The reason reaching out to my personal network is more effective is the same as the reason I don't want to do it: I actually have social capital among my friends and family. I have a reputation, I have favors owned, I have bonds of affection and history that give me some claim on their attention. And if I get their attention and deliver a message that sounds like a TV commercial, I am WASTING that social capital. They will be less likely to pay attention to me the next time I need something personal from them. They will take me less seriously, and may be annoyed enough to actually reduce those bonds of affection.

So if I am going to use my personal social capital and risk annoying the only cousins and high school friends I am going to have... It has to be absolutely sincere and in my own words. It has to be ONCE. And I have to really believe the cause is worthwhile.

But I think mostly people who believe the threat from Trump is real, DO believe the cause is worthwhile, and HAVE been appealing to their relatives. That's why Thanksgiving has been so fraught the past 8 years.

I'm not sure there's a lot left on the table here. I think people are already spending what social capital they can afford to spend.
posted by OnceUponATime at 9:12 PM on October 26 [12 favorites]

I think this is less about "spend social capital to change people's minds" and more "build a community that makes political engagement part of its identity".

Parting the Waters by Taylor Branch is a great book. It looks closely at how MLK got started. He got started by focusing on community building.

And when he spent social capital, he often earned more back than he spent, if people saw the benefit of listening to him.

It's worth considering. For example, a major thing union organizers do is try to get people talking about what they want from their work and what they don't like. Not necessarily because they want to act right then, but because they want to normalize questioning how things are and imagining how they could be different.

Maybe relational politics looks like asking some friends if they want to carpool to the polls, or offer someone to look after their kids while they vote, in exchange for taking someone with them.
posted by constraint at 9:30 PM on October 26 [12 favorites]

I'm on two different (co-ed) baseball teams, and one of the other guys and I have spent a lot of time bugging the men to go and vote for Harris. The women all already did it. It's sports, so it's coded macho, but it's also big-city intown and beer league, so nearly everyone is on Team Blue to begin with but maybe weren't quite so enthusiastic about going to vote. Two of the guys are Republicans, which the rest of us mock them for—one of them has 3 daughters FFS—but that guy says he's just leaving it blank and the other one at least plausibly claims to be voting for Harris.

I teach college students, mostly very young, mostly non-white, more women than men, and I've been at it the whole semester about voting registration deadlines, early voting sites, etc. Since I work for a state university, I have to preface everything with "of course I do not represent Big School here, these are my personal opinions", but it's not a big deal. One young man got upset about it, not so much because of what I said, but because he (who isn't white) feels "discriminated against because of his conservative beliefs", and this went about as well for him as one might expect.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 5:32 AM on October 27 [5 favorites]

Vote tripling: you tell three friends to vote and then ask them to tell three friends to vote. Sometimes this looks more like reminding people who already intend to vote that they could do it today at a certain nearby location. Or saying that you have a printed voting guide that you made for yourself that you can hand them if they are unsure about the down ballot races.
posted by tofu_crouton at 6:26 AM on October 27 [4 favorites]

Reaching out to your personal network can mean building a reputation as someone who can answer questions about voting. Be the person in your friend group who knows everything about early voting in your state or who to call if a mail-in ballot doesn't arrive. Take a few minutes to find out what the ballot questions mean and what local groups think about them. This might look like posting information on social media about voting dates and contact information. Or you might ask in a no-pressure way if a friend who has just moved knows where their new polling place is. Be a resource.
posted by mcduff at 6:30 AM on October 27 [2 favorites]

Yeah, my plan is to reach out to people in my WI network and ask if they’re planning to vote early and if they need any help making that happen. Which could mean figuring out dates and locations, but could also mean offering child care or to walk the dog if that’s what’s prevented you from getting out so far. Or if someone has an absentee ballot they haven’t returned, offering to help them figure out what’s going on with local races—that’s what has delayed my ballot completion in the past, because it takes a bunch of research, and I’ve just not always had time to do that early enough to return the ballot by mail and then have to deliver it in person. Also asking people who have returned their ballots if they’ve checked the ballot tracker to make sure it was received and how to follow up with the election commission if it wasn’t. Etc.
posted by brook horse at 6:46 AM on October 27 [1 favorite]

