ACTing out

America Coming Together's Las Vegas branch uses humor and hands-on approach to mobilizing voters

By Andrew Kiraly

Mackie Allen has knocked on a dozen-odd doors so far and gotten nothing. The asphalt's starting to bake as noon nears on a recent Saturday, but the 17-year old Allen is undaunted. "I can't wait to vote, but in the meantime, my thinking is that I can try to get others to. When I do get someone [registered], I can't wait to get back to the van. 'I got someone registered!'"

So far today, that prospect looks bleak. This downtown block at 15th Street and Bridger Avenue is filled with nobody-homes, doesn't-live-heres and not-a-citizens. Later, Allen meets up with other America Coming Together canvassers, Kristin Lewis and her daughter Megan, who've had about the same luck. Still, Lewis is unfazed; they fall back on legendary tales of registration watersheds, manna from political heaven.

"One time I had a woman with eight kids, and she sat them all down right there in her living room and registered them to vote," Lewis says. "I've had people chase me down the street [to register]. Some of them think if we're dumb enough to come out here in this heat to knock on doors, maybe there is something to this election." ACT's goal: Steering Nevada John Kerry's way by getting at least three votes in each of 24 high-Democrat, low-turnout precincts.

These paid canvassers are part of the veritable army of ACT, one of the "527" groups that have ballooned into a big blip on the radar this election season. 527s--named after the section of the tax code, essentially a loophole, that birthed them--sprang up in the wake of the recent round of campaign finance reform. They're political action committees in many cases funded by millionaires (ACT, for example, was initially endowed by philanthropist and hedge fund investor George Soros) and special interest groups that hope to give a divided electorate a nudge or two. The now-infamous Swift Boat Veterans for Truth is a 527.

But on the streets of Las Vegas, there's no 527 as ferociously local, tenaciously grassroots and creative as Americans Coming Together. As the Republican National Convention unfolded in pomp and splendor this week, ACT was its usual ruthless self, launching numerous press conferences to counter RNC hype. Indeed, ACT's "press events" can themselves be exercises in cackling subversion. It has organized human chains representing the broken promises of the Bush administration. It has spoofed "Wheel of Fortune" with the wheel filled with Bush-bashing categories. Members even delivered a cake to local Republican Party headquarters on West Sahara Avenue--as in "Bush can't have his cake and eat it too on the Yucca mountain issue." (The GOPers reportedly chucked the dessert in the garbage). Call ACT a bunch of highly effective court jesters.

"One of the great faults of the American left and of politics in general is it doesn't have much of a sense of humor," says Kevin Griffis, ACT Nevada's spokesman. "It comes back to that old adage you can catch more flies with honey, in this case by putting a very serious subject in a different context."

Which isn't to say that ACT can't be serious. That side comes in the form of Anna Franker, the Nevada branch's no-nonsense field director who heads up the street-level canvassing.

"In the last 20 years or so, [political action committees] have relied on TV ads to get out the vote. But we know that in the past, traditional door-to-door campaigns have worked also--just never in 115-degree heat."

But is the walk worth the talk? Franker declines to say how many voters ACT has registered or how many canvassers ACT employs, but they do seem to be making a difference. One Saturday canvassing session, with the help of the California group Driving Votes, netted 162 voter registrations, according to ACT's website. The question is whether those new registrants will actually vote. Some observers aren't so sure.

"This election is the big trial run for 527s," says University of Nevada, Reno political science professor Eric Herzik. "The big issue with these registration drives is that you can get people registered, but will they actually vote? The demographic they're registering doesn't have a very good track record of voting. It's good to go out and get people registered, but the yield of the registrant to the actual voter has not been very strong."

Franker counters that ACT isn't just bringing newbies into the fold, but also galvanizing registered voters who might not have hit the polls four years ago.

"People always focus on the voter registration aspect, and that leads to a misconception about the actual work a field campaign can do," she says. "We're not just registering voters. It's a multipronged attack. We're talking to registered voters about the issues that matter them and motivating them to vote as well."

Maybe ACT will be the thing to turn blue the state that gave George W. Bush its four electoral votes in 2000. But in Herzik's view, the more things change, the more they stay the same.

"These 527s are a really interesting new wrinkle," says Herzik, noting that many of these grassroots groups ultimately trace back to big money sources. "But they also show how hard campaign finance reform is. Every time you close one avenue, another one opens up." But for ACT, there's a lot to do in a loophole.