January 26 2020, 2:56 p.m.
THE PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN of
Bernie Sanders has a new directive for its army of volunteers in the final week
before the Iowa caucuses: Lay off the phone calls.
The new guidance was shared
with top volunteers on Saturday, and provided by a volunteer to The Intercept,
which independently confirmed its authenticity. The move away from
phone-banking comes as Sanders is surging in the polls in Iowa, New Hampshire,
and nationally and is explained in a detailed memo sent via Slack to campaign
volunteers by Claire Sandberg, the campaign’s national organizing director. The
directive applies to volunteers who live in states that vote in March, which
together make up more than half the country.
“Up until now, you have heard
us loud and clear that if you are not in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, or South
Carolina, the most important things are to: 1) get to one of those states and
knock on doors and 2) if you can’t get there in person, phonebank,” Sandberg
wrote. But, she continued, “We have already run through most of the calls we
wanted to make for this weekend,” citing volunteer participation that has
exceeded targets and expectations. “This is definitely a great problem to
have,” she wrote, “but this does mean we need to recalibrate.”
Sandberg, in the memo, urges
volunteers to pivot either to door-to-door canvassing in their home state, or
to friend-to-friend organizing through the campaign’s Bern app. The app,
covered in a previous
Intercept article, allows a user to find friends in the voter file and
enter information about their level of support or opposition to Sanders, and
has shown promise to be more effective than phone calls as an organizing
tactic.
It is far more effective,
campaign leaders have argued, to have friends and relatives urge those close to
them to come out to caucus than to carpet-bomb phone lines.
Campaign phone calls and text
messages, when the volume runs into the millions, can be expensive — and are
certainly more expensive than using the app or door-knocking — which may also
be contributing to a cost-benefit analysis. In the final week leading to caucus
day in Iowa on February 3, Democrats there are bombarded with phone calls from
pollsters, campaigns, and outside advocacy groups. That, in addition to
baseline spam, creates a cacophony that is hard for campaigns to break through.
It is far more effective, campaign leaders have argued, to have friends and
relatives urge those close to them to come out to caucus — known as relational
organizing — than to carpet-bomb phone lines. The campaign’s original goal
for phone calls before Iowa was 5 million, but volunteers have already surpassed 7 million.
The Sanders campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Moving away from the dialer is
a break with a practice that has become synonymous with volunteering and is
ubiquitous on other campaigns. So much so that on the same day Sandberg sent
the new directive, Sanders’s Twitter feed urged its followers:
We’ve got a long way to go.
It’s going to be a tough fight and we can't take anything for granted. Knock on
doors. Make phone calls. Do everything you can. https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1221071809686183937 …
The tweet and the new guidance
are not entirely in conflict, as people who live in states that vote in April
or beyond will still be able to make calls into early primary states, but the
clear emphasis is on friend-to-friend organizing and traveling to early states.
The March primaries will kick off with Super Tuesday on March 3, when voters in
more than a dozen states will cast their ballots.
The New York Times-Sienna
poll released
on Saturday showed Sanders with his biggest lead in Iowa yet,
at 7 points, and national polls — one by Fox News and another
by ABC — also show Sanders climbing at just the right time for his
campaign. His chief rival for the nomination, former Vice President Joe Biden,
meanwhile, has been dealt a series of blows, failing to win endorsements from
the New York Times, Des Moines Register, and New Hampshire Union Leader, who
endorsed Elizabeth Warren, Amy Klobuchar, or, in the Times oddball case, both.
(Biden still tops off
the national ABC poll.) Those papers were never going to endorse a democratic
socialist but benefited Sanders by not endorsing Biden, who had consistently
led in the polls for the past year.
A Sanders event in Ames, Iowa
on Saturday was jam-packed relative to the same time in 2016, even though this
event included Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez but not Sanders, noted former
congressional candidate Brent Welder, who organized in Iowa for Sanders last
cycle. (Sanders, along with Warren and Klobuchar, is stuck in Washington for
the Senate impeachment trial and relying on surrogates to campaign in the
crucial lead-up to the Iowa caucus.)
Now in Ames w @BernieSanders and @AOC. I came to an Ames Bernie rally right
before the 2016 Iowa Caucus & there were 1/4 the people. I’ve been to prez
events here since 2000 and I’ve never seen anything like this. There’s also a
packed balcony above and overflow room with 500 ppl
Biden and Sanders have spent
the last week-plus engaged in a lengthy debate over Biden’s record on
Social Security. It’s been damaging to Biden, and his supporters in Iowa
are urging him to shift away from that fight and back to a conversation about
electability.
NEW: With a little over a week
until the Iowa caucuses, Biden endorsers in Iowa want voters to focus on his
electability argument, rather than his ongoing policy debate on Social Security
with Sen. Sanders. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/meet-the-press/blog/meet-press-blog-latest-news-analysis-data-driving-political-discussion-n988541/ncrd1123106 …
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