Good morning, peeps, and welcome to ok F Daily with Meet your Girl Daniel Moody recording from the Home Bunker. Folks.
Often we have folks that join this show to talk about democratic messaging, to talk about who they should be outreaching to and how often and why why it should matter that you roll up on black and brown communities only two or three months before an election, as opposed to you know, working three hundred and sixty five days of the year to ensure that you are making your party the most attractive right and developing policies that matter
and affect people's lives, and that they understand said policies and why they need to vote for you, and so on today's show, I'm really happy to welcome to ok F Daily for the first time to Tenda Musapatiki. She is the founder and CEO of Voter Formation Project, an organization that she started in twenty twenty to diversify the electorate.
And you know, we get into a conversation today about how while on one hand, the twenty twenty election was the most historic in terms of voter turnout in the midst of a pandemic, and at the same time it is still retail politics and antiquated twentieth century retail politics that the Democratic Party still uses. And it's like, when are they going to get hip to how people think where they are and how they engage and use that
in a way to bolster civic engagement. What would the country look like if one hundred percent of the people who were eligible to vote actually voted. What would it look like if those that were in voter suppressed districts and states, right were armed with information and power and engagement, right, Like, what would that look like? And I know that there are organizations on the ground, you know, that are doing
the best that they can. But it's also like, we have an entire Democratic National Committee that has just seated the South, seated the Midwest, and put all of their stock in state in the coast. And we can see by virtue of the flipping of Georgia and the flipping back of Virginia that we should not seed anywhere. Right. What we need to do is a mass education project. And so I'm really excited for you to hear the
conversation with Tatanda coming up next. Friends, I am very excited to welcome to WOKF Daily, to Tenda Musapati wait Musafa, tell me again, Musapa Tiki to Tenda. Musapa Tiki, who is the founder and CEO of Voter Formation Project, which is an organization whose work is to try and create the most diverse electorate possible by ushering black and Latina folks who have faced the most severe barriers to the
ballot to the ballot. To Tenda, let's start out with telling me more about your organization and what you were thinking and was feeling about the strategies that you were going to use in the most consequential election of our lifetime.
Yeah. Well, first, thank you so much for having me. I am really grateful to be here. And it's a huge moment, a huge moment for democracy. And so I
founded this org at the end of twenty twenty. I had been in the communications, tech and democracy space for a little over ten years at that point and knew that I really wanted to start to build out an organization that did the kind of work that I thought was reflective for the moment, that really leaned into digital experimentation, using the best tools that we have in digital marketing to reach out to the people most disenfranchised in our
communities and who have the least information to the ballot box. I also cared a lot about how it is that people are treated in their workplaces and how it is that we can create strong strategies and work while also treating people with dignity and respect, because I strongly believe that if you are going to be a warrior for this moment, we need to be rested.
That way we can continue to persevere over time.
And I wasn't seeing that in any of the workplaces I'd been in, except for corporate ones, which was very interesting, and so I really knew that this organization needed to exist to meet the moment, and we are really focused on deeply understanding how it is that digital messaging can impact people's thoughts and feelings and attitudes about civic engagement while ahead of ever ever asking someone which is the key gap that's been missing, I think many.
Of your listeners are familiar or even.
Working in the moment where we focus all of our time and energy and attention on getting people to vote between September and November of an election year, and we are inundated with ads about candidates, We are inundated with negative ads about issues that are tied to candidates, but there is no year round work about how it is that we make people feel good.
About civic engagement.
Why is civic agent engagement portant, Why do these institutions matter, and why is it important that we don't just abandon it because we think the system's broken, and the system isn't broken. We don't have any messaging about that to any community year round, particularly those most disenfranchised and feeling
the effects of our society as it is now. And I really wanted to fill that gap because I think one of the most powerful things about digital tools, especially digital marketing, is one it's always constant and pervasive because we're.
On our phones all the time.
And two, it has incredible power to help influence people's feelings and emotions daily, and it seems a huge strategic loss not to use that most of the year every year. It's insane, it's almost more costly not to And so I really started this org not just to begin to do this work, but measure its efficacy over time, which is a big part of what we do, which is a lot of digital marketing and research and messaging. But it just seemed crazy to me that we had ceded
the Internet to these bad forces. Most of the you'ren't expected to remedy.
