People Don’t Vote When No One Asks Them To
By MATT PLATKIN
The Democrats selected Julián Castro, the
mayor of San Antonio, to deliver the keynote address at their national
convention — the same honor that propelled State Senator Barack Obama
into the national spotlight just eight years ago — as part of its
courtship of Latino voters, whom the President needs to vote in large
numbers if he wants to be re-elected. As it happens, as the campaign
manager for a young, outsider candidate for San Antonio’s city council
in 2011, I learned something simple but crucial: while younger Latinos
are increasingly the focus of national political strategists, they are
still largely ignored at the local level.
The issue here is that Latinos have historically voted and been represented in legislatures at disproportionately low rates. In the 2010 mid-term elections, for instance, Latinos comprised 6.9 percent of the electorate, their best showing ever in a mid-term election, but still significantly below their 10.1 percent share of eligible voters. Similarly, a 2008 study by the National Conference of State Legislatures found that Latinos represented only 3.3 percent of America’s 7,382 state legislators. Despite this, because Latinos are the fastest growing population in America and are driving demographic changes in swing states, they remain obvious targets for national campaigns that are eager to exploit every potential electoral advantage.
In local elections, though, the crass conventional wisdom that I often heard from political professionals was simply, “Latinos don’t vote.” But uncritical adherence to this conventional wisdom often results in a self-fulfilling prophecy: young Latinos are ignored in local races because of their prior voting record, which ensures similarly low turnout in future elections. In 2011, as an inexperienced campaign manager for a young, Latino city council candidate on the south side of San Antonio – a heavily Latino area – I faced this conventional wisdom directly.
To say I was an inexperienced campaign manager at the outset would be an understatement. Both the candidate, Rey Saldaña, and I were 24 at the time of the election. I first met Rey in 2005 when we were in the same freshman dorm at Stanford. Rey was a San Antonio native, born and raised in the district in which he ran. In high school, he helped lead an initiative to attract the first bookstore to San Antonio’s South Side and spent his college summers back home working for local politicians. And yet, when we started the campaign in April of 2010, Rey had been away from his hometown for nearly five years and had never run for any kind of elected office. I had never managed a campaign and had spent hardly any time in San Antonio.
Despite our inexperience, we quickly learned that running local campaigns apparently did not involve much ingenuity. We kept getting the same, recycled advice from political veterans: look at the voter rolls for the last three elections, and target those who voted in two of them.
We soon recognized a feedback loop at play: candidates and consultants continued to target those who had voted in previous elections — bombarding them with mail, phone calls and visits — while pretty much ignoring the rest of the population. Time and again, Latinos and Anglos alike stressed to us that Latino voters, particularly younger ones, would not turn out come Election Day, no matter what we did. Engaging them — and spending precious campaign dollars on them — was quite simply a waste of time.
Whether out of stubbornness, necessity or naiveté, we ignored these
instructions. As a heavy underdog, we did not have much choice. Rey’s
main opponent, Leticia Cantu, enjoyed the support of San Antonio’s
political establishment, including Mayor Castro, and a fundraising
advantage that would allow her to amass contributions that would more
than double ours. Sticking to a traditional campaign playbook — in which
we all targeted the same voters —would surely invite defeat.
Not only was a conventional campaign strategy a losing one, but it also presented an odd proposition: a young Latino candidate would be forced to ignore his own peers. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the “consistent voters” that candidates generally target were disproportionately older and whiter than the general population of our district. District Four of San Antonio is large, containing nearly 125,000 residents. As the home to Lackland Air Force Base, it also has a sizable veteran population that often drives turnout in elections. But in 2010 Latinos still accounted for over 80 percent of the district’s voting-age population.
Rey was a graduate of one of the district’s public high schools — which had a drop-out rate that consistently hovered around 30 percent — and decided to run in order to help spark development in a district that had seen too little of it. Ignoring younger, Latino voters struck us as not only poor politics, but also as contrary to the entire purpose of our campaign.
