The following Kos diary (reprinted with the kind permission of the author) is absolutely mandatory reading for anyone who really wants to know why the No On 8 campaign = epic fail.
There are things here I experienced myself; e.g., repeated pleas to the No On 8 campaign for something to do on the Web, which is the communication tool I use best, repeatedly ignored; countless suggestions for better broadcast ads and the need to directly address Yes On 8’s lies and smears, repeatedly ignored; secrecy, secrecy, and more secrecy (minor example; they wouldn’t tell me where my Election Day training was going to be until the night before, and would give me no other contact information); major frustration with No On 8’s crappy Web site and inexplicable inability to produce broadcast ads even one-eighth as hard-hitting as those being produced by the Courage Campaign (which never saw the light of day)…
Lots of things.
And there are many behind-the-scenes details no one could know without witnessing everything firsthand.
I could comment on every last line the author has written, but there’s no point, as I’d only be in agreement. What I did come to realize was how much faith I put in the No On 8 campaign solely because it was, indeed, the “only game in town.”
As our outgoing pResident once said, “Fool me once… er, fool me twice… errr… Won’t get fooled again.”
So, settle in, and do read every last word — your future, and mine, depends on it:
Proposition 8 postmortem
- from a senior volunteer
With suggestions for better campaigns in the future
This writeup is a rewrite of an extended series of comments that I originally emailed, post-election-day, in early November 2008 to a few no-on-8 campaign leaders. More recently it’s become apparent that a better writeup of my notes/analysis would be helpful, so I’ve done that here. I’ve also added a Recommendations section, not part of my original email comments, which offers some suggestions for future pro-marriage (equal marriage) efforts.
Context and my role: I served as a senior volunteer with the no-on-8 campaign in the final few months of its efforts, as the campaign ramped up its phone bank efforts. I handled phone bank location logistics, venue setup, teardown, refreshments, and technology for one of the larger weekly San Francisco bay area phone banks. The first organizing meeting that I attended was on September 3, 2008, a meeting at which the no-on-8 staff in attendance were asking for phone bank site leads and venues. The phone banks that I ran started on September 16. I also served as a “site captain” on election day, coordinating roughly a dozen teams of volunteers per the no-on-8 campaign’s (misguided but only game in town) strategy of handing out no-on-8 “palm cards” to voters at the polls.
I’m not and was not paid no-on-8 staff, and these comments aren’t intended to be a criticism of the paid field staff, who were simply executing a campaign designed higher up the no-on-8 decision-making chain. I believe that paid staff did a solid job of executing what was fundamentally a flawed campaign strategy.
Since I wasn’t involved either as paid staff nor at the strategic decision-making level, the experiences backing up my comments are entirely from the “worm’s-eye-view” of a volunteer who observed what the campaign was asking people to do for the 60 days leading up to election day.
Other postmortems that I know of:
http://www.rollingstone.com/…
http://calitics.com/…
http://www.openleft.com/…
PART I: Problems with the no-on-8 campaign
1. Reliance on focus groups, and the search for magic words
The no-on-8 campaign was focus-group driven and went searching for “magic words” to say to voters rather than following the hearts-and-minds strategy that the marriage equality movement, and the PFLAGs of the world, have been using successfully for years. From the very first volunteer recruiting meeting that I attended, paid staff made it extremely clear that the campaign had used focus groups to determine a messaging strategy, and that the campaign intended to stick by this messaging strategy. We were also informed that Dewey Square had been retained by the campaign as the consulting firm, and that Dewey Square “had never lost one of these ballot measure campaigns”. In September and October, the campaign treated this factoid as sufficient to rebut any and all strategic questions about the campaign itself.
This is the second time that I’ve participated in a stop-the-anti-marriage-ballot measure effort that was “focus-group driven” (the first time was California Proposition 22 back in 2000, which had identical language). I’ve since resolved that I will not participate in any future pro-LGBT ballot measure effort whose messaging is “focus-group-driven”. I’ve been burned twice by this approach — I’m not going to be burned a third time.
The focus group approach resulted in a negative-language campaign which made no attempt to persuade voters to vote FOR equal marriage, but instead unsuccessfully attempted to attach a few key words such as “unfair” and “wrong” to the ballot measure. Specifically, the key messaging of the phone script that thousands of volunteer no-on-8 phone bankers read on the phone was this text: “Regardless of what you think about marriage, it’s wrong to take away fundamental rights.” More on what I think about this message later below.
