Maximum Impact Volunteering: Yoni Landau
September 14th, 2023
“Eventually you want to be headed towards additionality for your volunteerism.”
Yoni Landau is the CEO and founder of Movement Labs, the founder of Contest Every Race, and a former White House Office of Management and Budget and Robert Reich staffer. We explore just how technology can empower our practice of democracy and enrich our civic action toolkit.
Think about your personal impact in terms of additionality – how much you’ve done that wouldn’t have otherwise been done. Movement Labs aims to make it easy for you to have an impactful volunteer experience. To be of more service would be to get involved at a very deeply local level. Down ballot, about 75% of elected offices go uncontested; when contested, 48% are winning their elections!
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Credits:
Host: Mila Atmos
Guest: Yoni Landau
Executive Producer: Mila Atmos
Producers: Zack Travis
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Yoni Landau Transcript
Mila Atmos: [00:00:04] Welcome to Future Hindsight, a podcast that takes big ideas about civic life and democracy and turns them into action items for you and me. I'm Mila Atmos.
Here on the show, we've discovered that our participation and volunteerism are essential for the health of our society. But the realities of everyday life often get in the way of our best intentions to be fully engaged. Technology can make it easier, so getting involved doesn't have to be a huge endeavor. For example, you could phone bank from the comfort of your home or volunteer to send text messages.
To explore just how technology can power our civic action toolkit, we're joined by Yoni Landau. He's the CEO and founder of Movement Labs, the founder of Contest Every Race, and a former White House Office of Management and Budget, and Robert Reich, staffer.
Yoni, welcome and thank you for joining us.
Yoni Landau: [00:01:09] Thank you so much for having me. It's a delight to be here.
Mila Atmos: [00:01:12] So I poked around your website, Movement Labs, and there it says that you are, "an incubator and consulting firm using technology and experimentation to stop fascism and build progressive power." So in real terms, what does this mean? Tell us more.
Yoni Landau: [00:01:34] [Laughter.] What the hell are we talking about? It's. Yeah, it's a real delight to be here. Let me try to unpack what we do at Movement Labs in simple terms. In one sense, our mission is to stop fascism. We use technology to do that, and we use people power to do that. Our approach to doing that is to both get hired by organizations -- Black voters matter, the DCCC, aligned organizations that are doing that kind of work -- and to look at the movement and say, what's missing? How can we make a contribution and to put any profits from our clients into filling those gaps. The important thing to know probably for your audience is that what we're trying to do is make it easy for someone to have an impactful volunteer experience. That's the
important thing for the general public to know about Movement Labs. We are trying to structure experiences that will maximize how you can contribute to stopping fascism.
Mila Atmos: [00:02:35] Oh, awesome. All right. So let's go to the progressive power building first, because I think you need to do that in order to stop fascism. So when you say you want to build progressive power, what does success look like to you?
Yoni Landau: [00:02:51] So our kind of second pillar of our work... First, we stop fascism. Second, we build progressive power; that looks like people having more agency to determine the fate of their lives, their families' lives, their communities' lives. That means that working folks, poor folks, marginalized communities, are in deeper touch and better represented by local and national politicians. That means that they have, you know, streetlights and paved roads and better schools. And it also means that people feel safe, that they can determine how they want to live dignified lives, that they have better pay, that they have health care, the basic policy issues of the progressive movement. We want to make sure that the people, the families, the communities are driving the enactment of those policies, of those ideas of how we want to live in a fair and just world. So it's about agency. It's about the connection between those in power, elected, and the people they should be representing.
Mila Atmos: [00:03:50] Mm Well, so let's talk about the volunteerism because this is key to getting those people elected. Yes. So my understanding is that your method of outreach at Movement Labs is texting. Your primary method, for your volunteers. In fact, I'm going to admit here that the reason I reached out to you is because I received a text message recently from Movement Labs and it asked me if I'm interested in stopping fascism and building progressive power, and encouraging me to join the Movement Labs' volunteer team. So I have to say I'm a little bit perplexed how we can stop fascism by texting. So how does it work?
Yoni Landau: [00:04:28] Oh, that's great. One, I have to ask Mila, were you on our list or was that a cold text that you got from us?
Mila Atmos: [00:04:34] I'm sure it was cold because I'm sure it was a bot.
Yoni Landau: [00:04:37] Yeah, I'm asking like you didn't know about us before,
Mila Atmos: [00:04:40] Correct.
