12 Week Plan

Do More Than Vote

12weekadmin — Tue, 12 Oct 2010 19:33:36 +0000

Whether you have 5 minutes or 5 days to give, you can do more to make a difference in this election.

Got 5 minutes?
Got 1 Hour?
Got an evening?
Got a weekend?
Got more time?

Got 5 minutes?

Know how to vote, where to vote and your voter rights.
This state-by-state guide tells you about early voting, polling locations, ID requirements and your rights as a voter.
http://elections.neworganizing.com/guide/

Register your friends to vote online.
Rock the Vote lets you register your network through Facebook or your personal blog
http://www.rockthevote.com/partner/

Get your Absentee Ballot.
Available in all 50 states. Or remind a traveling friend to get one.
http://www.longdistancevoter.org/

Update your Facebook status.
Let friends know about your latest political action.

Got 60 minutes?

Create a local voter guide.
Put together a ballot saying which candidates and ballot questions you’re supporting and why –then share on Facebook with your friends.
http://theballot.org/

Recruit your neighbors.
If you login at Democrats.com (not a party-affiliated site), you can find and connect with other progressives in your zipcode — starting conversations about local issues or inviting them to volunteer.
http://Democrats.com (you’ll need to create a username)

Email and Facebook your friends.
Friends vote when their friends remind them to. Take a few minutes to tell your friends who you are voting for, where you are volunteering and why.

Make calls from your desk, your couch, your park.
You can call-in anytime you’re at a computer to use a web-based method of contacting voters in critical swing areas.
http://www.barackobama.com/call-VIC (between 9am and 9pm)

Got 1 evening?

Call voters from wherever you are
You can make calls on behalf of progressive candidates around the country by joining Call Out The Vote
http://calloutthevote.com/#

Join other volunteers to call voters together.
There are phonebanks all over the country where you can go, meet other volunteers, get trained and call together.

http://www.barackobama.com/

scroll down to “Connect With OFA In Your State” and click your state
the new page will list local events in the right-hand column, feature a blog about volunteering and give you ways to contact local organizers

Got 1 weekend day?

Hit the streets and knock on doors.
There are different organizations in every area organizing “canvasses” — the opportunity to knock on voters’ doors. You can contact local campaigns or OFA chapters — or you can sign up through America Votes, tell them your location and your interests, and they’ll connect you to the right partner.
http://www.americavotes.org/volunteer

Got more time?

Volunteer for a local campaign.
Whether you have one weekend, a full week or the whole month, a campaign will happily take all the time you can give. And if they know you’re around for more than a day, they’ll even give you more responsibilities, if you’ll take them. You may become a team leader, help run phonebanks or lead canvasses…if that interests you.

Tell your local campaign you’re willing to help.
If there’s not a local campaign you know about, you can check out Democracy For America’s list of progressive candidates around the country. They are in red states and blue, running for all levels of office, and there is a link to volunteer for each one.

http://www.democracyforamerica.com/current-endorsements

Got 5 dollars?

Support progressive candidates.
ActBlue.com

VIDEO: 5 Steps to Voter Guide Magic

12weekadmin — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 01:38:27 +0000

VIDEO: 12 Week Plan

12weekadmin — Thu, 26 Aug 2010 15:04:08 +0000

The 12 Week Plan: A Road Map to Not Getting Our A**es Kicked on November 2

12weekadmin — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 15:54:13 +0000

by Billy Wimsatt

The 12 Week Plan will not make your abs tighter. It will not help you lose 10 pounds or even five. It will not get you off booze, crack, pills, glue, or make your ex decide to like you again. In short, the 12 Week Plan will not solve any of your life problems. Except one.

You will not have to spend the next two years listening to House Speaker John Boehner and wondering whether he actually just gets up in the morning and smears orange paint on his face.

You will not have to spend the next two years hearing, as the tiny window of change slams shut on your fingers and Barack Obama’s neck, how the 2008 election was a fluke. Yet the 2010 election is a mandate from the American people. And how the party of ‘No’ is poised to take back the Presidency in 2012.

You think you’re unhappy now under Obama, Pelosi and Reid? Sheeeeet. Wait until the guys who drove the car into the ditch for eight consecutive years get their hands back on the steering wheel. Wait until they get their butts into the drivers seat. Then you will know unhappy.

This is a moral imperative. We need to stop these people. We have to stop Karl Rove and his $200 million machine from taking over our country again. We have a moral imperative to stop Rand Paul, Sharon Angle and the Orange Man.

Yet somehow, according to polls, Republicans are twice as motivated as Democrats to vote in November. Are you kidding me? So we’re just going to sit by, let the bad guys eat our lunch? Really?

No. We are not.

