Translation of excerpts from Robert Heinlein’s book, Take Your Government Back - part 23

How to make a list of those voters who must be visited.

Suppose there are 320,000 permanent residents in 100,000 homes in your constituency. I doubt that you have enough volunteers to go into each of these houses. In addition, only 70,000 of all these residents are members of your party, and only from 25,000 of them can be expected to vote for the primaries. These 25,000 live in approximately 15,000 individual houses (the numbers are not sucked from the finger, but based on statistical studies). The 100 volunteers you have and one tireless candidate will be able to get around these 15,000 homes only if they know exactly which houses to visit without fail. Fortunately, there are ways to find out.

The entire adult population of the United States can be divided into three groups: those who vote for the primaries (and, of course, the main elections), those who vote only in the main elections, and those who do not vote at all. (The percentage of these groups fluctuates slightly, depending on whether we mean the elections to the city government, or the state and the whole country elections, but this change can be neglected, the principles remain the same). The fact is that, slightly changing in size, these groups as a whole remain composed of the same types of voters. That is, citizens who voted at one primaries will almost certainly vote at all primaries, if circumstances allow them to do so.

In many, or even most of the states, there is a custom to hang up lists of voters registered at the polling station at the exit from the polling station, with notes of which of them has voted. After the end of the elections, these lists leave to hang another week. By copying them, you can get the basis for your list of potential voters. Of course, manually rewriting posted lists is long and tiring, for this there are better ways. As far as I know, in all states each voter puts his signature in a special journal. These magazines are then handed over to the voter registrar, city official, or other official responsible for maintaining voter lists for whom they have been there for some time, depending on local laws and customs. This is done in order to present them as evidence in case of questions about the legitimacy of the elections.

Your state law may allow you to get these records. But, regardless of the provisions of the law, having found the person with whom they are located, you can persuade him to show them to you, by coming to him with a smile on your face, and by showing charm. Only achieve this as a service on his part, and not as the realization of your legal right. After gaining access to the records, two people, one of whom reads the signatures, and the other - tick the voter list, for two or four days, they can compile a list of those who voted for the whole congressmen district. After that, the alphabetically ordered list should be rewritten into a voter file, and begin to use wherever necessary. This work must be done before the election campaign begins, and its successful implementation is one of the pledges of winning the campaign, even before the start of the election race.

Of course, you will also need lists of all voters registered in your district. You will need three or four sets of these lists, and getting them can be expensive for your budget. However, the one who keeps the lists of voters, it is often possible to find free sets of lists of registered voters. Or you can get them through the printing house where they were printed. As a rule, the easiest way to get anything is to find out from whom it may be, go straight to him, and ask him to supply them to you for free. This method is applicable always and everywhere - from a request to smoke, to a request to donate a million dollars, and it is absolutely necessary in politics. Even if you don’t get free voter lists, you will probably be able to get an office for free, place free ads in the newspaper, and print your flyers for free.

When you have a list of voters who voted for the primaries, your candidate and your agitators start work: the candidate visits the voters on the list, and the agitators ring up the voters listed in it, and then, if they have time, they will start calling other people assigned to you parties of voters in your district. Agitators must constantly update the voter files, remove the cards of those who moved, and, adding those who moved to your district, as they are found. In addition to phone calls, each agitator should try to establish a channel for receiving information about new voters who have moved to his polling station. Such information may, for example, be given by the local postman, although the postal rules are very disapproving of the disclosure by the employees of the post office of information about the clients served.

Instead of a postman, you can also make friends with local policemen, a milkman, or messengers who deliver goods from stores. The sources of information you need can also be real estate dealers and moving and warehousing services. A good agitator with little effort always quite accurately knows what percentage of votes should be counted during the primaries at his polling station and what their results may be. And even that, on the voices of whom it is from the polling station that your candidate can count on, which of the voters will come to vote himself, and who should be taken to the polling station. Because the pack of cards that you handed him at the very beginning of his work contains all the necessary information about the voters he will attend, and helps him to immediately start acting no worse than any professional vote collector.

Just make sure that the number of voters assigned to your volunteer is not excessive, so that he has enough time to devote to them to bypass them. The volunteer organization in the district is always unevenly distributed: in some polling stations, none of your volunteers will live. But do not try to send volunteers there from other polling stations (except when a voter must be brought to a polling station on election day). Bypassing such sites is better to entrust the candidate, focusing on the most densely populated of them. The candidate will be able to get more votes than any of your agitators for the same time. And besides, he has chances to recruit new volunteers to your team. And on election day, send your people to deliver voters to the polling station whose votes your candidate got, even if your team will have to be dispersed.