Vote tripling - asking people to reach out to three friends or family members - is a part of my phone banking calls. The response I get is one of two things: "oh, we are ALL going to the polls together!" or "...my friends and family members are all Trump people, so I'm kinda hoping they forget to vote."
posted by rednikki at 7:05 AM on October 27 [3 favorites]

With the exception of one or two isolated Trump supporters (with whom I've been compulsively arguing on Facebook at great cost to my mental health), everyone I know is either a squishy liberal who is all in the tank for Harris or a hard leftist who won't vote for her because of her refusal to confront the Palestinian genocide and the American transgender genocide, so I'm not quite sure how I can help here.
posted by Faint of Butt at 7:30 AM on October 27 [1 favorite]

With the exception of one or two isolated Trump supporters (with whom I've been compulsively arguing on Facebook at great cost to my mental health), everyone I know is either a squishy liberal who is all in the tank for Harris or a hard leftist who won't vote for her because of her refusal to confront the Palestinian genocide and the American transgender genocide, so I'm not quite sure how I can help here.

If any of these friends are in swing states, you could go to one of the dozens of threads on MeFi that have swung round to genocides/harris-voting and pick arguments you think they would find compelling re:lesser evils/tactical voting/etc [please don't start these again in this thread] .

But I'm sure they & you are saturated.....
posted by lalochezia at 7:37 AM on October 27 [1 favorite]

Every conversation I have had about the election, none of them initiated by me, has made me like and respect the initiator less, regardless of who they are voting for. I strongly suggest that if you value your relationships you do NOT do this.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 7:38 AM on October 27 [1 favorite]

I mean, there are tactics and empathy for your friends to consider, and the idea of social capital holds, but this argument - don't initiate a conversation - could be made about any other "uncomfortable" issue where your friend has agency. It's a risk in many ways. Is the risk worth it?

It is a moral decision to have these conversations .....and a moral decision not to.
posted by lalochezia at 7:46 AM on October 27 [8 favorites]

> If any of these friends are in swing states, you could go to one of the dozens of threads on MeFi that have swung round to genocides/harris-voting and pick arguments you think they would find compelling re:lesser evils/tactical voting/etc


You could also consider spending some time talking with them about strategies to get the Democratic party to take meaningful steps to end the genocide, and earn their vote.
posted by constraint at 7:46 AM on October 27 [4 favorites]

It is a moral decision to have these conversations .....and a moral decision not to.

I'm not going to camp out in this thread, but I will say that it requires a certain degree of, for lack of a better term, self-importance to presume that it's necessary for us to have this conversation with another person. It is difficult to imagine a circumstance in which one's friend or family member has not already mulled over the idea of whom to vote for, or whether to vote, unless they've just recently emerged from a decade-long coma, in which case they are probably not registered to vote anymore in any case. So the only real point is to either congratulate them for voting correctly, or berate them for doing it wrong. It's an argument starter, not a vote maker, barring an exceptionally unusual event in which a person's mind is changed; it's much more likely that the person's mind will not be changed, except about us.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 7:54 AM on October 27 [1 favorite]

I'm a super dependable voter, and I try to be the voting info resource for my state and city as well as for my neighboring swing state, but I still appreciate any info friends have, especially about local candidates and ballot proposals.

Every election (down to local city elections), I get an email from a woman I met during the Obama 2008 campaign with detailed info on every candidate and ballot proposal, which I greatly appreciate, and I can't even remember who she was exactly.

My mom, who lives in another swing state, told me yesterday she was sick of talking about politics, then spent the next 45 minutes talking about up and coming politicians in her area.

All this because I respect my friends and family and I'm pretty sure they respect me. That's what social capital is.
posted by maggiemaggie at 8:13 AM on October 27 [5 favorites]

I understand the sentiment, but voters "decide to vote" and don't do it. In 2020, in the swing states, between 60-70% of voters who registered voted. That means ~1/3 of voters who took the time to register DID NOT vote.