That is why we created the 12 Week Plan. The 12 Week Plan is a new effort by a broad array of progressive groups. We pick key political moments to maximize our volunteer power through local self-organized teams.

The 12 Week Plan kicks-off the weekend of August 28-29 in a coffee shop, restaurant or house party near you. The idea is to get together with friends to make a plan for your community. You can download a template 12 Week Plan. Customize it to your schedule and key dates in your state. If you miss the August kick-off, you can plug in later.

The 12 Week Plan cares about you. You get Labor Day weekend off. Isn’t that generous? Then it’s time to get back to work before the Republicans take control and re-institute a 60 hour work week. Or a zero hour work week for lazy bums like you who don’t have a real job and don’t deserve one anyway.

September is all about voter registration, and making a local voter guide. Together, you will research and cut through the bullshit to tell voters in your area the real deal on local candidates up and down the ballot.

A home-made local voter guide with real talk recommendations is the one piece of election literature that people actually want to get. You and your friends can help empower thousands of voters, and influence thousands of votes in your town. That’s enough to help swing close elections, make politicians grovel and beg for your support. Mwahahaha.

September is the month we start organizing regular swing state and swing district trips. We have a national map with targeting recommendations. If you’re in Boston, you can organize buses or car pools to New Hampshire or MA-10. If you’re in DC, you can organize trips to Charlottesville to protect Tom Perriello in VA-5 or to Pennsylvania to fight for competitive Senate seats. If you’re in California, you can organize trips to Nevada. If you’re in Albuquerque, you can run trips to Las Cruces to protect Harry Teague. If you’re in Chicago, you can stay put because Illinois somehow became a f-ing swing state this year. Wherever you live, we’ll hook you up: targeting info, ride boards, buses, everything you need.

On September 28, we’re doing a national day of voter registration. There are a series of big national actions: The 10-2-10 One Nation March in DC. The 10-10-10 Day of Action on Climate. Early voting begins in some states. We will remind people to vote early, drive folks to the polls, and pass out our home-made voter guides -which will also be available via Facebook, Twitter and smart phones.

In Mid-October, we’re getting volunteers together to plan GOTV. We have an 86 Hour GOTV Plan which begins Saturday before election day. Sunday October 31 is Halloween so a lot of groups will be doing Trick or Vote -the biggest door-to-door canvass of the year (in costume) to scare out the vote. Trick or Vote has been proven as a successful model to get out new volunteers, to get voters to actually open their doors, and also to get free candy. I’m thinking I’ll wear orange paint on my face and dress as Speaker Boehner.

Then it’s GOTV. We’ll connect you with everything you need to run a GOTV operation or hook you up with sophisticated groups in your area to volunteer with.

After polls close, we celebrate. Two weeks later: (Week 13 of the 12 Week Plan), we will attend local Rootscamp sessions to debrief, talk next steps, and then take a big well-deserved 12 Week Vacation knowing we did everything we could to stop the bad guys.

I’m sorry, that orange-painted face look really gets to me.

This story was originally published on Huffington Post.

We Can’t Let Republicans Take Over in 2010 — All Hands on Deck!

12weekadmin — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 14:19:39 +0000

by Billy Wimsatt

Progressives must invent their own creative, independent ways to get people motivated to volunteer and get out to vote.

A lot of people remember 2004 as a bad year — the year George W. Bush was re-elected. I remember that too. But mostly I remember 2004 as an amazing year, a creative renaissance in political organizing. We weren’t excited about the candidate (John Kerry, remember him?), but we were absolutely terrified of the opposition — rightly so. There was no magical Obama campaign. So we had to invent our own organic ways to get people interested. 2004 was the year that grassroots artists, activists and organizers discovered a formerly despised tactic: Voting (eew, gross!). George W. Bush helped us realize we couldn’t afford to ignore it anymore.

2010 is a little bit like 2004. We’re not excited about the candidates (who are the Democrats running again?) but we should be terrified of the opposition. Karl Rove is back, raising $200 million for independent expenditures. The Tea Party is at high tide. And according to pollsters, Republicans are twice as motivated as Democrats to vote in the fall elections. Scary!

The parallels are a bit frightening. Even the dates are the same: Election Day 2010 falls on November 2 — same as in 2004. But what is most scary is that our team appears completely demoralized, uninterested in voting, and basically resigned to losing big in the fall. Can you imagine a sports team doing this? Can you imagine a sports team going into a game like: “Yeah, let’s try to only lose by 15-20 points.”

No, stupid! That’s not how you play the game. If you’re the underdog, that means you have to fight twice as hard and come from behind. You have to play to win!

