One easy trick to make me want to volunteer and donate to your political campaign

A political email actually worked? Maybe I shouldn't be advertising this too loudly!

I have thoughts about political solicitation emails. Mostly, those thoughts are that they are bad and I don’t like them. I hate them because they engage in a cursed form of reverse alchemy— taking something golden (our care and concern for the world) and spinning it into a mishmash of fear and drained bank accounts.

I dislike these emails and texts so much that there are identifiable sub-categories to my enmity. Here’s an incomplete list, just off the top of my head:

-I hate the fear-mongering subject lines… the “WE’RE IN TROUBLE, GARRETT” or “DISASTER AHEAD (Trump)” or “YOU LET US DOWN, GARRETT.” (Side note: Should I unpack the fact that there’s a small part of me that feels guilty when a centrist Democratic politician tells me that they’re disappointed in me? Yes, absolutely, but that’s my journey; the emails are still bad).

-I hate the false urgency, the whole “Garrett, I’m sorry to bother you, but we’re coming up on a reporting deadline so we’re on high alert” vibe (“Kids, you’re going to have to take care of each other today, if I don’t drop everything, MITCH MCCONNELL’S HAND-PICKED CANDIDATE is going to get better headlines when the quarterly fundraising totals are announced.”).

-I hate that solicitation texts suddenly started including photos, and that every campaign read the same memo about how these photos are supposed to look candid, which is another way of saying that now my phone is full of moderately-unflattering pictures of individuals I have never met. I don’t mean to pick on any one person, but we need an example. This man might be absolutely lovely. He is running for the U.S. Congress from the other side of my state. I have no idea if I support him, but I wish him well, in life if not in politics. But do I want an unsolicited picture of him mid-sentence, just kinda gawking at me? No, I do not.

The faux-candid photos actually point to a bigger, more holistically annoying trend: the Soundbite-Ready, Rigorously-Focus-Grouped, Consultant-Honed Biography. You know, the SRRFGCHB. There are a few versions of the SRRFGCHB. One of the most prominent, particularly in Democratic Party fundraising circles, is the “oh man, the red staters are going to eat this up” folk hero. This person is often some combination of a combat veteran, blue collar worker, high school football star and/or “guy with notable facial hair.” They are beloved by the kind of people who fret endlessly about working class White resentment but spend as little time as possible with working class people of any race.

In Montana, this person has to have both a mustache and a cowboy hat and star in at least one political commercial where they shoot at something (often television sets) because, well, that’s how we settle scores out in God’s country.

In the Rust Belt, this person doesn’t need a gun, but only if they’re able to commit misdemeanor assault against televisions in some other manner (for example: footballs! just like the ones that they throw at THE Ohio State University!).

Nothing to throw and/or shoot? Well that’s ok, but you’re gonna need the mustache again, as well as a hard hat, and for good measure, a plaintive stare into the middle distance, as if you’ve just stepped out of a scene on Season Two of The Wire and your face is a metaphor for the death of the American dream.

Are you a woman? Well, you too can be presented to the world with a SRRFGCHB, but only if you grew up in a fighter plane, currently live in a fighter plane and are legally married to a fighter plane.

Congratulations to all the women involved on their planes!

It’s not just the Acela Corridor-friendly fundraising darlings, though. Every political ideology has a particular flavor of SRRFGCHB designed to make our eyes bulge out like a cartoon wolf. Long before I had any concept of Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez as an actual political figure, I, like so many millennial lefties, was taken by the story of her. A Latina Socialist bartender from the Bronx? Let’s just say, some days you click the recurring monthly donation box and some days the recurring monthly donation box clicks you.

Now, to be clear. Biography does matter, particularly when it comes to ensuring that America’s isn’t solely led by an unholy combination of White guy lawyers and, um… more White guy lawyers. But there’s still something insidious about our lionization of these elevator pitch heroes. For one, it’s tokenizing towards the candidates themselves, who are asked to play a cardboard cutout version of their identity, endlessly spouting off the same canned lines about how “growing up, my dad worked third shift,” or “in the Marines, it didn’t matter what you believed or where you came from, we had each other’s back.” But more so, it’s one more input tricking us into believing that politics is merely a game of personality-driven projection: Find your heroic political avatar, be they Donald Trump, Nancy Pelosi or Rashida Tlaib, cheer and jeer at the appropriate moments, and otherwise sit back and allow politics to happen to you.