Again: They took the time to register, they did not take the time to vote or decided not to upon contemplation. If someone who they knew had talked to them.....
posted by lalochezia at 8:16 AM on October 27 [6 favorites]

> hard leftist who won't vote for her because of her refusal to confront the Palestinian genocide and the American transgender genocide

If these “hard leftists” think Trump will do a *better* job with either of these two things, they’re idiots. Or they’re actually right-wingers afraid to identify as such in your friend group.

You might be able to fix the “idiot” part a bit with some frank discussions.
posted by chasing at 8:22 AM on October 27 [3 favorites]

It is difficult to imagine a circumstance in which one's friend or family member has not already mulled over the idea of whom to vote for, or whether to vote, unless they've just recently emerged from a decade-long coma

There are far more low information voters than you think, and in particular young women without college degrees are more likely to be part of the 20% of voters who follow political news “hardly at all.”

Having been at least nominally in this demographic (I did not know I wasn’t a woman at the time) I can say that a whole lot of that was due to the burden of labor that was placed on me and the zero bandwidth I had for paying attention to elections more than a week beforehand. Not everyone chronically pays attention to the news, young overworked women in particular.
posted by brook horse at 8:31 AM on October 27 [7 favorites]

Oops, one of the links didn’t link. Here’s the one on young women w/o a college degree.
posted by brook horse at 8:42 AM on October 27 [1 favorite]

There are things on the ballot other than the presidential election, and your friends and more likely to have lower information about those. I agree that rehashing the last several months of arguments about the presidency is useless but there is probably an important local election that people need more info on.
posted by tofu_crouton at 9:15 AM on October 27 [2 favorites]

Something that's stuck with me is a psychology study I came across awhile ago (so I forget the source) that it's easier for humans to relate to a person's happiness or positive feelings than their negative/sad feelings. The takeaway was, don't judge your partner/friends/family if they struggle to connect to you when you're depressed, but do judge them if they put down your happiness. Anyway, if we apply the general principle - I think you're more likely to convince your friends with a positive argument, i.e. "I really care about climate change, I know this candidate is going to do [x, y, z bad things], and the other candidate promises to do [x y z good things] so because of that, I'm motivated to vote." One interaction like that is unlikely to make a difference, but if people have several friends express positive reasons for voting, it might rub off enough.
posted by coffeecat at 9:16 AM on October 27 [4 favorites]

You might be able to fix the “idiot” part a bit with some frank discussions.

So...someone might be able to, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say you may not be the someone in question.
posted by kittens for breakfast at 9:23 AM on October 27 [1 favorite]

Something that's stuck with me is a psychology study I came across awhile ago (so I forget the source) that it's easier for humans to relate to a person's happiness or positive feelings than their negative/sad feelings.

This was also the rationale for the strategy they used in the film "Inception" to convince the [spoiler redacted].

Anyway, thank you for all these great strategies and thoughts. This is the MeFi I remember loving and it made me happy and hopeful to read through (most of) these posts.
posted by cashman at 10:16 AM on October 27 [4 favorites]

It is difficult to imagine a circumstance in which one's friend or family member has not already mulled over the idea of whom to vote for, or whether to vote, unless they've just recently emerged from a decade-long coma

It is not difficult for me to imagine this at all. Lots of people, maybe even most people, barely think about politics, and have lots of stuff going on in their life. I didn't vote in 1994 -- why? I dunno, I was 23, I thought I was busy. A lot of young people were like me and nobody managed to hassle them and look what happened.

So think about the people in your life who are something like 23-year-old me, and hassle them.
posted by escabeche at 2:08 PM on October 27 [2 favorites]

You might be able to fix the “idiot” part a bit with some frank discussions.

So...someone might be able to, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say you may not be the someone in question.

And at any rate, you'd be better off using your energy to get your lazy but sensible friends to the polls than arguing with someone like that.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 4:05 PM on October 27

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