So instead of ignoring young Latinos, we targeted them. Running a predominantly grassroots campaign, Rey spent six months knocking on more than 3,000 doors. Campaign volunteers knocked on thousands more and made even more phone calls. And while we did reach out to the consistent voters using largely traditional techniques we also registered hundreds of new voters and engaged young Latinos and their families.
Of course, it can be difficult to target voters who have never participated before, which is precisely why strategists often advise against it. Technology certainly played a critical role. Online voter data tools allowed us to identify and contact residents with whom we felt Rey’s message was particularly likely to resonate. We specifically looked for young Latinos in key areas of the district who had voted in the 2008 election, but had never cast another ballot — including Mayor Castro’s 2009 victory. We were told that these Obama voters would never vote in a local race.
Once we identified these voters — and everyone else where they lived —
we used both traditional and nontraditional methods of reaching out to
them. We called them, went to their houses and looked them up on
Facebook. We spent countless hours individually reaching out to them,
largely through Facebook, but also through email or text message, and
asked them to not only come out and vote themselves, but to bring their
family members. Rey also spent a large amount of time speaking to
younger audiences: at schools, community colleges, and at a few local hangouts where we hosted events designed to attract younger residents.
While some of our communication methods may have varied, regardless of the age or race of the resident with whom we spoke, our message was remarkably consistent: we introduced Rey and asked them to share their concerns. And just as we did with the traditional voters, we dutifully logged, tracked and tried to follow up on these issues. Sometimes the most pressing issues for younger constituents did differ from those of their older neighbors — younger voters cared more about neighborhood revitalization and job development for instance.
More often than not, though, the most common concerns centered on the doorstep issues that form a councilmember’s primary responsibilities: maintaining the neighborhood’s safety and infrastructure. A quick glance through our campaign log reveals that an address or neighborhood is a much better predictor of the concerns we heard than is an individual resident’s age or race. It turns out that younger Latino voters really were not much different from their neighbors after all.
Fortunately, our stubbornness paid off. Our rewarding interactions throughout the campaign soundly defeated the notion that young Latinos were uninterested in local politics. As a fellow young Latino from the district, Rey connected with them in a way that others simply could not.
One story comes to mind. As Rey answered questions from the dozen or so residents present at a local neighborhood association’s candidate forum — a rite of passage for every local candidate — I stepped outside to take a call on our campaign cell phone. The caller was a woman in her mid-30s, who had voted in the past but had become disenchanted. But unlike many other calls, this woman didn’t want to complain; she called to ask a favor. Her daughter was 16 and was a good student. As she had not gone to college herself, the caller was hoping Rey could offer her daughter some advice on the college application process and, in her words, inspiration. Only a few years removed from that process himself, Rey gladly called her back and spoke at length with her daughter. That woman became a strong supporter, personally delivering Rey Saldaña signs to homes throughout her neighborhood.
While not every interaction was so emotional, the results were staggering in the aggregate. By simply engaging these overlooked voters through phone calls, door-knocks and a few non-traditional campaign events, we saw an 11 percent increase in voter turnout, with roughly one-in-eight voting in a municipal election for the first time. District Four was San Antonio’s only district to see an increase in turnout in 2011, which was particularly remarkable considering that the previous election cycle in 2009 featured a competitive mayoral race at the top of the ticket (when Julián Castro was first elected).
When the votes were tallied, Rey had won convincingly, leading his closest (and heavily-favored) opponent by 13 points and avoiding a runoff in the process. (A third candidate, a former neighborhood association president, received less than nine percent of the vote.) In addition, more 18- to 24-year-olds, predominantly Latino, voted in the first four days of early voting than had voted in the entire previous election cycle (consisting of eight days of early voting, Election Day and absentee ballots). Rey Saldaña is now a councilman because we asked people whom political professionals routinely ignore to come out and vote — and they did just that.
