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The Reality of the Corporate Campaign grift in FL- and what we can/ARE doing different. [1]
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Date: 2022-10-22
Candidate for FL House District 61 Janet Varnell Warwick chats with a voter in their driveway.
Look, democratic campaigning is inherently broken in Florida.
Here’s the cycle: candidate decides to run for office to represent their community. They file to run, and immediately get swamped with hundreds of emails offering services from mail, to texts, to voicemails, to TV ads, to digital ads, to websites. Now, if they are smart, they’ll realize that all of these are grifts, and blatant upcharges so people can make a quick buck.
Many of them will already have a consultant or four picked out, from their local area, or DC. Those consultants take a monthly fee, anywhere from $3000 to $10000 per month, just to tell them who they need to buy things from, mostly vendors who the consultant already has a worked out arrangement with, so they get extra $ on the backend.
Right now, a 6x9 mail piece can be sent for as little as .35-37 cents with postage to a voter door. The average consultant in Tampa FL charges .65 cents, sometimes as high as a dollar. Therefore, the candidate is forced to raise obscenely more $ than they should have to, to reach half the number of voters our competition does.
Consultants get as little as 5% or as high as 15% on TV ad buys, profit 2 cents per text message sent (in the hundreds of thousands, etc.), you get the point.
They encourage candidates to get out and talk to voters, and organize volunteer based knock gatherings that knock 250 doors in a district of 100,000 voters on a weekend. Most of the time folks aren’t home, and they’ll actually talk to maybe 50 of those voters.
It’s a broken, and then we wonder why we lose.
But, there is a better way, it just doesn’t get a consultant their new boat.
Volunteers are great, but they just don’t get the volume of contact needed to truly create a local movement. Paid canvassers have been not unheard of in FL campaigns since 2016, but aren’t liked by most general consultants, because they take $ out of their pocket, and require a lot of hands on management. Companies that do the management for you can charge upwards of $4/PER DOOR! which once again, makes it too expensive for most campaigns to touch.
Community organizers are the future, and how we save our state.
Take in the Janet Varnell Warwick Campaign for State House District 61, a seat that was flipped red by Republicans in 2020, where canvassers are being paid a living wage to knock hundreds of doors per day. The folks running that campaign are a coalition of community organizers, hellbent on recapturing the seat. It’s been largely ignored by the Democratic Party, and we ARE doing TV, Mail, Etc, but it’s at a third of the cost, so we have more $ to go to knocking doors. 17,500 in fact, in less than 8 weeks, more than any other campaign in FL.
We want to prove that this old/new way of campaigning is how we will rescue Florida. When the Red Wave hits, and all the statewide seats go Republican, there will be a beacon of hope in Pinellas county. And when folks ask how we did it- there will be no question.
We’d like to knock on another 10,000 democratic doors before election day. We need your help to do that.
Feel free to follow along with our daily knock count on twitter @VoteJanet
Pitch in, and help keep this record setting campaign in a state that could be a battleground again. Let’s Georgia this Florida:
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