Campaigns Spend Millions to Influence Voters. This Works Better | Katie Paris | TED

I haven't been on the dating scene since I was 22. But I still remember “the ick.” You know, that feeling when something just completely turned you off and there [was] no coming back from it? Turns out, bad dates are not the only thing with an ick problem. Politics has it too. I'm serious. The data proves it. When researchers at Pew a few years ago asked Americans to describe politics in one word, just two percent used a positive term. Two percent. Take a moment. Really think about it. When's the last time politics made you feel something other than exhausted, disgusted, afraid? I can't remember either. And I've worked in this business for 25 years. We're all feeling the ick. So we're doing digital detoxes, news cleanses, or just putting our phones in the drawer and calling it self-care.

Good stuff. But tuning out altogether, that's when things start getting done to us, not for us. And we can't afford it. Not now. So what do we do? What if we made politics something people actually want to be part of? Let me tell you what I've learned. But first, what I had to unlearn. My journey starts where all problems go to get solved. Washington, DC. (Laughter) I like to think I was different than your typical political insider, and in many ways I was. I helped start an organization whose entire job was to watch Fox News so you don't have to. (Laughter) I'm proud of that work. Thank you, it mattered. (Applause) But it was all built out of think tanks where we thought it was our job to find the right answer and ship it out to everyone else.

I even helped start a spinoff devoted entirely to message testing. I truly believed [that] if we could get everyone to repeat the perfect words, we'd win. And sometimes it sort of barely worked. Even after I moved to the burbs outside Cleveland to start a family around family, I kept doing the DC thing. I was living in Ohio, but my head was in Washington. Everything changed for me in 2018. The 2016 presidential election had lit a fire under suburban women all over the country. Women who had never done anything more than show up to vote had started organizing. And they got results. In a typical midterm election, the party in power loses about 26 congressional seats. In 2018, they lost 43, and 40 were suburban. Even more seats flipped locally in state legislatures.

Some of it was happening in my own backyard. But I had no idea. I was too busy dialing in to DC conference calls, even though I had become part of the very demographic both political parties spend millions trying to reach: a suburban mom. The morning after that election, I sat on the floor of my bedroom closet. I'd just had my second child, and for the first time, I felt completely out of alignment. Lost. I knew I couldn't be a DC operative anymore. I wanted to find those women. In DC, they search for "real people." Seriously, that's what they refer to them as in meetings and memos. But they don't really know them or even really listen to them. I wanted to. So I called up people that I knew who were working locally in Ohio politics, and I asked, “Do you know any of these suburban women who are organizing in their own neighborhoods?” It turns out they did.

So I hit the road. I met some over wine, some at a bookstore, one group over dinner, and every time, I thought, these women -- I want to hang out with them. They're fun, they're fired up. And they finish each other's sentences. Each time I’d ask, “How long have you all known each other?” I figured they’d say since high school or college. "Months," they'd say. "We've known each other for months." And that's when it hit me. They didn’t organize because they were friends -- they were friends because they organized. Take Tara. She's a single mom. I was introduced to her by one of the women I'd met over wine, Stephanie. Tara was distraught over the division in our country. She wanted to do something about it. She just didn't know what yet. So I invited her over to my house along with a handful of other women. My mom made Palomas. I made her egg casserole, and we set up on my back deck.

Before long, these women were opening up to each other in ways I didn't expect. One woman with a medically fragile child, who loved dinosaurs as much as my son, shared her sheer exhaustion from battling the health care system. Another, who had been raised hard-line Republican, was starting to question everything she'd been taught. There was laughter and there were tears. The kind that come when you let your guard down. And in the end, Tara said seven words I will never forget. "If this is politics, I'm all in." A few years later, Tara ran for school board and won. But this story is not about just one woman or one backyard. I started meeting women like Tara all over Ohio, all over the country. Women who'd never done anything political before were getting together and getting organized. And all of them had something DC can never get.

Real networks, real trust. But none of them knew about each other. I wanted to connect them and help them tap into the power they were just beginning to realize they had. So I hired two of the women from my road trip, and we got to work. Our first rule: if anything we did or said sounded like a political party, we'd throw it out and start over. Starting with the name. We called it "Red, Wine and Blue." The wine is optional. Diet Coke, Spindrift, Palomas and egg casserole, whatever. But how things got done needed an overhaul too. Traditional campaigns have their volunteers knock on strangers' doors and call people they've never met. We do the opposite. You see, every single one of us here already have a powerful network: friends, neighbors, coworkers, people from your book club, the school pick-up line. So we start there.

We map out everyone we know who could be with us, and we take responsibility for making sure they vote. Then those people talk to their people and on and on. Sounds simple, but you don't want to make things awkward. What do you say to the friend who says, “I don’t do politics?” Or the neighbor who says, “Voting doesn’t matter?” This is where the friendship part comes in. We have happy hours or unhappy hours, depending on the day. We do trivia nights, banned book bingo -- we learn together and get to know each other as people. So when it comes time to have those hard conversations, we know we're not doing it alone. We've practiced, we've gotten brave together. And that's the thing no political campaign can manufacture. Not the message -- the nerve. That alone would be worth it. But you know what makes it even better? It works.

When we hired an independent analyst to run the numbers, they ran them. Then they ran them again. They thought there had to be a mistake. I thought there had to be a mistake. Because here's what they showed. When our members reach out to the people they know -- not strangers, the people they know -- voter turnout among the people they contact goes up five to seven percentage points. Now listen, campaigns spend millions to move that number by a fraction of a point. A conversation between friends moves it by five. Now here's the best part. Friendship doesn’t go away after Election Day. So those same women are working together right now in their communities to stand up to ICE, take on AI data centers and school boards trying to ban books and take down pride flags. And they come from every side of the aisle. So if you're sitting in this room right now thinking that sounds appealing -- but also overwhelming -- I am talking to you.

I know it's a hard moment to feel hopeful. I feel it too. But I promise you, no matter where you live, there are people who feel like you do right around the corner. And if you've never done anything political before, you are exactly who this moment needs most. Because the answers are not in DC -- they are in living rooms and backyards among people who are getting together and making their communities the kinds of places they want to live in. And when we do it together, as friends who have each other's backs and show up for each other even when it's hard, that's what makes politics feel good. And that's something people want to be part of and something that actually works for all of us. So find your people, get together, start talking about what matters to you. Because as it turns out, we don't have to choose between taking care of our world and taking care of ourselves if we just do it together.

Thank you. (Applause)