Tag: Politics

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In Which I Give Worried Introverts Something to Do (2024 Edition)

A few years back on this site, I revealed my political preferences in American elections. While my novel Civil Blood and its sequel try to be political without being particularly partisan, I myself am pretty firmly in one camp.

And over the last month or two, I and many of my friends are looking at the current election cycle and saying:

“OH CRAP, WHAT CAN I DO?”

If you’re asking that question, I’m here to help.

So What Can You Do?

The easiest answer is, of course, “Vote!” or “Vote harder!” or “Vote and bring three friends!” Which is nice, but it doesn’t really move the needle much. I’ve been voting. My friends are already voting. Further, I don’t live in a swing state, so the chances that my vote is going to make a difference are negligible. This might be the case for you, too. But giving up doesn’t feel right, either.

Politicians, whom you may or may not trust, are all too happy to say “Donate!” Which is nice if you have disposable income, but if I gave money every time I felt afraid about the political future, I’d be buried under a pile of debt as big as Mount McKinley.

To be clear, I’m not against donations. In 2008, being gainfully employed with a certain amount of stability, I gave to my first political campaign, and have ever since. But that doesn’t feel like enough any more, right?

So the third option presents itself…

Volunteering to Get Out the Vote

The best way to get out the vote, by far, is canvassing: you go out in person, knock on doors, and introduce yourself to one person at a time. But since I don’t live anywhere near a swing state, I can’t physically do that.

In 2016, I tried phone banking, which was annoying. The best thing I could say about it was that I eliminated disconnected phone numbers to let some other volunteer concentrate on calling actual people. My few contacts with human beings on the other end of the phone changed no minds, netted no voters. It didn’t help that I didn’t have a script to follow, or training of any sort.

But in 2018, I found I could use my talents more effectively. I could write letters or postcards to get out the vote. My handwriting is legible, and I possess a little patience.

If this describes you… you could swing a state.

Introducing Vote Forward

The organization I volunteered for is called Vote Forward, and they’re awesome for worried introverts.

Their key argument is this: a lot of eligible voters toss out direct mail or e-mail without reading it. But if you got a hand-written letter in the mail, it’s such an unusual occurrence that you’d open it up just to see what it is. And once you read a personal message from a volunteer, you might be more likely to vote.

Of course, it’s far from magic. Vote Forward estimated that sent letters or postcards have about a 3% conversion rate. But that’s a lot higher than e-mail or direct mail. I usually pitch it as “for every 100 of these letters I write, it’s like voting in a swing state and bringing 2-3 friends.”

These numbers can add up. In the 2020 presidential election, about 200,000 Vote Forward volunteers sent 17.6 million letters, and moved approximately 126,000 votes. Now, if you’re sitting there with a calculator, you might be like, “Wait, that’s actually more like a 0.7% conversion rate,” which is fair. But the margins of victory in some swing states that year?

Georgia: 11,779 (Biden)
Arizona: 10,457 (Biden)
Nevada: 33,596 (Biden)
Pennsylvania: 80,555 (Biden)
North Carolina: 74,483 (Trump)

Obviously, I’m not saying it made all the difference… but with margins that narrow? This year, it might.

But Will I Feel Like a Shill? Is It Complicated? Or Expensive?

No to all three.

After downloading a batch of 5 or 20 addresses and blank forms, you fill out the form with a blue pen (supposedly the friendliest, most professional-seeming color) including why you vote and why they should, too. Note that you’re not supposed to mention a specific candidate or slogan, as those can be turn-offs. But you can tell a personal story or just go with something generic like “I want to be a part of making history,” or “since my grandparents came here from another country, I feel a sense of duty here.” Stuff like that.

Then you address an envelope, put the letter inside, add a stamp, and the mail is ready to go. Now, stamps are a little pricey for mass mailing these days — 100 letters at 73 cents per stamp adds up to as much as a decent campaign donation! But if you can’t afford postage, Vote Forward’s website has a place where you can sign up and they’ll send you voter kits that include rolls of stamps.

All that’s left is sending the letters at the optimal time. There’s two kinds of campaigns that differ here — if the address belongs to a potential first-time voter, you send it ASAP. If it’s part of a get-out-the-vote drive, you send it at Vote Forward’s optimal time in October where there’s still enough time to register and/or vote, but not so much time that the voter blows it off and forgets about it until Election Day.

And That’s It?

Yes, unless you wanna be super-enthusiastic and tell all your friends, or get your parents or your kids involved… that kind of thing.

So far this year, I’ve gotten one co-worker into it, two families’ worth of family friends, my daughter, and two of my daughter’s friends. And check out the photo!