2. Same-sex married couples were invisible
The campaign failed to use the most valuable asset available to the campaign, which was the thousands of already-married California same-sex couples. This strategic failure appears to be the consequence of the “focus group” strategy which resulted in a conclusion that “the voters just aren’t ready to vote FOR marriage equality.”. Such an attitude strikes me as an insult to California’s majority-Democratic voting base, and to me fails even a rudimentary sanity check. Since even the California legislature was willing, twice, to vote for full equal marriage, the voters can handle the same. I wanted to see a campaign that asked the voters to vote FOR marriage equality.
The campaign could have got newly-married lesbian couple Mitzi and Fritzi and their darling 2-year-old baby Carla on the TV. Cut an ad where the couple lovingly holding the baby looks into the camera and says “please don’t take our marriage away!” Closing message: “protect marriage for all California families. Vote NO on proposition 8.” Strategically this is a much stronger position to be in. Look at the messaging that results from this type of ad:
- The language and framing of “protection” and “protection of children” are seized as a no-on-8 value rather than a yes-on-8 value. To be pro-LGBT is to protect people, to vote no is to protect people.
- Message: No-on-8 is protecting poor innocent women.
- Message: No-on-8 is protecting babies (Yes, I’m quite willing to use children in ads if the parents consent)
- Message: Yes-on-8 are heartless bastards who want to hurt Mitzi, Fritzi, and poor little baby Carla.
Instead, in October the no-on-8 campaign suddenly found yes-on-8 playing the usual “homosexuals are out to get your children at school!” card (a strategy which should have been NO surprise), and by that point it was too late to reverse the media frame.
3. Refusal to advocate for yes-on-equality
The no-on-8 campaign refused to take a “yes on equal marriage” stance, again insisting that focus groups said that this wouldn’t sell. Well guess what, those focus groups sure didn’t produce a message that sold — it’s time to try something new. I will no longer volunteer for a marriage campaign that refuses to take a “yes on equal marriage” stance.
4. Nearly content-free web site
The noonprop8.com web site was awful. As in, really awful. As in, “there wasn’t any serious persuasive or well-reasoned content there at all” awful. I didn’t even realize this problem until an acquaintance, who had clearly been doing some research about the “yes” and “no” arguments, asked me the traditional question of “aren’t domestic partnerships equivalent and sufficient?” This is the “isn’t separate but equal sufficient?” question, and it’s a very common question from people who are actively thinking about the issue — possible “persuadables”. I went looking for the official response to this question on the no-on-8 site, blithely assuming that there would surely be an extensive equal-marriage FAQ document somewhere in there, and was stunned to find NOTHING, no basic issues FAQ at all. There was a basic “fact vs. fiction” document which mostly rebutted anti-LGBT claims about proposition 8, but nothing to answer the obvious questions that persuadables have when they start to seriously think about marriage and LGBT people.
I had to head over to PFLAG to get a well-written response about “why we need marriage equality and not just domestic partnerships [DP]”. The no-on-8 campaign’s failure to adopt a YES-on-marriage-equality position meant that strategically, the campaign wasn’t willing to put up content that responded to basic and common questions like this.
A related question that also came my way, from a strong ally, was: “what rights, exactly, does prop 8 eliminate?” The answer actually appears to be “technically, NONE at this time from a California civil perspective” because California domestic partnership already extends ALL California marriage rights to domestic partners, and the federal government doesn’t recognize either status. A more nuanced approach is necessary to explain why domestic partnership isn’t enough, and that nuance requires going the yes-on-equal-marriage messaging route. The no-on-8 ballot argument as printed in the California Voter Information Guide claims that there are “nine real differences between marriage and domestic partnerships” but fails to identify what these are, nor does the noonprop8.com web site ever bother to tell us.
5. Botched ballot measure argument text
The no-on-8 ballot arguments as submitted to the official California general election guide look like a right-wing lunatic rant, plus they make severe communications errors. Per the structure of California’s printed election guides in the ballot measure section, the “yes” side gets the first set of text, then the “no” side gets a rebuttal. Next, the “no” side gets a section to argue its case for “no”, followed by a closing rebuttal from the “yes” side.
As I write this, I have a copy of my November 2008 California election guide in front of me.
Here is the first paragraph of the “yes” argument. This is the first paragraph that the reader saw (assuming that anybody actually reads these election guides — this year’s guide was 144 pages long) about proposition 8:
“Proposition 8 is simple and straightforward. It contains the same 14 words that were previously approved in 2000 by over 61% of California voters: “Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.”
