Reflections on Milwaukee

I took a break from my various day jobs to do GOTV/canvassing in Milwaukee’s mostly Black northwest suburbs (Harambe, Rufus King, Sherman Heights) and the southside mostly Hispanic neighborhood of Walker’s Point.

A lot of it was joyful and connecting. And a lot of it was frustrating. A lot. I don’t want to dunk on hard-working and well-meaning colleagues and allies in the wake of a painful outcome. But I have spent a lot of time processing in my head what happened. I thought I would share, here, some insights that overlap with my work in the area of IP and LC informed consent, participation, and leadership.

Siren songs of scaling

Faced with massive challenges (climate changes, or tens of millions of unreliable voters), we must indeed think at scale. It would be irresponsible not to. But, only in part. Our attention is different "at" scale than it is at the local level, in the throes of the urgencies and paradoxes of any given situation. This difference translates into an inconvenient dilemma that we must hold as we move forward. Technology in particular often swoops in offering to rescue us from this inconvenience. New technologies are important, but we should be wary of any rescue. Solutions to the dilemma often, perhaps inherently, discredit the nature and even the desire of the local to be in the world, at some level incalculable by metrics and inaccessible except by invitation of locals themselves. ?

In Milwaukee, the new technology solution was a set of apps and websites around which the entire GOTV operation was structured. Wisconsin Dems are famous for this scaled-up operation; Dem Party chair Ben Wikler, who previously led Change.org and Moveon.org, is credited with having invented it or at least led it into ascendancy. And yes it succeeds at absolutely scaling up: tens of millions of phone calls, texts, and door knocks, each one registered by an entry into the system noting whether contact was made and if so what the call/knock recipient’s “top issue” was, among other data points. One organizer bragged to me that every door in the neighborhoods I was in had been knocked 10-15 times.

This organizer was a young white person with a laptop, a description which applied to maybe 80% of the operational staff I encountered over 10 days of work. After a 10-minute training on day one, I interacted with staff (or other volunteers) for maybe 5 minutes each time I picked up a new “turf,” or set of doors to knock. In and out, faster than the bank. Faster than McDonalds. Any questions were met with impatience - or more often just an uptick in anxiety. They had so so many volunteers, if they started chatting with all of them the system would break down.

And when I asked about “the doors” I was assigned to knock, another uptick. These folks may have taken turf shifts in the same areas, but they seemed to know little or nothing about the neighborhood itself, much less any actual individuals. What are the schools like? How did the football team do this year? Who goes to what church. What health clinics are available. Grocery stores? What businesses opened in the last few years. Which ones failed. Even policy wonk details, like whether the neighborhood got any clean water or internet access assistance from the infrastructure bill.

What does it feel like to have your door knocked 15 times by 15 different outside-the-neighborhood activists? (And no, if a person answers the door and answers the questions, they do not get taken off the list – they keep getting knocked. One young staffer told me this was fine because the research showed that even if they feel harassed, "voters don't retaliate.")

From the looks on faces and attitudes I encountered, getting 15 knocks doesn’t feel very good. It probably feels like what it is, being treated like a database entry rather than a person. I met a lot of nice people who protected me from their frustration with politeness. Others who dumped their frustrations on me, or refused to acknowledge me even when I could see them through an open screen door. And a 10-year-old girl who yelled at me “Just go home!” when I was about 50 feet past her door. She yelled softly, just loud enough for me to hear.

Benefit sharing, big and small

That girl was reflecting a truth that no one was going to say to my face. For all my best intentions, I was practicing extractivism, not activism. I was an outsider coming into the neighborhood to get something, a vote. But what was I offering in return? Obviously nothing, other than perhaps a droll encounter with a funny-looking white dude. (I did try to bring my sense of humor with me throughout the process.) I had no negotiating authority from any of the powers that I purported to represent. Another equally powerless version of me (but not me) would be back the next day, and in two years and four years and so on.

