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Campaign volunteers: Cold pizza and democracy lessons [1]
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Date: 2024-05-01 04:06:00+00:00
Long before David Schultz was a professor at Hamline University in Minnesota, he caught the politics bug.
At 16, growing up in upstate New York, Schultz learned that his next-door neighbor was running for the local school board, and the young Schultz jumped in to help. It would be the first of about 50 campaigns he would work on. He is one of the many Americans who care enough about candidates and ideals to spend their free time volunteering on political campaigns.
“We actually have a higher degree of voluntarism in politics compared to other countries,” says Schultz, whose day job is teaching political science and legal studies. “Volunteers are still an enormously large aspect of American politics.”
Volunteers make phone calls to voters to ask for their support for a favorite candidate, knock on doors to do the same, amplify social media efforts of campaigns and even give voters rides to the polls.
Schultz says his earlier work for campaigns was fun. “It gave me a sense you could make a difference. Sitting in a campaign office, sipping coffee and eating cold pizza, while it doesn’t sound romantic, I learned an incredible lot about how American democracy works.”
Although third-party candidates generally don’t have the built-in organizational help (or money) of the Republican and Democratic parties, charismatic politicians over the years have been able to make their mark with enthusiastic volunteers. In 1992, H. Ross Perot said he would run for president as an independent if the public did the footwork of gathering signatures and getting him registered on 50 state ballots. The grassroots outpouring that followed was successful in getting him on the ballot, though he did not win the election. (He won 19% of the popular vote, but not a single Electoral College vote.)
Allan Lichtman, a history professor at American University in Washington, urges his students to get out and volunteer on campaigns to learn about the process, especially if they want to run for office themselves someday. “It’s very important for people to get involved in their country’s politics and [to see] how it affects their lives,” he says.
At the federal level, candidates pay campaign staff. But volunteers, too, fuel a lot of the efforts, Schultz says.
“Campaign volunteers are absolutely essential,” says Jacob Neiheisel, a political science professor at the University of Buffalo in New York. “They are really passionate about what they do. The biggest bang for your buck is [accessing their] personal contacts.”
Many Election Day workers at polling places are either volunteers or running the voting apparatus for nominal fees because they want to help elections, which are at the heart of America’s democracy.
“The more people who are participating in a variety of ways, you would think it would be a healthier government,” says Barbara Norrander, emeritus professor of government at the University of Arizona.
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