What the NRA Can Teach us About Voter Empowerment
Earlier this summer, we overhauled Brigade to enable voters to tell their representatives what they expect of them. As Brigade Engineering Director Emily Leathers often reminds our team, “you can’t hold your reps accountable if you don’t tell them what you want.” With our second big product release of the year, which is now available for iPhone, Android devices and on the Web, we’re filling out more of the advocacy-to-voting accountability cycle that we believe our democracy sorely lacks. Today, I’m excited to share two key features that are part of this release and essential to real political accountability: “Grading” and “Rep Tracker.”
Grading is inspired by the work of advocacy organizations like the National Rifle Association (NRA) and the Sierra Club, which score thousands of candidates for office based on their alignment with the organization’s top issue positions. Rep Tracker is a tool for aggregating and personalizing these grades for an individual voter, so that she is empowered to understand how well her representatives are addressing her specific “asks” across a range of issues. To understand the potential power of these new tools, it’s helpful to analyze how they are currently used by advocacy organizations like the NRA.
The NRA is arguably the most effective single-issue advocacy organization in the country. With a membership equal to about 1% of the U.S. population, the NRA consistently defeats calls for tougher gun regulation despite strong majority support for certain restrictions (see chart).
The NRA’s secret? Superior organization. Specifically, organization that allows the NRA to consistently reward and punish political candidates for their gun policy stances, creating a feedback loop between legislative action (or inaction) and winning elections. It does this, in part, by scoring thousands of candidates based on their voting record, public statements and an NRA questionnaire. Scores are then shared exclusively with members in neatly designed reports and used to mobilize them to vote for and give money to candidates who align with the organization’s positions. Full-time NRA staff analyze races at all levels of government and identify the most important opportunities to support allies and challenge foes.
By coupling consistent, high-value actions (i.e. donating, voting) with a comprehensive candidate scoring system, the NRA has created a political feedback loop around their issue that influences how candidates think and act. This feedback loop may matter most at the margins, where legislation is often won or lost, because even reps who disagree with the NRA’s positions have to think hard about the cost of pursuing regulation, especially when — as is usually the case — there is no equally well-organized group capable of counteracting the political cost of crossing the NRA. Thus, superior organization allows the NRA’s membership to wield outsized political influence vis-a-vis the relatively less organized but more numerous supporters of gun regulation.
Part of our strategy at Brigade is to take what works most effectively in politics today — tools and practices that are all too often designed to empower narrow interests — and “productize” those approaches for everyone else. Issue grading is an excellent example of such a practice, provided it can be adapted to 1) be useful to every voter, and 2) go beyond a narrow, single-issue framework.
Our version of grading attempts to do just that. Going forward, every advocacy campaign run on Brigade will be required to assign grades to the targets of that advocacy with an explanation for the grade. For example, if a liberal organizer using Brigade wants to target the U.S. Senate with a campaign in support of funding for Planned Parenthood in an upcoming budget negotiation (or conversely, a conservative organizer wants to run a campaign to defund Planned Parenthood), they would eventually close out the campaign by grading each of the 100 senators with an explanation of what they did (or did not do) relative to the advocacy ask. Initially, targets will be limited to sitting representatives, but in future releases we plan to expand the universe of advocacy targets to include non-elected candidates for office, whose actions and on-the-record statements could be subject to grades.
Rep Tracker aggregates these campaign-specific grades for each representative of an individual voter, giving her a personalized view into how (or if) each of her reps has responded to her advocacy. For the first time, a voter will be able to easily see, in one place and over an extended period of time, what her various representatives have done on the issues that matter most to her. Of course, eventually these grades could be overlaid on a voter’s ballot, giving her rich, personalized insight into each of the candidates.
Along those lines, what I personally find most exciting about Rep Tracker is that it begins to make possible NRA-style organization and accountability for a broader swath of voters. In our political system, a corollary of the principle of “one person, one vote” is that individuals only have political power through organization and collective action. In fact, even one million disconnected people who all share a loosely held policy preference have little real power over that policy. But, if you could bring them together and organize them to consistently act — advocating, donating, most importantly, voting for candidates who represent their preference — the system is responsive over time. This is the key lesson the NRA and other highly effective advocacy groups can teach us.
Today, wealthy voters and ideologically extreme voters already have organizations that are designed to maximize their influence over the issues they care about. The rest of us do not. The major parties no longer play this role for most people, and the average advocacy organization has neither the scale nor discipline to build the kind of feedback loop described above. The Internet, however, opens up new possibilities to do what the NRA does, but at a fraction of the cost and for a vastly wider range of people and issues.
To this end, we hope to make Brigade the independent and neutral technology platform for everyone who isn’t already organized by one of the very few well-funded and effective political organizations. We think that the addition of Grading and Rep Tracker to a platform that already provides voter identity verification, political districting and targeted advocacy is a big step in the right direction.
As always, we are eager to hear your thoughts on Brigade, and especially these new tools. You can send feedback to support@brigade.com. Thank you for joining us on our quest to empower voters to take back their democracy. And even more, thank you for being an informed and engaged voter!
You can find Brigade in the App Store on iPhone, Google Play on Android devices, and at www.brigade.com on the web.