That’s easy for the reader to understand, and it’s probably persuasive to a significant number of people. “Oh, this is simple and it’s just reaffirming what we’ve already done anyway. Sounds good to me.”
Next, here’s the initial text of the no-on-8 rebuttal to the above “yes” text. All capital letters are in the original:
“Don’t be tricked by scare tactics. - PROP 8 DOESN’T HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH SCHOOLS
There’s NOT ONE WORD IN 8 ABOUT EDUCATION.”
The no-on-8 rebuttal text goes on like this with its INSANELY HEAVY USE of CAPITAL LETTERS which makes the rebuttal look like a RIGHT-WING CRACKPOT RANT because people who RANDOMLY MASH DOWN THE CAPS LOCK KEY inevitably look like INTERNET CRAZIES as I’m demonstrating RIGHT NOW in this PARAGRAPH!!! The no-on-8 rebuttal text is literally about 50% all-caps.
The contrast is striking. The “yes” argument leads with a simple argument in normal text, inviting the reader to join in agreement. The no-on-8 rebuttal, by contrast, is as if somebody pointed a bullhorn in your face, pulled an argument about schools out of the middle of nowhere (though it is in fact buried in the “yes” text), and started screaming at you.
Note also how the no-on-8 rebuttal begins by repeating a right-wing talking point (”the gays are out to get your children at school!”) and then denying it. This approach to doing rebuttals is a classic framing mistake. You can’t defeat an opponent’s frame by simply repeating it and then denying it, because the repetition itself simply reinforces the frame. Every LGBT supporter who hasn’t already done so needs, desperately, to read George Lakoff’s Don’t Think of an Elephant!, which is an introduction to framing and messaging for progressives, written by an expert in cognitive science (Lakoff). Or for a web-based crash course, you can go right now to http://www.rockridgeinstitute.org/…
As Lakoff has mentioned in similar trainings, Nixon said “I am not a crook” and people said “oh, crook? Nixon’s a crook”.
Similarly, as Robert Bray, former director of the SPIN project (www.spinproject.org), noted in a framing training that I took several years ago, if you get up in front of a crowd and say:
“Child molestation? Child molestation?? This has NOTHING to do with child molestation!!”
Well guess what, yes it does, because you just said it three times. Congratulations, you lose.
For everybody who contributed to that horrible no-on-8 rebuttal, I hereby require you to go read George Lakoff and stop writing any ballot measure arguments until you’ve written “I WILL NOT REPEAT RIGHT-WING FRAMES” 1000 times on the chalkboard right along with Bart Simpson.
This goes for you too, Geoff Kors (Kors is Executive Director of Equality California, EQCA.org) — every damn time you go on Fox “News” and repeat the right-wing term “tax relief”, you’re playing into right-wing frames that help to elect right-wing Republicans to office. I stopped donating to EQCA (though I did donate specifically to the campaign) because you have a history of going on Fox echoing right-wing language while thinking you’re helping LGBT people. The Lakoff crash-course web framing training has a discussion of how the frame “tax relief” is destructive to the progressive cause.
6. Fundamental flaws in the no-on-8 phone script and messaging
I disagree with the fundamental approach of the “regardless of what you think about marriage, it’s wrong to deny people rights…” phone script. This attempt at magic words, which again was probably focus-group driven, is what I’d call “preemptive surrender on our core issue”. The unwritten preamble that’s IMPLIED by the “regardless…” sentence is:
“[We acknowledge that same-sex marriage is sinful, sick, and dirty, but] regardless of what you think about marriage…”
The Rolling Stone no-on-8 postmortem whose URL I listed earlier agrees with this critique, and refers to this tactic as “affirm[ing] the homophobia of the swing voters it was courting.”
The no-on-8 phone script refused to take a positive stance on marriage but instead conceded that territory to the anti-gay side, leaving no-on-8 to attempt the much weaker magic-word-association game of “unfair” and “wrong”. I say: bull hockey. This homophobic phone script sucks. The best defense is a good offense: we need to GO ON THE OFFENSE (he said, resorting to the caps-lock-key mashing that he had so recently mocked) and claim marriage as our own. It’s the LGBT community and allies who are protecting marriage and making it better, not yes-on-8. Same-sex marriage is beautiful — say it! Say it again! Here, I’ll do it for you — “Same-sex marriage is beautiful!” Because the more we say that, the more we make it true for everybody. Focus groups won’t tell you that because we haven’t made it enough of a reality for the focus group participants yet. The more we refuse to say “same-sex marriage is beautiful”, the more we concede the moral terrain to our opposition.
