Grassroots organizing is no different than pretty much anything else in life. If you’re serious about doing anything, you need to make sure you have the right tools to get the job done.
Here’s a handy list of five of the most basic tools you should have at your disposal if you’re going to try and build a grassroots organization at the precinct level that can truly have an impact on the things you care about.
1) A list of all registered voters in your precinct
It’s hard to identify and organize if you don’t know who the registered voters are, (or aren’t), and in order to do that you need a recent copy of the voter registration list for your precinct (or whichever precinct you’re working in).
You can get this from your local election (or voter registration) board.
2) “Prospect” lists
Just like in sales, you make your job of finding the people you’re looking for easier if you have a “warm” list of prospects.
Conservative issue petitions, surveys or membership lists from conservative churches make great “prospect” list for potential conservative activists and voters. They will make it easier for you to identify registered (and unregistered) conservatives by cross-referencing them with voter registration lists.
The result is that you know who lives in which precincts, and who is registered to vote and you could possibly approach about getting involved in your efforts. You also find out who isn’t registered, so you can get them registered in the future.
3) Blank voter registration forms
Call your local voter registration office and get copies of your state’s voter registration form, (you may even be able to download it online, depending on where you live). You want enough copies for all of those unregistered conservatives you identified from your “prospect” lists.
If people aren’t registered, they can’t vote. And if they don’t vote, they don’t count.
4) A map of the precinct
Having a map makes it easier to get an idea of who is where and how to get to them. You should be able to get this from your local planning commission or voter registration office, (or if not, they will probably know where you can). Try to get one with street lines and names overlaid on it, to make it easier for you to use.
Remember, precincts are the building blocks of all other election districts, so you want to make sure your efforts revolve around individual precincts.
5) A political events calendar
Identifying conservatives and organizing them is one thing, but it is also important to keep them informed. Set up a calendar to keep track of the dates of party primaries, general elections, special elections, school board, local council elections and meetings, as well as local political party meetings.
Let your people know what’s going on and how they can get involved.
Bottom line: do the basics
This is just a basic list, but that’s the point. It’s “basic”. Don’t get too distracted by anything that would keep you from focusing on the basics until you get them done.
(Find out more about grassroots organization in my training series!)
A quick guide to Obama’s scandalrama
Suffice it to say that Obama has found his legacy. He has set the new presidential speed record for achieving lame-duck status, going from inauguration to irrelevance in just four months. With three major scandals all coming to a boil at the same time, Democrats will be distancing themselves in droves before the dust settles.
The IRS Hokey-Pokey
All of America just found out what many conservative groups have known all along – that the IRS has spent years targeting them in order to minimize how effective they can be.
New information confirms that over a course of three years the IRS singled out groups for abuse if their names or descriptions included certain keywords like “tea party”, “9-12”, “patriot”, “constitution”, “voter fraud”, “government spending”, “limited government” or “Bill of Rights”.
The IRS demanded that such groups turn over more information about their activities, their donors, their websites and social media accounts, even asking questions about the political beliefs of personnel. Worse, at least one liberal group has admitted that the IRS sent them confidential copies of applications and other documents from thirty-one conservative groups.
Despite initial White House claims that the problem was just a bunch of low-level bureaucrats, we now know that top IRS appointees in Washington knew all about it – including IRS commissioners and chief counsels.
In the end, the abuse affected almost five-hundred conservative groups, with none receiving tax-exempt status for over twenty-seven straight months – time enough to reduce their impact on the 2012 elections. Meanwhile, liberal groups with words like “progressive” in their titles zipped right through the approval process.
There even seems to be evidence that such government abuse extended to other agencies. One group that was founded to fight against voter fraud found itself the target of an alphabet soup of government agencies, including a series of FBI inquiries about the group and its founders, ATF demands to see the family’s firearms, surprise audits of the founder’s gun dealership, and an OSHA audit of a family manufacturing business.
There are already calls from Congress for a special prosecutor to conduct an independent investigation, and once such a process gets started it can lead pretty much anywhere. Just ask Bill Clinton.
The Benghazi Shuffle
Despite months of disinterest by the press, the Obama administration is facing serious questions and a probable congressional select committee over how it dealt with the September 11th attacks on our consulate in Benghazi.
There are three key elements to the scandal:
First, why did our State Department ignore repeated requests for more security from our diplomatic personnel in a place that intelligence agencies had reported as being frequented by terrorists?
Second, when our people were under attack, why didn’t our government begin moving Heaven and earth to help them? The White House claims there wasn’t time, as it would have taken too long to respond. But since they didn’t know “when” it would be over, why weren’t assets put in motion and kept in motion until it was?
Third, in the immediate aftermath why did the administration insist that this was just a violent movie review instead of a terrorist attack? Who whitewashed the official story of any references to terrorists, and why? (OK, you probably know the answer to that one, but they’ll never admit it.)
The biggest loser in this one is going to be Hillary. The odds that she will now actually have to fight for the 2016 nomination are increasing by the day.
The Telephone (records) Blues
This is the most recent and, for the press, the most creepy of the scandals.
The Justice Department admitted this week that it grabbed two months worth of phone records for over twenty phone lines used by the Associated Press in the Capitol Building, in addition to the personal phone records of at least five reporters in the process of investigating who leaked a story about a potential terrorist attack back in 2011.
Of course subpoenaing phone records is nothing new, but there are rules and procedures to follow which were ignored, plus two months worth is a rather wide net to cast. What future sources and whistle blowers are going to be confident that their anonymity will be protected now? Will they have to return to the days of trench coats and dark parking garages in order to avoid the prying eyes of Big Brother?
This scandal probably has shorter legs than the others, but it has burned a lot of goodwill in what has otherwise been Obama’s steno pool. Goodwill he will probably need when it comes to how they cover the other scandals.
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The danger for Democrats is that Americans will note that these abuses of government power come courtesy of the same people who keep asking us to trust bigger and bigger government with more and more influence over our lives.