MoveOn's 50 Ways to Love Your Country

Volunteer for Campaigns
Michael A. Smith, 33, Kansas City, Missouri

Seven to one: that’s how much we were outspent. Impossible odds—and we beat them.

When Dr. Charles Wheeler announced his candidacy for the Missouri senate in 2001, few took him seriously. This former Kansas City mayor had been out of office for two decades. Apracticing pathologist, he had focused his attention on his family and medical career after leaving the mayor’s office. But a few volunteers believed that Dr. Wheeler’s name recognition was still something special. The district was Democratic, so the general election was not a threat. Our challenge was to win the Democratic primary, in a field of three. Again and again, we were told it couldn’t be done, that the city’s political powers would line up behind someone else.

When the dust settled and the final candidates had filed for the senate seat, the political establishment had indeed coalesced around another candidate. An insider politician with ties to the city’s powerful special interest lobbies, he quickly amassed money and endorsements. He hired the city’s most feared consulting firm to run his political campaign. He saturated the district with direct mail and even ran commercials on cable TV. Our opponent spent $250,000 on the race. We spent $38,000, most of it raised in the last few weeks of the campaign. And we won.

While our opponent ran commercials and racked up endorsements, we stuck with yard signs. The signs, featuring a silhouette of our candidate and the word “integrity,” brought memories of the years when he had served as mayor—years when the city actually seemed to be in the grip of somebody besides special interests and political consultants. Our single direct mail piece also stressed the integrity theme.

The first break finally came when the city’s major daily newspaper endorsed Dr. Wheeler. According to the endorsement, the campaign theme, integrity, defined the election. Our leading opponent had lined up powerful special interests, but his own past was suspect: not only was he having tax problems, but he had even done time in jail for a check-kiting scheme.

My own job was to coordinate volunteers. We recruited people to talk to neighbors and supplied them with postcards. We wrote press releases and got our candidate out to every public forum we could find. We put yard signs on every corner in the parts of the district where our candidate was popular, in order to boost turnout. We knocked on doors, recruited more volunteers, and tried to create a presence in parts of the district where our candidate was less well known. In short, we used every low-cost method and volunteer we could find to stress a simple message: Our candidate has integrity, and he’s back in politics.

On Election Day, Dr. Wheeler pulled off the upset, winning 48 percent to 41 percent, with 11 percent going to the third candidate. Grassroots politics had defeated the money, the special interests, and the endorsements.

• Get behind a good, honest candidate.
• Develop a clear theme for the campaign.
• Be realistic, but don’t let the conventional wisdom decide for you. Your candidate may have great name recognition throughout the city even without the high-level endorsements of the political establishment.
• Raise enough money to be competitive, but don’t assume you have to outspend your opponent. Grassroots efforts really pay off! You’ll need enough money to pay for yard signs, literature, newspaper advertisements, radio ads, a website, and so forth. But you can run a campaign on a shoestring if you build a base of committed volunteers with heart.
• Use volunteers to get out and meet voters. Sometimes volunteers are better than paid workers because citizens see that they believe what they say.
• When you volunteer in the campaign, choose the tasks that suit you: making phone calls, passing out leaflets, writing letters to the media, going door-to-door, registering voters, getting out the vote on Election Day, among others. Time com-mitment is up to you, and you can work at headquarters, at events, or even from home.
• Don’t get discouraged. If we had $5 for every person who told us that it couldn’t be done . . .
• Once you are a volunteer, find others to join you. It’s a great way to be politically involved, meet people, and have fun.
• If you are overseeing volunteers, don’t forget to keep them happy. Assign very clear roles and tasks, train them properly, and recognize their efforts.