As with the ballot measure rebuttal, the “regardless of what you think…” language feels like it’s written by people who don’t understand the basic cognitive science issues that Lakoff covers in his books. If you say “regardless of what you think about marriage”, or equivalently, if you say “it’s not about marriage, it’s actually about X”, you’ve already got people thinking about marriage. It’s too late to tell them that it’s NOT about marriage, because it IS now about marriage, because you just said “marriage”. So what thought processes are taking place in the mind of a likely voter? Probably something like this:
“Well hmm, as long as this person on the phone has brought up the topic of what I think about marriage, what do I think? Well, I think that marriage is between a man and a woman. That makes sense.”
I’ll speculate that this phone script may have been focus-group tested to swing a few percentage points of voters, but I’m not buying it. On a strategic level, it’s a fail. Pro-LGBT ballot measure campaigns need to get rid of the inside-the-beltway bean-counting tactics and start advocating for marriage equality.
Here’s the message I want to see: “We believe that ALL California families deserve the freedom to marry, and the protections that marriage provides. Marriage makes families healthy, protects children, and makes our society stronger. As Californians, let’s make California a safe, healthy place for ALL families. Vote NO on 8.” Note how here I’m seizing language right out of Lakoff’s nurturing-parent worldview: “protection”, “healthy”, “strong society”, “safety”. This is a winning frame for our side.
7. Failure to anticipate and preempt yes-on-8 messaging.
This complaint has been covered in other written venues so it probably doesn’t need much reiteration here. You know for a fact that yes-on-8 is going to use the “they’re after the children!” argument, so for God’s sake hit them first on that and take away their ability to use it. You also know they’re going to use the “churches will be forced to marry gays!” argument, so defuse or reframe before those words even get out of their mouths.
8. Tactical: people don’t vote after dark in Santa Clara County.
On election day, the campaign deployed thousands of volunteers to cover polling sites around the state and hand out no-on-8 “palm cards”. In retrospect this appears to have been a last-ditch hail-Mary attempt to win an additional half a percentage point, or to just make it look like a lot of volunteers were being mobilized for something constructive, or who knows what. I had the not-so-fantastic duty, as it turned out, of co-running a “hub site” which was responsible for dispatching volunteers in teams of 2-5 people to slightly over a dozen polling places in the Mountain View, California area. We had great volunteer turnout, but I don’t think this was an effective ground game or that it persuaded very many voters.
The no-on-8 campaign appears to have made little to no calculation about vote-by-mail voters and early voters. In Santa Clara County, vote-by-mail is something like 50% of the vote, perhaps more. And empirically, we found that almost everybody who does vote physically on election day does so in the morning, not after work. This put us as co-captains of the election-day hub site into the painful situation of dispatching 50+ volunteers to polling sites after dark (sunset was roughly at 6:00 PM), where as it turned out nobody was voting. Half of our evening shifts called in to ask if they could be redeployed because they were only seeing 1 voter every 5 minutes, and half of those voters were dropping off sealed absentee ballots which weren’t going to change regardless of how many palm cards we pushed at people (and in the dark?? Come on, what voter wants to have election material pushed at them at 6:30 PM in the dark when they’re just trying to vote and get home?)
9. Tactical: failure to do proper, well-understood election-day get-out-the-vote (GOTV)
So, no-on-8 campaign people: WTF with the election-day GOTV? When I volunteered for the Jerry McNerney campaign, on election day we did a traditional “aggressive pollcheck-based GOTV”, which works like this:
1. You do GOTV phone calls or door-knocks to all your 1’s and 2’s, which you’ve predetermined from your phone calls in the weeks prior. For those not versed here in my election jargon: a “1″ is a very strong supporter, a “2″ is a likely supporter. Your “1’s” and “2’s” are the people you’re trying to get to the polls.
2. After you’ve finished step 1, it’s now noon, so you send a team to the polling location and look up the posted list of voters who have voted already. Per California election law, the poll-site staff post this information every few hours and update it. You work through this posted list and cross off the names of all of your 1’s and 2’s who have voted.
3. Now you do a second round of GOTV phone calls or door-knocks to those who remain on your now-pruned 1’s-and-2’s list.
4. It’s now 4 PM, so you go to the polling location and get the updated list of voters who have voted. You cross more people off your 1’s and 2’s list.
