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Managing Election Campaigns
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Recently updated threads
- Concluding the class Tue, 2010-11-23 00:49
- Week Six: Get Out the Vote (GOTV) Sun, 2010-10-31 03:49
- Week Four-Five: Candidate Statements, Direct Mail, Campaign Organization Fri, 2010-10-22 06:46
- Week One: Understanding the problem Fri, 2010-10-22 06:15
- Miscellaneous Thu, 2010-10-21 16:20
Welcome Messages
First, let me introduce myself. Then, I'd like each of you to post a welcome message with:
- Your interest in the course. Why did you choose this course? Presumably you are pondering or already active with a candidacy of some kind.
- What areas of election campaigns you would like to focus on. The course will cater to its participants, so now is the time to say which areas we should focus on.
- How you found P2PU? This has nothing to do with the course, but it will be interesting feedback to P2PU for the future.
One word of warning: This is a public space. Don't reveal anything about specific election campaigns that would embarrass you later.
Now for my welcome to you!
I became interested in election campaigns about 20 years ago, when a local school board seat was left vacant in the highly politicized city of Oakland, California and in its most left-liberal portion at that, the part that borders Berkeley. To make a long story short, I persuaded my then-girlfriend, a teacher and a mom, to run for the office.
That fateful decision set into motion my direct involvement in five different election as either campaign manager, database manager, treasurer, volunteer manager, etc... and sometimes all of the above. I wrote the literature, occasionally designed it as well, walked to thousands of doors, raised funds, and, most importantly, played a leading role in each of them in terms of campaign strategy.
I haven't run a campaign recently. I livei n Southern California, play basketball when I get the chance, and am the Director of OpenCourseWare at the University of California, Irvine. I am very involved right now in open education, so here was a chance to contribute something.
Anyway, please feel free to jump in with your own messages.
I live in Chicago, where local politics is corrupt and shady politicians are difficult to hold accountable.
I am interested in this course as a purely intellectual exercise, at the moment. It would help me as a voter to know more about the techniques that politicians use to manipulate voters. Eventually I may use this knowledge in a small local campaign, but that is not my immediate reason for taking the course.
The internal workings of a campaign (educating volunteers about a candidate, raising funds, etc.) and the formation of ideas about candidates in the minds of voters are both issues that I would be interested in learning about in great detail. I would also appreciate it if we studied dark horse candidates and the best practices of campaigning against the electoral odds.
I found P2PU by searching around for tuition-free colleges. The site appeared in the google results and I leafed through some of the open courses. My interest was piqued in particular by your own previous course, so I jumped at the opportunity to participate this term.
I'm going to post something about last night's results and it goes to your point about dark horse candidates. I don't think Christine O'Donnell was a "stealth" candidate, but we still have to ask why polling didn't pick it up. There are actual techniques candidates can use to "fly under the radar" and ground campaigns often provide a surge that are not picked up until it is too late.
I also lived in Chicago for seven years and I was there when Harold Washington won. My friend got punched by two big guys outside a polling place. He got some cops to come by and they told him that "they were thinking of charging him with assault, but he convinced them to drop the matter!"
i was a comp sci student who got bored getting upset with bugs in software when i was more interested in hardware.
switched to political science to try to work on policy instead of having socially-numb & corrupt individuals setting policy (they sometimes/often don't read), i thought i'd try to help put a more practical spin on campaigning.
now i'm here to learn anything i can about the process...
(C-Span is my least fav channel... even seen how many empty seats there are.. and ppl voting for others... has that stopped yet?)
i know we;ll eventually get tot alk about stuff like votes on digg.com being gamed and voter fraud on electronic media... :-)
Well, I went the other way professionally - from political science toward programming anyway (if not computer science). I think that you'll get a well-rounded view.
Hello,
My name's Fatou. I am from Senegal but currently living in the UK.
