Draft authored by Dean Myerson, Green Party Organization Coordinator.
With the growth of theGreen Party in the last year, there are many new Green state parties and local chapters asking for assistance. Many do not have basic grassroots political experience, and the effectiveness and growth of the Green Party at the grassroots will be enhanced greatly by sharing our knowledge.
It has always been the goal of the ASGP to assist state parties to form and grow. To date, most help has been on the legal side, and by organizing the national convention and party. But we have not been able to provide direct organizing assistance. The Field Organizing Plan lays out our effort to meet this need.
The plan is to ramp up our efforts so that we can offer real and physical assistance during the 2002 election cycle, particularly for ballot access for our states. Keeping our existing ballot lines and adding new ones is a key step in building credibility for the Green Party nationwide.
I. Types of field organizing assistance
Field organizing takes on many forms based on the underlying goal. And it can be broad-based or more specific. As we start our next growth phase, we will prioritize how help is offered.
A. Basic instruction in grassroots organizing
In most parts of the country, the basic strength of our grassroots is defined by the ability to build a local and make it prosper. While no two locals do it identically, there are many basic strategies that can be shared. The way locals choose issues for issue activism, keeping the foundation of the local strong, and strategies for working with the press are examples of the types of things that organizers can teach locals, and some of this applies to state parties as well.
This kind of organizing focuses on educational workshops that can be scheduled whenever Greens get together for meetings. And it will usually be best to schedule such organizing trips during low-intensity times, such as in between elections.
Educational trips usually involve sending an organizer to a local or state meeting for a day or two. The group getting the help usually provides housing and maybe food as well for the organizer, so travel expenses are the extent of the cost. An airplane ticket to most places in the United States is between $200 and $500. If organizing workshops can be combined, it may be possible to save a lot of money and rent a car for the organizer to drive between locations.
B. Ballot access drives
Ballot access rules and difficulties vary, but in many states getting a ballot line is a key step both to building the state party, getting credibility as a genuine political force - both at the state and national level - and running effective electoral battles.
Efforts to support ballot line drives will have to focus on fewer states for many reasons: Over half already have access, only some states permit access drives in 2002, some are easy and don't need support while others may be so difficult as to make the effort a bad choice. See the appendix for an analysis of ballot drives in 2002.
Holding or increasing our ballot line count could be a significant step in achieving national credibility for the Green Party, and could thus help us in getting more coverage by the press at the national level, as well as from progressives who are currently sitting on the fence. For this reason, this plan puts a great emphasis on supporting ballot line drives by our state parties.
Because ballot drives vary in difficulty depending on state law, assistance to them will not always be educational. A few are petition drives, but most are electoral campaigns, where a certain percentage is needed for a candidate. Where states are inexperienced, this help might be educational. But in some cases, it may be primarily in the resource category. We might send an organizer in to help coordinate the drive or advise the election campaign, or assist in paying for petitioners in a few cases.
C. Electoral campaigns
Electoral campaigns are when we are most visible and are our best opportunities to take everything else we do and put it on display for the public while they pay the most attention to politics. Until we convince the American public to take a more daily activist role in their democracy, elections will continue to be a prominent outreach tool for the Green Party.
But running low-cost grassroots campaigns is a skill that many Greens do not have. There are some key things that can be done to greatly increase the number of Greens getting elected, as well as the vote total for those who don't win. These key steps include both pre-campaign candidate training and grooming, as well as techniques in the campaign itself.
Greens have been running campaigns since the 80's, and some of us have built up a large store of experience. By sharing that with younger and inexperienced groups, many more Greens will be elected at the local level and our higher-level efforts will be more prominent.
Assistance to actual running campaigns would usually take the form of having an organizer visit for a meeting or maybe a week to learn about the specifics of the campaign and strategize with the local campaign team. The organizer can identify weak points of the campaign plan and make suggestions for doing more with the resources they have, and how to recruit more volunteers or raise more money. If the organizer is put up, expenses will usually be for travel and some food possibly. It would be rare for the organizer to actually take on a key campaign role. In other cases, we may consider paying door-knockers or leafletters to travel to help a campaign, but this will be rare as well.
D. Issue Campaigns
The national Green Party is not expected to take on national issue campaigns with its own organizers. For the foreseeable future, we will support local issue organizing with educational field organizing.
