Don't "Pledge to Vote"

It begins on a cold March evening in your sleepy Wisconsin town. Your friends invited you out for the night, but you have chosen to stay in - it’s dark and cold, the kind of evening that makes one choose the hot tea over the cold beer, anyway. The wind howls and the still-naked branches of trees scratch on the windows. For comfort, you turn the volume on the TV higher than you normally would, louder than your mother would approve of at least. 

Dinner is nearly ready, the scent of frozen pizza wafts through the chilled air of your apartment. There is solace in the coming spring, though these days the spooky season seems to come more than once a year. The evenings are finally coming a little later as the temperatures creep up, and the seasonal depression wanes. At 6pm, just before dinner the phone rings. 

You were not expecting a call. Yet this is the second call of the evening. You hesitate but it rings again.

The number is local but not one that you recognize. If you do not answer, will they call again? Your friendly-midwest instincts get the better of your judgment…

“Hello?” you whisper meekly, your hand shaking.

They ask for you by name…

“WHO IS THIS?!” the dread has turned your voice forceful.

“Hello, my name is Dottie and I am with Wisconsin For A Brighter Future, wondering if you have a plan to vote on April -” Click

Talk about a horror story, amirite?? Elections fucking suck. Something has to change and that’s obvious. You might have noticed that everything is expensive, and that minimum wage is $7.25 still. So, when the election carnival rolls into town and offers $25 an hour to table, knock doors, or make phone calls, it’s not hard to imagine the appeal for that real person on the phone. Honestly if that is, or has ever been you, and you are just looking for some work/extra cash - then I understand! 

For the idealists though, pouring yourself into the meat grinder of electoralism and watching the world waste away can cause real psychic damage. If you are someone who really wants to overthrow the systems that harm us, and make the world we believe that we deserve, then proximity to this type of harm will change you. With every election cycle, even the ones “we win”  I become more convinced that elections are actually evil and cause us as a community great harm. These are some of the reasons that brought me to this conclusion.

The Gig Economy Model For Organizing

The gig economy as an economic model relies on quick hires of disposable contractors who do not get benefits, stability, or job security. Any liberal worth their salt knows that this is an infringement on the dignity of work that has been a pillar of the Democratic party (at least on paper) since the early 1900’s. It is easier to forget these principles, despite the well studied social and psychological damage of gig-work on employees, during an election because:
A) it is temporary. There is a defined start and stop date and a lot of terrible conditions are easier to overlook when you know at which point it ends.
B) This disregard for workers' health and wellbeing is acceptable, because guys, it’s for a good cause!

Workers at Political Action Committees (PACs) are the organizing arms that mobilize campaigns at the ground level. The typical job responsibilities include knocking on doors and phone banking, just two types of talking to people. This kind of work is real work, and is exhausting. Most of the time when these organizations set up shop they hire quickly, and the candidates are most interested because of the excellent pay they offer. Certainly some of the people who are hired are there for their idealism, and they may be given opportunities for advancement within the organization

The rest of the employees who may only be working in these jobs for the pay do not receive the training that they need to effectively communicate the issues to the people that they talk to. They are told to  stick to lawyer-approved talking points which lead to confusing conversations at doors and on the phone. Former employees at one local organization, For Our Future PAC, have said of the work that it was “exhausting,” “had a high burnout,” and “that workers were consistently asked to work overtime without additional compensation.” 

The idealists (and most who are reading this I would imagine) are typically happy to commit to this sort of rigorous work schedule in the name of a cause that they believe in. This sort of organizing disconnects people from their labor. It is alleviated somewhat on smaller campaigns for specific candidates. In such a scenario an organizer may have more opportunities to collaborate with their campaign, and give feedback on issues. The diametric opposite example would be back in 2024, when the Harris campaign silenced those attempting to join her camp and change her position on Palestine. The person working for a campaign with documented positions that oppose their own must swallow their own conviction, there is no self-determination for those organizing with political campaigns.

