THREE

Know Your Community

You gotta’ know the territory.

THE MUSIC MAN

The traveling salesmen in Meredith Wilson’s musical The Music Man could be talking about nearly any neighborhood in America: every community has its unique way of life, a political and cultural history that you need to learn in order to serve effectively. You must know your neighbors and their families: How do they live, work, worship, and play? What are their hopes, dreams, and aspirations for their kids and their parents? In short, you gotta’ know the territory.

As you look to serve your community as a volunteer for a cause or as a candidate for office, prepare, connect, and target: prepare a Community Inventory, connect with leaders, and target supporters. First, prepare a Community Inventory by gathering raw data about your community’s people, economy, geography, traditions, opinion leaders, politics, social networks, and challenges. Second, connect with the community leaders, organizations, and networks that enhance civic life. Third, target people who are likely to support your candidate or cause.

Look at whether significant races (such as the presidential race or ballot initiatives) or highly competitive local races will be on the ballot because these contests historically bring more voters to the polls. As discussed in chapter 2, it is important to know what is on the ballot so you get a flavor for where your candidate or cause fits within the message environment.

PREPARE A COMMUNITY INVENTORY

There is no substitute for crunching the numbers and filling in the local wisdom so you know the territory. You might want to have volunteers or staff each take on a piece of the Community Inventory then compare notes to put a composite together. In my UC Extension Public Service Leadership Boot Camp class, for example, we divided up the San Francisco Bay Area among students who each conducted a Community Inventory on a particular element. Then we compiled our notes to build a matrix. Having a sense of place gives you a sense of purpose. Let your Community Inventory be your guide.

Know the people. Begin with the people in the community. Look up the national census data, employment data, and local sources of demographic data to show the people in terms of age, gender, ethnicity, and family units.

Then look at how people live: Do they rent or own their homes? What is the per capita income? How does the per capita income vary by neighborhood? Where do the children, young people, and adults go to elementary school, college, or vocational school?

Know the economy. List the top ten employers in the private, public, and nonprofit sectors and the five fastest growing small business opportunities. List the national security infrastructure, be it a military base, defense contractor, or veterans hospital. Identify which unions work which jobs. List schools and universities. Identify the first responders. Look up this information online and gather it in conversation with local and ethnic chambers of commerce and labor unions. You will expand your knowledge base and your networks.

Know the geography. Map your community, be it urban, suburban, rural, or a combination. “Maps tell you about the territory,” says 2012 Project’s Mary Hughes. She encourages aspiring public servants to collect as many maps as possible of parkland, transit routes, political districts, schools, population and growth centers, real estate (such as available commercial space), historical museums and landmarks, and critical infrastructure. “You don’t know your community until you know these basics,” Hughes advises.¹

Think of it this way: What is on the postcards? In the local history books? When disaster strikes, what physical icons matter most? These are places where you should be campaigning and connecting. Incumbents, do yourself a favor—don’t stand in front of a capitol or city hall dome when you campaign—stand in front of one of these landmarks instead and tell people what you did to maintain the values it reflects.

Know the traditions. Every community has traditions that shape the local culture: the Big Game, annual neighborhood or ethnic festivals, Fourth of July parades, chamber picnics, beach cleanups, walkathons, and 5K races. Each of these events requires the support of community leaders—block club presidents, church deacons, shop stewards, and parent-teacher association (PTA) officers—who bring people together to participate. For example, PTA officers have been networking for years with other parents and teachers, so they have their fingers on the pulse of the community.

There is an adage about Boston that its favorite traditions are “politics, sports, and revenge.” Anyone who has seen political coverage of John Kerry, Mitt Romney, or the Boston Red Sox knows that the reputation is only partially tongue-in-cheek: the press is pretty tough and the players must be too. Few Bostonians will forget the woes of Martha Coakley, an effective attorney general but ineffective campaigner whose gaffe of mistaking a Red Sox hero for a Yankee fan is a cautionary tale for the ages. People who love their traditions will expect you to love them too, or at least to do your research before venturing to comment on them.

