About a week ago a friend of mine organized a call for a bunch of his friends who where wondering how they might help with the Biden / Harris campaign. I found the call very useful, but a few of my friends who were on the call said they were hoping for a simpler summary of things that they can do.
I’ve done some research into how best to help out. Here’s what I’ve come up with.
The single most important thing is to find something that works for you, and to start doing it!
- Vote. Are you registered to vote? Do you have you vote by mail packet? Do you know where to drop it off? If you don’t want to vote by mail, the try to vote early and help reduce the lines on election day. There are plenty of websites that can help you get registered and vote. Vote.org is particularly easy to use.
- Donations. Do you have money to donate? Donate now! In a couple of weeks the campaigns won’t have any more time to spend your money. If you are wondering where to donate, here are some ideas about how best to distribute your donations. If you have concerns about how your donation in process, here is some information I found about ActBlue, the platform that Democrats use to collect donations.
- Friendbanking. Have you reached to all of your friend & acquaintances yet? If not, that is the single best place to start. The idea here is to encourage your friends to take a step further in. If they aren’t registered to vote, help them get registered; if they haven’t voted yet, encourage them to vote early; if they have already voted, encourage them to reach out to their friends; if they have already reached out to all of their friends, encourage them to volunteer for a campaign. The Biden / Harris campaign has the “Vote Joe” app, which interfaces to your phones contacts lists and helps you keep track of who you have reached out to.
- Canvassing. Do you live in or near a swing state? Are you comfortable knocking on doors? The Biden / Harris campaign has said they will start in-person canvasing. I haven’t found details yet, but I will update this as soon as I do. I’ve put this one up higher that some others because not everyone is going to be comfortable doing this, so if you are comfortable, you might think about grabbing your PPE and hitting some doors.
- Fundraising. Do your friends have money? Or do you just have a lot of friends. Both the Biden / Harris campaign and Swing Left have tools for grassroots fundraising.
- Voter outreach. Whatever works for you, and with a few friends if you can manage. Get a few friends together, grab your laptops and cell phones, go to a friend’s house with a nice large porch where you can socially distance, and spend a couple hours making calls, sending texts or writing letters and postcards to swing state voters. At this point in the campaign, most of what you will be doing is targeted “Get out the Vote” activities. Basically, checking up on registered democratic voters and making sure that they have voted, or to encouraging them to vote and get them the information they need to vote. Both the official campaign website and Swing Left have lots of resource to help you volunteer.
- Sharing useful information on social media. One side of this is sharing useful for your friends. The other side, is correcting misinformation. Don’t bother getting in long online arguments with folks on the other side, just post the facts and move on.
- Pressure Republican office holders. This one is mainly therapeutic. But you might want to consider writing a short note about how disappointed / disgusted you are with Republicans for not doing a thing to stand up to Trump, and then emailing it to a bunch of Republican Senators in close races each time you contribute to their opponents campaigns or call voters in their state. The idea here is to turn up the pressure on vulnerable Republicans. They are starting to crack.