I know 2004 was a traumatic experience many of us would prefer to forget. November 3, 2004 alone was so depressing that the progressive movement basically went into a coma for six months and barely woke up in time to stop Social Security from being privatized in mid-2005.

But given that we are in a similar situation today, it might behoove us to take a moment to see what we can learn from 2004.

Even though we lost, my friends and I remember 2004 as an incredible year — the year we launched the League of Pissed Off Voters. We had local groups self-organize and create their own local progressive voter guides in 31 states. We held a national conference called Smackdown 2004 in Columbus, Ohio. We gave local groups a 90-Day Plan. We had thousands of volunteers create and distribute 350,000 copies of 147 homemade local voter guides.

We weren’t the only ones doing it.

In 2004, literally every week, another creative new organization was launched to register voters or shoot spitballs at the Bush regime. There were literally three different Bike the Vote projects that weren’t connected to each other. There was a project to row a boat down the Mississippi river from Minnesota to New Orleans to retrace the path of Huckleberry Finn and register voters in the swing states along the river’s banks. In addition to Rock the Vote, there was Smoke the Vote, Fuck the Vote and Votergasm. Yes, there were two different vote-for-sex initiatives. There was Music For America and Punkvoter and Vote Mob and Concerts for Change and Bands Against Bush, Drinking Liberally, and two separate groups of Moms Against Bush. Run Against Bush organized meet-ups for anti-Bush joggers who ran in matching T-shirts. They sold 20,000 shirts online and raised $250,000 for the Democratic Party. Then there was Operation Bubbe which transported New Yorkers to get out the Jewish grandparent vote in Florida. (In 2008, it was revived as The Great Schlep, and Sarah Silverman did a hilarious YouTube video.)

Everywhere you turned, there was another creative idea.

There was Swing State Spring Break which evolved into Swing State Summer Break, which by fall became Swing the State: Your Anti-Bush Travel Agency, which moved thousands of volunteers to battleground states. Not to be confused with the Swing State Project, which was urging Democrats to move to swing states. Or Driving Votes, which arranged rides and carpools to swing states. Or Downtown for Democracy, which did the same thing for New York artists.

There were four major hip-hop voting efforts. Russell Simmons’ Hip-Hop Summit Action Network was eclipsed by Puffy’s Vote or Die. There was the union-bankrolled Hip-Hop Civic Engagement Project that registered 350,000 voters, not to be confused with the National Hip-Hop Political Convention that brought together thousands of young activists in Newark and spawned a network of Local Organizing Committees (also known as LOCs) in more than a dozen states.

You get the idea.

We might not have won the election. But we did generate incredible new momentum and volunteer energy. Yes, we were out-organized by the right-wing field and message machine. But you can’t blame the sandbags for not stopping the tsunami. We tried very hard and we came close. We did create the largest Democratic turnout in history up to that point. We did start young people trending Democratic (youth voted for Kerry 54-45). And we did win a lot of victories down ballot, like Washington State Governor Christine Gregoire – by 127 votes.

There’s a tendency when we lose to think we did everything wrong. And there’s a temptation when you win to think you did everything right. This tends to camouflage the true lessons.

One of the hidden downsides to the Obama campaign’s effectiveness in 2008 is that it sucked up most of the political oxygen and imagination. Progressives didn’t feel the need to build a strong independent political movement or field operation, which left us a little bit screwed in 2009 and 2010. According to progressive pollsters and focus groups, 2008 Obama voters are not responding as strongly to the Democratic brand anymore. Surprise, surprise. You can’t build a movement around one charismatic leader. Authentic independent messengers are needed once again to turn out progressive voters this fall.

So a bunch of us who remember 2004 are getting together, reviving and upgrading some of the best projects we did in 2004. We’re bringing back the 90-Day Plan. It’s called the 12-Week Plan (www.12WeekPlan.org). We’re bringing back Driving Votes and Swing the State’s swing state trips. We’re bringing back progressive voter guides (www.TheBallot.org). And we’re working with a wide spectrum of groups on creative organizing efforts with new technologies and collaboration.

We’re calling this effort All Hands On Deck. It’s an all-hands-on-deck moment. Like: Hey, the Titanic is headed for an iceberg! All hands on deck, everybody — let’s turn this ship around. For starters, let’s bring back the most successful efforts of 2004. Let’s bring back our creative, can-do, volunteer-driven, movement-building spirit. That way November 3, 2010 won’t have to be as depressing as November 3, 2004. 2011 won’t have to be as depressing as 2005.

And hopefully this time we’ll learn the other big lesson from 2004 and build this movement for the long run instead of letting it die after 2010.

OK everyone, put your hands in the middle and act like you want to win.

On the count of three…

Goooooooooo TEAM!

This story was originally published on Alternet.

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admin — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 00:21:13 +0000

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