5. Wash, rinse, repeat until polls close. You keep phoning 1’s and 2’s who haven’t voted until the polls close or until they vote.
For no-on-8 on election day we had teams covering dozens of key polling locations throughout the state, yet no-on-8 didn’t take the obvious step of having these volunteers get the “voters-who-have-voted so far” information and relay it to whoever was doing the GOTV phone calls. I don’t understand at all why no-on-8 didn’t do this. From where I stand, it looks like utter incompetence on the part of the campaign.
10. Insufficient engagement of progressive church allies along their traditional strengths
The no-on-8 campaign could have worked better with its progressive church allies. In September 2008, I offered to campaign staff the possibility of organizing some no-on-8 religious events somewhere around election eve. I was told in very clear terms, by staff, that “the campaign doesn’t want this” because… wait for it… the FOCUS GROUPS said that it was a bad idea. In the end, yes-on-8 held a Qualcomm Stadium rally (which apparently sucked badly), and no-on-8 allies independently organized and held several large-scale (for progressive churches) no-on-8 religious services in 3 cities on the same Sunday. The result, thankfully for the good guys, is that the media reported “religious groups on both sides stage events”. The no-on-8 campaign should be thankful that the churches ignored the focus groups, otherwise the headlines would have said “People of faith hold mass yes-on-8 event” with a picture of some PFOX guy mournfully praying.
To be clear, I had no problem organizing phone banking instead of organizing a religious service, which can be a pain to pull together anyway. However, when a campaign tells some of its allies that their core competency of “doing religious events and thereby bringing moral credibility to the no-on-8 message” isn’t welcome, it tends to stunt the ability of the allies to help the campaign.
11. Secrecy = Death
In September and on into early October, the campaign actively discouraged me from posting information about phone bank times, days, and locations to the web. Incredible yet true. The messaging that I heard from the campaign was “don’t post information about when or where our phone banks are taking place, just leave it to the campaign to communicate this on a week-by-week basis please”. In the early weeks of the phone banking there was a desperate hunger in the activist community for information about when and where the phone banks were taking place, yet I was actively discouraged from posting information about them on a public blog. A few weeks later, I heard this message from staff at the phone bank “gee, we just aren’t making our total-call numbers on the phone calls, we don’t understand what the problem is!” Well, when you actively discourage the progressive community from engaging in precisely the sort of viral advertising and communication that we do best, low volunteer turnout is quite likely to be the result. A few weeks later, I noted that no-on-8 had finally added a web page at noonprop8.com that publicly listed the phone bank locations, dates, and times… in other words, it was doing in October exactly what I had been told not to do in September. And sure enough, a week later at the phone bank I heard from staff, “we’re doing great on our phone bank numbers, we’re blowing through these call lists!” And attendance at phone banking had gone way up.
Activists, please take this lesson to heart: a culture of movement secrecy will fail you every time. I recommend Gene Sharpe’s The Politics of Nonviolent Action for a discussion how a culture of secrecy can stifle a social change movement. I’ve had to fight this fight in various activist venues over the years, and it still often doesn’t get through. People can get paranoid — they may want to overcontrol the volunteers, overcontrol the flow information, control who shows up at events; people get paranoid about “outsiders” or “spies” or whatever, and all that fear is contagious. Fear strangles a movement. Fear turns off potential allies. It prevents a movement from taking the steps necessary to succeed. If you’re refusing to publish information about when your phone banks are happening because you’re “afraid that spies for the other side might show up”, fire yourself and get new leadership, because you’re killing your own justice movement. I fully support the concept of message discipline, and I strongly oppose the “do-your-own-thingism” which so often pervades progressive activism and demolishes progressive message coherence, but there’s a difference between enforcing messaging discipline, versus telling your volunteers not to share information about where the upcoming phone banks are located.
12. Failure to understand or use internet and web media
No-on-8 got its clock cleaned in at least two areas by yes-on-8: Youtube videos, and Google Adwords/Adsense. No-on-8 appears to have been run as a 1990’s campaign that had limited understanding of internet used as new-media communication. Yes, there was a (wretched) no-on-8 web site, but yes-on-8 knew how to effectively use newer web technologies while no-on-8 apparently didn’t.
12.1: Youtube: yes-on-8 dominated, no-on-8 failed utterly
These particular comments are specific to YouTube, however they apply to any internet video hosting service that supports user-uploaded content for public viewing.
