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So I want you to think back on if you've received an email
from a political campaign that read something like this or this or this.
So this is what my inbox looked like, last week and I'll come clean.
Having worked on a campaign, I've sent 1000s of these emails.
A belated apology if any of you watching are from the state of New Hampshire.
Now, it may come as a surprise,
to hear that emails are a major part of how candidates reach voters.
However, I'm sure it's no surprise to hear that they're incredibly ineffective.
Click through rates are abysmal.
And studies have shown that excess outreach actually reduces intent to vote,
it's counterproductive.
However, on a campaign, there's no time to experiment.
No time to consider new strategies.
We do what's been done before.
In fact, over the last two decades, the playbook for
driving voter turn out has not significantly changed.
We've just gone from donor thing to bar worthy vision spam.
And yet working on campaigns, are baffled.
Given the billions spent on elections every four years.
How do we not have a better system for voter outreach?
Or even more broadly,
why does it seem that the issues plaguing our democracy are unended?
The lack of secure voting, disinformation,
partisan districting, I could go on.
So this is what I'm here to talk about today.
1, what's wrong with our democracy, 2,
why democracy entrepreneurship might be the solution and
3, how we can fund and support this work?
So let's start with the first question.
What's wrong with our democracy?
Most Americans once acknowledged a few universal truths.
The sun will rise, Tom Brady will enter the Super Bowl.
And American democracy will persist.
Now fast forward to 2022.
Tom Brady's retired and according to a recent poll,
64% of Americans I believe that US democracy is in crisis.
Now, this is a harrowing fact.
Our democracy is the system by which we peacefully transition power and
hold leaders accountable.
It is because of the resiliency of our democracy, that we have free and
fair markets and why the US dollar is the world's reserve currency.
Without a trusted government, we cannot fight corruption,
advocate for human rights or pursue justice.
These are the promises that a healthy democracy delivers.
Thus, it is baffling to think that we are not only ignoring improvement,
but we're actively moving backwards.
The last time trust levels in the American democratic process
were this low was in the 1850s in the lead up to the civil war.
The nonpartisan electoral integrity project ranks
the United States second to last among liberal democracies and
57 overall, in administering trusted and fair elections.
We must completely reject the notion that our democracy will
magically bumble into better times.
It won't without active intervention.
So, with a laundry list of issues in tow, you'd guess a country like
the United States, so focused on relentless improvement,
would throw its full weight into revitalizing democracy.
However government isn't civilized to tackle democracy reform.
And I can think of a few reasons why.
1, it's hard to use the system to change the system.
Politicians aren't civilized to open the process that puts them in power.
2, dependency corruption, the constant need to fundraise for
elections often drives partisanship over progress.
3, polarization, and trench polarization makes any
chance a passing by partisan electoral reform difficult
And 4, the scale of government, even donors who are passionate
about democracy, think they can just support perform candidates.
However, reform from the politicians cannot unilaterally make progress.
So because government isn't incentivized to tackle this issue,
we need to do what America does best, turn to our entrepreneurs.
In this case, I'm talking about democracy entrepreneurs.
Democracy entrepreneurs represent a legion of passionate and patriotic leaders.
They include technologists, they include research organizations,
they include community organizers and they include advocacy
groups that drive innovation and change in a space that needs it.
It is because of democracy entrepreneurs, at ballot ready that we have access to
state and local level ballot information with two clicks.
It's because of democracy entrepreneurs at Rock the Vote that we can register to
vote online.
It's because of democracy entrepreneurs at Politifact that we
have near instant fact checking of politicians.
Whereas private sector entrepreneurs innovate in antiquated industries and
social entrepreneurs take on issues tackling societal safety.
Democracy entrepreneurs are working on solutions to build
a government of the people, by the people and for the people.
Their key distinction is that they're not chasing a financial exit.
They're often nonprofits or social welfare organizations.
So we've laid out the issues of democracy and
identified who is best position to fix them.
So now to address the last question, how we can fund and support this work?
To best illustrate this, I'll share a story about a time that I worked for
a democracy entrepreneur at Vote Rev. we used behavioral science and
organizing expertise to drive bipartisan voter turnout.
It was September of 2020 and our organization was unstoppable.
We'd raised over $10 million.
We'd recently doubled our headcount.
And we were actively turning out thousands of early voters.
Now fast forward to February 2021, exactly one month after the run offs.
We were no longer receiving contributions and
over 50% of my colleagues had been laid off.
The core issue is that infusions of political dollars
are painfully tied to elections.
Every 4 years, candidates and political groups are flooded with billions.
And like clockwork post elections, those dollars dry up.
No matter how successful we were in 2020, we couldn't raise our series B.
We had to downsize just like hundreds of other democracy ventures.
And just like that, progress was ground to a halt.
And our democracy remained stuck, waiting for the inevitable,
another election, for those funds to come flooding back in.
So, this is the fate of democracy entrepreneurship today.
Blessed and dammed by the whims of donors,
tied to the shoe strings of political contributions and
wholly dependent on the cyclicality of our elections.
So how do we fix this.
The first part of the solution involves reallocating political dollars to fund
democracy entrepreneurs.
Every 4 years donors give over $10 billion to campaigns and political groups.
And only a fraction of a percent of that money goes towards strengthening
democracy.
Just like we do with science and infrastructure,
we need to make more investments in democracy and
we need to make them more strategically and longer term.
The second part of the solution involves supporting this work.
This is where you all come in as future investors and operators,
we need to empower this work by building accelerators and incubators by cementing
democracy innovation, as a part of corporate social responsibility.
By providing technical resources to founders and
by evangelizing to build the movement.
I am calling for a pro mass democracy mobilization event.
It's about time we recognize the service of democracy entrepreneurs and
flood them with funding and support.
We do this with the goal of inviting all Americans to co-create our nation by
giving them a fair say in the forces that govern their lives.
And I'll end with this, it's not about which side wins,
what matters most is for American democracy to win.
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