Campaigning for the Future with the Virginia Young Democrats
The Virginia Young Democrats will be virtually convening on Saturday, May 30th to vote for their next Executive Committee. I’m hoping to earn my fellow Young Democrats’ votes to be their next Campaign Director for 2020.
I have been working in campaigns for a while now, having worked for progressive candidates across the United States from 2016 on. I have worked for and consulted for candidates like Beto O’Rourke in Texas, Attorney General Tish James in New York, Congresswoman Ayanna Pressley in Massachusetts, Attorney General Maura Healey in Massachusetts, Congresswoman Ilhan Omar in Minnesota, Senator Dick Durbin in Illinois, Governor Tony Evers in Wisconsin, Congressman Josh Harder in California, and whole host of local electeds in Northern Virginia, while advocating for working class issues, union labor, health care reform, climate justice, reproductive rights, and criminal justice reform. I want to hone in on my skill set and the political knowledge I have gained up until this point to raise the Virginia Young Democrats to a new level when it comes to campaigns.
As I wrote previously, I have a lot of plans to help us campaign virtually, but I want to do more than that. I don’t just want us to be focused solely on the 2020 General Election. I want us to be focused on the future. I want to help effectively create a well-oiled machine that will continue to train people for campaigns and get more young people involved with politics in general here in Virginia:
Coordinating Our Chapters for Campaigns
One of the things I would like to work on is being intentional on coordination between our chapters for campaign invasions. For campaigns within Virginia, I want to empower those chapters local to that region to really take a leadership role and be stewards for those campaigns. If we are fortunate enough to be able to canvass during the 2020 campaign season, we need to be intentional on giving those local chapters a feeling of ownership of their areas during campaign invasions.
The best way for that would be to communicate with Regional Chairs for a specific congressional district and create a channel of communication between the VAYD Executive Committee through the Regional Chairs to the local chapters to make sure that everyone is on the same page when it comes time for outside YD chapters to come help out. We will be able to plan more effectively, campaign more efficiently, and make sure that we are not creating opportunity gaps for campaigns. I want to be able to send in volunteers to areas that they are comfortable with, with the necessary knowledge they need to have about an area, and with confidence that they know they are making a difference.
Also, having that same line of communication will help raise concerns effectively for which chapters may need more assistance from leadership when it comes to campaigns and also how we can use our resources more effectively. Creating cohesion through the entirety of VAYD will only help us towards victory in November.
Campaign Volunteer Trainings Prior to November
The most effective kind of team is a well trained and well informed team before November. We should be hosting campaign training for all of our chapters ahead of the General Election season so that we are ready to hit the ground running after Labor Day when campaigns ramp up. If the Virginia Young Dems can walk into a campaign and already know how to use the necessary equipment, it increases our impact on campaigns astronomically. In our current environment, I want to be able to host virtual trainings for phone banking, text banking, and even peer to peer voter outreach, so that folks can really see an increased ability to virtually campaign from home. This will empower our chapters to stay engaged with campaigns and hopefully have the resources they need to take back to their own campaign operations within their individual chapters. I want to be able to address volunteer concerns early in the process so when it comes time to get to work, we have already tackled most of the problems that could arise.
Candidate Trainings and Building a Bench
We need to improve as a Democratic Party at building a bench of future leaders for generations to come. One way we can do this within VAYD is to coordinate candidate trainings and workshops around the Commonwealth, with the help of leveraging connections with organizations like Run for Something, Win Virginia, Emerge, and others. It is important for us as young people to raise each other up and make sure that we all know that we can make an impact in politics starting at a young age. We need to ensure that we are giving our fellow Virginia Young Dems the necessary tools to make meaningful change in the political arena as future elected officials. I will work with our College Dem chapters to host candidate workshops virtually (or hopefully in person on campuses if we reach that point) so that they can continue to feel empowered in politics post graduation. I want to work with our Young Dems chapters to host the same workshops in their localities so that those who feel empowered can make a plan and take the leap to run for office. These workshops can be great ways to recruit politically minded people to get involved with the Young Dems and Democratic politics as a whole when campaigns aren’t moving. As they say, young gets it done and we can prove that by making the next wave of young candidates highly trained to be the best candidates they can be.
Voter Education and Voter Registration
Millennials and Gen Z are currently the biggest voting block in the country. We need to make sure that we are employing that to its greatest extent. That means making sure that young people are registered to vote, know how to vote, and know when to vote. This is not an easy task in a virtual environment but it can be done. I believe that building a robust voter education program will do just that. It will be a perfect warm up to the election season and also give chapters more ways to get involved with electoral politics in the campaign off-season. Voter registration is difficult when you can’t be canvassing in person or pamphleting out in public, but it’s not impossible. If we do continue to remain socially distant in the coming months, we will be able to do voter outreach either over the phone, over email, or over social media to get voters, especially young voters, to register and to know how to vote absentee.
Outside of electoral politics and actually voting in elections is advocacy for voting. We have made great strides in the General Assembly this year to make voting easier, but we can always do more. I would like to continue to advocate to restore voting rights to those people who have had them taken away. We can advocate to expand our electorate by making it easier for people to register to vote, to access ballots, and to vote absentee. Voting is a huge issue that we need to continue to tackle and these are some of the many ways to do that.
2020 has not been easy so far and that is an understatement. Unfortunately with the upcoming election, it is only going to get harder. That is why I want to come in with these plans to make sure we are prepared as Virginia Young Democrats to boost our down ballot and local elections, protect the House, flip the US Senate, and to take back the White House. We know what a Democratic Trifecta looks like for Virginia, now it’s time to show what a Democratic Trifecta looks like for the country. Let’s go to work.