Now, democracy is bigger than a project benefit context, so maybe the analogy doesn’t fit. You can’t negotiate individually with each voter, or even each neighborhood, right? But if the mechanics aren’t the same, what about the underlying ethic? The legitimacy of my bid for folks' attention, I fear, wasn't even close. Speaking politically for a second (I'll make this quick), here I was in a neighborhood deeply wounded by poverty, following a legacy of failed efforts and promises. While there were surely broader and more complex reasons at play beyond my particular candidate for office, I couldn’t even acknowledge that reality. (Ok I did, but it wasn’t in the script.) The political offerings I could point to were marginal improvements, usually harm mitigation measures in response to larger systems of low wages, inhumane health care rules, predatory debt obligations, resource-starved educational institutions. The other side was offering grandiose gold-plated ambitions of success and power. Everybody in those neighborhoods probably knew the gold wasn't real, but in a weird way it paid tribute to their desire to escape and expand more than my targeted improvement measures did.

Speaking operationally, what I was not offering also started to become increasingly loud for me. I am hardly an expert, but I have done GOTV for maybe 25 years, and I remember more diverse forms of action and engagement. A lot of cookouts and other events, maybe co-sponsored by the party but hosted and run by local groups. When not atomized into “doors,” voters engage the system in groups with leaders. I remember getting trained and motivated by some of them, not just by young grads with laptops. In a model where, for example, a church is counted on to “deliver” 100 votes, the deacon of that church has actual negotiating power, at least at a local level. Maybe concrete benefits, like more investment. Maybe just a better seat at the table.

While atomized, there were some folks I encountered whose personality and role in the community just seemed to pop. It felt heartbreaking that we hadn’t found a way to put them on staff to fully utilize – honor and utilize – their local knowledge, credibility, and political acumen. I remember a 19-ish young man who was practicing cynicism in front of me, but I could just tell he was a hyperactive politics nerd under the surface, he had all these little details about the race. A middle-aged mom who had story after story about how and why things had gone wrong at the local level in the last two decades. Could she help craft a better way to talk about politics and organizing in her neighborhood? An older gentleman retiree who gave me an off-the-top roadmap of every house and family on his block. A true resource, who I encountered at 7 pm on election night.

I don’t know what level of resources it would have taken to better mobilize these folks. While remuneration is important, it might also have been possible with more inclusion, respect, and responsibility. Trump’s GOTV model may have been exploring these logics when it largely ditched the traditional "ground game" and instead gave each volunteer a single list of 25 voters to focus on all the way through election day. It called these folks "captains." It also strategically aimed to give volunteers a sense of responsibility by "deploying them" en masse as ballot observers.

Threnody** for Milwaukee and the work ahead?

(**Don't worry I just learned this word too. I define it below.)

I’m not an expert in GOTV, elections, US politics, or anything else that was going on in Milwaukee. I am seeking connections to areas of practice and complexity I know somewhat better in the hopes of bidirectional insight and perspective, at least as to ethics and framing. The benefits question clearly reminds me of dynamics in the international development/project space. The need to recognize the legacies and structural inequity that frame each conversation, no matter how beautiful and well-intentioned the plans of the moment. And the fact of the two conversations: not just benefits at the funding and design levels, but at the operational level, exemplified by the often thought, rarely spoken question, “why are you NGO staff person getting paid for your time but I am expected to 'participate' for free?”

The scaling question is also familiar. The single-minded focus on metrics. Fair enough that institutions start by measuring what they can measure. But eventually they come to prioritize and reward what they can measure, as if that is “the thing itself.” But it isn’t, it’s just what they can measure. You can record a door knock. You can tick a box in response to a survey question. But you probably can’t record the eyeroll or gritted jaw of the person answering the question. You probably could score 1 to 10 the likelihood of a person getting out to vote (that would have been a great feature on the app, btw). But even then you are still in the realm of striving for consent, at best. And we know that consent, even fully Free Prior and Informed, is still the lowest rung on the ladder. It is not true participation, much less leadership. It delivers the thinnest benefits of relationship – embedded knowledge, perspective, trust – the things we know are necessary to make our work together last.

My experience in Milwaukee was limited and anecdotal. I am not here pretending there are any quick fixes. This is a reflection, a conversation-opener. One that I can send around to both my freaking-out-about-US-politics and my trying-to-make-international-work-meaningful communities. It is a lament on obstacles, an elegy on intentions. It is a threnody, which is an archaic word for this kind of piece that I just discovered by running the previous inexact words through a thesaurus. Our words are always inexact, on the facts and certainly on our feelings. We know this and, at our best, we honor this. We let parts of ourselves and the world be inexpressible, incalculable. Local. We treat those parts, at our best, with ongoing human attention rather than a master planner’s frustration.

This kind of attention is flowing widely now, in this time of reflection. Let's be grateful for that, and much else.