Technical discussion that I was privy to in the final weeks of the campaign revealed that:
– Yes-on-8 videos were consistently ranked in the top 10 when searching on basic keywords such as “california prop 8″
– Yes-on-8 made a concerted effort to get their volunteers to rank up the videos so that they’d always win in Google’s search algorithm. And of course, video up-ranking is a computer-and-keyboard based task that can be done by armies of people anywhere in the world… such as, shall we say, to pick a completely non-hypothetical example, Utah.
– No-on-8 comments posted in the comments section of yes-on-8 videos would immediately get downrated by an army of yes-on-8 minions, making it impossible to have an open debate or post rebuttals within the Youtube comments section.
– No-on-8 videos were also posted on Youtube, but initially the no-on-8 campaign didn’t even know enough to tag these videos with appropriate keywords so that they’d hit Google searches for basic terms like “proposition 8″.
– Progressive blogs were doing a lot of “look at this horrible yes-on-8 video, it’s really nasty” web linking, which per Google’s ranking algorithm is a vote FOR the video. This is a general problem that ballot measure campaigns will need to solve in general: simply doing opposition research by PLAYING an opposition video, or by LINKING to an opposition video, actually helps the opposition. “Number of views of this video” is a tracked value that presumably contributes to the up-ranking of a YouTube video.
– Even after no-on-8 tagged the videos with appropriate keywords, they never made it into the higher-ranked video lists because yes-on-8 had already invested a lot of time up-ranking their own ads.
RESULT: anybody who searched on anything related to proposition 8 on YouTube always got yes-on-8 videos and ads, and never got no-on-8 ads. This is a TOTAL FAIL for no-on-8. The campaign needed somebody on the staff who understood the tactics of upranking videos and how the comments systems can be gamed for or against you. Pay one of those evil “search optimization” firms for some consulting time if you have to.
12.2: The Google AdSense yes-on-8 ad bomb.
“AdSense” is Google’s ad product that allows web site owners to place Google-brokered ads onto their own web sites. Don’t confuse this with the ads that appear on www.google.com. For example, go to www.americablog.com and scroll to the bottom, where you’ll probably see a small “Ads by Google” section. These are “AdSense” ads. These ads are relayed to the web site by Google’s ad system and are not pre-selected by the web site owner.
Google AdSense is used by hundreds of thousands of web page owners as a way to make some money as a commission from Google by placing the Google-brokered ads onto their site.
On Monday Nov. 3 and Tuesday Nov. 4, yes-on-8 engaged in a mass advertising bid across all “targeted verticals” available within the Google Adsense program for advertisers. This yes-on-8 advertising also presumably used Google’s geotargeting system, which allows advertisers to pay only to display their ads to viewers believed to be in a certain section of the country. Geotargeting saves vast quantities of money by allowing the advertiser to only pay to show the web ads to, say, people who are in California rather than people in Florida.
The result of the mass yes-on-8 ad buy was that for hundreds of thousands of different web sites, anybody in California who looked at one of those web pages saw one or more “yes-on-8″ ads. I’d speculate that yes-on-8 did the same thing with Yahoo ads, however I haven’t researched that. So it’s likely that for all intents and purposes, anybody in the state of California who used the internet on Monday or Tuesday Nov. 3-4 saw a yes-on-8 ad. That doesn’t mean that the user clicked on the ad and made it to the yes-on-8 web site, but certainly there would have been a lot of click-throughs.
Since the internet has just this year passed newspapers as people’s primary source of news, this yes-on-8 ad buy probably had a significant impact.
While no-on-8 was doing a certain amount of ad buys — there were very sporadic reports of a no-on-8 ad showing up on certain web pages — there was nothing on the scale of the yes-on-8 ad buy.
Pro-LGBT ballot measure campaigns need to understand the dynamics and impact of the “mass message-bombing” that the right wing is using against us — this was done with yard signs on election eve as well, for example. I don’t know how effective it is, but obviously the anti-LGBT team believes their money was well-spent, because they went ahead and did it.
12.3 Myspace and Facebook.
I don’t use these social networking systems so I can’t speak to how well no-on-8 exploited them compared to yes-on-8, however given no-on-8’s performance in other areas, I’m not optimistic.
