I started writing this in March, 2016, after reading some of Chris Reeves’ stuff. I had a lot of ambition, in the spring. I figured with Chris’ recent series, it would be apropos to go ahead and finally publish this.
Original text below the fold.
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This election cycle has seen something of a sea change in my political outlook, not in terms of what I believe or what kind of candidates I will support, but in terms of my own personal involvement. I have voted every chance I’ve gotten since I was 18. I’ve missed many local elections over the years, partly due to having been in the Navy, but also partly because I just didn’t keep track of what was going on locally here in Kansas.
I don’t know what finally drove me over the edge to try and engage beyond voting; maybe it’s that my 5 year old son started kindergarten this year. Maybe it was something someone wrote here that finally wormed its way deep enough to penetrate. Whatever the case, I decided to get involved...but I had (and largely still have) no idea how to do that.
You see stories and comments online all the time with familiar exhortations to “get involved” and “take action,” but there’s precious little information to be found about how one does that. I’m not talking about what kind of actions you can take; there’s plenty of that. Phonebanking, calling your local reps, doorknocking, writing letters to the editor...you know the stuff I’m talking about. But, again, how do you do that?
I still don’t entirely know. I figure there are more people like me out there, hell, right here on DK, who would do more if we knew how. What follows is what I plan to be the first in a series in which I will lay out how I’ve gone about getting involved. For the purposes of this story, I don’t care about issues or candidates or policy or turnout. I’m looking at this as a purely mechanical question:
HOW can I get involved?
I am an engineer by trade, and a troubleshooter by nature. Currently, I work for a small industrial automation company as an outside engineering consultant and sales rep. I have never, not even once, solved a complicated problem just by treating it as one big animal and poking it at random to see what it does. I have had a great deal of success starting with a broad overview of the system and then reducing that down into smaller and smaller functions until I find places that I can apply leverage to produce a result.
This is...not terribly easy when you’re talking about a system as complex and squishy as politics. It’s hard to accurately predict how even one person will react to different stimuli; trying to predict how many thousands or millions will react is way beyond the scope of what I’m shooting for here, which is why I’m not focusing on policy outcomes as my goal. I can’t take much more than baby steps in shaping policy until I understand the tools at my disposal, which makes this a great place to start.
What are my tools, and what do I know about them?
1. Voting — this seems pretty basic. Find out when elections are happening and then go vote. Don’t forget about local races and ballot measures.
...well, actually, maybe there’s more to that. Where can I go to learn about upcoming ballot measures? When do they come up for a vote at the state level? What about county and city ballots? Where do I go to find my polling place? Does my polling place change depending on the election? Who works at polling places? How can I do that?
2. Contacting my local reps — again, this seems pretty straightforward. Figure out who my local reps are and send them an email or call their offices. They work for me, so I should be able to talk to them.
...hmm. How do I find out who represents me at the state level? County? City? What about things like the school board or local water commission? Can I do this with any elected official, like judges and sheriffs? How do I find out what their office hours are? Can I just go visit their offices in person? Do they have open office hours, like college professors, or is it typically done by appointment? Is that only when they’re in session? Are my representatives on the job year-round, or only during certain times of the year? Can I only talk to my reps, or can I contact anyone?
3. Attending policy meetings/legislative sessions — okay, this seems like it’s going to be tougher. I’ll need to find out when the meetings are happening and then work my schedule out so I can go.
...great. Where can I even find out what meetings are happening? Do open meeting laws mean that anyone can attend any meeting, or do I have to have some kind of credentials like a press pass? Do I have to get an invitation? How long do these things last? Do votes happen at every meeting, or do they set the framework and then have the votes later on? Am I allowed to participate? Wait, does my state/county/city even have open meeting laws? Where do I go to find out about that?
4. Working for the party or a candidate — alright, we’re on more familiar ground here. I’ve heard about all kinds of things I can actually do on this front. I can phonebank, I can canvass, I can volunteer to put up yard signs and distribute fliers, I can donate money, I can post stuff online and talk to my friends and neighbors. Easy-peasey. I bet there’s other stuff, too, like creating an ActBlue page or soliciting donations on behalf of a candidate. If I’m really creative, maybe I could even run a fundraiser of some kind.