Relational Voting

One of the reasons for hiring random people to hit the doors or phone bank is to capitalize on the relationships of the people being hired through Relational Voting Programs. RVP is the codification of something that has basically always existed in campaigns with grassroots enthusiasm. It was one of the reasons for Barack Obama’s overwhelming success in 2008, and was later revived and turbo-charged following Clinton’s defeat in 2016. This “tool” involves having employees sit down and write out 10 of their friends that they promise they will reach out to in the future to remind them to vote. Those lists will also include data such as address, phone number, and email so that the campaign can reach out and send that little reminder to vote as well.

You may already see how this becomes a problem, because this is how Dottie from Wisconsin For a Brighter Future got your information. RVP is not a terrible idea in that we should be talking to the people we love about the issues we care about (voting included) and grassroots organizers do this sort of thing all the time. The thing is that the data that is phone numbers, etc are not disposed of after the election, and can then be sold to other campaigns. Once you are on these lists they are terribly difficult to get off of (be careful this year whenever anyone asks you to sign a “pledge to vote,” they are putting you on a list!) In 2018, I worked for a PAC partially funded by Nextgen America, and all of our RVP data was given to Tom Steyer’s joke of a presidential campaign. 

Local organizer Tarek said this of his time using RVP: “the list building. You need it to organize. The lists are then sold, and that data is where a lot of the fundraising goes. If you don’t do it, you can’t compete.” Campaigns typically do not knock every door in the neighborhood, nor do they open a phone book and start dialing at random. Resources are just too thin to effectively reach everyone. Therefore, it is prudent to cull down the list from “every person in the district,” to “everyone I think might already lean in our direction.”

In his most recent organizing experience, Tarek used a program where a post card is sent to individuals on a list, that are personalized with a photo from the person who put the receiver on the list. “Good experience, it is effective. The drive behind the program is to get the post cards out for whatever candidate. But more than that, it is a list-building tool. Ideally we would pair it with a real community grassroots issue based campaign.”

A grassroots campaign is one that is built by people who are motivated primarily by their desire to see a cause through. Electoral campaigns typically work differently, and there is so much money pumped into them to try and simulate grassroots experience (that's why we call it astro-turf, cuz it pretends to be grassroots.) This is something we have argued before, we don’t need money to create hype around an election when a candidate is actually exciting to their base. And a candidate that is propped up by tons of money given by rich people does not have the conviction or flexibility to inspire.

Money in Politics is Worse Than You Know 

We have recently spent a lot of time talking about the caustic effect of money in elections. Money plays a large role in adjusting the agenda of candidates who are beholden to their financiers, and is then spent on fliers, commercials, and exhausted poorly trained workers that ultimately turn people off from politics as an enterprise. Money has undue influence in powering elections in the United States, but you don’t have to be an investopedia nerd like me to know that. The pursuit of money in politics leads to ghoulish behavior, like the one who fundraised off the death of Renee Good back in January. 

Campaign finance in the modern US context is regulated under The Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 (FECA) and its various amendments. The original law intended to provide transparency in the election process and limit the amount of god-damn mother-fucking ads we see every time they want us to vote for something - laudable! This law was amended, and challenged in court over the following decade, with the 1979 amendments specifically creating loopholes for what we now call “Soft Money.” That is: political contributions that are used to increase “voter turnout” and “party building activities.” 

There is half a century of history trying to weaken FECA that does not need to be understood to have a grasp on this problem. These conversations typically begin with discussion of the Citizens United ruling and that is understandable. This 2010 Supreme Court Case is the reason we have the massively oversized Super PACS which corporations can pour limitless funds into. These cases have largely increased the amount of money that can be contributed by individual donors - hard money. Soft money is out of control as well and I think that bears understanding.

This soft money is used to fuel huge and expensive campaigns that seek to increase general turnout. I think that this can be accomplished in a neutral way, specifically organizations like the Fair Elections Commission do a good job giving communities information on how to vote, and what is on the ballot. Many other organizations flirt with the lines a little bit, using the vaguest language possible to butt up against what is and is and is not legal to say. Consider if you will, Souls to the Polls. 