As a practical matter, you want to work with, not conflict with, community events. It is a lot cheaper to set up a booth at one of these events than it is to establish your own event altogether, so your scheduler should keep these traditional events on your calendar so that you can use them to create message opportunities—like a team in the local 5K run—or avoid obvious conflicts like phone-banking in the middle of a big game.

Know the opinion leaders. Every community has its icons: people who command respect through their outstanding achievement in political, business, cultural, or philanthropic endeavors: newspaper columnists, labor leaders, corporate executives, nonprofit directors, civil rights and human rights activists, city or county commissioners, and people connected with cultural landmarks, places of worship, and highly regarded institutions, such as universities, policy think tanks, foundations, civic organizations, chambers of commerce, and other business associations.

Author Malcolm Gladwell differentiates among opinion leaders as connectors, mavens, and salesmen from the community. His book The Tipping Point explains: “Connectors are individuals who have ties in many different realms and act as conduits between them, helping to engender connections, relationships, and ‘cross-fertilization’ that otherwise might not have ever occurred. Mavens are people who have a strong compulsion to help other consumers by helping them make informed decisions. Salesmen are people whose unusual charisma allows them to be extremely persuasive in inducing others’ buying decisions and behaviors.” Gladwell identifies a number of examples of past trends and events that hinged on the influence and involvement of connectors, mavens, and salesmen at key moments in their development.² Apply this thinking to your work.

Through local news outlets and online searches, you can identify these connectors, mavens, and salespeople. Divide your search into major categories: tech, education, arts, disease research, children, civil rights, and so forth. Search the Web to see the incidences of appearances of connectors, mavens, and salespeople in the news to determine who is most often quoted. Then “friend” or “follow” them to see why and to track their networks. Chances are they are saying something you need to know.

Know the politics. Who are the voters? Look at how people vote: how many are eligible, registered, and voting? Get voter registration figures and election results from your secretary of state or county elections official to see how many people registered and voted in recent elections. Check the census to see how many young people will be of voting age by Election Day. What election technology does the community use, and do citizens vote early, by absentee ballot, or by mail? If most people vote early, for example, you might begin your outreach earlier and develop an early-voting campaign strategy. Looking up the voting patterns also means looking at the fights to restrict or expand voting rights. Many restrictions are being passed as I write this book, so make sure your information is current. Rock the Vote’s Web site has good indices of voting laws, so check there and with your local election protection experts.

Look at the incumbents: the people elected at the local, county, state, and federal levels. What do they say about themselves? Visit their Web sites, read their blogs, see who follows them on Twitter, and research news archives for text, audio, and video. This research will also provide good information for your message box.

To be effective, you need the support of others who have served before you. Review your relationships with the people elected to represent your community at the local, county, state, and federal levels. Consider also the various political camps in your community, and who is on which side. Will you be forced to choose sides? If so, which side shares your values? Have you worked for or against the election of any of these people? Did everyone come together after the last fight, or do you have some fence mending to do? Which of these elected officials and political leaders are likely to get involved in your cause or campaign?

Party registration data will give you an idea as to whether people tend to vote for members of your party. Independent voters in states that allow party registration have already made a decision: they have opted not to register with a particular political party.

Political party registrations give you a starting point, but you have to look beyond party labels to discern voters’ concerns. Check election results for ballot initiatives relating to taxes, growth, school bonds, library bonds, labor relations, and social issues because they may reveal voters’ values and the priorities that those values represent. After a review of the voting patterns, consider whether there is a deciding voting bloc that can determine the outcome of the election. If the numbers are not in your favor, consider whether you have the resources to register enough new voters or persuade enough voters to cross party lines to support you or your candidate.

Know the social networks. Members of most communities hang out in both physical and virtual spaces. The August 26, 2011 Pew Internet and American Life Survey calculated that 50 percent of Americans are online, and 66 percent of online adults use social media platforms.³ So you will need to include peer-to-peer social networking in all your outreach. Find out where your voters spend their time online, and get to know each audience.

“They all have different focuses, different cultures, and different personalities. One blog or community is not like any other,” says Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas.⁴ “Know whether a site’s culture revolves around a high-profile lead blogger, or whether it’s a more community-minded approach,” advises Moulitsas.

