(Note to readers: Our usual practice here is to tweet out posts to all our followers. I only have twelve so that won’t do. Please email this link to the congressional candidate of your choice, no matter how safe red or dismal blue the district may be. This plan is inexpensive, doesn’t take much time, and what’s more, on a small scale, is proven to work.)
In 2008 I tried a small experiment with some small business owners I knew. I encouraged them to call together their employees, which ranged from 5-12 per company, then warn them what an Obama presidency might mean to them (e.g., layoffs), and then see to it…make it a condition of employment…that they get registered, even driving them there if necessary…then ensure they vote.
In 2010 I contacted those same small businessmen, to find out, yes, in fact, they’d laid off almost half of those kids. But almost all had registered, and to their knowledge, voted.
So the proof is in the pudding about what I am about to say here.
Now my district in Virginia is pretty safe GOP territory, so it never dawned on me to try to contact our incumbent candidate himself to advance GOP registration here. I will this time around.
The 18-25 single male demographic
The largest unregistered voting bloc in America, (next to illegals) are 18-25 year-old males (mostly white, mostly unmarried) with a high school diploma. They may be employed, maybe not, many are underemployed (slinging fries at Mickey D’s instead of hanging drywall) or have been laid off since 2008. 18 year-olds entering the labor market since Obama have had a much tougher row to hoe than those who’ve gone before them everywhere in America. They too have their story.
What distinguishes this demographic is they all want jobs, but view them in a different way than college grads, especially the Occupy crowd. They are content to build their lives starting out at $8-$9/hr IF they can see a way forward for greater responsibilities, higher wages and promotions. They are not afraid of work, even outside work that involves dirty hands and sweat, and generally look down their noses at fast food or direct sales, wearing one of those little blue vests, or having to tend to a clean-up in aisle 7. The only exception to this rule is if they can monkey around with computers and graphics. Almost all would sell their souls to be a game-tester for X-Box.
Like finding a good saloon, they can’t describe the perfect job, but they know it when they see it, and it always starts out with a good boss who usually is a little like them, not pretentious and too blue-suit, and who knows every part of the trade himself, and can go out on any job and do it with them.
Their ambitions are simple. Unlike the Occupy crowd, they want to be able to buy a car, since Mom and Dad can’t afford to buy one for them. Or won’t. They want to be able to take Ellie Mae out to a movie and a TGIFriday’s Saturday night special without having to mooch two twenties off pop, who probably doesn’t have it anyway. And they want to live away from home, and count the days until they can.
Without ever having read a book, or being able to pick Mitt Romney (or John McCain, Newt or even Krauthammer) out of a line-up, they are all still natural born conservative Republicans.
In a word, their principal politics can be found in their wallets. Work. Without an ounce of philosophical introspection, they believe this is the key to all good things. They don’t articulate their conservatism as American self-reliance or pride. It just is.
In my district, a solid GOP district, no one seems to care much about these people. “Why spend good money going after them when we really don’t need them?”, seems to be the general notion. (You cultural constitutionalists can answer that one, while the rest of you, give it an extra thought.)
The point is, they are hard to reach, much harder than plantation blacks or illegals, all of whom have a patrone somewhere with their name written down, insuring they’re ready on election day, when the shuttle bus to the polls pulls up. All the left’s voters are bought and paid for, and even when they don’t want to vote, or don’t like the candidate, as many inner city blacks now feel about Obama, there’s really no place they can run and hide. Somewhere, someone has their name written down.
(After I get these kids registered I may decide to go rescue them, too.)
There are ground games and there are ground games.
Republicans, especially the Karl Rove wing who I hope Mitt Romney won’t heed too earnestly without getting a second opinion, is big on the media game. But as for the ground game, Republicans tend not to go where they have to get their hands dirty, so “ground game” to the GOP usually is more sanitized and buttoned-down than the Democrat game by the same name.
So, at the national level I don’t expect to see any change in this strategy, in part, because it’s all they know. They live or die by it.
Put your message out there where the people you most need to vote for you will see it…slick media ads, airtime on Clear Time talk radio, and all the television slots. That’s money well spent.
