Discussion
If you are in the US and you care about the midterm election outcomes, the time to get involved is now.
This cycle's results will largely be determined (on one level) by GOTV, aka Get Out the Vote.
I used to work professionally in US politics. Here's a short thread about how GOTV works, and how you can get involved. 1/n
#FieldWork #FieldOperations #Elections #CampaignsAndElections #ElectionCampaigns #USPol
I have tagged this thread above with #USPol, because my examples will come from my experience working in US political election campaigns, but this is an explicitly non-partisan thread about how field operations in an election campaign work.
Please keep your partisan political observations out of my mentions. That's not what I'm discussion, and I don't want my comments to be bait for nasty trolls or full of venting. You've got your own account for that. Thank you for your understanding. 2/m
Fedi is a one-room school house in the sense that the audience here has different levels of familiarity with the mechanics of US political election campaigns specifically and more broadly of election campaigns in general. I'm going to present this thread at a generalist level -- it will be too simple for some of you and too detailed for others. Sorry, that's how social media works. 3/n
In politics, you start with your vote goal for election day and work backwards. The official vote goal is 50% of the vote plus 1 vote -- that's a win margin. (In practice, the math gets more complicated, but that's good enough for this discussion.) Yes, there are other kinds of election systems -- I'm not discussing those in this thread, you are welcome to start your own thread about them. 4/n
To achieve your vote goal, you work backwards to set up your GOTV (Get Out the Vote) plan. You don't hope that people show up to vote: you make a plan to ensure they cast their vote.
On election day, that means knocking on doors & making calls to encourage your supporters to vote, and also offering rides to the polls in some areas.
(Mail-in-ballots and early voting also come under field operations; I'm not discussion those in this thread.)
5/n
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