So, the Law of the Few is that the Few, including Mavens, Connectors, and Salesmen, have a disproportionate influence over the many, and that therefore, if you want to Tip a social epidemic, you can save your resources by finding some of the Few, and convincing them.\n
Could it be done for Voter Turnout? How would we go about it?\n
Well, I think first, it would be up to the parties at the local level to find the Mavens. Spend a little money—not much, just a little, a million or so—to get a task force to call up precinct committeemen, wardmen, and local activists, and ask if they know any Mavens or Connectors. Get lists. Compare lists. Refine the lists. A dozen people could make a pretty good start on this in six months; that would bring us to September. Then get your Salesmen—it should be fairly easy for the state parties to hire a few of these, as is, after all, the job of the party, in many ways, and if they are too feeble, ask the unions—to visit your Mavens, and your Connectors, preferably together. Go to the grocery store with them, and to the school when they pick up their kids. Go to the meetings the Connector goes to, and when the Connector gets calls, put the Salesman on for a moment. Talk about voting.\n
Imagine it. In September and October, the Salesmen the Party has use of will be going to shopping malls and cookouts anyway, but if a Salesman spends three or four days with a connector; how many people does he meet? And with the Connector next to him, he really meets them, and with a Maven next to him, he has all the right information at his fingertips. Instead of the Salesman inefficiently working the union picnics, he is working with the Connectors and Mavens, meeting more people, and having a better chance to convince the unconvinced.\n
That’s it. A few thousand Salesmen, put in the right places, alongside the right people. Oh, you’ll need all kinds of follow-up, but the beauty of the Law of the Few is that these Few can convince the Many. A few thousand visits to grocery stores and K-marts, convincing a hundred people because of that combination (a Salesman, a Connector to introduce him, and the Maven to give him the right info) means a few hundred thousand people. That’s half a percent of the voters. Which is a start.\n
It can be scaled up a little bit; as you go through the process, you find new Connectors and (I hope) new Mavens, and you keep working with them. Have a Connector Maven on staff, to keep all the information on the Connectors, and of course a Connector, to keep in touch with all of them. It only goes so far, but it’s a lot further than it goes now, and it starts us toward that Tipping Point.\n
Yes, I’m looking at it from a Party point of view. I don’t really know how else to do it, as the resources are party resources. I don’t think that a non-partisan, impartial, disinterested Voter Turnout group will be able to command the loyalty of the Mavens and Connectors, nor to afford to hire Salesmen (either as pure hires, or, as with our Party’s and Unions’ Salesmen now, work-cheapish-for-the-good-guys discount). I could be wrong, I suppose. It could be tried; TiptheVote (dot org) could set itself up as a vote-smart type Public Interest group, and try to get the lists of Mavens and Connectors that the parties already have (but don’t know it). It could raise money, and pitch itself to the Salesmen who work for each party, for the unions and the corporations, and see if duplicating the party effort isn’t too exhausting and expensive to keep itself alive. It could even, perhaps, work with both major parties to combine lists; it would be nice to think that both parties have an interest in more voters, and would share information through some honest broker. But I think, if it’s going to be done, it’s going to be done through the Parties.\n\n
Redintegro Iraq,
-Vardibidian.\n<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
So, the Law of the Few is that the Few, including Mavens, Connectors, and Salesmen, have a disproportionate influence over the many, and that therefore, if you want to Tip a social epidemic, you can save your resources by finding…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[201],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1844","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-navel-gazing"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1844","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1844"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1844\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16940,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1844\/revisions\/16940"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1844"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1844"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/vardibidian\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1844"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}