As I’ve honed this particular aversion over the past few years, I’ve become more circumspect in my political giving. I am less likely to jump from one shiny object to another. I’ve devoted more resources towards efforts (some related to electoral politics, many not) that have more depth than a viral ad. And, quite frankly, that’s felt pretty good. Growth!

And then, this past week, I was perfectly micro-targeted. I received an email from the Wisconsin Democratic State Senate Committee. Now, I was already more likely to give this specific entreaty my time and attention. I’ve previously been grumpy (back when our state’s maps were more thoroughly gerrymandered) that the Wisconsin Democratic Party wasn’t organizing in every legislative district, and I’m excited that they are now making a more concerted effort to make up for lost time.

The specific pitch didn’t start promisingly, though. I was told that the candidate in question grew up on a dairy farm. “OF COURSE!” I yelled at my screen. If you lived on a dairy farm at any point in the past thirty years, no doubt the Democratic Party of Wisconsin has, at one point or another, shot a campaign ad with you standing in front of a barn. In Wisconsin, these colors don’t run (because they just drank an entire pint glass of whole milk).

But still, the candidate in question, Sarah Keyeski, seemed earnest, and I am invested in flipping the State Senate. So I clicked over to her website and read her biography. And I tell you, friends. I am so immune to a SRRFGCHB. I stayed strong as Keyeski told me about life on the farm, about becoming a counselor, about raising a family. And then, damnit, she got me! Oh goodness did she get me. She started talking about what she’s been up to in Lodi.

Then Covid hit. Our town, like most, was deeply hurt, not just financially, but emotionally. Our residents became more anxious and increasingly divided over responses to the pandemic and the small town values of mutual respect and connection began to erode. As a mental health provider, I was in the "trenches" seeing, and feeling, the devastating impact this was having and I felt compelled to help. I became convinced that, to heal our division, we needed to all come together with a shared, positive purpose. So, I decided to form a non-profit entity that I named "Lift Lodi" and charged forward. The mission was to "bring Lodi together to revitalize what's around us and lift what's within us." For the past two years, I've worked with seven other devoted community members to coordinate community-wide days of service where over 220 people each year work together to pick weeds, paint fences, rake yards, clean up garbage, plant flowers, put up birdhouses, etc. to improve our shared surroundings.

Damnit, Kayeski! You founded a community support/small-town-version-of-mutual-aid effort in your community! And it’s still going strong! And suddenly I trust you when you say you weren’t planning on running, that others asked you to do so. I do believe that you’re doing this for your town, and that you’re informed by relationships in your town, and that regardless of whether you win or not you’ll continue to organize in your town.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe, like all of us, I am still susceptible to a well-honed story. I still don’t know anything about Sarah Keyeski that I couldn’t glean from her own website and some quick accessory googling. But as somebody who has long encouraged friends and colleagues in small towns, suburbs and big cities across the country to focus first on their own communities rather than the Sturm und Drang of reactive, personality-driven politics, if ever there were a moment to let my guard down for a second and give a candidate on the other side of the state a chance, this feels like it. So yes, I’m currently on Team Kayeski. Recurring donations have been set up and I’m looking forward to making the trip west for some volunteer canvassing.

Perhaps this will be the beginning of a beautiful new era of political connection. Perhaps in getting involved with Keyeski’s campaign, I can bridge some of the distance that exists between my big city on the Eastern edge of the state and her tiny town in the middle. Or perhaps I’m a sucker who fell for a more nuanced version of the same old story. We’ll see!

So yes, the risk of this particular essay is that, for all the would-be political candidates reading this, I have laid out on a platter exactly the recipe you should follow to sneak into my pocketbook: If you talk enough about your community organizing work, you’ll apparently get me Acting Blue until the cows come home. But that’s not the bigger point here, or at least I hope it isn’t. What matters much more than whether I support any given candidate is the question of what political figures owe us. Are we looking for heroes to save us? For empty vessels into which consultants can pack so many folksy signifiers? I hope not.