For example, members of the Daily Kos community organized a national convention—Yearly Kos—that morphed into Netroots Nation. True to the spirit of Daily Kos, the Netroots Nation activities include crowd-sourced agenda items, cross-trainings by various progressive stakeholders, and “Netroots for the Troops,” a volunteer service activity.

Know the challenges. Gerald W. McEntee, president of AFSCME, expects aspiring leaders to know “the hopes and the challenges of the people in your community. More than being aware of problems, you need to care about people’s challenges and have a way to help solve them,” he says.⁵

Economic challenges, for example, manifest themselves in ways unique to your community. For some communities it may be underwater home mortgages in a slumping housing market; for others, a “brain drain” as kids who leave for college do not come home to work and raise families; and for still others, a more industry- or company-specific challenge. When my UC Extension class prepared a San Francisco Bay Area Community Inventory in 2010, at the beginning of the semester we listed the NUMMI auto plant in Fremont, California, as among the largest employers. A few months later, the plant was closed, meaning a loss of jobs to the thousands of workers at NUMMI and at companies supplying car parts, as well as a loss to the community of consumer and philanthropic dollars. We could chart the ripple effects of the plant closing across the community. When plans were announced to reopen the plant via Tesla Motors several weeks later, the people’s economic prospects and our Community Inventory changed again.

NETWORK WITH GROUPS AND
COMMUNITY SERVICE LEADERS

Now that you have mapped out the territory, you can engage with the various networks relevant to your campaign or candidate.

If you are thinking of running for office or accepting a leadership position with a community-wide nonprofit agency, get out and visit. If you are running for office or organizing a public service mission, begin with a listening tour, where you can meet people and hear the community’s concerns.

No one expects you to make up for a lifetime in a few months; however, people do expect that if you are going to lead, you will begin by showing your respect for them. Explore, don’t exploit. Nothing alienates potential allies faster than blanket requests for support or cash. Observe before participating. Failing to listen or to respect a community’s protocols is a pet peeve of community leaders, online and off. Sometimes you need an invitation; you cannot just show up. Like in-person meetings with members, online communities are platforms for conversations, not for self-promotion. “If you want to come and have a chat, then most online communities will give you a fair hearing. If you come in trying to market to them, they’ll turn on you with a vengeance,” says Moulitsas. “Realize that you aren’t the only person, campaign, or operation with an important mission. Give people a reason to get excited about your efforts and don’t assume or expect anything.”⁶

Friend-raising should come before fund-raising. Make friends by providing information (friend-raising) before requesting contributions (fund-raising). Democratic netroots guru Tim Tagaris advises candidates to (1) communicate directly with communities, (2) involve netroots in your effort, (3) reach out to opinion leaders, and (4) position yourself on the issues, relative to your opponent. He says, “The ideas of 50,000 [people] will almost always be better than the ideas of five people who live their entire lives inside of a campaign headquarters.”⁷

You must prepare to cede control and listen to the wisdom of crowds if you are to represent people or attract them to your cause.

Congressman Bruce Braley’s work in Iowa’s First Congressional District is instructive. When Braley first ran, this was an open seat with no incumbent and no clear advantage in voter registration for either political party. Braley made a commitment to represent everyone in the district, no matter their political party, and set out to visit with as many people as possible. Braley posted a map of all twelve counties on his Web site so people could click on the county for a schedule of events, which included meet-and-greets, town hall forums, pork chop dinners, 5K runs, and homecoming parades. By the time his tour was finished, Braley had a deeper respect for the traditions and a broader knowledge of the values and issues in the campaign. The people, in turn, had his visits to their neighborhoods and his articulation of their issues as proof that he saw them as his future employers.⁸ Now five years into the job, Braley continues to tour his district, revisiting all those areas and, in recent months, laying sandbags and offering assistance to the areas savaged by flooding, all the while Tweeting his perspectives to followers.

Like Congressman Braley, you must get out and visit with people in order to understand their aspirations. Be sure to keep in contact with the people you meet, adding them to your various networks as appropriate. Ongoing updates will let you know what issues are most on people’s minds as well as the fund-raising and organizational work they are doing.