Yoni Landau: [00:04:40] That you had signed up to get texts from us in any way.
Mila Atmos: [00:04:43] No. No.
Yoni Landau: [00:04:43] That's amazing. I wonder how we got. Okay, so.
Mila Atmos: [00:04:45] Yeah. How did you get my number? That's one of my questions.
Yoni Landau: [00:04:47] Okay, so. There's a lot to unpack here. There's a lot, a lot to unpack here. But let's start with the first and most fundamental question. Does this shit work?
Mila Atmos: [00:04:54] Yes.
Yoni Landau: [00:04:54] Excuse my language. Mila Atmos: [00:04:55] Tell me.
Yoni Landau: [00:04:56] We run randomized controlled trials. So we have scientific minds. We're focused on proving causally, like a vaccine. You prove that a vaccine works and is safe by running a randomized controlled trial where people get placebos. We do the same thing. So we'll take a million people and we'll split out half and not text them anything, and then we'll text the other people, you know, join the movement, or here's your polling place, or whatever. The thing is that we're trying to test and we measure and we'll see half a percent, whole percent, MORE voting. So we'll say we generated a thousand votes, 10,000 votes from that million people. So we know that it works to generate votes. We also know that it works to generate volunteers. Because, Mila, you reached out. So obviously this is definitely getting people's attention. Broadly speaking, we have a few different mediums that we're using as political organizers in the digital space, email, digital ads. SMS really is right now, I think, the most effective one. We're not obsessed with text because we love spam-texting people. We're
obsessed with it because it's the most effective medium right now in this moment. We also do email. We also do digital ads. We also do phone calls. But this is just much more effective, at scale.
Mila Atmos: [00:06:11] So I want to backtrack a little bit. You texted a million people and 10,000 people showed up to vote. How do you know this?
Yoni Landau: [00:06:18] An additional.
Mila Atmos: [00:06:19] An additional ten?
Yoni Landau: [00:06:20] Let me break down a randomized... Mila Atmos: [00:06:20] Let's do that one more time.
Yoni Landau: [00:06:21] Let me break down a randomized controlled trial a little bit better. We have two groups of people. One has been randomly selected not to receive the texts. We will measure how many of those vote. So let's say out of those 100 people, ten will vote. It's a very low turnout election. Then we have another set of 100 people. They're statistically identical to the placebo group. Right. But we've randomly chosen that we're going to send them a text. We have 11 of those people vote. We've just increased turnout by a full percentage point.
Mila Atmos: [00:06:52] I see.
Yoni Landau: [00:06:53] Okay, great. Our texts caused that.
Mila Atmos: [00:06:54] That's great. That's great. So that's your proof positive that texting works.
Yoni Landau: [00:06:58] That's the gold standard. When you have people tell you, we knocked on a million doors and this many people turned out, that is meaningless unless you have a control group that isn't receiving those door knocks and who you're measuring their turnout or their voter registration or whatever.
Mila Atmos: [00:07:14] Right. Right. Now, I want to have the technical questions like, how did you get my number?
Yoni Landau: [00:07:20] Haha.
Mila Atmos: [00:07:20] Like, seriously
Yoni Landau: [00:07:23] Mila, we just track you! [Laughter] So, this is how politics is done, broadly speaking. Voter files produce a lot of public information so your information, Mila, is readily available. Your probably address, maybe your cell phone, maybe not your birthday. It's available through the Secretary of State. And when you vote, it is also public information. If you voted in Democratic or Republican primaries, that's public information. So a bunch of companies suck up that information and connect it to credit files, cell phone records that they buy from AT&T, and the like. They combine it and we do a little bit of that, and we buy a lot of it as well. And so we're creating this massive database of people's cell phone information that is connecting this public and this private information as well as we've sent over at this point 500 million texts. So we also have a lot of information about who's responding. So we also connect to this database. So it's a little bit of a creepy world for the random person walking around. But the reality is this is definitely not more invasive than what private technology companies are able to do with your information. It's just this is in the political side it uses the voter file, so it's using public information from the secretary of state.
Mila Atmos: [00:08:36] Right. Well, that's good to know. So I guess I want to ask a question about where the volunteers fit in here, because like I said earlier, I'm pretty confident that an individual person did not text me, but maybe I'm wrong. So why do you need volunteers and what do they do?
Yoni Landau: [00:08:55] Oh. There's so many different layers of complexity that I can get into here. But I think, I wanna start...
Mila Atmos: [00:08:59] Let's go all in.
