Fwd: Transportation advocacy, elections and candidates
Jim Baross
From: Carter Lavin from If you wanna win, you gotta fight: training for activists <carte...@substack.com>
Date: Tue, May 7, 2024 at 12:39 PM
Subject: Transportation advocacy, elections and candidates
To: <cabo...@cabobike.org>
Transportation advocacy, elections and candidatesElections are a great time to make friends, but here’s a few warnings
It's an election year. While it is important to incorporate that fact into your bike, transit or street safety advocacy, figuring out how best to do it can be tricky. As you make plans to leverage the coming election to advance your transportation goals, here are some things to keep in mind. What do you gain by engaging and what do you gain by sitting it out? Elections can be dramatic so you might be tempted to pretend they aren’t happening and steer clear. Sitting out elections means you are less likely to make political enemies, but it also means you miss out on the opportunity to make political friends. Sitting out the election might also mean abandoning an ally who was expecting your support. When you don’t engage in elections, you silence yourself and your issue gets drowned out by all the other issues. In other words– if you sit out an election, and later ask an elected official to prioritize your thing, they’ll likely be occupied working on the issues that helped them win. You were neutral when they needed you. It’s likely they’ll be neutral when you need them. Better to engage in elections and use them as an opportunity to win allies. What is permissible? Depending on how you are structured there are legal limits to what sort of election-related stuff you can do. Do not break election laws! According to the IRS, “all section 501(c)(3) organizations are absolutely prohibited from directly or indirectly participating in, or intervening in, any political campaign on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office.” If you are a 501(c)(3) you can elevate your issue and educate voters but you can’t single out candidates. Candidate forums and questionnaires are great, events with only one candidate are generally a no-no. Non-electoral events with a current office holder are generally fine. If you aren’t a registered 501(c)(3) and are acting as a private individual or collecting of individuals, you can do candidate-specific things like hosting meet-and-greets or making public endorsements. Who are your candidates? What you want to do will depend a lot on who you are dealing with. Is it an open race with no incumbent? How is the incumbent on your issue? If you are just getting started, you might not know much about the candidates and that’s ok. Sending a short questionnaire about your issue to each candidate is a good place to start. It helps your community know more about the candidates, helps the candidates understand that these issues matter, and helps the candidates get the word out about their campaign. If you do have a preferred candidate, then organizing some specialized events done within your legal abilities are great ways to help voters learn to like them too.
What is your “point of no return?” When you do an action like a forum or questionnaire that brings attention to all candidates, you help bolster your connection a little with each one. When you do something to strongly preference one candidate, their opponent tends to not think all too fondly about it. You can try to not pick favorites, or only subtly tilt the playing field, but once you effectively pick a side you pass some points of no return. You have effectively declared for one candidate and not the others– there is no turning back. The point of no return varies based on your situation, your previous relationships with the candidates, and how the candidates feel. Watch out– you might think you are doing something that’s ok, but ask yourself what the candidates will think about it. What power do you actually have? Can you actually get 20 people out to an event about the election? Could you get a dozen people to volunteer for a candidate? Can you get the questionnaire answers into the hands of a meaningful number of voters? One of the big risks of getting involved in electoral politics is making enemies. But the other major risk is revealing yourself to be all bark and no bite. If you decide to go all in on a candidate but can’t manage to move the needle electorally, you show that you aren’t a political player to be concerned about. To be clear, you don’t have to be able to move huge swaths of the electorate, but you have to be able to move the needle a bit. At least move it enough relative to what you are asking the candidate for. If you want them to make your issue their #1 issue all the time, then you better be able to single-handedly get them into office. If you just want your issue to be somewhere on their top 10 priorities, then you just need to have a noticeable impact. Primary and special elections have lower turnout so it is easier to have more of an impact. And it is easier to shift an election when it is local and when there is an open-field of candidates. What can you internally agree on? Finally, just like there are other issues your candidates care about, there are other issues that your co-organizers care about too. There might be a candidate who is great on your top issue but bad on other issues your colleagues care about. You and your co-organizers bring all sorts of other relationships and priorities to your organizing and elections can highlight those points of disconnection or tension. You might not be able to get to a larger internal consensus on what to do as a group this election– that’s ok. You will likely be able to all agree on doing a questionnaire of some sort, so do that. Transportation advocacy takes time, allies and consistent effort. It goes way beyond any one election so don’t let an election fracture your organization (unless it is an absolutely do-or-die election, but that’s for a separate post!) Elections are pivotal times in our democracy and are huge opportunities for you to advance your transportation issue. Make use of them! Need help winning transportation changes in your community? I’m here to help! Whether you want a 1-on-1 training session or a group workshop, let’s talk. Email me at Car...@carterlavin.com to set something up. Here’s a bit about what training sessions are like. Want to take a peek behind the curtain of this advocacy training work? Sign up for my quarterly newsletter here. Donate to help get more bike, pedestrian and transit activists trained across the country! Interested in sponsoring the training of an activist working on an issue you’re passionate about? Let’s chat. Car...@carterlavin.com You're currently a free subscriber to If you wanna win, you gotta fight: training for activists . For the full experience, upgrade your subscription.
© 2024 Carter Lavin
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