Chapter 9 Important points and common mistakes

Your volunteers should not engage in mass distribution of campaign leaflets, the time spent on this is best used to bypass the voters. If you think you can afford to use such unaddressed methods as leaflet distribution for campaigning, hire professionals to do this. To reduce the cost of paying for their services, you can cooperate with another customer who needs mass distribution of materials, for example, with a local newspaper or advertising agency.

You will receive many sympathizers of your campaign who do not want to, or who are not able to go around the electoral circle. Borrow them with other things, because you can always find a lot of routine work that needs to be done - sending letters, copying documents, preparing voter lists, and so on. Become a little slave owner - since these people are here, it means they want to help you. So load them with the deed and they either start working or leave you alone.

A lot of people by phone will call the candidate to visit him, and if the candidate is busy, he will invite you personally. No matter how they explain their invitations, they all need only one thing - money or a post in the government. Handle them extremely politely, and make sure that your candidate doesn’t come to them by chance. Explain to these people that the lack of time does not allow them to accept the invitation, and invite them to visit them - to your office. Most of them, of course, will not appear, and I think it will suit you.

Mr. Influential Figure, an intimate friend of the Judge Someone, and someone familiar with Governor So-and-so may allegedly come to you, ostensibly once practically ensuring his victory in the elections. He will say that your candidate trusts him completely and that he can teach you how to conduct the election campaign correctly. For this, he needs in your office only a table, a personal secretary and a telephone. If you fall for his bait and start listening to his advice, he will condescendingly criticize your campaign methods, and the size of your campaign budget will bypass a contemptuous silence. Assign him "responsible work" in your campaign headquarters - let them stick stamps on envelopes, or do other similar routine work. In the end, he will leave you and smash the candidate. It may even cause a quarrel between you and the candidate, because Mr. Influential Figure may indeed be his old friend, and one of those whom he very much trusts. Explain to your candidate that if this person wants to participate in the management of his campaign, he must either collect his campaign fund, hire his offices and find his employees, or change you as the campaign manager. There is no third. You undertook to conduct this campaign, and therefore it is on you that all power is vested, and nothing else. The candidate will agree with you. If not, then you can always resign.
But I think it will not happen. And the subject you have rejected will begin to tell everyone that the hapless Mr. Chestnyag is doomed to lose the election, because he has entrusted his political career to an amateur. And this is good, because it lulls the vigilance of your rivals without interfering with your work.

Also, you will sooner or later meet such characters as Crazy, the Source of Problems and the Tired Liberal. And if everything is clear with the first two types - just remove them from the office as soon as possible, then the third type should be treated differently. He is like a married woman many times, and has been brewing in politics for so long that all her novelty has faded for him. He knows the weaknesses of human nature, and that is probably all that he knows. Of course, he would be glad if you won the election, but he only knows that you will not win. And, by the way, what's the difference? Chestnyaga is a great guy, and he would like to support him - with his connections and rich experience in campaigning, in general - he will help, he can. This subject also sit sticking stamps. After a couple of days of such work, he will retire back to his ivory tower, giving way to the arena of political battles for the new generation.

The visibility of visitors will bring you to the handle. Your patience will be tested not only by volunteers who want to do anything but the real work. You will be distracted from work by various initiative groups, actors offering to make dubious political deals, you will be amazed by the variety of dirty political tricks used against you - from ripping your posters to publishing perfect lies, making false compromises and organizing provocations. Regardless, keep your working mindset. All these problems are outweighed by the invaluable experience in the group of enthusiastic and tireless enthusiasts. Even if you lose the election, all these efforts should be experienced for the sake of such invaluable experience.

Advertising

In this matter, it is best to resort to the help of professionals, if you can afford to hire them. To work in this area, you have to give it completely. Even if I had a good understanding of it (and I do not understand), describing only the basics of advertising, I would fill the entire volume of this book. If you have not found a professional, and are forced to organize advertising yourself, I will give you some guiding principles that will help you avoid many fatal mistakes.

Use the same photo of your candidate on all your campaign materials, making it your brand. This photo does not allow to choose a candidate, or his wife. Instead, make a collective decision on which photo to use, based on its effectiveness for agitation, and not for reasons of beauty, likeness, or neatness.

Being consistent throughout, support the printers 'union by printing your printed materials in their printing houses, and be sure to put the printers' union logo on everything you print, including letterhead, envelopes, and leaflets with a portrait of the candidate. If through your sponsor you have the opportunity to print all this in a non-union printing house, first decide how the voters will take it and whether this corresponds to the political views of your candidate. And if you are a staunch supporter of trade unions, then, of course, you know how to act.