Yoni Landau: [00:09:00] Oh, all you want all the way in?
Mila Atmos: [00:09:01] Let's go all the way.
Yoni Landau: [00:09:03] It's going to get, we're going to get into Supreme Court case
law if you really want to go all the way.
Mila Atmos: [00:09:05] Let's do it. Let's do it.
Yoni Landau: [00:09:06] Careful. Let me start with a story that grounds you in like why we care about volunteers and where we come from. And then we'll, and then we'll head towards Supreme Court case law. The night after Trump was elected. I live in Berkeley. You know, as Berkeley residents do, we gathered in a living room and we had a circle that was filled with emoting and people were sharing like they're so sad. They don't understand what happened. How can this be? And I was filled with rage, fury, and hope that we could organize into power. That in that moment we could organize into power. This is a long time ago now. But seven years ago, it took a long time for people to actually get started and organize and figure out sitting in a living room, how can I be useful? If you remember that moment, there was a lot of like, Who do I know in a swing state? Sister District and Swing Left cropped up. Indivisible cropped up. There's a lot of new momentum. There was not a lot of actually good strategy on how those folks in those living rooms could actually be impactful. Swing Left was saying wait until the midterm elections -- which in January, in December when it just happened, that's not a good response. That's a long time from now. Indivisible was saying, you've got to yell at Barbara Lee. Essentially, you know, you have to yell at your congressional representative, which if you're in Brooklyn or Berkeley, that's not good advice either, really, to make a difference. So we were initially called Rapid Resist, and our focus was on finding these living rooms of folks trying to make a difference in blue areas and plugging them in to the ongoing work of building grassroots power in swing states. So an organization that we took some inspiration from was Movement Voter Project, called Movement 2016, at the time, I think. And it had lists of grassroots organizations that were deeply embedded doing year-round power building work in these swing states. So I had gone and door-knocked with a PICO affiliate, you know, a faith-based group in Reno. I brought a bunch of friends and we door knocked in the poorest communities of Reno, Nevada, to turn out voters, and also tell them about "go talk to your city council about your poor housing conditions. Also, there's going to be a barbecue down the street at the church next week." And it was a very inspiring experience, especially
compared to knocking on the doors for Clinton, where people are like, "go away. We've already spoken to five people" to say, "I'm with this group that has services. We support you. We're in the community. We're trying to build power for you and with you." You know, to be able to drop in and support that group that's doing long term power building was much more inspiring as a volunteer experience than working with a national campaign. So I took that idea of door knocking in that way and I said, Why can't we do that again? I actually thought initially we should send people on buses to try to do that and quickly found out that in December of 2016, no one was getting on a bus and door knocking in Phoenix or Reno. We luckily got connected to this idea of texting, of finding cell phone numbers from the voter file where we can actually model who is likely to be an activist and we can text 20,000 people. We need humans to send those texts. Now, there's legal requirements that a human should send each of those texts, or there certainly there were in 2016, an understanding that humans should send all of those texts. And so we had volunteers sending, it turned out to be about 7 million texts in 2017 on behalf of 350 different grassroots organizing groups. Again, this is as Rapid Resist before we were called Movement Labs, and it was just very inspiring to be able to see the kind of flash mobbing that you have when you text 20,000 people. You know, Jeff Flake, Dean Heller, you remember these old senators that were the swing senators in Nevada and Arizona. They made actual shifts in their policy position because we recruited hundreds of people to bird dog them at Chamber of Commerce events after hearing about these events from local organizers. So that was our mission. How do we find these moments where it's easy for blue state volunteers to plug in and make a tangible difference for long term power building and federal politics.
Mila Atmos: [00:13:08] The law was that you had to have a human send the text. But I said to you earlier, I'm pretty sure an individual did not text me and you paused. And so. So tell me who actually did. And so how does this work?
