In preparation for National Census Day on April 1^st, the California Alliance has blanketed the state’s most densely populated regions in a campaign to ensure that all Californians are counted. As home to the nation’s most populous state, California has the most at stake in this year’s decennial census.  More than $400 billion in federal funding is up for grabs and for the first time in its 160-year history, California could lose a congressional seat.  Each undercounted Californian loses the state and their community $1000-$3000 PER YEAR ($10,000-30,000 over the next decade!).

The U.S. Constitution requires that a national census be conducted once every 10 years to count the population. All U.S. residents —both citizens and non-citizens, people with expired visas, students on educational visas, guest workers, undocumented workers—any and everyone residing in the U.S. on April 1^st must be counted.  Census data is used to allocate funding for important community resources such as hospitals, senior centers, schools and transit systems.  Recent polls project that 1 in 5 people are uncertain whether or not they will complete their census forms, citing mostly a lack of interest but also a broader distrust of government.  The Alliance will wage a large-scale outreach campaign to build trust and motivate hard-to-count (HTC) communities—which include poor and low-income minorities, immigrants, children, homeless, single-parent households and formerly incarcerated men and women of color—to participate.

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Building a progressive base of power call by call, door by door

Last fall, the California Alliance launched the first of many leading-edge, large-scale civic engagement programs to build a base of 500,000 Californians who support rebuilding and investing in California’s public infrastructure and programs.

Equipped with a state-of-the-art database and phoning system, 13 organizations in 8 regional centers mobilized to phone-call and knock on doors with a survey of voters in San Diego, East Los Angeles, South Los Angeles, San Jose and Oakland.  One hundred fourteen (114) dedicated, well-trained daily phone team members and 150 volunteers conducted in-depth interviews with 66,000 (60%) of the 110,000 voters reached through the program.

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California is considered a blue state, with a solid core of voters in liberal and people of color communities. Progressives sometimes can move an electoral majority. More often, the state is polarized with a core of liberal voters, a relatively equal sized core of conservative voters, and a fluctuating contested middle. Contrary to popular belief, this contested middle is not only composed of white, middle class, “swing” voters. Millions of residents in urban and increasingly diverse suburban and rural communities identify as moderate or independent. Many of these people’s lives have become unstable because of the global economic crisis, and they are inconsistent voters with very mixed attitudes about government and taxes.

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