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voter turnout
Democrats Need to Grow Up and Move Beyond the Myth of the 'Ground Game'
Believing the current style of door-knocking wins campaigns is the same as believing in Santa Claus.
Dec 26, 2024
Once upon a time, in a precinct long, long ago, there was a campaign that built voter contact programs solely from those who lived in the targeted neighborhood. The entire community shopped at the same grocery stores and even saw one another at the bank, gym, and library. In other words, this was totally different from today's "ground game," manned by people who drive from hours away, armed with clipboards, shiny new campaign t-shirts, and ready to tell residents exactly how they should vote.
While a ton of articles have been written about the importance of the "ground game" in the final days of the Harris campaign, no one is discussing the increasing problems and decreasing rate of return of this tactic. Time Magazine's October election article, "Democrats Bank on Ground Game Advantage in Pennsylvania," opens with the author observing that "most of the people on Elana Hunter's list weren't answering the door," but does not dig into the actual problem. The same is true with campaign analysis in hundreds of other news outlets. The New York Times wrote a lengthy piece comparing Vice President Kamala Harris' in-house door-knocking operation to the Trump campaign's outsourced field operation. The article highlights both sides bragging about how many doors they knocked on and how much paid staff was hired. But, neither side (nor the writers) discuss how few people answer their doors or even care what the stranger is selling.
This analysis misses the real problems of modern-day door knocking: Voters don't open their doors anymore, voters do not know their neighbors, and undecided voters are more skeptical than ever when it comes to talking about politics.
As Democrats, we should know that a last-minute paid "ground game" that gets dropped into the battleground days before an election hasn't worked in years.
Year-round precinct work with "local captains" who knew their "turf" and how each neighbor would vote disappeared as the campaign industry grew and political parties stopped building traditional ward systems. Instead, they were replaced with volunteers and paid voices that only knocked on doors during major elections. This transition from a known, trusted neighbor to an unknown door knocker has made modern campaigning a data-driven competition that ignores effectiveness as it optimizes toward knocking on the most doors.
Nonetheless, message and messenger still matter in all aspects of campaigns, especially in the field. Door-to-door salesmen are a relic of history (Even the legendary Fuller Brush company started transitioning out of door-to-door sales in 1985).
Public safety studies show neighborhoods are more responsive to community policing programs when public safety officers know the people they serve. Why would political campaigns be different?
Technology has also had a major impact on door knocking. It's now been a decade since the invention of video door camera technology. According to a 2024 Consumer Reports study, 30% of Americans use video door cameras. These changes in neighborhood dynamics and consumer behaviors are realities that must be faced.
The rite-of-passage, where a volunteer gets lost in below-freezing weather canvassing an unknown precinct or gets bitten by a dog while knocking on doors, needs to be relegated to history. While campaign war stories are fun, it's time to be honest about the changing times and begin a new chapter: These age-old tactics are neither sacred nor effective. If no one is home or no one is answering their door even if they are home, political campaigns need to change with the times.
To win more elections, target voters with appropriate messages and messengers. It's time to explore better ways to use scarce time, people, and money to achieve the desired victory. Are there better places to send volunteers to work more efficiently and rally potential voters?
This is not to say that field organizing should be discarded or that campaigns should go completely digital. (Lots of criticism is being written on the current problems with these newer tactics that will hopefully be fixed.) But, as the Democratic Party's messaging and mobilization are transformed, an honest assessment of all tactics is needed to understand what works and create better ways to win.
Remember, just because a tactic worked on one campaign, it will not always continue to work the same four years later. We have tried this with auto-calling and text messaging technologies and know they have diminishing returns each cycle. Now is the time to dig deep and have honest conversations with field organizers and volunteers to learn what tactics need to be retired and start adopting new approaches.
Let's stop pretending that more "fake neighbors" door-knocking is the solution to the Democrats' problems and focus on how to best reach targeted voters with a message that resonates, delivered by respected voices that matter, while we have time now to build a real organic field effort.
As Democrats, we should know that a last-minute paid "ground game" that gets dropped into the battleground days before an election hasn't worked in years. It didn't work on Howard Dean's well-funded 2004 campaign that flew tons of staff and volunteers to Iowa. It's now 20 years after the infamous Dean scream, and we continue to blindly follow the same failed "orange cap" tactics of these past campaigns: inserting last-minute volunteers and door-knocking teams instead of thinking about how to create long-term community-based approaches.