Yoni Landau: [00:13:24] All right. Now you're going to all get get the deep dive in mass Texting and Telephone Communications Protection Act, TCPA Law and FCC. So essentially until Supreme Court case called Facebook v. Duguid the understanding was, for this to be legal, you couldn't use an auto dialer to reach out to people's cell phones. And that meant, you know, click, send, click, send, click, send. But, you know, you could be sending 500 texts, 1000, 5000 texts even sometimes, in an hour or a few hours as a volunteer. So you're sending a lot of texts if you ever text banked. You know, that's the
experience sending a lot. In this world that we're in after that, basically what happened in that court case is Facebook was blasting texts out to people. They had a wrong number. Someone sued them, said, "you can't blast text me. You have to not use an auto dialer. What you were using is an auto dialer." This is from the TCPA, is the law passed in the '90s that defined what an auto dialer is, it's very out of date. It doesn't have anything about text messages. In the TCPA, the Supreme Court basically said, "no, that's not an auto dialer." Basically, an auto dialer is only very limited. What the statute says is it's something that uses a random or sequential number generator to store or send numbers. And the idea from the TCPA is these autodialers are things that are randomly generating numbers. They don't have your cell phone number. They're just calling every number they can think of. That's what the autodialer definition was. Now that's obviously not something we're doing now, but it's still the law in that courts will try to assess, did you use an auto dialer? Was the system you were using at any point using random or sequential number generators? It's crazy! But that's that's how laws happen 20 years later, 30 years later, they end up being very crazy. So what that means is that it's a little bit less clear whether you need volunteers to click send on each text. What we use our volunteer time for is to respond. When someone responds back. So, Mila, if you would have said "go F yourself" or "tell me more" or "yeah, I'm interested," a human would certainly be on the other end saying like, "let's talk about this." So it's less crucial now, though. A lot of people do have volunteers clicking send. It's less obviously crucial.
Mila Atmos: [00:15:38] Oh, awesome. This is a great explanation. Now, I understand. Also I mean, I have to say, I get a lot of text messages from a lot of political campaigns. And I know I'm not alone. And so I wonder in all this time, now that this case has been decided, the Facebook case, and that I'm truly inundated by text messages, has the efficacy waned with the deluge of these messages? Have you done a follow up study?
Yoni Landau: [00:16:05] Well, yeah, we've been of course, we're doing these randomized controlled trial studies all the time. We have 25 that we're going to do this year across the course of the year. So, you know, what has waned is fundraising. What you're getting mostly right now, probably, Mila, are fundraising solicitations, especially if you haven't signed up for a bunch of organizations's text lists, who are actually doing real organizing. That's gotten less effective because it's happening so much. Asking people to turn out to an event or make an impact, or vote, or register, it's still very
effective. While we use email and email can be effective as well, we actually have some really interesting research on sending people an email with the name of their roommate that hasn't voted yet in the subject line. That generates new voters. Doing that kind of tactic. Email is less effective and phone calls are much more expensive and digital ads are less effective, in our experience, when you know how to use texting in new and exciting ways.
Mila Atmos: [00:17:06] Fascinating.
Mila Atmos: [00:17:12] We're taking a short break to share about a podcast called In Her Ellement. Join AI and digital expert Suchi Srinivasan and product designer Corin Lines for meaningful and vulnerable conversations with women leaders and allies in business, digital, and technology. In Season Two, you can expect more deep dives into the often difficult journey to the top, more demystification of the barriers women face in their careers, and more celebrations of the joy they find in their everyday work. Episode One of In Her Ellement Season Two is out now. Listen on your favorite podcast app.
And now let's return to my conversation with Yoni Landau.
Mila Atmos: [00:18:01] Well. So let's pretend that I responded to the text message and I said, "Yes, I want to be a volunteer." What would happen next?
Yoni Landau: [00:18:12] You will get an excited response hopefully shortly after saying here's a link, probably, or here's a few different options. At Movement Labs, we have a few ways of plugging in. So the most obvious one is the texting team. We're sending out millions of texts, so responding, being a warm response. There is the first layer. That's easy. It's very easy to do. You get on your web browser, it's fun. It's kind of gamified because you can see how many people you're responding to. I think the main message I would want to leave your readers with is that the way to think about your impact, though, is not just how much you did directly. It's how much you did that wouldn't have otherwise been done. So if that phone call would have been made, if that candidate would have won anyway without your donation, your impact in that situation, like if we want to look at it very rigorously, you know, is you didn't have an impact on that election. If the election wasn't close, you didn't have an impact on that election from donating. Right. In the same way, if you didn't have additional impact by sending that text because
it would have gone out anyway. You know, your impact is less. So what we're trying to always do is get people to do things that are a little bit harder, take a little bit more effort, use your relationships a little bit more. That's how you have additional impact because no one would have reached out to your uncle, your friend, your neighbor. No one has that relationship that could move them to vote or get organized or volunteer or be involved in their community like you. But a lot of people will be sending postcards. A lot of people will be sending texts. So that's sort of the framework. It's called additionality, the technical term for this. You want your volunteering eventually after you've gotten comfortable and you've taken some initial steps, maybe sending texts, maybe sending postcards, doing things that make you feel comfortable, give you a sense of a sense of the kind of activity that you can do. Eventually you want to be headed towards additionality for your volunteerism.
