The drift: how constituents stopped being the center

Two weeks out from an election, a late chunk of money lands. I have sat near this moment more times than I can count, and it always comes down to the same fork.

Option one: put it into people. There are thousands of supporters on the file who have been asking what else they can do. They are ready. They do not need recruiting. What they need is organizing: briefing, structure, somebody to lead.  Every staff organizer knows if that is done badly the enthusiasm is spent for nothing. You will find out whether it worked sometime after the election is over.

Option two: put it into digital ads. One meeting. Sign off on three creatives. It is spent by Thursday, it is reportable on Friday, and if it doesn't work nobody will be able to say you did the wrong thing. You have numbers like reach that proved it did something. Even if that isn’t visible in the ballot box

They take the ads. They almost always take the ads.

Spoiler alert: The digital ads do nothing. That much is settled, and I'll come back to how thoroughly it's settled later this week. But the ads doing nothing is not the interesting part of the story today.

The interesting part is that taking them was the ‘right decision’.

Not right for the campaign. Right for the person making it, who had a fortnight, no capacity, a board or a boss, and a genuine need to not be the one who gambled. Nobody in that room was cynical. Everybody in that room was solving the problem in front of them. That is what the drift is made of. Not a betrayal, but a decade of afternoons like that one, each ending in the reasonable choice.

And their bosses will have their back. We are talking, after all, about teams that are already overworked, exhausted and somewhere close to burnt out. They carry the mission on their back and you any supervisor worth their weight will feel a responsibility to their well being. 

None of it started with digital, either. Theda Skocpol was tracking the slide back in 2003: American civic life moving from membership federations, where ordinary people held actual roles, to professionally managed advocacy, where civic involvement became one more occupation rather than every citizen's right and duty. Then we made it a science. Sasha Issenberg's The Victory Lab is the admiring account of that turn: campaigns moving from instinct to experiment, voters becoming research subjects, and the work becoming something you needed a career and a toolset to do.

Half a century ago a person who wanted to act had somewhere to go. The union hall. The library debate. The civic club. The campaign office with the folding table. Those places asked something of people and gave them something back.

Now we have the doomscroll. And within the horribly lonely but dopamine-driven experience of arguing on social media there is no sense of belonging.

But here is the harder part to hear: Ask any middle manager, in any industry, what the hardest part of the job is. Not one of them says the strategy. They all say the people.

James MacGregor Burns, who gave us the distinction between transactional and transformational leadership, put the structural version of it plainly: almost nothing of significance can be done without the power of other people. Which is precisely the trap. Everything that matters requires them, and they are the hardest part of everything that matters.

Deliberation may be the most important activity in a healthy democracy. It is also two hours on a Tuesday evening with one person who will not stop talking, three people who came for entirely different reasons, and a decision that gets pushed to next month. Anyone who tells you otherwise has not chaired one.

So consider what the last thirty years have actually sold into that. None of it is a scam. That is the whole point Each one solves a real problem for a real person under real pressure.

The pollster sells relief from being wrong- or at least, from being wrong according to the data. Not accuracy, relief: if the numbers said do it and it fails anyway, the failure belongs to the numbers.

The fundraising vendor sells something more valuable still, though nobody puts it in these words. What an executive director is really buying is another quarter in which she does not have to sit down with her team and work out whose job goes.

And the consultant sells the sauce. Not a plan but rather the belief that a plan exists somewhere, that somebody out there has the thing you are missing, and that it can be acquired for a fee. The reliable customer is a candidate with an ego and a war chest, no idea how to turn the second into position, and a preference for buying the answer over going and finding it.

Every one of them is, underneath, a way of doing politics without having to be in a room with people.

And underneath the individual choices sits a machine that makes the escapes permanently available and permanently affordable. Money moves in a loop. The public gives to organizations and campaigns through fundraising. Organizations spend it back at the public through advertising. Round and round. On both legs of that loop, vendors take a cut.

The cut is the engine. Fundraising vendors are paid on volume, so they optimize for whatever raises the most, fastest be it fear, alarm, or saturation. And the cost of alienating the people they are spamming appears in nobody's accounts. Advertising vendors are paid on the size of the buy, so they sell reach. Whether anyone was actually moved does not appear on the invoice. Neither do the people disenfranchised on the way to these numbers. The cumulative effect are those who decided that afternoon that they now hate politics, which is the socially acceptable version of I am done with this whole messy, annoying democracy thing. And after all, isn't life easier when less is asked of us?

No villain is required for any of this. Everyone is behaving rationally given how they are paid.

Our political practices, as I put it in The Age of Junk Politics, have become akin to the fast food industry: quick, easy, and ultimately unsatisfying. And in both cases it is the consumer (read: constituent) who gets blamed, rather than the people profiting.

You can see what it produces in the moments when people do show up. Millions went to the No Kings marches. Almost all of them went home and scrolled, because scrolling was what was there.

Here is what all of it adds up to, and it is not a moral failing. It is an accountability arrangement.

An organization ends up accountable to whoever it is genuinely in a relationship with. Major donors are in a relationship. They are on the phone with senior staff, their concerns shape what gets prioritized, their priorities turn up in who gets recruited and what gets said out loud. That is not corruption. That is accountability working exactly the way accountability works.

I have often thought it is possible that a candidate feels more accountable to their fundraising vendor than to the constituents of a safe part of their district. They do, after all, have to win. And what do those people ultimately offer toward that?

The millions of people on the list are in no such relationship. Their money is processed. Their addresses are stored. They are contributors, not constituents.

And here is the part that took me the longest to see. A list cannot want anything. The individuals on it have views, but the list itself has no way to arrive at a position, no way to press one, and no way to withdraw. Hahrie Han and her colleagues put it precisely in Prisms of the People: the millions of names on a petition "become mere props rather than collective agents of change. The lists, no matter how large, do not have the flexibility to constitute an independent source of political power."

If I had a dime for every candidate or nonprofit leader who seemed to believe they would become Mahatma Gandhi the moment their petition sign-ups crossed the million mark, I could have funded this whole thing myself.

Nobody removed constituents from the center. We replaced the thing that had held them there with something that looked bigger but ultimately is empty.

Which means putting them back is not a matter of values, and no quantity of language about centering community is going to do it. It is a question of whether anything a constituent does can travel back up the line carrying any weight. That is an infrastructure problem.

I have spent years trying to shift this on good intentions. I wrote a book about it. People nod. Nothing moves. And while we are all nodding, a great many other people go on charging their commissions, and the rest of us hang on to the edge of the merry-go-round.

In the meantime the arrangement holds. The organization goes on speaking for communities it has, in practice, stopped listening to. And two weeks out from the next election the money will land, and it will go into the ads, and everybody in the room will know exactly why.

So I have stopped waiting for the forces to be argued out of existence. Accept them as they are, and go looking instead for the leverage — the point where a small push moves something large.

That is what my team has been building, and it was time I worked on an answer rather than another description of the problem. On September 15th I can't wait to show you what we have come up with.