Rethink Your Precinct – 2010 Edition

Every year, registered Democrats in almost all of North Carolina’s roughly 3000 precincts meet to discuss policy, elect officers (in off years), and, sometimes, figure out how to organize themselves. The county Democratic Party has set next Monday, March 1st as the date most Buncombe precincts will have their meetings, though there are a few exceptions (see here for a full list.)

After seven years of organizing precincts and precinct meetings, I have learned by experience (and sometimes painful experience) a lot about what precinct-level organizing can’t accomplish.

Want to make a difference in an election? It’s probably more effective to volunteer for individual campaigns. Even if you’re not the biggest fan of particular candidate, if they’re running a well-organized campaign, they will often help other worthy candidates on the ballot. Want to stay involved in meaningful action between elections? Groups like MoveOn and Organizing for America manage their volunteers better than the party as a whole, and certainly better than a precinct committee full of amateurs.

And yet there’s still something about precinct meetings that make them unique. Join a campaign, and it’s all about the candidate, and they and their staff call the shots. Even if you join grassroots groups like Organizing for America, your approach to an issue – the strategy you follow, and even sometimes the tactics you’re allowed to employ in your community – are largely determined by people a long way away who are unaccountable to you or your fellow members (except insofar as they’re sensitive to the feedback provided by rising or declining membership and donations).

Go to a precinct meeting, on the other hand, and it really is all about you.

For one thing, chances are good that the meeting won’t happen unless you show up. It takes five registered Democrats from the precinct to reach a quorum; in Buncombe that means more than 350 people across the county have to show up at more than 70 different locations on a weekday night eight months before the election for every precinct meeting to conduct business. That’s quite a feat: at this point in the year, MoveOn and OfA would be doing well get a quarter of that number in a single location, and neither organization would much care if they all came from Montford – or, for that matter, from Upper Hominy. And in most precincts, getting a quorum takes some doing: by dint of merely showing up, you’ll become an indispensable part of the meeting.

In off years, when attendees at the precinct meetings elect precinct chairs and other officers , you – yes, you – could become chair yourself merely by exhibiting sufficient organizing skill to corral a dozen of your friends and neighbors into showing up and voting for you. After that, there really is no one to tell you what you can’t do in your precinct (provided that you don’t work to elect anyone who isn’t a Democrat).

The fact that most precinct officers (myself included) don’t do all that much actual organizing doesn’t change the fact that individual chairs are free – by dint of having been elected to office – to use the tools the party provides to reach out to the voters in their precincts. The opportunity still exists for chairs to become what precinct chairs and captains once were: a person whose good graces could make the difference between sweeping, just winning, and losing important neighborhoods. In federal elections, this doesn’t mean so much, but two or three organized chairs could still possibly swing a city council election, or a local Democratic primary.

Finally, national organizations do sometimes solicit “ideas” and “input,” and they’ve become fond of using conference calls and surveys as a means of convincing the grassroots that they’re being heard. (As I remember it, two weeks couldn’t go by in 2005-2006 without MoveOn asking me what I and their 2,299,999 other members thought.) And yet, well, hearing isn’t the same thing as listening. Ask any supporter of the public option whether they felt that their concerns were addressed by the higher-ups at OfA, and I’m pretty sure you’ll hear the sort of thing that gives David Plouffe nightmares.

You can, however, go to your precinct meeting and present something called a resolution-a brief statement of why an issue is important, and what you think should be done about it. Even if only four others are in attendance, you’ve had the opportunity to educate your neighbors about that issue in a setting where people are supposed to be talking about politics-and where, again, you’re essential to the meeting happening at all. If the majority of them vote in favor of your resolution, the county party must bring it up for a vote (after a brief discussion) at the annual county convention. Provided your idea passes there, it enters the hopper for resolutions that might make it into the party’s platform.

And then? Well, few pay all that much attention to the platform, and about half of those who do are working to ensure that it includes nothing that would require elected officials to stand for something they don’t already support. But saying that is simply one more of the thousands of ways of saying that progress is hard, and that none of the avenues available to us of changing the world guarantee success.

Since I chose to “work within the party” to achieve progressive goals, two bits of wisdom have stuck with me. One comes from Ralph Nader: “Where your eyes glaze over – that’s where the action is.” There are more exciting things to do than go to a precinct meeting, to be sure, but I find it immensely satisfying to be tasked with forming political networks based on face-to-face contact within a neighborhood – much more satisfying than any experience in an online community. After all, we still vote based on where we live: why shouldn’t we organize along the same lines?

The second bit of wisdom comes from Nader’s alter ego Ani DiFranco: “Every tool is a weapon if you hold it right.” There are reasons why both parties must maintain at least the semblance of democratic organizations, and reasons why they’re not particularly interested in what their democratic wings have to say. But in that dependence on democratic structures lies the opportunity to change minds, change policy, and change the outcomes of elections. That’s worth two hours on a winter weekday night, and maybe more.

As with anything, it’s up to you.