Mila Atmos: [00:20:14] All right. Well, let's pretend I'm a volunteer. So if I'm a volunteer for Movement Labs, what happens? Do I log in for, like, let's say, an hour a day or like, how do you do it? How do you get people into it and doing the work?
Yoni Landau: [00:20:27] Great. So you go to MovementLabs.com; go to volunteer. We have a few teams you can join. I mentioned the texting team already, which I basically said like, we got a lot of texters. We want people elsewhere. The research team is our next largest and most important team. We're researching every Republican that is up for elected office because 75% of them will not have a Democrat running against them. And we need to fix that. That program is called Contest Every Race. And we cannot get their information from a national database like we can get your cell phone number. We have to find information about that elected office by hand, on the Internet, or calling election clerks. So we have 100 plus people. You can do a shift in your own time. You can plug in and do Internet research or call clerks. We'll assign you. Okay. Now we're working on Michigan. We have these 5000 races that are up. We'll give you a few rows in a spreadsheet, fill in information on who is up, how to file, that kind of work you'll be doing in community with other people doing similar work with guidance from staff, you'll be trained on how to essentially do local political research, understand local political elections, and produce a database that will be the foundation for a program that's trying to recruit tens of thousands of new Democratic elected officials so that we can actually have democracy instead of Republicans running unelected in 75% of elections. So
that's our biggest additionality opportunity is the research team. We need more volunteers. We're always looking for more people to help there.
Mila Atmos: [00:21:56] Let's go and pivot and talk about Contest Every Race, because this is really fascinating. I love, first of all, that you want to contest every race because we recently discovered that Brian Hughes in Texas, who actually wrote the SB8 bill that banned abortion after six weeks, was uncontested in Texas. And in fact, his election was, quote, cancelled. They didn't have an election for his seat because there was no opponent. I was like, oh, this is really incredibly bad. So when I was looking around your website and there was a big button about contest every race, I was like, I want to talk to Yoni and find out what you're doing over there. How did you build up this part of the organization and why did you come to do that? Because you were texting, and now you're organizing people to run, which is a different, really big kind of endeavor. Let's say.
Yoni Landau: [00:22:47] It's a big step. It's a big step to take to run for office. Yes. I just want to emphasize the point you made briefly, which is that the extremism that we've seen in the country is not just about social media bubbles or racism, you know. It's also about the geography of political power, that Republicans have sorted to be rural. Rural elections, they have fewer voters. There're more elected offices in a smaller city council and municipal irrigation district, etcetera. Those Republicans have a lot of opportunity to get leadership experience. That is disconnected from competing against Democrats. They're just competing against other Republicans, all the way through state legislative races. Exactly as you said, you got to the state legislature, you still maybe have never competed against a Democrat in an election, which means that you're just competing in Republican primaries. What drives the winner of a Republican primary? It's just how extreme you can be, because Republican primary voters are the most extreme part of the MAGA faction in our country. That faction is determining who has political power in a vast swath geographically of our country, not a vast swath necessarily of the population, but geographically. They're just determining so many elections. 75% of elected offices go uncontested and all those races are more likely to produce extreme candidates, extreme Republican candidates. So, okay, how do we get here? We were doing this work with Rapid Resist. We had a partner in Modesto, California, Central Valley of California, who said, "you know, you've recruited amazing people to turn out at town halls to yell at our Republican Congress member. We actually have a city council seat."
City council, District four in Modesto was open. C"an you recruit people to run for that office as well?" And we said, I don't know. Can we? Like we're a C3... Are we allowed to do candidate recruitment? Let's just try it. Let's see what happens. And we texted people that had said they're interested in making a phone call. And I remember that so vividly. 20% of the people that had made a phone call said they're interested in learning more about how to run for office.
Mila Atmos: [00:24:57] Wow.
Yoni Landau: [00:24:58] 20%, which is; it was just a shocking number. It was so high. It was much higher than really anything I'd seen, asking people to, you know, to take a step up. And it's such a big step up to it made me realize, there's certainly there was, and I think there still is a huge thirst to do more, to be of more service, to take something meaningful into your hands. And so, frankly, I mean, that was the end of 2017. 2018, we started just texting people like, are you interested in more information in how to run for office, in these places that we knew were going to have a lot of uncontested races. And, you know, it started slowly. It was in fits and starts. We found a method to actually generate a lot of people running for office. So, you know, the most important step here was finding people in those communities to meet with the people that said, yes, they might be interested in more information.
