Politics Is for Power by Eitan Hersh

Author:Eitan Hersh
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2020-01-13T16:00:00+00:00

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In the early 2000s, the Democratic Party organization in Washington County, Oregon, was on life support. Washington County is a large county in suburban Portland. It was once fairly Republican. Now, it’s Democratic. In the early years of the George W. Bush administration, the party committee could barely get a quorum of thirteen members at its monthly meetings, in a county with a population of a half million.

Then, in 2006, things began to change. A growing number of active Democrats started investing in the county party. They chipped in with monthly contributions and hired a field director. The field director recruited volunteers and staffed a permanent office that could be a home base for a range of projects. Washington County was the first in the state to have a paid, permanent Democratic Party staffer.

With the help of the field director, the group initiated a “neighborhood leader” program.1 Neighborhood leaders in Washington County were, and still are, responsible for turning out the vote for thirty-five households in their own neighborhood. They report to one of the three or four volunteer coordinators who split responsibility for the area of a statehouse district. The county has about ten statehouse districts.

Carol Greenough, now age seventy-one, a retired psychologist, a widow, is one of those coordinators whom the neighborhood leaders report to. She is also a neighborhood leader herself. Carol was part of the group that barely made a quorum in the early 2000s but then started investing in the party. In Carol’s assigned area of the statehouse district, she has recruited eighty leaders, sixty-five of whom are active. She recruits them at the library, on Facebook, on the website Nextdoor, at the local crawfish festival, and anywhere else she can find them.

Carol’s volunteerism—managing eighty other volunteers—is a big commitment, but being a neighborhood leader within Carol’s turf is not too burdensome. That’s the beauty of the neighborhood leader program. It’s only thirty-five doors. In the first step, a potential leader meets with Carol, maybe over coffee. This meeting isn’t strictly necessary, but Carol wants to gauge the depth of the person’s interest. Sometimes, in the heat of a national crisis, people will sign up to participate in some form of politics but soon after they lose interest and back out. Carol is looking for people who are more committed than that. If they sign up at the crawfish festival but then don’t return her note to talk or meet, she knows they’re not for real.

A neighborhood leader, when she signs on with Carol, is asked to go around and introduce herself to her thirty-five assigned households and find out what issues, if any, the voters care about or what questions, if any, they have. Then, right before each election, the leader goes around again and encourages the neighbors to vote. She passes out a slate card, which recommends how neighbors ought to cast their votes for all the offices and initiatives on the ballot. The county party’s endorsement committee determines who gets the nod on the slate card.

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