That’s our first crop of 200 letters, 40 written and addressed by the kiddo, and 160 by me. They were all written in July, and we still have all of August, September, and a bit of October to go!

What if I Don’t Know What to Say?

I kept mine nicely generic. You can use it if you want:

“I vote because generations of Americans before us marched, fought, and died to secure our right to choose our leaders. I’m not giving up on this state or this country, and I hope you’ll join me by voting as soon as possible. Let’s make those past heroes proud!”

This keeps the focus on a lot of good patriotic feelings. The person you’re writing to might not agree with “a woman’s right to choose” (which is definitely on the ballot this year) but I think we can agree we’ve got a right to choose our leaders, and we should use it.

“I’m not giving up” doesn’t shame them for not wanting to vote (that’s legit) but it sets me up as someone who doesn’t quit, and “I hope you’ll join me” is an invitation rather than a castigation.

Then there’s what advertisers call the “call to action” at the end — voting as soon as possible — and the warm fuzzy motivation of making our ancestors proud. Sometimes I switch it up and say “let’s make history,” because this election is totally going to be historic one way or the other, but most of the time, I stick to this script.

So that’s the kind of structure you want — not too long, not too short, nothing insulting or offensive, all brought together at the end with a “get out and vote” message. And by the time you write 100 of these, you tend to believe it. And I feel much less worried, not because I’m confident in a particular candidate, but because I know I’m doing what I can.

I’m not giving up, no matter what the polls say.

And I hope you’ll join me.

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In Which Months Go By

580 letters to voters.

I once flipped through a dictionary (Merriam-Webster Collegiate, I think) and found that in the back, they had a super-cool list of foreign words and phrases that are or were popular. You know, like the Latin “finis coronat opus,” which translates to “the end crowns the work.” If you ever want to whip out the snotty literary criticism, throw that baby in and sound like a scholar, when all you’re really saying is “a story needs to stick the landing, or it doesn’t add up to much.”

I think my favorite, though, is “Parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus,” which is “Mountains will go into labor, and a silly little mouse will be born.” That one’s about overpromising and underdelivering. You know, like the game that’s been delayed ten years that better be the Second Coming of Almighty Zeus when it comes out, or else all that expense and hard work will be met with a resounding “meh.” (It’s kind of telling that there’s a few games out there this could apply to.)

Me, I try not to overpromise. But it has been a long time since I posted, so I hope you weren’t betting on me giving birth to a mountain. There’s been good news and bad news in my life, my career, and my personal writing. So let’s take a tour.

I Got (More) Political This Year

As I posted in 2020’s “In Which I Give Worried Introverts Something to Do,” I decided to use a not-insignificant amount of my spare time to volunteer for a get-out-the-vote campaign. This year, I started earlier than I did in 2020 because historically Democrats don’t turn out in midterms, and if past was prologue, they were going to get pasted.

I wrote 20 letters a week to get voters to turn out in Texas, Georgia, Florida, Nevada and Pennsylvania. By the time of the big send-off in late October, I finished 580 letters, about 100 more than I managed in 2020 if you include the Georgia runoff. It would have been nice to do an even 600, but in that last week I was crunching at work and totally out of brain fuel. Then, the next week, when it became clear Georgia was going to another runoff for its Senate seat, I burned all my free time and got an additional 100 letters out.

I don’t regret the time spent — the Democrats snatched a stalemate from the jaws of defeat and broke a pattern 20+ years long of getting routed in midterm elections. However, I am quite happy campaign season is over for the moment. I have a little more time on the weekends, and the ability to find other topics to talk about on Twitter.

I Tried To Be an Involved Dad

Just a minor note here from a proud pops: I helped teach my daughter how to drive and I wrangled my son through a frustrating season of soccer. Both kids’ grades are pretty great, and they seem to be thriving. Couldn’t be happier with them.

Some other obstacles came our way: my daughter got COVID for about 10 days. She was vaxxed and wasn’t in much danger, but it hit her like a truck. The rest of the family masked up and sanitized religiously and all somehow avoided it, even including a 3-hour car trip (shout-out to my wife for doing the driving, windows down the whole way).

I Kept Submitting Stories

I wrote and rewrote a few more short stories, but they have yet to find a home anywhere. As with martial arts, where you are only as good as your next move, a writer can have great experience and skill and still, the story may not resonate with whoever’s at the editing desk. So that was disappointing and consumed a bit of time.