Mila Atmos: [00:25:50] All right. Let's talk about that.
Yoni Landau: [00:25:51] So who who is in every community in rural America, who is in every county that's interested in building democratic power? And what kind of organization has a network like that? Move On certainly doesn't. It's just the Democratic Party.
Mila Atmos: [00:26:07] Oh!
Yoni Landau: [00:26:07] That is the only the only organization. Speaker3: [00:26:10] Shockingly simple. [Laughter]
Yoni Landau: [00:26:12] Democratic county party chairs. So when you think about the Democratic Party, you think about the DNC. But the DNC is just one of the acronym soup organizations that make up the Democratic Party. They're only responsible for electing the president. You know, you have many of the other acronyms soups responsible for different entities. But at a state level, the Democratic Party is composed of county parties. In most states, someone has been elected as the chair of that county's Democratic Party. Often those chairs elect the state chair of that Democratic Party. And that's really, if you think about the Democratic Party, that is what the Democratic Party is. It's all of these grassroots activists that are showing up at some library, community center, very unglamorous, talking about like, "let's file our minutes" and like "vote on our chair." And okay, now we have you know, and typically, these folks are completely unsupported. County parties, the ground troops protecting democracy at this point against our fascist threat have been completely unsupported. So what we found, this person that was in Modesto was connected to the county Democratic Party. We found that that was a perfect network. And once you had people setting up meetings in cafes and so forth with potential candidates that we were texting to find; those potential candidates were 50% more likely to actually file to run than folks that didn't have those in-person meetings. That was one of our earliest tests in Kansas. So we we went hard and we've developed a real program to support county parties. At this point, we actually have 300 county parties that we're working with. It is so much depth that we're giving them monthly goals. We're recruiting for them to meet all of their monthly organizing goals, hosting an event, doing fundraisers, etcetera, building that fertile organizing network in their county. And we actually give them grants, $500 a quarter if they meet those goals. It's a very in-depth program that we're running in 300 counties, mostly in battleground districts, as a part of this Contest Every Race program, because it's so fundamental to have fertile places for Democrats to run, if they're going to win.
Mila Atmos: [00:28:10] Wow. Well, this is fascinating and very encouraging. So tell us, though, you know, as you said, the county chairs have not been very much supported. Basically, people don't even know they exist. Right? And if you're running in one of these races, because it has been uncontested for so long, how do you succeed? Because, you know, nobody's ever heard of you, probably. And even though running everywhere is in and of itself a really good goal, it's punishing right to run and lose?
Yoni Landau: [00:28:42] Mila, how many? What percent of candidates do you think in these rural areas would win just based on your kind of guess if you were going to guess a number?
Mila Atmos: [00:28:52] I'm going to say... mmm... I'm going to say it's going to be something shockingly high because you're asking me this question.
Yoni Landau: [00:28:59] You're jumping ahead here.
Mila Atmos: [00:29:00] So but I'm going to say maybe like 30% because, you know. Yoni Landau: [00:29:04] That would be shockingly high.
Mila Atmos: [00:29:05] Same guy, like still running, that guy that I voted for last time. I always see him on the side of the road, you know, at the car dealership or something like this. Right. But tell me, what is the real number?
Yoni Landau: [00:29:16] Yeah, 30% is very close to what our initial... My initial guess was 25% would win. 48% are winning their elections.
Speaker3: [00:29:24] Wow.
Yoni Landau: [00:29:24] 48% of our candidates that we're recruiting are winning. It's an unbelievable number. And the way I explain it to myself is that these are such local elections that just showing up and saying, I have energy. I'm going to run against exactly what you're saying. This incumbent that like you kind of see him, but like not really, old white guy, not doing anything for the community. People are winning just by showing up because, you know, most of these are going to be county, school board, very, very local races.
Mila Atmos: [00:29:54] Huh. Interesting. So if they're really local and like you said, your showing up in and of itself is good enough in many ways. Are there sort of winning platforms that your candidates across the board more or less espouse, in the spirit of fighting fascism and building progressive power.