Our model wasn’t particularly innovative. With some effort and a little bit of money, candidates can easily replicate this outcome across the country. Indeed, many already are. Time recently highlighted a very similar, and equally successful, campaign run by Daniel Valenzuela, a councilman in Phoenix. As technology continues to make voting data more accessible to all candidates and enhances their ability to communicate directly with voters, campaigns that break from the conventional mold and pursue more innovative strategies will become much more viable.
If more candidates do buck the conventional wisdom and engage younger Latino voters, states and localities across the country stand to witness greater Latino representation in legislatures and on the voter rolls. The benefits of increased electoral diversity are not merely abstract, either. Consciously or not, elected officials often place greater weight on the concerns of communities that actively vote. Consequently, officials often devote more attention and resources to areas with higher voter turnout. Some may view this situation cynically, but it simply reflects our representative democracy at work. If more candidates ask more young Latinos to turn out, it will demonstrate to the political establishment that the conventional wisdom is wrong, and those in the establishment will need to pay greater attention to the concerns of Latino communities as a result.
Of course, Latino communities cannot — and should not — be represented by one voice. These communities are as diverse as America itself. One need only look at the differences between Julián Castro and Ted Cruz, the Republicans’ own Texan Latino star, to see the disagreement between these leaders. At the national level, the battle for the Latino vote will be won by the party that actually addresses the problems with which Latinos are concerned — not just immigration, which gets the most attention, but also health care, unemployment and economic growth and opportunity. As Antonio Villaraigosa, the mayor of Los Angeles, said pointedly last week, “You can’t just trot out a brown face or a Spanish surname and expect people are going to vote for your party or your candidate.”
But as national campaigns become ever more sophisticated in their exploitation of political preferences, it’s important to remember that local officials often operate outside the realm of intensely partisan politics. While Rey has taken strong stances on high-profile issues — such as providing benefits to domestic partners of city employees and supporting Mayor Castro’s proposed one-eighth of a cent sales tax to fund full-day prekindergarten for low-income children — he has also focused extensively on responding to individual constituents’ concerns and leading lower profile countergraffiti and fitness initiatives. If Rey is a strong voice for his community, it’s because he’s truly a voice from that community. If more Latinos run and encourage other Latinos to come out and vote, that can become an increasingly common occurrence.
While we were campaigning in San Antonio, the brother of Willie Velásquez — the late founder of the Southwest Voter Registration and Education Project, which has registered millions of Latinos since the 1970s — explained voter apathy to me in simple, but poignant, terms: people don’t vote when no one asks them to.
Matt Platkin is a student at Stanford Law School.
The issue here is that Latinos have historically voted and been represented in legislatures at disproportionately low rates. In the 2010 mid-term elections, for instance, Latinos comprised 6.9 percent of the electorate, their best showing ever in a mid-term election, but still significantly below their 10.1 percent share of eligible voters. Similarly, a 2008 study by the National Conference of State Legislatures found that Latinos represented only 3.3 percent of America’s 7,382 state legislators. Despite this, because Latinos are the fastest growing population in America and are driving demographic changes in swing states, they remain obvious targets for national campaigns that are eager to exploit every potential electoral advantage.
In local elections, though, the crass conventional wisdom that I often heard from political professionals was simply, “Latinos don’t vote.” But uncritical adherence to this conventional wisdom often results in a self-fulfilling prophecy: young Latinos are ignored in local races because of their prior voting record, which ensures similarly low turnout in future elections. In 2011, as an inexperienced campaign manager for a young, Latino city council candidate on the south side of San Antonio – a heavily Latino area – I faced this conventional wisdom directly.
To say I was an inexperienced campaign manager at the outset would be an understatement. Both the candidate, Rey Saldaña, and I were 24 at the time of the election. I first met Rey in 2005 when we were in the same freshman dorm at Stanford. Rey was a San Antonio native, born and raised in the district in which he ran. In high school, he helped lead an initiative to attract the first bookstore to San Antonio’s South Side and spent his college summers back home working for local politicians. And yet, when we started the campaign in April of 2010, Rey had been away from his hometown for nearly five years and had never run for any kind of elected office. I had never managed a campaign and had spent hardly any time in San Antonio.