E. Assistance from afar - Consulting and Materials
We will not always be able to send an organizer to every group that wants and needs one. But experienced ASGP organizers and campaigners should make themselves available by email and phone for consultations. This will be particularly valuable to strategize on specific problems that occur in electoral and issue organizing campaigns. Greens that run into situations where the best strategy is not clear should be encouraged to contact someone with experience and the ASGP should make a list of such people and their contact information available.
We can also provide printed or audio visual materials. Organizers can take these around when they travel and they can be made available from the main office at cost. Such materials should address all of the subjects above from a Green organizing perspective and also include the most relevant of commercially-available books.
F. What we generally will not do
Traditional left-based organizing often focuses strongly on targeting an unorganized area and sending in outside organizers to create a group from scratch. Greens have rarely done this, and with limited success when they have. The primary and significant exception to this is the ballot access effort by the Nader 2000 campaign. Most Green state parties and locals are home-grown groups that learned about the Green Party and it's values from a campaign or web page, and contacted us to join and/or ask for help. We do not anticipate trying to break into this kind of organizing. State parties can choose to try to organize unorganized parts of their state, and we can respond to calls to help in this, but we do not plan on choosing unorganized areas on our own for targeting.
We also will never send an organizer into an area without the cooperation of Greens already there. In most cases, we will mainly respond to requests from Greens for help, but when we do choose an area that already has Green activity for targeting, we will first consult with them.
II. The need for field assistance from the states
This section ties the types of organizing assistance to the level of development that our state parties are at.
A. Experienced state parties
Experienced state parties will not need as much educational support except for those that are physically large and request assistance with areas where Green activity is new. Assistance to these state parties will primarily be for resources for difficult ballot access drives, and to a lesser degree, breakthrough electoral campaigns.
B. New state parties
Clearly, most new state parties will need educational help first and foremost. Efforts should be made to provide this help prior to its actual use in an election or petition drive. But new state parties will also generally not have a ballot line, and depending on the difficulty of getting that line, we may want to provide more specific resource help, such as a paid coordinator, during a ballot line petition drive.
C. States without a Green Party yet
A few states have some active or interested Greens, maybe some locals, but no state party yet. We will actively respond to requests for assistance in these cases. But, as described above, we will not target areas with no Green activity in the short run. This kind of organizing is much more effective as a ballot access drive for a Presidential candidate, as taken on by Nader 2000 last year.
III. Where and when to offer help
This plan will attempt to set out a general policy regarding priorities, but actual decisions will be made on short notice by the Steering Committee based on recommendations by the field organizing team and in consultation with the Coordinating Committee.
The general concept will be to focus resource organizing assistance (paid organizers or other monetary resources) to states with key ballot access or candidate efforts, while assisting other state at the educational level. Thus we will spread our assistance fairly broadly, not excessively favoring a few states, while still being strategic with our limited resources.
We will need to keep legal issues in mind. As a National Committee, the national Green Party is subject to the laws and regulations of the Federal Election Commission. In some cases, we may not be legally permitted to offer financial or in-kind assistance to campaigns. More research is required to define these problems and work with the states so that our legal structures do not exacerbate these problems.
A. Prioritizing based on national priorities
National-level priorities are those actions and achievements which provide national-level credibility and growth to the Green Party. This results in greater press coverage, attention and support from progressives who want to see if we are "for real." In some cases, such assistance directly helps fewer states, but if we do achieve greater national credibility, all state parties will be helped by the increased attention in their local press from national press and bureaus, as well as the increased ability to recruit new members and activists.
The first level priority is with ballot lines. The Green Party already has a ballot line in most of the high population states, but if there are news stories that we have lost those lines, they would be covered nationally and would hurt us all, not just the states that lose the access.
But the press also pays attention to total state counts. During the Nader campaign, the press did not report that Nader's name was in front of 92% of voters, say. They reported on how many state ballots he was one. So we will need to support ballot drives in both large and small states.
See Appendix X for a list of potential ballot drives in 2002 and a discussion of priorities.
B. Input from states on local priorities
Many new or younger state parties are already asking for educational help. In order to avoid a rush next year, and so that new groups can absorb and share new information, we hope to make at least a half dozen such educational trips this year.
With the adoption of this plan, we will put out a call to state parties to ask what type of organizing help they would like, and when it would be most helpful. Our organizing team will compile the requests and will consult with the Steering Committee in applying these priorities to the requests.