Large (so-called 24-sheet) posters are always perceived by the public as a sign of a full-scale and well-funded campaign. Meanwhile, they are not so expensive. Although, nevertheless, it is better not to use them, because they will give your campaign a taste of professional politics. Advertising agencies also offer advertising space on smaller billboards - 6-sheet and 3-sheet, they are cheaper and more efficient. For the period of the last month before the elections, even the poorest election headquarters can afford to cover the city with advertising on such billboards. Until the last month, this ad is still not needed.

When placing advertisements on billboards, an optical illusion arises, the reasons for which I do not understand, but which requires leaving in the poster on the billboard less empty space than the same image on the printed page. If this is not done, then the image layout that looks great in a printed format will look sluggish and anemic on a large billboard. Therefore, use larger letters and fill up more free space on the shield. And even better - entrust this work to a professional.

Do not try to fit a lot of information on your flyers. Make their content brief and then even more concise.

Never mention the name of your opponent, neither in your advertisements, nor in propaganda literature. Teach your agitators also never to mention his name, let them call him an “opposition candidate” if you already have to mention him. And do not let your candidate mention the name of the opponent, even if he is forced to talk about him.

If your district is large enough to have your own radio station with a large local audience, you can buy airtime from them for short ad units in the day program. Make a few short (from five to ten seconds), different ad units, they should all be simple and easy to understand. A little thought about the text, you can make mention of the name of your candidate in them up to three times - per ten-second block. Here is the simplest example: “Attention, a message from Jonathan Chestnyagi. Mr. Chestnyaga calls on you next Tuesday to vote for the primaries - Jonathan Chestnyaga, a candidate for Congress. ” Just do not make these blocks too private and annoying.

The main goal of any political advertising is not to persuade the voters, but to fix the name and organization of the candidate in the voters' subconscious mind with constant repetition. The second most important goal of advertising is to make it clear to your supporters that they are not alone in their commitment, and to cheer them up. Unlike bypassing voters, advertising on billboards and on the radio brings very little benefit in terms of directly attracting votes. But on the other hand, thanks to this ad, your supporters clearly see that you are indeed leading the election campaign. They see posters, hear radio commercials, and this warms their souls. No matter who they are - your agitators, or ordinary voters who have decided to vote for your candidate, they say to themselves: “It seems that the campaign is going well for us - perhaps we can win the elections!”. And I repeat once again: advertising campaigns will not bring many electoral votes, unless the voices of those who peck at everything new, loud and bright, like a circus rally. But then all this hype clearly shows that you are not inactive and will inspire your supporters.

Advertising in newspapers has a noticeable effect on how these newspapers will write about your candidate, this applies even to most metropolitan publications. In small local newspapers that are published once or twice a week, it is better to post, not custom-made articles, but advertisements, buying medium-sized ad units. If the editor of such a newspaper treats you well, he can provide you with advertising space for free, provided that you don’t tell anyone about it, because he places ads for other candidates for a fee.

The editors and staff of the newspaper will help you put together an ad unit and prepare a customized article, even if you are not a supporter of your candidate. The main thing is to ask them well, and not to interfere with helping, saying that you yourself know everything. If they start with the phrase: “Honestly, you have to redo everything here,” then you should be happy, because now you will get free practical advice from a professional. I must say that people, as a rule, respect and value those whom they have helped, this is more common than gratitude.

Placing large ad units in local newspapers is often a cheaper way to inform local audiences about themselves than mass distribution of leaflets. By “large,” I mean blocks up to two newspaper columns and half a page height. If you have extra money, instead of increasing the size of the ad unit, it is better to repeat it in several subsequent issues of the newspaper.

Evenly distribute newspaper advertisements to all district publications, except those that actively oppose you. Although, if it allows you to reach the part of the audience that you do not reach, it will be wise to advertise there. But do not get carried away: newspaper advertising can empty your budget, and the effect of it is rather doubtful, and not at all as noticeable as the newspaper reporters say. Recall that Roosevelt won the election four times, despite the fact that the opinion of 90% of the press was against him. Do not forget about it, even if you are a Republican, and do not let anyone fool you in the head, convincing you to build your campaign on advertising in newspapers. A large-scale newspaper advertising campaign can mislead you, making you think that you are winning, at the time, when in fact you are losing (how to investigate the electoral situation in the district - see below). You can win even if all of your district’s newspapers are against you.