...so...who do I talk to about that? How do I find out who’s running for office in my district? Who are my local party officials? Is that an elected position? When are those elections? When are party meetings held? Can I go to those? Where are the local party offices? What about candidates? Do they typically have an office, or is it a more informal thing at lower levels? Can I donate something other than money? I know that I care a lot about ethics...am I likely to run into problems if I try to fundraise for a candidate or a party? Are donations like this tax deductible, like charitable contributions? If I start a grassroots campaign to support a local ballot measure, am I bound by the same rules as things like PACs and SuperPACs?
…
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...I’m only four tools in and I’ve already got a million questions. I was right that this is going to be a daunting task; the learning curve seems to be relatively mild, but very long. Still, I’m in a good place here. My questions are all concrete, and I’m fairly sure that they all have definitive answers. More importantly, I’ve already spotted an important commonality in my questions:
My biggest problem seems to be not knowing where to locate information, not necessarily in knowing what information I need to locate.
What resources do I have available for answering my questions?
Looking through my list, the information I’m looking for falls broadly into a handful of categories:
1. State Government — finding officials’ offices, legislative schedules, meeting schedules, meeting rules, etc.
It seems like the best place to start with this is going to be my state government’s website. A quick Google search for “KS state government” pulls www.kansas.gov. Poking into it I can see a tab at the top called “Government,” and click that opens a dropdown menu that lists Executive, Judicial, and Legislative as options. Clicking into those reveals that, at least on the surface, this is a pretty good resource. It looks like I can locate some quick “How To” links pretty easily that will answer most of my questions. Excellent.
2. County Government — same as #1, but for the county I live in.
Let’s try the same search, but substituting “Sedgwick County government”...which brings us to www.sedgwickcounty.org. Hmm. Not quite as clean as the state website, but, again, on the surface it looks like it’s going to have a lot of my answers and they’re probably going to be pretty easy to find. Again, excellent.
3. City Government — third verse, same as the first.
Google did me right the first two times, so let’s give it another go: “Wichita city government.” Okay. Similar result: www.wichita.gov Again, this looks good. There’s a ”Government” tab which seems like it’s laid out well...but I’m starting to feel overwhelmed by the sheer number of links and pages I’ll have to navigate. Time to step back again.
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...Man, again, only three deep and this is looking harder and harder. There’s so much information available, and I’m confident that with a few weeks or months of study I could start to get a good grasp of it all, but there’s so much to sift through. I remember feeling this way when I first started my technical education. How did I get past this chasm when I did that? How did I go from being a kid who’d taken a single woodworking class in the 7th grade to being an accomplished technical expert in a pretty broad field?
Teachers. Mentors. Guides. I didn’t go it alone. I joined the Navy. I took classes, and I worked alongside experienced people for years.
Where can I find a pool of knowledgeable mentors and helpful information in the world of politics? Hey, that sounds just like a certain Democratic Party I keep hearing about, doesn’t it?
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This is the end of the purely original material I’d written back in March. I’ve updated and cleaned up some of the rest of this with revised info from the events calendars from the different pages; they were better back in March, but not much.
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What does the Democratic Party do for people like me? What tools do they offer?
I know the party operates, broadly speaking, on two major levels: local, and national. I don’t think I’m interested in the national party, at this point. It seems clear even to me that the national is more the place for experienced Democratic Party members. I’m still very much a novice. It seems like I should focus on the local party.
Google’s been good to me so far. Let’s see what we get when we drill down with some searches.
“National Democratic Party” yields www.democrats.org Good, but, again, that’s national party stuff. Still, good to know. Bookmarked.
“Kansas Democratic Party” takes me to www.ksdp.org Now we’re talking. Bookmarked. Let’s poke around.