Strategically, the principle that we need to understand is this: the Christian evangelical community has a very long history of rapidly adopting to the use of new media technologies for its communication and expansion use. Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network was built starting from a tiny UHF station back in the days when nobody knew what “UHF” was, and you had to buy the special UHF loop antenna at Radio Shack to even receive his show. Prior to that, evangelicals effectively used radio in the early days of that technology. NEWS FLASH: the Christian Right has learned how to use the internet and all of its modern services. If you’re not savvy about modern internet media, your campaign is at a severe competitive disadvantage. For the proposition 8 campaign, yes-on-8 completely outmaneuvered no-on-8 in the internet media space.
PART II: Recommendations
1. Work proactively, don’t wait until you’re forced to react. Do pro-LGBT education every year, all the time.
“Peacetime campaigns” appear to be easier than “wartime campaigns”, by which I mean that it appears to be easier to do the right messaging during intervals when there is NOT an anti-LGBT ballot measure coming up. In my experience, as soon as the LGBT equality movement needs to shift into defend-against-the-ballot-measure mode, all thoughts of long-term messaging and strategy go out the window, and people are in a rush to “mortgage the future on behalf of the present”, as we might say. So my suggestion is to start doing, or strengthen existing, public visibility and communications actions today, rather than waiting for anti-LGBT groups to put a measure on the ballot. Start a GSA (gay-straight alliance). GEt with the local PFLAG and join their speakers’ group, or jumpstart the speakers’ group if they don’t have one that’s active.
2. Tell stories of real same-sex couples. Aka: “go for the heart, and the head will follow”.
My belief is that all anti-LGBT efforts, rhetoric, and arguments are fundamentally prejudice-based. Prejudice happens as a part of the built-in human process of category creation: it happens when I put myself into a group called “in-group” or “my tribe”, and I put LGBT people into a different group called “that out-group over there” or “other”. Once I’ve put the stigmatized group into the category called “other”, I then martial whatever cultural resources or language happen to be available to me to justify my categorization: Bible verses, appeals to history, appeals to “tradition”, appeals to “nature”, etc. To break through the prejudice requires that we, as LGBT people and allies, humanize the Other. Doing verse-by-verse rebuttals of Bible verses generally isn’t going to help, because it isn’t the Bible that’s causing the prejudice, it’s the prejudice that causes people to choose to read the Bible in a certain way. I’ve done the verse-by-verse rebuttal work in the past, and it can be necessary AFTER prejudice reduction has already started, but it’s extremely unlikely to change any minds up front. As Rev. Peter Gomes has noted (and here I paraphrase), “it is not generally possible to use logic to get somebody out of a position that they didn’t use logic to get into to begin with.” Start with winning the heart, and then suddenly you’ll find that the Bible part falls into place.
So my suggestion is to seek ongoing ways to humanize and normalize same-sex relationships and marriage (yes, we have to use the M word!) as part of normal, healthy, positive, loving human existence. This is part of the work that many PFLAG and GSA (gay-straight-alliance) groups have been doing for a while.
Storytelling about real, loving same-sex couples that you know is a win here. Advocates for equal marriage need to have multiple (true!) stories at their disposal that they can share in social contexts. Tell people about the lesbian couple raising a kid. Tell them about the gay couple living down the street who do yardwork and go to football games together.
On the public visibility front, in California the yes-on-marriage movement has made efforts at various periodic visibility actions, typically centered on Valentine’s Day and “tax day” (April 30) when tax returns are due. “Tax day” events try to get people to hold signs at post offices saying “we want the marriage tax” or similar, using various equal-marriage messaging.
3. Know your framing rules
The usual advice about framing applies. Don’t repeat the arguments or language of the opposition; reframe the debate. Read your George Lakoff, please.
4. Anticipate the opposition (duh…)
If and when a ballot measure or similar right-wing attack looms large, anticipate the arguments of the opposition and move to defuse them before they’re even articulated. You know that the anti-gay crowd is going to say “they’re after our children!”, so come up with ways to preemptively blunt that attack. My postmortem suggestion to the no-on-8 team was to take the “look at these lovely same-sex couples raising their own happy healthy children!” approach. Argue that equal marriage protects children, equal marriage promotes healthy families. We need to own (reclaim) all of those good words: “healthy”, “family”, “strong”, “protection”, etc.