It with like what a few two months and.
Like content for two months. That's not how psychology works, that's not how human emotions work. And if we are serious about protecting our institutions in our democracy, we need to be serious about defending it in word and in media every day.
Every day.
You know, talk to me about what you have discovered over the course of time since the founding of your organization.
And you know, the question that I have really is that do you really think that it is a mismanagement or misstep on the part of let's say, the Democratic Party in their lack of ability to educate and use social media as a way to educate, or is this just par for the course that you don't really want that many people engaged in our electoral process, right, And when I say not that many people engage, I mean people of color, right and young people. We talk about
this every single election cycle, every single election cycle. It is the same conversation. The messaging is bad, they don't know how to speak to people, they don't get out. It's not a three hundred and sixty five right style campaign. It is one that is pushed in two months. And so I wonder, one, do you think that this is purposeful or is it just laziness, a lack of understanding how social media and people work and think right? Or
is it purposeful? And if it is purposeful, a purposeful marginalization of certain groups, then how does your organization and the work that you are doing seek to really remedy that? And is it more of a long term right, not what I think the Democrats want and what Republicans want, which is just, you know, give us a quick return.
Yeah, so I would say I don't think it's purposeful on the part of the Democratic Party. I do think it's purposeful on the actors who most of the time are in the Republican Party, who say that we have voter fraud, we have insecure elections, we need to take all these extra precautions, like that is a made up problem. It is a made up problem.
It does not exist. That is not a thing.
Our elections are actually quite quite secure. And if you'll notice, the people who tend to get arrested for voter fraud.
Are the ones proving it doesn't exist.
Speaking on it.
Georgia indictments like those are the people who are in trouble for like voter fraud and Rico, not voters. Okay, so it's a made up problem. I will say, what I think is happening on the Democratic party side is the problem of inertia, where there is a set of people who have determined and gained their power and their financial power and their personal wealth through a series of tactics and strategies that are no longer applicable for the moment.
I think we truly have a series of leaders, both in office in many cases and behind the scenes, who are ill equipped for this moment and who do not understand the gravity and I think the intensity for which younger people who I'm defining as forty five and under are experiencing our country and our democracy, and therefore are not yet ready or fully understanding the need for actual, prescriptive, year round messaging. Because I think a big part of
the problem is the finances of it. And that's a piece that like I think, you know, normal everyday people don't think about, but because of my job, I think about every day. It is the finances of who is going to pay for this outreach all the time, and if it's committees and candidates.
They have to fundraise for it.
They have to get that money from normal people, but then they have to give it to candidates.
Right.
Our financial our eluctant financial system one is very fucked up.
There's way too much money in it.
And it is not designed for people to actually have more folks voting, even though it is one thousand percent in Democrat's best interest to have the most diverse electric possible. That is oftentimes why you see Democratic campaigns running voter registration at all. In many cases, in many many demographies, the equation to fifty plus one requires voter registration of
new constituents and the activation of lapsed voters. And the folks who are the strategists, who wield the most power, and who have the most influence, and who have the most fundraising prowess have not yet adapted to this modern model. The thing I have been telling people over and over and over again, as I think many people, and I actually.
Think Joe Biden did this at first. He was like, I can work with these Republicans, I know the blah blah blah.
No, these are not the people that we were dealing with before. We are in a completely new way of these folks thinking. And Hitler did not become Hitler on the first try.
No, it was the third. And guess where we're at.
So in this case, do I think that Donald Trump has the longevity in terms of his health.
I don't know. Evil people tend to live longer.
But McDonald's tends to kill people. So what I'm saying, who.
Knows, But that facistic moment can absolutely get a new leader who can usher it in.
Right. It's the ideas that we are fighting against here.
It is the marginalization of people. It is the factionism. It is the people trying to equate democracy with fascistic control based on religion. These are not American values at all, and I don't think they know the majority of people do not hold those stances, which is why they're fighting so hard to change the system that way that their person can get in. And so the system and the constructs for how we run our elections, particularly for people on the left, is not meeting the moment.