Few people knock on 25,000 doors through their entire volunteer operation, so that perseverance helps explain why Debbie Wasserman Schultz won her first election for the Florida legislature with 64 percent of the vote.⁹ Her husband made her milkshakes to keep up her strength, and off she went to meet the neighbors one household at a time. She went on to congress and became the first woman nominated to chair a major political party by a sitting president. As the congresswoman has reminded candidates at our AFSCME boot camps, knocking on doors gave her the best polling data possible: direct feedback from the people.

If you are working with an incumbent, keep visiting with people as aggressively as you did when the person was a candidate first seeking the job. By all means, don’t stop listening. Many newly elected party and public officials embark on thank-you tours when they are elected and listening sessions once they are in office to stay close.

If you’ve lost and are trying for a comeback, make sure you show growth and not a grudge. Congressman John Tierney of Massachusetts ran three times against the same opponent, losing in 1994 and winning in 1996 and 1998. “Anger doesn’t work,” cautions Tierney. “Better to identify what people liked in your campaign and highlight and improve on that.” Tierney advises repeat challengers: “Do not run the last campaign. Essentially, it is all about keeping your base from the last time and building a new voter group through concentrated outreach.”¹⁰

If you are working for a public servant or are an incumbent yourself, help the other members of your community’s official family. Congressman Mike Thompson, Democrat of California, a leader of the Blue Dog Coalition, advises you to stay close to your family of elected officials. Thompson cooks up an annual pasta feed hosting all the elected officials and community leaders in each county of his sprawling north coast California congressional district.¹¹

Use social media to organize local groups and individuals for fact-finding, fund-raising, and communicating with the public. Once you build your networks, be sure to find ways to keep them going—even after you win. Now that the economy is sputtering and the Tea Party has urged Republicans not to spend money on direct stimulus investments, the Obama administration faces the task of re-engaging those networks and re-enlisting support. One lesson they learned the hard way was not to let their network atrophy. Their e-mail list of 11 million people withered on the vine for several months before becoming engaged for the health-care debate several months into the administration. Though its revival certainly helped pass health-care reform, the relative inaction in the early months of 2009 undercut the president’s support among his base. Going forward, the lesson for President Obama and for any elected official is to keep that network going because there is only a limited opportunity to make change. Winning only matters if you can translate it into making progress in people’s lives.

Build coalitions. Look for unlikely allies to join your networks. GreenDog Campaigns’ Dotty LeMieux (introduced in chapter 1), described a coalition to require that any new construction at the Marin County Civic Center be subject to a public vote. “A preservationist group attracted the interest of prison reformers (because a new jail was being contemplated at the site), anti-tax advocates (who feared they would have to foot the bill for some lavish building projects), and neighbors (who wanted to keep things quiet),” she recalls. LeMieux and her unlikely allies sought endorsements from conservationist groups like the Sierra Club and social justice networks whose members joined their ranks as volunteer precinct workers, phone-bankers, and donors.¹²

Similarly, when plans surfaced for a biotech medical research facility on one of the most visible hillsides in Marin County, these same groups formed a coalition. According to LeMieux, a referendum opposing the facility passed easily with the support of animal rights activists (who were against animal testing) and local service providers (who were against new competition for resources). Conversely, an effort to stop a new golf course on the site of a historic blue oak forest failed because the developers offered discount greens fees to local golfers, who outnumbered the environmentalists.

Create affinity groups. Most national organizations have local leaders who have engaged in various political and community campaigns. Whether you are looking to Occupy, MoveOn, or have a Tea Party, you can visit the sites and enter your zip code to find events in your community. These organizations often form coalition networks around particular issues such as income inequality, Constitutional rights, education, energy, taxes, and net neutrality.

Tap into campus networks. Outreach to and input from young people are especially critical. Nearly every community has a college, and nearly every college has a tradition of student activism, including local chapters of national organizations. Many of these organizations have years of experience in developing young leadership.

