How Labour organisers can learn from US field campaigns

There tends to be a feeling across the Labour Party that the Democratic Party in the US “does campaigning” better than we do, or at least that there are substantive things we could learn from them. In my experience of US campaigns, this is true – but it’s not always true in the way British politicos think it is. The most vital things we can learn from US campaigns aren’t about big data or attack ads, but about how we structure our field campaigns and recruit and manage our volunteers.

If we were roughly trying to overlay the amount of field staff you have on a campaign in the US to the UK, you would be looking at six or so field staff per parliamentary seat. And that is just field staff. It’s hard to exactly compare the roles these staff play in each country, but very roughly speaking, what we would call an organiser does the job of what a ‘regional organizer’ would do in the US, and what a US organizer does is more akin to what we would call a mobilisation assistant, except they take ownership of their own geographical areas.

Regional organizers in the US are in charge. They run their campaigns; they build them pretty much from the ground up every time and are able to recruit and train volunteer leaders and teams in ways that are tailored to the campaign. There are local Democratic Parties, which have chairs and committees the same way that CLPs have committees. But these committees do not run the campaigns: there are no Local Campaign Forum (LCF) equivalents. Party committees handle the logistics of primaries, but do not decide overall campaign strategy. These things are guided by paid members of staff, professionals who do this work full-time.

US field staff only have to be field staff – they do not have to raise funds, design leaflets, manage social media, write letter copy, etc. (There are other staff members to do those things – as there should be, because as well as being time consuming, those tasks require entirely different skill sets.) And  in the UK, of course, hiring more staff is complicated. We have much stricter campaign spending regulation. But mobilisation assistants don’t have to count in campaign spend, because they are reaching out to members, not voters. And there’s a lot of work that is and can be done before the official “campaign period” that therefore doesn’t fall under spend. Trying to work around the limitations we find placed on us isn’t easy – but that’s not to say there aren’t steps we can take towards a more fleshed out staffing structure on our campaigns.

There’s also a lot we can learn from how the US recruit, mobilise and train volunteers. A lot of this stuff is already done by some CLPs here and there – but not universally implemented as best practice, with real oversight over execution, across our target seats.

Maybe the single biggest thing from US politics that I would bring into British politics is that, in the US, every single day, campaign organisers will make four hours worth of calls to potential volunteers. Something you hear over and over again in the Labour Party is that only the same ten people come and campaign – which is inevitable if all you do is send a member-wide email, rather than call people individually. And when someone says they are up for volunteering, it’s vital you schedule them for a specific session – not just ask them to come along whenever they can. Four hours of calls every day can be gruelling, but it delivers.

On top of that, we should be reaching out beyond our membership to expand our volunteer pool. This doesn’t translate directly from the US to the UK – we don’t have “registered Labour Party supporters” built into our countries democratic structures the way they have registered Democrats. But we have Voter ID histories, so can identify die-hard Labour supporters. We can and should reach out to them to inquire not whether they want to join the party cause, which is quite a big ask, but simply whether they can do one delivery round or one door-knocking session. This keeps the ask small enough that they might actually get involved. It might lead to deeper engagement, but even if it doesn’t, getting a fraction of our dedicated voters to do one volunteer task each would make a huge difference.

In the US, they do confirmation calls, or texts if people don’t pick up the phone. Organisers don’t assume that people will turn up just because they agreed to do so two weeks ago. They chase them up, then people actually show up.

But all of this only works if you make it fun. In the Labour Party, we tend to treat campaigning like a chore, giving the impression to new or potential volunteers that this is a miserable activity, which is not going to motivate them to do help out again. In the US, campaign offices are bright and vibrant, and volunteers are made to feel like they are there to change the world – which is how they should feel, because they are.

In the US, there is real training for volunteers. If someone has never knocked on doors before, the training will be half an hour to 45 minutes long. If someone has knocked on doors before but hasn’t done so in that campaign, or not recently, a trainer will still spend 20 minutes or so going over the talking points. The quality of the conversation you have on the doorstep matters, and people can’t be expected to have these conversations without being given pointers. If you train your volunteers properly, the quality of your data will be better, the effectiveness of your GOTV will be improved, and you can even persuade undecided voters on the doorstep.

Finally, we should learn to knock fewer doors but knock the doors that we do knock more frequently. We don’t need to GOTV at a house that we know votes at every single election. We don’t need to persuade someone who has only ever voted Labour and will continue to do so. It is perfectly normal in the US canvass during a campaign that you will only knock on one or two houses per street; because those are the houses that you really, really need to knock on. And if you knock fewer houses, you can return again and again to the ones who aren’t in until you get hold of them, because you’ll have more time. And you’ll end up speaking to the people you can best influence with a conversation, which is how you win.

Rachel Megan Barker is a Labour member, and has campaigned in the US on Presidential, Governor and mid-term elections, in New Mexico in 2012 and 2018, in Virginia in 2013 and 2017, and in Wisconsin in 2016.