Just a week ago, Drive 4 America was a half-baked idea. Today, seven weeks from Election Day, it’s now fully-baked, but it’s still an idea. So if you’re good at math, you already know it was only thrown into the oven on September 1st.  Now it has to gain traction quickly — execution is the name of the game. To become a movement, organizational partners, drivers, financial sponsors, and influencers, all have to come together and shape it, refine it, make it real.

In this vein, I’m happy to share some very helpful pushbacks to the idea that I just received from an experienced professional who recently hired me to be a field organizer on a presidential campaign. Through that experience, I learned a lot from him and the many other FOs with whom I got to work. I’m super eager to hear what you think of his pushbacks – so here they are, verbatim:

Here is my question / pushback / suggestion. Please don’t take it as anything other than a set of questions and thoughts intended to push the envelope. 

On one of my first campaigns, a friend of mine would always ask “is this the best thing we can be doing to elect Margaret right now”. Didn’t matter where we were what we were doing Sam would always ask. Staff meeting, phone calls, going to get lunch, having a beer.

So, let me start there. Is this the best thing we can do to achieve our stated goal of driving high turnout and ensuring a free/fair election? 

Let’s start with turnout. As you know, there are a ton of states we don’t care about. And a handful of states we really care about. Instead of taking volunteers from those states (Michigan, mn, Wisconsin, pa, Nevada, az, florida) and driving to DC, would we have a greater impact of driving to them? 

Would it have a greater impact to spend 6 hours a day driving voters to early vote centers? (270 miles a day divided by 50 plus lunch/bathroom etc)? 

On the point of securing the election, I think having observers and people in the states is more important than at the White House. That’s where the ballots will actually be counted. 

That’s my top level thought and overview and question for you, instead of driving all the way across the country can these resources be deployed into the states with the greatest impact.