Despite our inexperience, we quickly learned that running local campaigns apparently did not involve much ingenuity. We kept getting the same, recycled advice from political veterans: look at the voter rolls for the last three elections, and target those who voted in two of them.
We soon recognized a feedback loop at play: candidates and consultants continued to target those who had voted in previous elections — bombarding them with mail, phone calls and visits — while pretty much ignoring the rest of the population. Time and again, Latinos and Anglos alike stressed to us that Latino voters, particularly younger ones, would not turn out come Election Day, no matter what we did. Engaging them — and spending precious campaign dollars on them — was quite simply a waste of time.
Who Votes? A series about the complexities of voters and voting.
Not only was a conventional campaign strategy a losing one, but it also presented an odd proposition: a young Latino candidate would be forced to ignore his own peers. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the “consistent voters” that candidates generally target were disproportionately older and whiter than the general population of our district. District Four of San Antonio is large, containing nearly 125,000 residents. As the home to Lackland Air Force Base, it also has a sizable veteran population that often drives turnout in elections. But in 2010 Latinos still accounted for over 80 percent of the district’s voting-age population.
Rey was a graduate of one of the district’s public high schools — which had a drop-out rate that consistently hovered around 30 percent — and decided to run in order to help spark development in a district that had seen too little of it. Ignoring younger, Latino voters struck us as not only poor politics, but also as contrary to the entire purpose of our campaign.
So instead of ignoring young Latinos, we targeted them. Running a predominantly grassroots campaign, Rey spent six months knocking on more than 3,000 doors. Campaign volunteers knocked on thousands more and made even more phone calls. And while we did reach out to the consistent voters using largely traditional techniques we also registered hundreds of new voters and engaged young Latinos and their families.
Of course, it can be difficult to target voters who have never participated before, which is precisely why strategists often advise against it. Technology certainly played a critical role. Online voter data tools allowed us to identify and contact residents with whom we felt Rey’s message was particularly likely to resonate. We specifically looked for young Latinos in key areas of the district who had voted in the 2008 election, but had never cast another ballot — including Mayor Castro’s 2009 victory. We were told that these Obama voters would never vote in a local race.
If more candidates ask more young Latinos to turn out, it will demonstrate to the political establishment that the conventional wisdom is wrong, and those in the establishment will need to pay greater attention to the concerns of Latino communities as a result.
While some of our communication methods may have varied, regardless of the age or race of the resident with whom we spoke, our message was remarkably consistent: we introduced Rey and asked them to share their concerns. And just as we did with the traditional voters, we dutifully logged, tracked and tried to follow up on these issues. Sometimes the most pressing issues for younger constituents did differ from those of their older neighbors — younger voters cared more about neighborhood revitalization and job development for instance.
More often than not, though, the most common concerns centered on the doorstep issues that form a councilmember’s primary responsibilities: maintaining the neighborhood’s safety and infrastructure. A quick glance through our campaign log reveals that an address or neighborhood is a much better predictor of the concerns we heard than is an individual resident’s age or race. It turns out that younger Latino voters really were not much different from their neighbors after all.
Fortunately, our stubbornness paid off. Our rewarding interactions throughout the campaign soundly defeated the notion that young Latinos were uninterested in local politics. As a fellow young Latino from the district, Rey connected with them in a way that others simply could not.
One story comes to mind. As Rey answered questions from the dozen or so residents present at a local neighborhood association’s candidate forum — a rite of passage for every local candidate — I stepped outside to take a call on our campaign cell phone. The caller was a woman in her mid-30s, who had voted in the past but had become disenchanted. But unlike many other calls, this woman didn’t want to complain; she called to ask a favor. Her daughter was 16 and was a good student. As she had not gone to college herself, the caller was hoping Rey could offer her daughter some advice on the college application process and, in her words, inspiration. Only a few years removed from that process himself, Rey gladly called her back and spoke at length with her daughter. That woman became a strong supporter, personally delivering Rey Saldaña signs to homes throughout her neighborhood.