If you are seeking progressive volunteers, look for Young Democrats of America, College Democrats, progressive campus networks devoted to women’s rights or the environment, Public Interest Research Group (PIRG), ethnic organizations, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) pride chapters. If you seek conservative volunteers, look for local chapters of College Republicans or conservative campus networks such as the Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ISI), the Collegiate Network, the Leadership Institute, Young America’s Foundation, or the Heritage Foundation.

Consider groups that reach across the political spectrum to organize around causes. For example, young Americans from a variety of political and religious traditions are asserting leadership on the cause of combating genocide in the Sudan. Web sites like SaveDarfur.org and RocktheVote.org list local Divest for Darfur chapters. Log on to see if there are any chapters in your area.

Outreach to college students should start where they are and start when they start. Have a plan for the week before classes start. Staff a table the first two weeks of classes every semester. Recruit young people to provide feedback and to lead the effort, give them training, help them write a plan, and coach them to be competent civic activists.

Empower youth networks. Effective outreach finds youth where they are—on the Web, via text messaging—addresses and produces on the issues they care about, and approaches them in an authentic style. Pollster Celinda Lake expects young voters to be a battleground constituency in 2012. “Research demonstrates that people who vote the same way three times in a row tend to vote that way disproportionately over the rest of their lifetime.”¹³ With young people having voted for Democrats in 2006, 2008, and 2010, anticipate that Democrats will try to seal the deal in 2012, while Republicans will try to break the pattern.

A dynamic youth network is the Bus Project in Oregon. Founder Jefferson Smith and director Matt Singer combine humor and activism to engage young people.¹⁴ In 2004, organizers coalesced around a strategy to get a bus, put young people on the road, and drive into competitive districts to talk to voters. By 2010, their Trick or Vote program had thousands of volunteers in over seventy-five cities dressed up in costume to talk to over 200,000 people, reminding them to vote. Their viral videos of kids dressed up in costume asking people to vote remind me of my own childhood. What began in Oregon has spread to several states, and even to the country of Cameroon.

Connect with seniors networks. The fight over Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid will dominate elections as millions of seniors press for the hard-earned benefits that others wish to cut. Mess with the safety net at your peril. Nancy D’Alesandro, my maternal grandmother, who led her “Moccasin Army” of ladies in Baltimore politics, once said in a fight with the power company: “I’m on a limited income with unlimited time.” Connect with the senior centers and networks in your community, remembering that they are the least likely to be online. Some, like the National Committee to Preserve Social Security and Medicare, are online and tweeting @NCPSSM, but most remain off-line or without cell phones. So text messaging is statistically not the way to reach them.

The seniors networks will kick-start your messaging on Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, but remember these issues are intergenerational, so be sure your messaging includes all layers. Saving Social Security is also a priority for women aged 45–65. Celinda Lake elaborates: “Women aged 45–65 tell us in focus groups ‘Social Security is all we have. We are already raiding retirement to help our kids.’”¹⁵ Young people are concerned about Medicaid because for many it is the source of health-care funding. Contacting the senior in a multigenerational household, therefore, will not “cover” the issue. You need networks to do that. A good example is the Sarah Silverman Get Bubbe to Vote ad in 2008. By convincing young people to get their grandparents to vote, she engaged in an intergenerational effort with humor.

If you are running for office, include your primary foes in your coalitions. After a primary, it is essential that your team present a united front. One of my rules for baseball is, “Don’t boo the home team.” That’s what the other side is for. Remember President Ronald Reagan’s eleventh commandment: “Thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican.”¹⁶

Montana Democrats created their own version of the eleventh commandment: Don’t make other people pay the price for our divisions. Brad Martin remembers: “We constantly reminded ourselves that other people paid the price of our divisions. When a poor child did not get health care or a hot meal because we were fighting each other, and losing elections, that child paid the price.” Martin recommends building a coalition network including your former foes by giving thanks and reaching out: “Thank your supporters. Reach out to your primary opponents and their supporters. You won. Be gracious.”¹⁷

I once walked precincts for a candidate who had not cleaned up an internal political fight from years before. It was a real problem with some members of his community who wanted him to reconcile with his foe before they would give this candidate a promotion. He didn’t, and they didn’t.

TARGET YOUR SUPPORTERS

To determine whether your cause or candidate can succeed, take a look at different groups of people and target the folks whose support you need.