We all have to grow up at some point and face the truth. Or you could keep believing in Santa Claus and see what gift he brings you in the next election cycle.
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Could Poorer Voters Determine the Outcome of the 2024 Election?
The Poor People’s Campaign is organizing to push the concerns of poor and low-income people into the center of the 2024 political debate.
Feb 20, 2024
Amidst all the nail-biting uncertainty over the 2024 election, one thing’s for sure: Turnout will be key. This February, the Poor People’s Campaign announced plans to mobilize a powerful yet often overlooked voting bloc: the 85 million eligible voters who are poor or low-income.
The campaign crunched the numbers and determined that if this bloc voted at the same rate as higher-income voters, they could sway elections in every state. But most voting drives—and candidates—still ignore this segment of our society.
“The conventional wisdom—which isn’t very wise—is that the poor don’t care about voting,” said Poor People’s Campaign Policy Director Shailly Gupta Barnes at a February 5 press conference. “But that’s just not true.”
In Arizona, 40% of voters are low-wage—and in 2020 the margin of victory was just 0.03%.
What’s the biggest factor discouraging low-wage people from exercising this basic right?
“Political campaigns do not talk to them or speak to their issues,” explained campaign co-chair Bishop William J. Barber II. “In our election cycles sometimes we have 15, 20 debates for president. In 2020, not one of those—not 15 minutes—was given to raising questions about how the policies of that particular party or politician would impact poor and low-income people.”
The Poor People’s Campaign is organizing to push the concerns of poor and low-income people into the center of the 2024 political debate. Their goal is to mobilize 15 million “infrequent” poor and low-income voters.
Will politicians listen?
At the press conference, pollster Celinda Lake ticked off one battleground state after another where even a small increase in participation could determine the outcome. She pointed out that in Arizona, 40% of voters are low-wage—and in 2020 the margin of victory was just 0.03%. “You’d have to be a moron to not get this,” Lake said.
What are some of the most pressing issues on the Poor People’s Campaign agenda?
The campaign and the Institute for Policy Studies just co-published fact sheets for the nation and all 50 states on the interlocking problems that hit the poor hardest: poverty and inequality, systemic racism, ecological devastation, and militarism. Several speakers spoke about these problems from their own personal experiences.
“I’m tired of companies and billionaires buying politicians who are pushing people deeper into poverty and debt,” said Matthew Rosing of Lancaster, Pennsylvania. “I’ve put up with the thankless toll of minimum wage retail jobs and back-breaking construction jobs in a state that has 19 billionaires. And because of our flat tax, they pay the same state income tax rate as I do.”
Linda Burns, a former Amazon warehouse assembly line worker, has struggled for basic labor rights and decent healthcare benefits. Burns was a supporter of the valiant union drive at the Bessemer, Alabama, facility that Amazon eventually crushed through harsh intimidation tactics.
Burns says she was fired for her union activity, which led to the loss of her health benefits right before a needed surgery related to a workplace injury. Today she works 16 hours a day as a caregiver.
“I’ve worked too hard to have nothing,” said Burns. “We have to stand up for our rights.”
Veronica Burton spoke about the economic gulf in her community of Beloit, Wisconsin. A woman who lives “around the corner” from her is a billionaire while Burton is struggling to pay bills in the face of multiple rent increases and the low wages she earns at an understaffed child-care center.
On top of dealing with her own problems, Burton often finds herself trying to help parents of the children under her care. “We’ve had mothers unenroll their children because they can’t afford their asthma medicine,” she said.
These and other organizers in more than 30 states are ready to put on their door-knocking shoes in the lead-up to this year’s election and beyond. “We are not an insurrection,” Bishop Barber said. “But you better believe we are a resurrection—a resurrection of justice and love and righteousness.”
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We Know That Wannabe Dictator Trump Can Win in 2024—So What Is to Be Done?
With only 11 months to go, this feels like the political crisis of our lifetimes. Where is the resistance we need?
Dec 06, 2023
I finally put up my Christmas lights on Saturday, in a T-shirt with no jacket on a warm December afternoon — a fitting finale to Earth’s hottest year on record. Meanwhile, the world’s life-or-death climate summit is presided over by an oil dictator who insists there is “no science” to support phasing out fossil fuels. For those who wonder if humankind is taking global warming seriously, the joke of holding COP28 in the United Arab Emirates is your answer.
