Politico reports:
A group of Democratic strategists is trying to spread a novel organizing tactic in this year’s election. Technically, it’s called “paid relational organizing,” but it boils down to this: paying people to talk to their friends about politics.
Democrats think it helped them win the Senate in 2020 — and are hoping the get-out-the-vote strategy will help limit the pain of a brutal 2022 election environment.
Granted, I am not an expert in voter turnout. But my instinct is that the Democrats should not do this. In my experience, the last thing any normal human being wants is to be talked at enthusiastically about progressive politics by the sort of people who like talking about progressive politics. In fact, I would go so far as to say that, if the Democrats want to do okay in 2022, they should probably be paying the sort of people who are likely to volunteer for this task to stay quiet between now and November 8 — or even to leave the country for a while.
The Democrats did not win the Senate in 2020 because they paid people to talk to their friends about politics. The Democrats won the Senate in 2020 because, despite underachieving across the board, Donald Trump lied stupidly about the election result and the GOP blew both runoffs in Georgia. (It doesn’t matter to the result or the legitimacy of the result — Georgia’s system is what it is, and everyone knew that going in — but Perdue actually got more votes across the two elections than Jon Ossoff did.) The problem the Democrats have ahead of 2022 is not that their message hasn’t been sufficiently amplified; the problem the Democrats have ahead of 2022 is that voters are not happy with how things are going. Hiring a bunch of political junkies to spread the good word to their reluctantly engaged acquaintances seems unlikely to change that.