Software programs will allow you to create categories of information and merge them into a master file. For party committees, candidates, and ballot initiative campaigns it’s Voter Vault or VAN technology: voter files purchased from election officials and updated with consumer data. Nonprofits have lists of names, addresses, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, and participation histories. Voter files are essentially the same—public Rolodexes telling you who registered, whether they registered with a political party, where they live, and how often they vote. (It may also have e-mail addresses and telephone numbers.) Voters are organized by small geographical units covering a few city blocks or county roads called precincts, which include about a thousand voters according to a the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.

How do you use these tools?

Take this list of voters in each precinct of the area you want to cover.

Crosscheck it with your Community Inventory data—people, geography, traditions, leaders, politics, and networks.

Merge the file with commercially available consumer information, personal Rolodexes, membership lists, and input from individual volunteers who have reached these voters directly.

Let’s say you are organizing support for a ballot initiative to promote after-school programs. One approach is to reach out to the PTA officers and child advocacy groups in your community and invite people to share their personal Rolodexes and organizational membership lists so you have a list of potential allies to identify. Then crosscheck these names against the voter files in your precincts to see who registered and votes, who should update their registration, and who needs to register.

Once you identify potential supporters, the people making peer-to-peer contact can ask for support and provide specific information on where to register. If voters express support for your cause or candidate, update your file. If allies register to vote or update their registration, update your file and ask the registrar of voters to provide you with an updated list.

National party committees use databases to identify voters with labels showing what issues would likely persuade them to vote Democratic or Republican so that people can call or visit these voters to encourage them to vote. Longtime Republican presidential adviser Karl Rove has trumpeted “microtargeting”: using databases and search tools to divide voters by their backgrounds and interests, appeal to them with tailored pitches, identify sympathetic voters, and try to move them to the polls.

During the 1987 Nancy Pelosi for Congress campaign, we deployed the Nana Brigade—my paternal grandmother and her friends sending postcards to their neighbors with Italian surnames urging them to vote. I recommend that every campaign establish a Nana Brigade of sorts—friends and family reaching out to their networks. Nowadays, the Nana Brigade meets Karl Rove. Rather than have nanas highlight names themselves from voter rolls, do your crosschecking electronically. For example, to microtarget Italian Americans, look for Italian surnames in the voter file, add names of Italian organization members, and put in publicly commercial data such as lists of people who subscribe to Italian newspapers or magazines. That leaves more time for handwritten postcards. Same outreach, new technology, and always most effective with a personal touch.

Keep in mind that microtargeting only works with input from people on the ground, in the communities. A classic cautionary tale comes from Democratic strategist Donnie Fowler, who has worked in the field on every presidential campaign since 1988. Fowler recounted a story he heard when he first arrived in Iowa for the presidential caucuses: “A candidate preparing to broadcast a pro-choice message thought he had a receptive audience in an eastern Iowa community full of single women Democratic voters … until a closer look revealed that the precinct was a convent full of nuns.”¹⁸

Although the nuns will know that your candidate is pro-choice—as would anyone reading your campaign Web site—targeting them with a pro-choice message will reflect badly on your campaign. The lesson, says Fowler, is that even if a high percentage of people agree with your position on an issue, your campaign is wasting resources by broadcasting the same message to 100 percent of them. You have to narrowcast, based on input from people on the ground. In the nuns’ case, this input saved the candidate major embarrassment. Fowler concludes: “Campaigning is an art and a science—the science is the data, and the art is the local wisdom.”¹⁹

GUT CHECK: CAN YOU LEAD
A CAMPAIGN TO VICTORY?

Now that you have inventoried and toured your community, do you have a visceral understanding of the people in your community? Take a hard look at the data and ask yourself, can my cause or candidate succeed?

Now match your visceral understanding with political reality. Do you have the relationships necessary to take the top leadership role in campaigning for a ballot measure or as a candidate for office? Do you have the optimal relationships, experience, and track record in your community to put together the message, management, money, and mobilization that are needed to win?