Nearly seven years later, it’s easy to forget how remarkable the first Women’s March that occurred on Jan. 21, 2017, truly was. The most incredible thing was the size of the protest that occurred on the first full day of Donald Trump’s presidency. It’s believed that at least 470,000 people attended the main event in Washington, D.C., but satellite protests across the United States and globally drew an estimated 5 million, likely the largest one-day event in American history.
That success resonated for the next four years, as thousands went back to their hometowns and organized political groups that loosely were hailed as “the Trump resistance” — not only staging local protest events but ultimately knocking on doors and sending out postcards by the millions as Democrats reclaimed the House in 2018 and the White House and Senate in 2020.
But there’s also something else worth remembering about that initial Woman’s March and the early days of those resisters. Their movement was born in the early morning darkness and frustration of Nov. 9, 2016, amid the shock realization that a dangerous demagogue had somehow been elected the 45th president of the United States. The rage that flowered on a chilly January day in a field of pink “(p-word) hats” was in part regret that more had not been done to stop Trump before the election.
Today, Trump is back, and no one calls him a demagogue anymore — because that’s too polite. The 47th presidency he envisions is tyrannical, even dictatorial — siccing zealous MAGA prosecutors on his political enemies and the media, pardoning 2021′s insurrectionists, mass detention camps for deporting migrants, and calling out troops to put down protests, perhaps as early as his Inauguration Day. And yet he is all but guaranteed the GOP nomination, and an even-money bet against President Joe Biden next fall. Even a normally cautious mainstream media is starting to get it.
“Why a Second Trump Presidency May Be More Radical Than His First,” blared Monday’s headline across the New York Times homepage, describing how Team Trump has learned from the failures of its leader’s more outlandish ideas in 2017-21. A super-long Washington Post essay from neocon scholar Robert Kagan — “A Trump dictatorship is increasingly inevitable. We should stop pretending.” — was that paper’s most-read article. Not to be outdone, The Atlantic dropped a special issue with 24 separate stories about the dangers of a Trump 47.
It’s great journalism, but will it make any more difference in 2024 than the supposedly fatal Access Hollywood tape did in 2016? What about the millions of casual voters who don’t know The Atlantic from Popular Mechanics, who’ve convinced themselves that America was better during Trump’s somewhat constrained first term than under Biden in a moment of global chaos?
Even more to the point: Where is “the Trump resistance,” now that we know how truly dangerous the man is — and that he can win again?
Few will argue that some groups have faded and some disappeared after the Democrats’ 2020 victories. Here in Philadelphia, for example, Tuesdays with Toomey is gone, its mission of flipping a Pennsylvania Senate seat accomplished. The American University sociologist Dana Fisher — author of 2019′s American Resistance: From the Women’s March to the Blue Wave — told me “I have been tracking many of the groups and some are shells of what they were” — such as the Women’s March organization — “and others are limping along trying to keep funding.”
But some groups are still going strong, three years after Trump left the White House. Vicki Miller, the group leader of Indivisible Philadelphia, told me her members still chat regularly on Zoom. Although there is the occasional protest — including a boisterous street-corner condemnation on the Jan. 6 insurrection anniversary — the focus is heavily on voter turnout, including postcards and phone banking around last month’s Pennsylvania Supreme Court race won by Democrats, as well as lobbying the state’s U.S. senators. Miller said members still sign up for Door 35, a pledge to knock on at least 35 neighbors’ doors to woo undecided voters.
“It’s sad,” Miller said of those early polls showing Trump tied or narrowly ahead, but she was quick to add, “it doesn’t change what we are doing, which is working our tails off to get Joe Biden and Senator [Bob] Casey elected.” She also believes talking to voters about the things that affect them personally, like reproductive rights or, if done the right way, the economy, is most important — more so than hyping the Trumpian threat to democracy.
Maybe. But with only 11 months to go, this feels like the political crisis of our lifetimes, and I can’t stop wondering if there is more to be done before Election Day. Voter turnout is indeed the most critical, but should there be protests or maybe teach-ins to raise awareness for that true sliver of undecideds? Should there be boycotts of companies whose CEOs support Trump (also known as the Yuengling spit-take)?
As I write this on Monday night, “dictator” is a trending topic on X/Twitter. It could be trending nightly if the too-silent majority of Americans who believe in democracy don’t take a more forceful stand. The moment for resisting Trump is right now, not waiting until Jan. 21, 2025.
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