This article from March 2025 covers a community brunch put on by Souls to the Polls (StP) to discuss the April Supreme Court Race. They are described as a “non-partisan voter education group,” but their rhetoric does not read as Republican friendly in the slightest. In response to Elon Musk spending $6 million dollars to support Brad Schimel, Senior Pastor of Progressive Baptist Church Walter Lanier said, “Wisconsin’s democracy is not for sale.” Later, Executive Director and Minister Greg Lewis spoke “Don’t take away Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security,” before showing a video of Judge Susan Crawford.

This is not to explicitly pick on StP, lots of organizations do this. But they do so in the name of “nonpartisan activity” and that money is regulated with much less scrutiny than the money that is given to candidates for partisan activity. StP did attempt to have then-candidate Brad Schimel present a video as well, and he declined to do so. Navigating these sorts of groups requires legal oversight that hand selects nonpartisan facts and presents them in a way to make a candidate appear favorable without an explicit endorsement. Another example of this is from the website guides.vote, and this is their “voter guide” for Kamala Harris v Donald Trump. Certainly the information presented is factual, but there is an attempt to present certain issues that are popular among Democratic voters in a more positive light. Do we tend to agree that abortion should be safe and legal - duh - but if we are taking a stand against money in politics, we need to mean it.

Just Enough Hope

The tragedy of the Souls to the Polls example is that I think they do electoralism “right.” When they aren’t pushing for a particular election they hold voter registration drives, and connect issues that affect the community to the politicians who can do something about it. I have to admire the follow-through on the usefulness of voting, even as I am critical about the amount of money they are spending. Which is similar to the criticisms I have of elections taking energy away from other causes; that money could be so much more useful elsewhere. 

What is the allure of electoralism? I have heard comparisons to it being some big fuckin’ nerds version of sports and I kind of like that, though the cost is much greater. The powers that be continue to dangle change in front of us to keep us engaged with the system. To pursue more than what is offered by electoralism would cost us as we gamble with the little we have in the system we live in. We are conditioned to be scared of what it would take to divest from electoralism knowing what the hard work of a “revolution” would actually look like. So, we anoint a politician to do the hard work for us and praise ourselves for having the best understanding of the cage we are stuck in. 

Barack Obama. Bernie Sanders. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez. Zorhan Mamdani. These four figures captured the hearts of all of us (me too!!) because their campaigns sold us on their winning as a part of what liberation was going to look like. But no election will meaningfully challenge the status quo, and leftists cop to that every time they get mad at AOC for not being as radical as they want her to be. Elections are comfortable, and support the doom and gloom ethos that continues to grow as this generation becomes the first to have a lower quality of life than the generation that preceded them.

We talk a lot about elections here, and we are going to continue to do so. But I hope that in doing so we are not misleading any of our readers. Old Dan likes to use the quote “elections shift the terrain on which we struggle,” which helps me be a little more at ease with engaging with them. Angela Davis encouraged leftists to vote for Hilary Clinton in 2016, and I’m not a better leftist than Angela Davis!! Her point in doing so was that Donald Trump is a fascist, and if we had elected Hilary Clinton we may have been able to continue on the same trajectory in the struggle many were making during the Obama years with Occupy Wall Street, and the Ferguson uprising. Instead, we are fighting actual Nazis again.

In Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine, she extensively details the brutal dismemberment of countries all across Southern America, Asia, and the Middle East to prop up global capitalism. When reading history it seems easy to see the points where organized resistance could have intervened and stopped the forces that brought so much suffering. It is a lot harder when you are the one living through these times. The appeal of electoralism is how easy it is to get involved, and feel like you are doing something but it is not enough. We have to do the hard work of changing the way we think about and engage with electoralism or else it will drain us of the tools we actually need to change the world for the better.