Stickers for cars are very well suited for advertising, they are cheap to manufacture and show the personal political preferences of the car owner. Even better and cheaper bumper stickers, which can also be made at home by screen printing, which you can learn in any workshop for the production of advertising stretch marks. But even custom stickers for bumpers are cheap enough, and in addition are equipped with clips to attach to the bumper. Self-made stickers can be attached to the bumper with wide rubber bands or ropes. This is a great kind of advertising: everyone who sees them reads the inscriptions on them, which is not the case with billboard advertising. Let, at a minimum, your agitators hang such stickers on the front and rear bumpers of their cars.

Bypassing voters, your agitators can, without wasting too much time, at the same time stick up advertising billboards all over the district - they are in sheet format, in half, and in a quarter of a sheet. Local laws often prohibit the posting of ads, but, as a rule, in practice, no one observes these laws.

Nevertheless, it is better to hire a professional to carry out an advertising campaign, even if part-time, or on piece-rate payment.

Internal party relations

During the primaries, your opponent will be Jack Hope, your party colleague. Never forget that after the primaries you will need the support of all factions of your party, and do not let your supporters forget about it.

Relationship with a rival on the primaries is a very subtle topic, especially in volunteer organizations, in which many of your supporters are innocent idealists who think in black and white categories. They are confident that Jack Hope is a real Enemy with a capital letter, and in the heat of political struggle may go beyond the rules of good taste in his behavior towards his opponent. The same can happen with your opponent's supporters. Developing on the principle of "an eye for an eye", the situation can get completely out of control, splitting your party into two camps, which will make it impossible for your candidate to win the final election. Since in itself the victory in the primaries does not matter to you, being only a means to win the elections, you should prevent such a development of events at any cost.

All this can begin with a perfectly reasonable plan: to conduct your campaign, try to do it well, and not pay any attention to the opponent's campaign. But one day a day may come when someone will tear down a few of your posters, or some troublemakers from a rival camp will appear at your meeting, and your ardent supporters in their noble indignation will hurry to pay their rivals revenge. By their inappropriate behavior, they can put all your work down the drain in one day, in the sincere conviction that they help their candidate.

Even if your opponent is not entirely clear on the hand, and it was he who organized the provocations (which is very doubtful!), You must prevent any revenge on your opponents. Posters could be ripped off by members of the opposition party, not by supporters of Jack Hope. It is even possible that the rival party has introduced its agents to you and to the opponent, with a task to provoke a split in the ranks of your party at any cost.

To prevent all this, I know two effective methods, and you can think of others. The first of them, and you and your candidate, must constantly repeat to your comrades that, together with the entire party list, you will support Mr. Hope, if the party nominates him. Explain to your supporters that the reason for such a determination is the very essence of the democratic process, which consists in the struggle for dominance between groups, where the majority decision is perceived with understanding by the rest, uniting with them into even larger groups capable of waging an even larger struggle.

Thus, today's your competitors tomorrow will become your allies in the fight with your common rival. Remind that if your candidate is elected to Congress, he will work there for the good of the country alongside congressmen from both parties. For democratic organizations, there is nothing more destructive than the fierce hatred between their internal groups. In England, there is a good term - “His Majesty’s loyal opposition”, meaning that the opposition carries a constructive start, and is not some kind of eternally snapping outcast.

An even wiser way to avoid hatred between factions is to acquaint them among themselves: it is difficult to dislike a person with whom you are well acquainted, if only he is not a frank rascal. The election campaign of the primaries is a very good time to introduce parties into the custom of the party with all the local party representatives. It can be dance evenings, or invited lunches, dinners, or dinners, which are even easier to arrange. In your area there will certainly be restaurants with banquet rooms for any size and wallet. The typical restaurant owner will only be happy to organize a group meal without prepaying in advance, but gathering more from a large group in one evening than from individual visitors for the same evening. Especially when you tell him how many people he will have. I think that if you search in your neighborhood, it will be easy for you to find such a restaurant. (Do not forget to organize a tip collection for your waiters on the dish passed among your guests, the deprivation of which is bad not only politically but also morally).

In the district in which I once was engaged in politics, we, for many years, gathered for Sunday breakfast. Usually, this breakfast was held once a month, and on the eve of the elections - a little more often. The beginning of this custom was laid by ordinary party members who felt the need to rally the party ranks, but the event was usually organized by the district party committee: harmony in the party ranks is necessary for everyone - from the bottom to the top. "May the peacemaker be blessed, for he will see the coming of his party to power!"
Sunday morning was chosen because almost everyone was satisfied with this time. I think in your case, Sunday morning will also be the most successful choice - because the Catholics have time to go to the Sunday service before breakfast, the Judaists will hold the service on Friday evening, and those of the Protestants who regularly attend church will miss only one service per month, and , besides, can go on this day to the evening service. (, : « : : ? , ? , ?»).

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Part 1, where there are links to all other parts