If you are making a decision as a candidate, be clear about your aptitudes. California progressive strategist Alex Clemens, who founded the Usual Suspects Web site tracking San Francisco Bay Area politics and policy, offers the following advice to aspiring leaders: “Identify the issues you would take to the barricades. Determine if you are the best person to take the lead for your issue on this campaign: go to your mountaintop, speak to your rabbis [mentors], and be honest with yourself. If this is a fit, go for it. If not, find the person who is the best fit, and support them.”²⁰

In that vein, former New York congressman Dan Maffei told me that when he decided to run, he was told by a key mentor: “Assume that you are on your own.” That’s a lesson for all campaigns: even with all the networks and party registration numbers that portend success, in the end you have to take personal responsibility to earn every vote and raise each dollar on your own.

If you are consulted by prospective candidates, don’t be a dream killer. This decision is too personal for anyone to make for another. Lay out the risks, be sure they have thought through their options and let them decide how to pursue their dreams. Otherwise, they will think it is you—not their own lack of readiness—that prevented them from going down that path; and in addition to harming your relationship, you will hinder their ability to grow. I never tell candidates not to run—but I do ask them for strategies needed to achieve a win number and to recruit the people needed to talk to strangers, walk in the rain, and sleep on floors. If the numbers add up, it is time to recruit people from their community to the cause and empower them with leadership roles in the campaign. If now is not the time, they may wish to gain public service experience by working with a cause or candidate who shares their visions, ideas, and values.

GET REAL:
MAP YOUR POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY

Step 1 is to use this checklist to prepare a Community Inventory.

The People

How many people live in your community?

How old are they? How many are seniors? Families? Kids?

What is the ethnic breakdown of the district?

How many are renters and how many homeowners?

What is the per capita income?

What are the major schools?

Who are the 10 largest employers in the private, public, and nonprofit sectors?

What are 5 fastest growing small business opportunities?

What are the local unions and their membership figures? Which unions work what jobs?

What are active military, civil defense, and veteran populations?

Who are first responders?

The Geography

Is the community urban, suburban, rural, or a combination?

What are the parkland, beaches, and other recreation areas?

What are the transit routes?

What are the political districts (Supervisor/Assembly/Congress/etc.)?

What are the population and growth centers?

What infrastructure is critical or integral to national security?

What are the historical museums, landmarks, and tourist attractions?

The Traditions

What are the community traditions: the Big Game, annual neighborhood or ethnic festivals, Fourth of July parades, chamber picnics, beach cleanups, 5K races?

What are the cultural landmarks, places of worship, and institutions: universities, think tanks, foundations, civic engagement organizations, and business associations?

The Opinion Leaders

Who are the opinion leaders: newspaper columnists, philanthropists, labor leaders, corporate leaders, nonprofit directors, civil rights and human rights leaders?

Who leads the community institutions that participate in these traditions (block club presidents, church deacons, shop stewards, PTA presidents)?

Which online networks have vibrant followings in your community?

What are the campus networks?

The Politics

How many voters are eligible, registered, and voting?

How have similar candidates and initiatives performed in the past?

Are voters likely to support you or your opposition in an upcoming election?

What election technology is used?

How do people vote: early, absentee, by mail?

Are there any restrictions or expansions to voting rights since the last election?

Are there changes in polling places or time of operation?

Is there a deciding voting bloc that can determine the outcome of the election?

Who are the people elected at the local, county, state, and federal levels?

What are the various political camps in your community, and who is on which side?

Will you be forced to choose sides, and which side shares your values?

Which of these political leaders are likely to get involved in your campaign?

What is your win number: how many votes do you, your candidate, or your cause need to succeed?

Step 2 is to connect with community service leaders.

Do you know the community leaders you identified?

What challenges are most on their minds?

What work on issues have you done in the community?

What fund-raising or organizational work have you done for these community groups and leaders?

What work have you done with the online communities in your area?

What work have you done for (or against) these political leaders?

Finally, step 3 is a gut check: do you have a visceral understanding of your people?

How well do you know the people and traditions in your Community Inventory?

How familiar are you with the ideals and ideas of the people?

Are you the best person to step forward for your cause or candidate?

Can you win?