Huh. This...isn’t what I was hoping for. (What was I hoping for, though?) There are a lot of links that take me to pages where I can fill out my contact info, a recent news section, a Twitter scroll…poking around some more I can see names & contact info for board members, links to the platform and the KDP bylaws* (bookmarked and bookmarked)...I think I need to find the Sedgwick County Democratic Party. There’s a link for county party info on the KDP pages, but it just takes me to the phone numbers for the chair & vice chair for each county party, not to any links to the county parties. There is a calendar of events on the KDP site, which is good...but there’s only the one meeting shown for Sedgwick county, which can’t be right...Wichita is the largest city in the state, not counting KC, KS. There’s got to be more happening here.
Back to Google. “Sedgwick County Democratic Party” takes me to, oddly enough, www.sedgwickcountydemocrats.com Bookmarked! This looks good, on the surface. This page seems much more informative than the KDP site did. There’s a calendar of events. Let’s see what else is...wait, what? Nothing? No events at all? Nothing? Not even the lunch get-together that the KDP page showed for Wichita?
Wow. That’s...disappointing.
Click the “How to be Involved” link. Oh. Just another request to donate/volunteer/register to vote that takes me to contact info entry forms.
Where is the office? Maybe if I just show up in person tomorrow I’ll...huh.
Huh.
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That’s the last thing I had written. I actually did drive by that building a few times over the next couple of weeks. It never seemed like there was anyone there. Maybe there was? I’ve thought about it off and on all through the election. Thought about this diary...this series I planned to write...but it was so...depressing. I realized that there weren’t any real resources like I was looking for, or that if there were I would have to fight to find them.
Shortly after this things started to go kinda south for us, anyways. Medical bills. Some car repairs. Work slowed down. Stress. Debt. Suddenly I had no energy to invest just digging for the information I’d need to have to be helpful, or to just feel included.
So...I gave up. I focused on my family, and I kept hanging out here. Jumped on the unity train. Sparred a little bit with attitudes I thought were counter-productive. (I did go to a Bernie Sanders event back before the KS primary, and I did go to a Dem Party debate watch at a local theater, which was fun, but I’m pretty sure that I was one of maybe five or six people there under 40 years old.) Crashed as hard as anyone did on November 9th...and then started to feel worse.
Should I have done more? What more could I have done? Did anyone even want me to do more? The three weeks following the election have sucked. I came back looking for somewhere to feel welcome and to try and rebuild. I actually dusted this off and re-read it to consider some edits...and then I learned that I was apparently the enemy of the party. I’m a working-class, straight, white guy living in Kansas who supported Bernie Sanders. Even if I’m not the actual problem, everyone in my state deserves to burn now, I guess. My wife. My kid. My neighbors’ kids. All of us.
My son is one of only half a dozen white kids in his first grade class of 30. We live in a poor area in the center of town, and I know that he’s the only kid out of 90 first graders that doesn’t qualify for free school lunches. I know because the school secretary told me there are only a dozen or so families in the whole school who don’t. When he came home from school on November 9th he said that there were nine kids who didn’t come to school that day. Nine kids out of his class of 30.
I don’t know if I want to be involved any more. I think I do, but I don’t know. I know I’ll keep voting blue. I’ll donate to and keep tabs on the locals on the off chance there’s an event I can go to. But...how do I do that? How do I join an organization I have to fight with to participate in? How do I do that when the place I should be coming to for support hates me for believing that helping my neighbors feed their kids is a more immediate concern than whether or not some school in the KC area allows teachers to wear safety pins when their whole damn job is to be protecting and supporting kids, pins or no pins?
I’m posting this up, at last, because Chris Reeves has, once again, inspired me to try.
I don’t know if this helps anyone else. I hope it does.
*Sidetracking myself for a moment, I read through the bylaws to the section that describes the duties of county offices. Here’s what they say about Precinct Committeepersons, who appear to be the lowest-level office holders:
Precinct committeepersons are responsible to engage their precinct’s voters to help the Kansas Democratic Party grow membership and elect its candidates. All committeemen and committeewomen shall have the right to vote in all central county committee meetings.
That is...vague, but whatever. Interesting, I guess. I’m curious about what that translates to in actual, real-world responsibilities.