Yoni Landau: [00:30:17] This is a good question. So Movement Labs is not a strong advocate typically of specific policy positions. And I'll tell you why. Different communities have different needs, but also have different media environments that whatever your policy position, it's just going to get spun into a very different kind of media environment. Different set of narratives. So we certainly don't ask people to pledge any specific thing. I'm definitely more on the like Bernie Sanders socialist side personally, but we're not really pushing that as a policy platform now. Like as a political practitioner who's just in the world seeing what's out there. Certainly abortion is one of the most mobilizing issues, still a very important one to our base. And I would say economics is also. This is probably the number two. Speaking strongly about villains, about economic villains, about lobbyists, corporate lobbyists that we're punishing essentially, when we make it possible for Medicare to negotiate insulin prices. Speaking about the work we do in that combative way against economic villains, I do think is effective. So these these things I think are effective. But it's really important mostly that we do the work and that we don't worry about getting it exactly, especially at a local level. You don't have to get it exactly right. You just have to show up and listen to people and do the work and get out there and pound the shoe leather. That will take us most of the way there.
Mila Atmos: [00:31:44] Yeah, it sounds almost like a meditation. You know, you have to show up and you have to do the work. You have to just see where it leads you. Like there is not one answer. You know, there's just the way, let's say.
Yoni Landau: [00:31:53] Are you a meditator, Mila?
Mila Atmos: [00:31:54] I do meditate.
Yoni Landau: [00:31:55] Yes, me too. It's hard. It's one of the hardest things you can do. And it's so unpleasant in so many moments and the results are so impactful. Even though those unglamorous moments pile up on you. And I think activism is really like that, you just kind of apply yourself to the working surface. Whatever's right in front of you. You do the work.
Mila Atmos: [00:32:15] Yeah, that's very spiritual. I have a question about the text messages, to return to that topic. What have you learned in these hundreds of millions of text messages that you sent that really works, that gets people to text back or to sign
up, and what doesn't work? And is there anything in these millions of text messages that you've discovered surprises you or the messaging with contests, every race.
Yoni Landau: [00:32:43] It's kind of common sense in a way. What works is typically being clear and direct. Just like in any communication with Contest Every Race, the most effective way in terms of getting a positive response is going to be something like, "do you want more information on on running for local office?" And typically, to get the highest response rate, the positive response rate, you'll you'll go for the broadest approach. Do you think abortion should be legal? We'll get a very high response rate. But it's also not necessarily the case that someone who responds to that, yes, I think abortion should be legal has been organized in any meaningful way. Whereas if you ask people, will you call your legislator to make sure abortion stays legal and they respond, yes. A lot fewer people are responding yes to that, and they've now been organized. So there's not really magic to it. There's just the common sense applying to your objectives and how much you're going to follow up. I would say for your listeners who are volunteers, it's about ten times more effective, maybe even more than that for you to reach out to your network than for these campaign tactics to be applied at scale. It is so much more effective for you to think about who you know, who you want to be in community and relationship with, rather than for you to go send a thousand text messages. The most impactful thing you can do is definitely to be reaching out to your personal networks, to be pushing things out on social media, to be showing up in a less mechanized way.
Mila Atmos: [00:34:13] Right. Right. I will say here for the mayoral election in New York City, where I live, and it's always very poorly attended, much to my chagrin -- or everybody's chagrin, frankly, in New York City. People love to complain about the mayor, but they don't vote. So that's really a problem. In any case, I texted everybody I know in New York City that is of voting age and I know is a US citizen. And I asked them to vote and I asked them to bring at least one friend to the polling station. I'm not sure how effective that was, but I did it anyway. [Laughter] Because I don't have a control group, like I texted everybody I know in New York City. So, I mean, not everybody, but you know what I'm saying.
Yoni Landau: [00:34:49] What was the response to people? Were people positive?
Mila Atmos: [00:34:52] Most people were positive, but there was one person who was very difficult to pin down. And in the end, she didn't vote. I can't tell you what a disappointment that was because I texted her so much and she texted me back and she was like, and I have to do this, but I don't know. I think I might be traveling. I said, you can vote early! This is your polling station. I looked it up for her and she didn't make it. She didn't vote early. I was like, oh. Anyway.
Yoni Landau: [00:35:18] Mila, it's a numbers game. It's a numbers game.
Mila Atmos: [00:35:21] Right. Right. But I do know that there are some other people
that I texted who did go and voted and brought a friend.
Yoni Landau: [00:35:28] Yeah, you made a big difference, it sounds like. That's how you exert your power. That's how you build your... There's a great book that I love called Politics Is for Power by Eitan Hersh. I would recommend.