In those lines, I agree with you wholeheartedly because I think that there is an inertia and a complacency, and I think to your point in the way that Joe Biden even entered his first term as president, was you know, I was a member of the good old Boys network, Like there are still good Republicans. You know, this is still the America of you know, my father and my
father's father. And I'm speaking at the factories and I'm doing those things, and I'm just like, are we really still doing retail politics in the same fucking way we've been doing for the last like half century plus and thinking that that's working in the age of TikTok and Facebook and Instagram and threads and Twitter and x and all like in every single other fragmented space that communication
flows through. And so to your point, it is bizarre to me that we know right, like it is not it's not unknown, the ways that social media gets after people, the way that I can very much talk about my favorite lufa and then that show up in all of my advertisement on social media, right, the way that like
these algorithms are made to keep you on. And so the fact that we haven't figured it out then, I mean you have now and have the desire to tap into what emotionally connects people to their devices and to these platforms and then turn that into what also connects you to your civic engagement, right and responsibility. I think is just crazy at this point. Now I say that, and I don't want to overlook the fact that the last election happened in the height of a pandemic and
we had historic turnout. So talk to me about too, the compelling nature not necessarily of the candidate, but of the issues that we're facing that are driving people to the polls that might not have gone to the polls if we hadn't have been in the midst of a pandemic with you know, the beginning of which began with a facistic leader, you know, and then we're like, oh my god, we're never going to get well if we don't get rid of this guy.
Yeah, it's god.
That election was just so revealing for a number of reasons, but one I think a few things impacted it. One, people were at home and had time to pay attention to like the fuckery, right, Like people were not in many cases rushing to and front work or like out and about living their lives like we were in the
house or at work. And if you were at work, you probably weren't happy about it because you wanted to be in the house because there was a pandemic and you were a frontline worker for whatever, like at whatever job that you had. Right like that I think brought to like a lot of things. The other thing that happened, though, is we had governments really thinking in a way that they never have about how can we still have people
both safely. And it's pretty incredible to me actually that now that we still have this pandemic, by the way, folks aren't still thinking about how to get as many people to vote safely. Like we still live in the United States of America where like everyone's getting shot frequently. So why aren't we still thinking about how more people can vote safely?
I'll tell you why.
Because there are people interested in making sure certain communities don't get to vote safely.
And so in that.
The issues that like are heightened for people were ones of education, access, wealth, like questions about safety at work, and those issues still matter. So we ran a test during the midterm cycle and found that issues framing for younger voters in particular was extremely motivating for them to feel better about saving engagement. So usually in previous election cycles. Again, I've been doing this for a decade and like tracking
research and whatnot. Usually, the most impactful messages on turnout or people registered to vote tend to be informational. A huge reason why many people don't vote is they just don't have enough information. It's not familiar to them. It's a convoluted process. You have to take time out of your day to do it, and so easy presentation of the information necessary to vote makes a difference for many
many people. This was the first time in my life I had seen an issues framing outperform an information framing for a.
Certain cohort of people. And it is not.
Lost on me because when I think about millennials and Gen Z, the world that we have grown up in is very markedly different from that of our parents. We are very acutely aware that the planet's going to burn us up and could easily kill us or ruin our livelihoods, because that is happening every.
Day in our livelihoods.
We are the first generations to understand that it is very likely that we could get shot at school, and we have to practice how not to get shot at school. This is a generation of people who have not been able to afford housing. This is a generation of people who have not been able to afford rent. This is a generation of people that when they had their first
kids there was a formula shortage. This is a generation of people who, you know, church was not a thing that we went to, but yet we're being told what we can do with our bodies because people went to church and institution that is deeply unfamiliar to most of us. This is the first generation to lose many rights for half of this population when there weren't any. This is the first generation that had the bravery to be out and be clear and be told to sit back down.
We are living in a fucked up situation compared to our parents, and so it is not surprising to me that these issues and things that we want to fix that are frankly being forced upon us from a generation with outsize power.
Are animating.
And when I explain that to people, they're like, oh my god, Genz's been through so much on like the millennials too, Like, it is not lost on me that, like, finally, when y'all realize that we are not children anymore, that we actually are like the middle aged John Tie's watching the kids on TikTok with Bama Rush That is me currently all the time.