Instead, I dream that we’re up for a better set of questions. Not “who are you and what’s your story?” or “how well have you figured out to pander to me?” but “what have you been building in your community, to whom are you accountable, and what work will you stay connected to if elected?”

The myth of the Perfect Candidate Story is that elected officials have to pretend to be fully unlike the rest of us, unblemished, sanded-down simulacra of human beings. I have no interest in any of that. I don’t need to vote for somebody whose biography is too good to be true. Instead, I want somebody who has put in their time at over-long meetings in church basements, who believes, from the work that they’ve done alongside their neighbors, that all of us are pretty great, actually, and that none of us need a hero to save us.

End notes:

There’s a lot of protest and organizing news!

• You’ve heard about the United Auto Workers’ victory in Chattanooga, right? You understand the historic significance? About how important it is to disprove the myth that, when it comes to labor, the South is unorganizable? Right??? It’s so exciting. Ahhhh! Organize everywhere, win everywhere! For more on what enabled the UAW to break through (spoiler: yes, they have a charismatic leader, but this is not Shawn Fain’s victory, this is a true rank-and-file, all hands on deck victory), I highly recommend this piece by Hamilton Nolan. On the flip side: If you’re a progressive publication, this headline is gross and weird and erases the multiracial Southern organizers who made this victory possible.

• Because Idaho is in the news, a reminder that in that state, like everywhere whose politics we often bemoan, organizers are working to change the current political reality. You’ve heard me praise Reclaim Idaho and their campaigns before. I’ve been less enamored with the Democratic Party in the Gem State, but credit where credit’s due— they’re now contesting every legislative race (should it have taken 30 years to do this? augh!!!).

• I haven’t fully made sense of my thoughts about the Columbia University Gaza Solidarity encampment, not because of the action itself, but because I’m trying to process all the layers of America’s disproportionate fascination (both on the right and the left) regarding protests at Ivy League campuses. That’s not necessarily a judgment. I’m really sorting through it (like, personally… why do I know more about the protests at some of the Ivies than current events in my own city?). What I will say, is that thanks to these protests, there’s been a new interest in analyses of past student occupation movements (both their strategic successes and weaknesses). As for Columbia, 1968? Lots of powerful lessons from that one, particularly the particular organizing approaches taken by Black students and Harlem residents. There’s some cautionary tales there as well, about self-righteousness and holier-than-thouness.

• Want to know about another local candidate for whom running for office is just one more extension of her work as both an educator and organizer? And who has utilized the brilliant strategy of “being a White Pages reader who occasionally sends me thoughtful emails?” In this house we support Tiffany Koyama Lane for Portland (OR) City Council.

There’s also a lot of Garrett Bucks-related news!

• It’s still true! I wrote a book about caring more about building a better world than your own ego, and I think you’ll like it. Please consider buying a copy if you haven’t already. And also: if you missed my appearance on the Slate “How To!” Podcast, that’ll give you a good introduction to the overall vibe.

• The world’s funnest book tour continues apace: Next Tuesday (April 30th). Lynchburg. It’s a joint book talk/organizing workshop at Lynchburg Grows (6:00 PM) and though it sounds like there will be a great crew of Lynchburg activists in the house, the organizers want to make sure that further afield friends know they’re welcome too: Richmond? Charlottesville? Dare I say it… D.C.? Greensboro? Triangle Area? You already know it’s a beautiful road trip.

• Speaking of organizing workshops… Barnraisers Spring Mini Sessions have started and they’ve been such a blast. The great news is that there’s still three more chances to get in on the action. Info and registration here.

Song of the week? Sure, let’s do it.

As much as I roll my eyes a bit at all the candidates in Wisconsin who run as “Midwest farmer’s daughters,” it is a very resonant identity marker, so much so that it made for a pretty damn powerful debut album by Margo Price. If you, like me, haven’t listened to “Hands of Time” in a minute, well, you’re worth it. You’re especially worth the “Live at Farm Aid, 2016” version.