While not every interaction was so emotional, the results were staggering in the aggregate. By simply engaging these overlooked voters through phone calls, door-knocks and a few non-traditional campaign events, we saw an 11 percent increase in voter turnout, with roughly one-in-eight voting in a municipal election for the first time. District Four was San Antonio’s only district to see an increase in turnout in 2011, which was particularly remarkable considering that the previous election cycle in 2009 featured a competitive mayoral race at the top of the ticket (when Julián Castro was first elected).
When the votes were tallied, Rey had won convincingly, leading his closest (and heavily-favored) opponent by 13 points and avoiding a runoff in the process. (A third candidate, a former neighborhood association president, received less than nine percent of the vote.) In addition, more 18- to 24-year-olds, predominantly Latino, voted in the first four days of early voting than had voted in the entire previous election cycle (consisting of eight days of early voting, Election Day and absentee ballots). Rey Saldaña is now a councilman because we asked people whom political professionals routinely ignore to come out and vote — and they did just that.
Our model wasn’t particularly innovative. With some effort and a little bit of money, candidates can easily replicate this outcome across the country. Indeed, many already are. Time recently highlighted a very similar, and equally successful, campaign run by Daniel Valenzuela, a councilman in Phoenix. As technology continues to make voting data more accessible to all candidates and enhances their ability to communicate directly with voters, campaigns that break from the conventional mold and pursue more innovative strategies will become much more viable.
If more candidates do buck the conventional wisdom and engage younger Latino voters, states and localities across the country stand to witness greater Latino representation in legislatures and on the voter rolls. The benefits of increased electoral diversity are not merely abstract, either. Consciously or not, elected officials often place greater weight on the concerns of communities that actively vote. Consequently, officials often devote more attention and resources to areas with higher voter turnout. Some may view this situation cynically, but it simply reflects our representative democracy at work. If more candidates ask more young Latinos to turn out, it will demonstrate to the political establishment that the conventional wisdom is wrong, and those in the establishment will need to pay greater attention to the concerns of Latino communities as a result.
Of course, Latino communities cannot — and should not — be represented by one voice. These communities are as diverse as America itself. One need only look at the differences between Julián Castro and Ted Cruz, the Republicans’ own Texan Latino star, to see the disagreement between these leaders. At the national level, the battle for the Latino vote will be won by the party that actually addresses the problems with which Latinos are concerned — not just immigration, which gets the most attention, but also health care, unemployment and economic growth and opportunity. As Antonio Villaraigosa, the mayor of Los Angeles, said pointedly last week, “You can’t just trot out a brown face or a Spanish surname and expect people are going to vote for your party or your candidate.”
But as national campaigns become ever more sophisticated in their exploitation of political preferences, it’s important to remember that local officials often operate outside the realm of intensely partisan politics. While Rey has taken strong stances on high-profile issues — such as providing benefits to domestic partners of city employees and supporting Mayor Castro’s proposed one-eighth of a cent sales tax to fund full-day prekindergarten for low-income children — he has also focused extensively on responding to individual constituents’ concerns and leading lower profile countergraffiti and fitness initiatives. If Rey is a strong voice for his community, it’s because he’s truly a voice from that community. If more Latinos run and encourage other Latinos to come out and vote, that can become an increasingly common occurrence.
While we were campaigning in San Antonio, the brother of Willie Velásquez — the late founder of the Southwest Voter Registration and Education Project, which has registered millions of Latinos since the 1970s — explained voter apathy to me in simple, but poignant, terms: people don’t vote when no one asks them to.
Matt Platkin is a student at Stanford Law School.
No comments:
Post a Comment