I’m going to rant on Amy McGrath one more time here. When I volunteered to sign up for her congressional campaign, I clicked I was interested in sign delivery, data input. When I show up for my first day they say, we want you to phone bank. Not what I signed up for but okay. I was barely comfortable when I was dialing the numbers. Walked out the first day they had a computer dialing numbers for me.
But fuck off when I say what I am willing to volunteer for, and you pressure me into something different.
Hey man take it easy her campaign is working hard to spend $50 million without cutting the margin down to single digits. Thats a lot of pressure, you can’t be expecting them to be using volunteers efficiently and shit.
Hard to overcome disinformation (both), no name ID (Pete), or youth voter disenfranchisement + lack of turnout (Bernie).
I just wish other campaigns wouldn’t be so insular and instead decide to learn from the organizational prowess of those two. It’s one thing to funnel volunteers to one phone or text bank at a time. It’s another to actually give them the tools and power to help run the show.
Yeah I totally agree, it’s also hard to overcome major financial and institutional disadvantages. If Biden ran his primary campaign half as well as either of those two he would have had it sewn up in New Hampshire.
I’m going to text bank for Raphael Warnock. He’s running in the special election for the second senate seat in Georgia, which is only in office until 2022 when it is up for a regular election. There’s no primary, and if no candidate gets 50% of the vote (they won’t) we go to a runoff.
Warnock will almost certainly be in a runoff election, and getting name recognition in advance of this is important groundwork. We need a Dem to be in the top 2, so we need to concentrate the votes among the frontrunner.
A lot of people don’t understand there are two Georgia senate races. It’s important to communicate that voting for Warnock doesn’t mean you can’t vote for Ossoff and vice versa. It would be worth text banking for Ossoff for that reason, too.
Stressing the importance of two senate races on the ballot might cause more people to turn out in general, which could help Biden and Ossoff.
Thanks for starting this thread. I didn’t realize text banking was a thing.
I love all of the new text/phone bankers ready to get involved! UP has a lot of potential to make an impact and it’s really awesome to see the community turning our anger into action.
Also, that seems like a great race to help and reason to to text bank.
Yeah, I’ll also post general opportunities in here as well…no need to wait for a UP group thing.
But seriously, if we want to text for Biden, you all need to take one of these trainings. After everyone is trained, we can probably set up a group event over zoom or whatever, watch a movie or just chat while we text.
They seem to be filling up, because there are two fewer dates on there than there were last night when I checked, so clicky:
One of my college professors, now friends, posted that he is matching donations today to any progressive cause or donating $50 for every hour volunteered. I mentioned that I registered for training and he spent sent $50 to Sara Gideon. I also just sent a little bit to Jaime Harrison cause fuck Lindsey. You all motivated me to do so and seeing his post locked me in.
ETA: he just sent $25 to Harrison. What a good dude.
I attended the textbank training yesterday. Takes less than an hour, and I’ve already sent ~300 texts. There were over 1600 people in the training yesterday, so people are definitely signing up to volunteer.
This is for Biden. I am still researching texting for various senate candidates, most have much more active phone banking campaigns right now.
Most of the campaigns seem to be using the same texting app, so once you learn it in one place, we can easily switch to others’ campaigns.