Campaigns spend millions to influence voters. This works better | Katie Paris

Elise Hu (0:04)

You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hugh.

When's the last time politics made you feel anything other than exhausted? If you're drawing a blank, you're not alone.

Katie Paris (0:18)

When researchers at Pew a few years ago asked Americans to describe politics in one word, just 2% used a positive term. Two percent.

Elise Hu (0:30)

That's community organizer Katie Paris. She says she felt the same exhaustion, so she set out to try and understand politics differently.

Katie, who is the founder of an organization called Red Wine and Blue, shares what she learned when she left the world of DC political strategy and organizing and started paying attention to ordinary people organizing in their own neighborhoods and their living rooms and backyards. She talks about why she's come to believe the most powerful tool in politics isn't a message or an ad. It's doing it together with the people already in your life.

Katie Paris (1:04)

When our members reach out to the people they know, not strangers, voter turnout among the people they contact goes up five to seven percentage points. Now listen, campaign spend millions to move that number by a fraction of a point.

A conversation between friends moves it by five.

Elise Hu (1:23)

That's coming up right after a short break. And now, our TED Talk of the day.

Katie Paris (1:35)

I haven't been on the dating scene since I was 22 But I still remember the itch. You know, that feeling when something just completely turns you off and there's no coming back from it. Turns out, bad dates are not the only thing with an itch problem. Politics has it, too. I'm serious, the data proves it. When researchers at Pew a few years ago asked Americans to describe politics in one word, just two percent used a positive term. Two percent. Take a moment, really think about it. When's the last time politics made you feel something other than exhausted, disgusted, afraid? I can't remember either, and I've worked in this business for 25 years. We're all feeling the itch. So we're doing digital detoxes, news cleanses, or just putting our phone in the drawer and calling it self-care.

Good stuff.

But tuning out all together, that's when things start getting done to us, not for us, and we can't afford it. Not now. So what do we do?

What if we made politics something people actually want to be part of? Let me tell you what I've learned, but first, what I had to unlearn. My journey starts where all problems go to get solved, Washington, DC.

I like to think I was different than your typical political insider, and in many ways, I was. I helped start an organization whose entire job was to watch Fox News so you don't have to.

I'm proud of that work. Thank you. It mattered.

But it was all built out of think tanks, where we thought it was our job to find the right answer and ship it out to everyone else. I even helped start a spinoff devoted entirely to message testing. I truly believed if we could get everyone to repeat the perfect words, we'd win. And sometimes, it sort of barely worked. Even after I moved to the Burbs, outside Cleveland, to start a family around family, I kept doing the DC thing. I was living in Ohio, but my head was in Washington.

Everything changed for me in 2018

The 2016 presidential election had lit a fire under suburban women all over the country. Women who had never done anything more than show up to vote had started organizing, and they got results. In a typical midterm election, the party in power loses about 26 congressional seats. In 2018, they lost 43, and 40 were suburban. Even more seats flipped locally in state legislatures. Some of it was happening in my own backyard.

But I had no idea. I was too busy dialing in to DC conference calls. Even though I had become part of the very demographic, both political parties spend millions trying to reach. A suburban mom.

The morning after that election, I sat on the floor of my bedroom closet. I'd just had my second child. And for the first time, I felt completely out of alignment. Lost. I knew I couldn't be a DC operative anymore. I wanted to find those women.

In DC, they search for real people. Seriously, that's what they refer to them as in meetings and memos. But they don't really know them, or even really listen to them.

I wanted to. So I called up people that I knew who were working locally in Ohio politics, and I asked, Do you know any of these suburban women who are organizing in their own neighborhoods? It turns out, they had. So I hit the road. I met some over wine, some at a bookstore, one group over dinner, and every time, I thought, These women, I want to hang out with them. They're fun. They're fired up.