Yeah, we couldn't feed our kids, like people couldn't feed their children because of systems set up by the older generation.
We can't afford college, we can't afford homes. We are mired in debt.
It's like the cantiford college. Can't afford not to go to college, right, like can't afford can't afford not to work. But there are no jobs like it is you know, when you list out all of the ways in which the latest two generations have been robbed of the prosperity that prior generations, it was just a given right, It was just a given go get your ged. Here's Levittown for you. Here are all these things, here's the GI bill, here's the new deal. Here are all of these opportunities
for you to build inside of the middle class. And what did we give millennials? Kind of like like r not getting taught in school and not.
Being forced to go to war right like and when I say forced for a lot of low income people, the military is the best.
Option for you because housing education. Right.
We live in a system that has been rigged against us while being told that the.
Generation should each make each generation wealthier, and that never happened.
Right us, So, yeah, and issues are animating.
It's we also saw.
An instruction that was fun, right that that was great too,
also televised. You know, when we think about the issues being animated, when we think about this generation, these generations that are coming now being less fortunate than the generations that went prior, when we think about oh, not to mention the fact that, you know, authoritarianism is not only taking a hold in the United States but around the world, and that thirty percent of the population would love to appoint Donald Trump as their king right as opposed to
have a democracy that is multiracial so that they can continue to have this fallacy of white supremacy and the privilege of their of their skin. When we take all of those things into consideration, you still have a large slot of people who are like, government does not work. These are all of the reasons why government does not work. So why the fuck am I voting? What do you say to that?
A few things. One, it's a very rational thought.
I'm not going to look at folks who have had a system not work for them and have never seen change or you know, monumental change happen between between administrations and say it's a rational thought.
But let's look at locally how these things can help. I think local elections are a really strong and easy and fast demonstrator of how government can be helpful. Right like if you are looking at your local school system and your school district, and I think that's one of the backlash things that's going to.
Happen for the tactic of let's change.
All of our school policies and let's make our schools like matic for right wing policies. People are not realizing, oh shoot, who I vote for at this local level impacts my kids, their education, their access to things. It impacts the roads, it impacts my local taxes, it impacts my direct life. And I think once that starts getting explained to people and you start showing concrete examples, another good one at the national level would.
Be called them bidom bucks.
We came out of a pandemic, you got extra money, we had our student loans pause, like all of these things that had made a difference in people's lives. We need to tie that back in a very coherent way to show no, you might not see change overnight, but there are marginal things that happen when you participate, and there are very bad things that can happen.
When you don't. But we have to make the case.
I don't think it's right to judge people who have made that basis based on their life experiences. We have a responsibility, especially as people who are working in the democratic space little de democratic space, to make sure that we are making the case. I just don't think it is fair for people to get upset at certain populations for not voting for Democrats when they don't put the work in to explain why they should.
Right right. Last question for you.
Is this.
We have in next month is Voter Registration Day National Voter Registration Day that's happening on September nineteenth. What do people need to know? What can they learn from your organization? How do they get involved? Tell us all the ways?
Yes, thank you so much so. National Voter Registration Day is so exciting. A few ways people can get involved one bare minimum. Please tell people in your community to register to vote and why they should. I think that is like way more impactful than people realize, and it can make a marginal difference because elections have been won and lost by one vote. Second, our website is www.
Dot voter for meproject dot com. We are on I refuse to call it x. We are on the artist formally Twitter, Twitter, voter Formation, and we are on Instagram as well at Voterformation Project and you can follow us there. You can contribute at any one of those sites and give to us. That way we are able to spread the good word about democracy to the communities that need it most.
We also are on Threads at voter Formation Project.
We are on all the places, so please give us a follow, please support us if you would like. That would mean the world to us for our organization and I can't wait for Threads to get hashtags. That way I can concred myself from the artist formally known as Twitter.
Yeah.
Same same to Tenda, thank you so much for making the time to join WOKF and I hope that we will have you back because we got the most consequential election of our time coming up and people need to hear more from you. So appreciate you.
Thank you.
That is it for me today, dear friends on woke A app as always power to the people and to all the people. Power yet woke and stay woke as fuck.