IV. Field Organizers
In order to get the most result from our field organizing effort, we need careful coordination and strategizing from the national office and close consultation with states regarding their plans.
A. National/Head Office staff
1. Coordination/Management from the National Office
The organizing coordinator at the national office will do some field work, but as the field team expands, he will do more coordination and less travel. Careful tracking of campaign and petitioning efforts will be needed so that the allocation of resources can be adjusted as necessary. The Organizing Coordinator will consult regularly with the Steering Committee and make regular reports to the SC and to the CC as well.
2. National staff as in the Field
As mentioned above, the OC will also do field work. In the early phase (late 2001), the OC will be the only "field" staff and will do educational field work. If funds permit, others may be hired for a few visits.
In early 2002, this will accelerate some, but then slow down as more field staff come on line and more coordination is needed. The OC will then travel primarily to state party meetings and convention where more formal representation of the national party is required, or for visits or as representative to kindred groups outside of the Green Party.
B. Field Staff
Field staff will be almost all active Greens and where possible will be hired in from the state where they will do organizing work, particularly in larger states. The degree to which fewer organizers are hired and travel more widely will depend on whether organizers from larger states are willing to leave them to work elsewhere while a major effort is going on in their home state. It is expected that some organizers will work for us all year while a few may work for fixed periods of time, depending on personal schedules and travel needs.
We will put out a call for resumes late in 2001 so that we can make the best choices in our hiring.
1. Traveling organizers
These will travel within a state and among states, visiting multiple locals to provide both general training and strategizing for specific ongoing efforts. They may return for a visit later on to evaluate how things are going. The amount of time an organizer spends in a state will depend mostly on how many locals it has, but also the nature of the project. The state party will work with the national party in order to create organizer schedules that maximize the use of the field organizer.
Locally based short-term organizers
Less common, but in some cases, we will hire a local person to be an organizer in their own area, maybe to coordinate the closing period of a petition drive.
Appendix I - Timeline and Plan
The startup plan is to do educational field trips during the rest of 2001, primarily by the Organizing Coordinator, though possibly by others if finances permit.
The first field organizer would be hired half-time at the beginning of 2002 and would go full-time in March. A second full-time organizer would be hired at the beginning of April, a third at the beginning of May, and two more in June, for a total of 5 full-time field organizers, through November.
We will assume that pay and travel will add up to $2500 per month for field organizers. This comes to $92,500. We will round up to $100,000 to cover other various expenses.
State Tasks
Here is a list of 35 states, grouped together by the type of effort required.
States with no difficulty to keep existing ballot line - 10
Visits to these states would be to help educate weaker locals on organizing.
California
Colorado
Delaware
Florida
Hawai'i
Maine
Montana
New Mexico
Rhode Island
Utah
States with easy or medium difficulty effort to keep existing ballot line - 6
Alaska - registration drive
Massachusetts - needs 3% of any statewide race
Michigan - For any race, needs total vote equal to 1% of highest race
Nevada - any candidate needs 1% of Congressional total count
Oregon - any statewide needs 1% of Congressional vote
Wisconsin - needs 1% in any statewide race
Of these, possibly only Massachusetts would need any serious help, and this depends on what statewide races are available. These states would get primarily educational organizing visits, passing through a number of locals as needed in each state:
States with hard effort to keep ballot line - 6
Arizona - Needs 2/3 of 1% registered
Iowa - Needs 2% of Gubernatorial race
Minnesota - Needs 5% of any statewide
New York - Needs 50,000 votes in Gubernatorial race
Pennsylvania - Need 25,000 signatures and then 2% of highest vote-getter
Texas - Needs - 5% of any statewide
These states would need more than just educational visits. Organizers would also strategize about their campaigns and make two visits to each local, the first for education and strategizing, the second as a follow-up to maximize the campaign near the end. The larger outlay of resources will need to be to these states.
States without a ballot line but for which it is possible in 2002 to get it - 13
Arkansas - very hard election
Georgia - very hard election
Idaho - easy?
Illinois - very hard election
Kansas - hard petition
Maryland - easy/medium election
Mississippi - easy?
Nebraska - hard election
New Hampshire - hard election
Ohio - hard election
Tennessee - hard election
Virginia - very hard election
Washington - hard election
It's not clear which of these states will attempt to get a ballot line. We will need to consult with each state.