1. In 2012, presidential elections will be held in Senegal. Recently my friends and I have been wondering how the elections machine is put in place in western Africa.
2. I want to understand how politicians use propaganda to convince people and then how they put in place a fraud system that allows them to stay in power.
3. I can't remember how I found P2P. I registered for the KMD journalism. I had to drop though. I just couldn't keep up with the hours
It's great that we have such international diversity in this course. That was one of the hopes when we got started. Of course, P2PU, from its start has relied on people from South Africa to Brazil, so perhaps it is no accident.
In this course, we are going to look specifically at voter data and access to voter data, which are my personal areas of expertise, But this course is really built by its participants, so I am excited to see where the conversation will take us. Do you have any government sources of information around elections and campaign organization for Senegal? There must be some website by now that at least gives some hints.
Hello. I am a Free Lance Journalist/Photo Journalist. Know a lot of politicians, see and hear a lot of politics, but allow them to do their own true self worth by quoting them in articles and the pictures to join the moment.
I am sorry for being absent this week. This has been a strange year for my family. In less than one year, six family members have died. This past week and my younger sister. Tough for anyone.
I appreciate this moment to develop a greater understanding of campaigns.
I'm very sorry to hear of your personal situation, so I appreciate your participation in the course even more.
I'm Claudia from Italy.
I'm here to exercise my english and to learn about election strategy in other country, because i'm already active with a candidacy in Italy.
I found P2PU on Italian Television, Rai 3.
Claudia, this is great. Could you give a few specifics on election regulations in Italy? Also, could you check the postings in Week Two and tell us what kind of voter data is available there.
This is a good time to remind everyone that our class goal is to map how election campaigns look different across the globe - and therefore, how we have to adapt the tactics I describe here.
I am preparing the municipal and provincial elections. Here, each type of election is different: the provincial is proportional with barrier and majority premium. The communal (for communities under 15,000 inhabitants), follows a pure proportional system.
Claudia
1. I'm a young journalist from Argentina and I've worked as a press advisor for politicians in the last couple of years. I like learning all about political campaings that would help me in my different jobs. I worked at the House of Representantives here in Argentina as an advisor and now I got the chance of a similar job at the Buenos Aires Legislature. At the momment, I'm working as a photographer for the Official Press Office of an Argentine province.
2. I would like to learn more about campaings of politicians that are in a current official position at the moment of the election.
3. I found P2PU in many sites that talk about free sofware and stuff like that. But in this case in particular, I just read an article in an Argentina newspaper called Página 12, where they interviewed Asa Dotzler and one of the topics was the Open Web / Open Journalism course and got interested so I visited the site. That's how I found this course today!
Sebastian,
Thanks for joining the course. You bring an important perspective given your current involvement in the famously complicated politics of Argentina! One of the not-so-hidden objectives is the course is to develop a comparative look at democracies through the prism of electoral systems.
Hello everybody
1. My name is Tete. I am youth trainer in leadership and citizenship, particularly interested by elections because in my country all elections are often followed by protests. I join this course to learn about managing elections in order to this share the knowledge with the trainees. Secondly, As local election will be held soon in my city, this knowledge could serve me if I commit to one level or another.
2. I am interested by all areas of elections. I have no preference.
3.A Francophone blog has mentioned P2PU and given the link.
Tete, it's a pleasure to have you join us. We started some weeks ago, so you'll probably want to read through the course and post your own thoughts and questions. I'd like to also note that we now have a fully international class, with several students from Africa, others from Latin America, two from Europe, and the rest from the United States. Tete, if you can post a brief description of what public voter information is available to campaigns, we can all see how it differs (or is the same) as what I've described here. Since you mention that elections are followed by protests, I imagine that there are issues with transparency. The US, despite its reputation for democratic functioning, has been scarred in recent years by controversies over presidential elections (2000 - Florida and 2004 - Ohio) as well as significant questions being raised over electronic voting machines and the lack of a paper trail.