Mila Atmos: [00:35:38] Yes. Yes. I've read that. We've had him on the show. Yes. Yoni Landau: [00:35:41] Oh, wonderful. That. Of course. Of course.
Mila Atmos: [00:35:44] His book was really such a clear illustration of how politics is really how you band together, how people come together to solve a problem that affects your community. It's not something dirty. It's something that is designed to work for us. So now that we have established that politics is good and is for power, what are two things an everyday person can do to supercharge their volunteerism?
Yoni Landau: [00:36:14] Mhm. Love it. I'm going to make this a little bit more complicated. I'm going to introduce two worlds here. World one, Mila, is the world that, for better or worse, you and I live in. You know, blue big cities on the coast where politics here is, for the most part about which flavor of progressive priority will get implemented, how progressive. The fights are about zoning. They're very important. They're important to our lives. But it's not as motivating as stopping fascism in the US to me personally. The most important thing that you can do if you live in one of those places to supercharge your activism is to plug in to a network like Movement Labs that has thoughtful programs in battleground states. That will turn your volunteer hour into
additional votes. So as I said earlier, texts will get sent, post cards will get written. Even though those things are great, they're great for building muscle and relationships. To actually make an impact, you might have to make a phone call. You might have to find someone you know in a swing district or whatnot. You might have to get on a bus to make that actual impact if you live in a city. We are doing as much as we can at Movement Labs to make that experience of additional impact easy. So join our research team, join our social media team. We'll make that impact very easy to access. That's World one. World two is basically everywhere else. It's a lot of places. It's suburbs outside of those cities and many, many communities. It's big cities in swing states like Detroit. And in those places, typically my recommendation would be get involved at a very deeply local level. So it could be with the county party, could be with a local candidate, could be with an organizing group, be in relationship, show up in person, figure out who's actually meeting to convert time and connections into political power, who is serious about doing this. It's kind of different in every community. What we're trying to do is centralize some support to make sure county parties at least are a place, a good, effective place to do that. So if you live in a place where we're supporting these 300 county parties, connect with the county party. They'll have events. They'll have ways that you can contribute that are meaningful and that will pull you into greater connection with your community and will pull you into more agency and power, and then run for office.
Mila Atmos: [00:38:38] Run for office, yes.
Yoni Landau: [00:38:38] Definitely run for office.
Mila Atmos: [00:38:39] So tell us where we can find this information for the 300 places that you're doing. Contest Every Race.
Yoni Landau: [00:38:44] Ooh. Oh wow we just launched. Definitely contesteveryrace.com or movement labs and find Contest Every Race.
Mila Atmos: [00:38:52] So as you know we are a very hopeful podcast and so I always close out our interview with this question: Looking into the future, what makes you hopeful.
Yoni Landau: [00:39:04] The coalition that responded to Donald Trump's ascent is, in the literature of anti-fascist coalitions, it's a successful coalition. It's a very broad umbrella, even though it has very painful divisions between AOC and the Lincoln Project and so forth. Real major differences in how we view the world and what we want has been unified and still so far has remained unified in the face of this autocratic threat. I think if we can keep that kind of unity and keep that kind of mobilization, it's going to be very hard for a fascist contingent to take over the country. I think the history of autocratic takeovers is that we need to be divided for them to win. And so far we've been unified. And I think if we stay unified, we will win.
Mila Atmos: [00:39:57] That is very hopeful. Very hopeful indeed. Thank you very much for joining us on Future Hindsight. It was really a pleasure to have you on the show today.
Yoni Landau: [00:40:06] It's a pleasure for me to be here. Thanks so much, Mila. Mila Atmos: [00:40:09] Yoni Landau is the CEO and founder of Movement Labs and
also the founder of Contest Every Race.
Mila Atmos: [00:40:21] Next week on Future Hindsight, we are joined by Sara Schreiber. She's the executive director of America Votes, an organization that coordinates more than 400 partners to engage and to mobilize voters for elections up and down the ballot across the country. That's next time on Future Hindsight.
And before I go, first of all, thanks for listening. You must really like the show if you're still here. We have an ask of you. Could you rate us or leave a review on Apple Podcasts? It seems like a small thing, but it can make a huge difference for an independent show like ours. It's the main way other people can find out about the show. We really appreciate your help. Thank you.
This episode was produced by Zack Travis and me. Until next time, stay engaged. The Democracy Group: [00:41:17] This podcast is part of the Democracy Group.