Similarly we now know that the anti-gay industry will use the “churches will lose their tax-exempt status, or be forced to conduct same-sex marriages” or whatever pile of lies it morphs into next week, since that argument was very effective for them in California. The equal-marriage movement will need to find a way to flush that argument — it unfortunately might require addressing it directly, maybe simply with a lot of credible authorities saying “that’s a lie.” I saw the “we’ll lose our 501c3 tax-exempt status!” stunt pulled on us in a regional church governing body meeting several years ago, and in that case the argument was stomped on when the respected moderator of the assembly spoke from the floor mike and said he had checked with multiple attorneys and that the claim was simply not true. But it required a well-known, trusted authority figure to say it.
5. Campaigns: understand and use internet media
Use of a variety of forms of internet media is now a mandatory part of any ballot measure campaign’s media strategy. For those who haven’t been watching, in 2008 “the web” surpassed print newspapers in the ranking of Americans’ primary news source. It’s no longer acceptable to slap a few HTML pages up and call it a web site. Your campaign’s senior media director must understand the use of social network sites such as MySpace and FaceBook, the use of online campaign-produced and activist-produced videos, viral marketing, and techniques for up-ranking videos and the attack techniques that your opposition can use to downrank you. You need to know the difference between Google AdWords and Google AdSense, and how to use Google Analytics — with similar knowledge of Yahoo’s advertising offerings. You need to have a campaign budget for banner ad and keyword-targeted internet ad buys. You need to know how to build an online activist base and ask them via email to take action, both online and offline.
Because whether you’re appropriately using the internet or not, I guarantee you that the anti-LGBT movement knows how to use the technology, and will crush you in a demographic space (voters under 29) that ought to be strongly pro-LGBT if you’re not equally savvy.
6. Campaigns: understand ballot-casting patterns and do proper election-day GOTV
When do people vote in your state? How do people vote in your state? Does your state have early voting? Vote-by-mail? What percentage of people use these voting options? Which demographic groups use them — your supporters or your non-supporters? Whom do you need to turn out, how, and when? These are nuts-and-bolts questions which are critical to any election ground game. If 50% of the people in a county vote by mail, 20% vote the morning of election day, and 25% vote between noon and 5 PM by dropping off pre-sealed absentee ballots, it’s not an effective use of your volunteer base to attempt in-person voter persuasion on election day at the polls. Your GOTV efforts need to start whenever people start to receive ballots. In many states, that’s several weeks prior to election day.
And for the love of Mike, for counties where election-day turnout matters, do a proper phone-call-based GOTV. Have pre-generated lists of 1’s and 2’s and call them. Then call them again. Keep calling them or knocking on their doors until they tell you OK, they’ve voted already. This approach is old-school, and it still works… if people haven’t already voted by mail, that is.
Despite the enormous pain of the passage of proposition 8, the good news is that despite a badly botched no-on-8 campaign, support for marriage equality in California has shifted from about 40% to about 50% in just 8 years. The “tipping point” years that we’re in right now are particularly painful, because it’s right when you’re just under 50% support that your opposition throws the most money, the most resources, the most of everything at you. They know that it’s endgame now — they have to pull out all the stops now to preserve hetero privilege before public opinion shifts permanently in favor of LGBT equality on yet another front.
Proposition 8 will, in the end, go down in flames. It might happen in 2009, if the California Supreme Court accurately recognizes that when the tyranny of the majority gangs up on a scapegoated minority to deny equal protection, it’s a “revision” of the California constitution rather than a simple constitutional modification. Or it might not happen for 20 years, when a no-longer-hardcore-right U.S. Supreme Court gets the LGBT version of Loving vs. Virginia and issues a blanket invalidation of all of the residual state anti-marriage laws in those states that haven’t already bothered to repeal them. Or it might happen via California voter repeal action within the next few years. We don’t yet know when marriage equality will happen. What we do know is that the message of the full humanity of LGBT people works, it resonates, it changes hearts and minds. Now let’s transform our ballot measure messaging from a weak negative into a strong “yes-on-marriage” positive, stop using focus groups, and fix our internet and election-week tactics. If we can do that, victory for marriage equality will arrive sooner, and much more easily, than we might ever expect.
Bruce Hahne is a sporadic LGBT equality activist, and a former board member of More Light Presbyterians (mlp.org). He can be reached at hahne at io dot com.
The opinions I’ve expressed in this essay are mine, i.e. I don’t speak for any organization in which I presently serve, or have served.
Copyright (c) 2008 by Bruce Hahne. All rights reserved. Non-commercial, non-profit republication and forwarding of this essay as part of efforts to support LGBT equality is permitted and encouraged. For all other reuse, please contact the author.
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