Then There’s Civil Blood‘s Sequel

When I last posted about the sequel, I was reviewing its outline, trying to turn it into the book I really wanted to read. Rather than write by the seat of my pants, I spent a month or so planning it out and adding notes for a direction in which to take a third book. This all took time, but I’ve managed to get started on the manuscript itself. As of this writing, I have one chapter down and a pretty good grip on the second, so I really want to make this happen sooner rather than later. It’s been “later” long enough.

I Crunched Like the Captain

This one is kind of bittersweet. After months of work that sucked up weekends and evenings, my job with Mattel163 came to a close. The project is in soft launch now (it’s not in the US or China yet) and the prognosis is good for it being able to ship. I’ll tell you all about it when it goes wide, but right now I need to set my sights elsewhere.

…and We Lost Some Good Ones

Lastly, some things happened on a vastly more serious note. Some of my life had to be put on hold to grieve.

Since I last posted, three people I knew died. The first, Jerome Joaquin Mabrey, was a gamer I met at San Diego Comic Con in 2012. He was on the first team to beat the Mass Effect multiplayer’s fancy new Platinum difficulty, he ran a great Facebook group called Nerd Alert, and had an encyclopedic knowledge of space opera. The second was Kevin Barrett, who was director of design at BioWare and was responsible for giving myself and my wife our most significant video game industry job. We used to love arguing with him in a BioWare dev book club. We disagreed all the freaking time, but we never had a negative experience with him. The third was Ferret Baudoin, who worked with my wife on Dragon Age, ran a killer Roman-themed D&D campaign for us, and after the BioWare diaspora, wound up at Bethesda. I had mad respect for all three of these men, and the world is smaller for not having them in it.

…and that’s all, he wrote.

So, all told, this summer and fall were pretty busy. I don’t have a lot to show you just yet, but I hope you’ll understand that sometimes, life isn’t a performance, or all about your next gig. Quite often, it’s day-to-day progress, or even just holding the line when that progress tries to disappear.

Festina lente. (In English idiom, “More haste, less speed.”)

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In Which I Give Worried Introverts Something to Do

Once upon a time, I was not very political. Those times, naturally, are over.

In 2016, I volunteered my time to do some phone banking. It did not go well. They were probably the most ineffectual hours spent by anyone with a phone, ever, and I’m including that time I left a message on an answering machine asking a girl to the junior prom. (Yeah, I had game. Why do you ask?)

The phone banking consisted of calling people of my preferred political party in swing states. And in 2016, people in swing states were absolutely deluged in calls. I heard answering machine messages saying “We’re not at home right now. If this is a political call, hang up and cross us off your list.” Every voter I reached said “I’m already ready to vote, our family has a plan,” with the exception of one person who went Green Party. I changed no minds. The best thing I did was update the registry so that no one else on the team wasted their time calling a dead number.

This year, I’m trying something different. I signed up with Vote Forward to see if I could get some use out of this writing thing I’m supposed to be good at. Their theory is that since no one gets hand-written letters any more, the average voter would be curious to see one in the mail and open it. Inside is a handwritten letter encouraging the reader to have a plan to vote.

I should be clear that there’s some hard data on this from previous elections. The best way to get someone to vote, bar none, is to volunteer to knock on doors, talk to someone, and leave literature: it’s got a conversion rate of about 20%. But if you don’t live in a swing state, that option’s not going to score your team many voters where it matters. Letter-writing like this has about a 3% rate — which is much higher than ads for clicks.

The process is pretty simple. You log in to the database of voters, click “Adopt Voters” from swingable states in batches of 5 or 20. (The “adoption” process is so nobody duplicates your work.) Then, you download and print the names, and write your letters. Vote Forward gives you a return address that matches their in-state field offices, so you aren’t telling complete strangers where you live. Download the form letters, add your personal message (no issues, no specific candidates, just encourage them to vote), and fold it up in the hand-written envelope. Then you add a stamp that you bought (think of it as supporting the Postal Service).

Then you hold on to the letters and send them on the date that’s optimized for voter action and retention.

It takes about two hours for me to bust through 20 letters from download to final product. I did 20 a day, and at the end of my first week… behold!

That’s a hundred envelopes, or, if the ratio is about right, three voters in swing states. It doesn’t sound like much, but before this, my vote would have zero influence on the election. That’s just how my state works in the Electoral College. When people on Facebook say “Vote!” after whatever bad news comes their way, I can say “Not only did I vote, I brought three friends!”

Will it make a difference? I don’t know. But I feel a hell of a lot less helpless. And maybe, if enough of us more-than-triple our impact like this, we can get better leaders. The site says they have more than 100,000 volunteers, and their goal for letters is in the millions.

Vote Forward is at https://www.votefwd.org.

Game on.