Indeed, it is, but these millions of 18-25 year old “apolitical conservatives” who want to work, or keep their jobs, aren’t reachable by anything Karl Rove and the media consultant wizards can come up with. They listen to Country or Rock FM on the way to work and on the way home, and then they listen to CD’s or play X-Box with headphones rather than watch TV at night…unless there’s a big game, NASCAR or WWF wrestling.
Limited to the tools they have, including resourcefulness, you can see why the media hosses in the RNC don’t spend too much time pondering how they can get these voters registered and to the polls. They see them everyday, yet they can’t count them, find them, reach them or communicate with them.
Booshway! I say.
They miss that one important distinction between this 18-25 bloc and the student-recent grad in Occupy; that one word- Work. College kids have no real reason to vote unless, as Ohio tried, they make is real super-easy to vote. Voting from their beds in the dorm would be really cool. To them politics is just one of many instant gratifications, enjoyed best with a group of friends, beer and weed, and after 1 PM, for sure.
Working class kids have a rationale altogether different, for work is their lifeline to freedom.
Only they can’t be reached by the conventional RNC media game.
Who can reach them are their bosses…if, as described, they are good bosses. Young men like bosses who are accessible, bosses they see regularly, bosses they can identify with.
Young men like working where they are recognized mainly because they tend to try to see a connection between themselves and their employer. In this way, without getting too philosophical, some of those kids can see in their boss their own potential track, that they too might be able to run their own business and have a big bass boat parked out behind the shop someday.
In small business working America, there are many millionaire bosses who came up from the shop room floor, and those men are a Sears and Roebuck Christmas catalog of opportunity for millions of young working men just starting out and looking for signs of things to come.
(By the way, if this condition among the low end of the working class is a revelation to you, as I’m sure it is to the Beltway media consultants, this condition is well known and understood inside the Left, for this is precisely why they want to destroy America’s small business sector. The small by-the-bootstraps entrepreneur is one man they cannot compete with. Their wars of words and class envy fall on deaf ears.)
So here’s what the individual congressional candidate, incumbent or otherwise, red or blue, can do….
It won’t cost any money, just a couple of hours of private talks with business leaders in your district. Go down to Rotary, Kiwanis, the Lions Club, and find out who the more prominent figures are. Presidents, former presidents. That sort. Also meet with local bank officers, all of whom have automatic credibility to small business, only who, because of corporate rules are not allowed to be publicly political. Ask them to jawbone the small businesses in their orbit to, in turn, reach out to their employees on 1) registration, and 2) voting. They probably don’t even have to mention Obama. Everyone will instinctively know.
Just take it for granted that those employers will talk to their employees who will then pass that message along to kids their age along the tom-tom circuit to other kids, employed, underemployed and unemployed alike.
It works.
Ask these surrogates to liaise with your staff, and then go on about your normal campaign business.
You can help by drawing up a flier for the small business owner. His message to his employees is important. I’ve tried scripting these things before but found most bosses have their own style and manner of delivery, so just list the high points, mostly what kids who were around in 2008 already know, that all those things they dream about having are about to drowned in a sea of regulation and downsizing, for that is exactly what the Obama regime has in store for them. Much of small business’s business is supposed to dry up, by design.
All this endeavor will cost is a little time. In virtually every district there are thousands of young (unregistered) young men who are employed, maybe even blissfully so (as many of the boys of ’08 were) but also many who have been let go, or those are struggling or just plain pissed off. A lot of ambitions and dreams are in limbo. With a little effort you can show them a way back.
You’ll also be doing your country a favor if you reach out and get them before Ron Paul or Obama’s militia does.
Time to Pass the Hat to the Campaigns and the Candidates
What I’ve imparted here is free. Gratis. But UnifiedPatriots can always use a little support and I have a special mission at vbushmills@thesandsinstitute.org to raise $8000 in order to send Vinnie and Augie out to recruit some special people, for carrying forward our battle against the Left in other unconventional ways. If you can use what I’ve said here, drop $100 at either site’s donate button, as a way of acknowledging you’ve read and approve this message.
