Jackie Lacey in Los Angeles. Gasçon came to San Francisco from Los Angeles where he'd risen to the rank of Assistant Chief in the L.A.P.D. In 2009, Gavin Newsom made him chief of the S.F.P.D.; when Gavin jumped to Lt. Governor in 2011, he appointed Gasçon as D.A.; the office was vacant because Kamala Harris had gone on to bigger and better office as State Attorney General.

In many respects, Gasçon has been a stand up progressive, vocally on board with the movement to reduce incarcerations, also with a citizen initiative to reclassify non-violent drug crimes as misdemeanors, and with ending the death penalty. He's pledged to clear 9300 marijuana-related convictions. He created a "Blue Ribbon panel" that investigated the broken culture of the S.F.P.D. All that is not nothing for a prosecutor; many of his fellow prosecutors across the state seem to view him as a traitor to the law'n order team.

Yet, for this San Franciscan, he's besmirched his record by failing, ever, to charge a police officer for murdering a civilian. For a couple of years, the S.F.P.D. went on a shooting binge, killing five people who could only by an imaginative stretch be deemed a threat with to cops or anyone else: Alex Nieto, Amilcar Perez Lopez, Mario Woods, Luis Gongora Pat, and Jessica Williams. Okay, I know that the state legal standard pretty much allows cops to shoot whenever they assert the action was "reasonable," but I think city residents had a right to expect that their D.A. represent them by bringing some charges to break this epidemic of death. And from Gasçon, crickets. Sure, he might have lost at trial, but he would have represented the people against police impunity and that should be part of a D.A.'s job description.

Gasçon's hometown (for the moment) paper, the Chronicle offered the only one of the three Gasçon boomlet articles that mentioned this sorry part of our D.A.'s record. The Los Angeles Times played the story evenhandedly, though emphasizing that an array of L.A. bigwigs including Mayor Garcetti and such liberal Congresscritters as Adam Schiff and Ted Lieu had thrown down for Lacey. But the New York Times went big on what it treated as a kooky California tale, emphasizing the real contrasts between the two metropolises and their incumbent D.A.'s.

San Francisco and Los Angeles may share a similar brand of liberal politics. They are both led by mayors who see it as their jobs, in part, to push back against President Trump’s agenda, and both cities are trying to bring liberal solutions to bear on some of the same problems, like homelessness and housing. But when it comes to criminal justice, the two cities could not be more different.

Well maybe. What the Times added was something important: to Los Angeles justice advocates, Gasçon looks like a much better bet than Lacey. Patrise Cullors, a co-founder of Black Lives Matter and director of the Real Justice political action committee, told the Times that in meetings Gasçon has

“been very clear that he wants to end mass incarceration in Los Angeles. He’s been very clear that he wants to hold law enforcement accountable. He has been very clear that he does not want to lock up people with mental illness.”

Let's hope he's learned from his tenure here. He might have; he seems a well-meaning guy, but perhaps a little weak. And he did come out of a police department (L.A.P.D.) with some history of being out of control.

For what it is worth (not much), if Gasçon moves on to L.A. and knocks off Lacey, I'll be among those who applaud. Having worked against the death penalty, I'll root for any passable Lacey opponent. These days very few county D.A.s in California even charge crimes so as to make death a possible sentence; these cases demand so many resources and raise so many ethical issues, D.A.s prefer slightly lesser charges that lead to long imprisonment, but which are easier to win in court. But Lacey is an outlier. Since 2012, she has sent 22 defendants, all of color, to rot on death row, more likely to die of old age than by state action while their appeals cost Los Angeles County millions of dollars. She won't let go, so it is up to the citizens of L.A. to let her go.