Dear Democratic Party
So, I’ve repeatedly offered my (*very* experienced, valued at $100+/hr) time to help the democrats suck less at IT. In particular they need to find a way to work together to keep track of which numbers in their database are expired and cull them, they need to communicate the cull lists and with the various democratic groups, and they need to also stop calling so often for money that when they call to GOTV people automatically assume it’s another beg-a-thon call. All of this hurts their ultimate goal of getting people elected and also burns volunteer hours.
They also really should stop with the fake surveys which go directly to /dev/null in order to beg for more money. (To be fair, this isn’t a partisan thing, the republicans do the same thing)
They have repeatedly ignored me. I’m assuming there’s nepotism in the democrat IT department involved, although it’s possible that they just are so internally chaotic that the message does not get through.
One thing I’ve noticed about the Democrats is they have a real problem with triage. I agree that nearly all the things that people bring up as important to fix are important, but there’s certainly one thing that’s *most* important. In general left leaning groups seem to fall for identity politics and everyone seems to think that the item hurting *them* is the most important, not *the item hurting the most people*. This leads to everyone wanting to throw energy into their special hobby-horse while really large problems like ICE, the republican cheatiness surrounding gerrymandering, the republican cheatiness surrounding fair play in general (i.e. Mitch), and whatnot go unfixed.
I did recently buy a interesting book on possible ways to unfuck America’s deeply fucked political system. (Actually, strictly speaking, it’s not fucked – it does exactly what the 1% want it to do. It just kind of shafts the rest of us)
Anyway, the IT brokenness underlines how little they care about volunteer hours – I volunteered to do phone banking for GOTV in 2018 but 90% of the calls were wrong numbers, people with so much call fatigue that they hung up almost immediately, or people who were not eligible to vote. This made me feel extremely non-valued as a volunteer. I’ve repeatedly emailed my contact offering to help fix the situation but they have completely ignored me thus far. I suspect you have to earn your place in the organization not by having good ideas and good skills but by putting in a certain number of hours at pointless tasks.