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DEMOCRATS MUCH TOUTED GROUND GAME WAS NOT ENOUGH. HERE’S HOW TO FIX
IT  
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Astra Taylor
November 25, 2024
The Guardian
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_ Democrats should stop mocking trump’s ground game snd start
learning from it. Cable ads and bussed-in volunteers don’t cut it
any more. If the party wants to win, it must engage voters in a
collective push for change. _

Illustration credit: The Guardian,

 

Since campaign season began, experts have assured us that Donald Trump
had “no ground game”, a phrase that generally refers to a
campaign’s effort to mobilize voters through local outreach offices,
phone calls, text messages, and door knocks. Pundits, politicos, and
partisan observers repeated this charge and scoffed at his ramshackle,
amateur, and fraud-riddled
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with some seasoned Republican operatives even sounding the alarm.

A slew of articles and commentary unfavorably compared
Trump’s “paltry”
[[link removed]] get-out-the-vote
operation to the Democrats’ supposedly well-oiled and professionally
managed machine. Alex Floyd, the Democratic national committee’s
rapid response director, issued a confident statement in April:
“Donald Trump’s Maga takeover of the [Republican national
committee] has left the Republican party in shambles, lacking the
ground game and infrastructure to compete this November.”

We all know how that story ended.

And yet many Democrats remain reluctant to reassess their views, both
of Trump’s ground game and, perhaps more importantly, of their own.
Soon after the election, Tom O’Brien, chair of the Democratic party
in Lancaster county, Pennsylvania, told the New York Times
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Republicans “really didn’t have a ground game”. The Democratic
strategist Christy Setzer went further, telling the Hill
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“Trump had no ground game and ran only on rambling hatred”, while
insisting that the loss “wasn’t the fault of Kamala Harris”, who
had “the best campaign any of us has ever seen”. But if that’s
true, why did Trump succeed where Harris failed?

Trump succeeded, at least in part, because he is a man who will say
anything and do anything to win. And of course he was boosted by
conservative media – by Fox News talkshows, conspiratorial podcasts,
manosphere influencers, deceptive deepfakes, targeted ads
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and “First Buddy” Elon Musk’s transformation of Twitter into X.
But he also won because he had a strong ground game, even if it
occasionally blundered and often looked different from what observers
and experts expected from a get-out-the vote drive, including its use
of “untraditional
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and “micro-targeted” strategies aimed at reaching low- and
mid-propensity voters who didn’t fit the usual Republican profile,
including Latinos,
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men, and Asian
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Arab Americans. The rocky
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of Musk’s new political action committee, America Pac, which hired
canvassers in key areas, became a punchline
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but it was last-minute outreach that supplemented other efforts. (And
America Pac is no joke: Musk has invested $120m in the project and is
already planning for the 2026 midterms and beyond.)

 
Elon Musk awards Judey Kamora $1m during an America Pac town hall in
Lancaster, Pennsylvania, on 26 October 2024.  (Photograph: Samuel
Corum  //  The Guardian)
Belittling and discounting Trump’s operation might make liberals
feel better, but strategically, it’s self-defeating. This hubris
leaves Democrats
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opponents’ achievements, while they overestimate their own approach.
And it makes it harder to appreciate what needs to change if Democrats
want to not only win elections but govern effectively and in ways that
materially improve people’s lives.

Since Harris’s defeat, even moderate commentators are waking up to
the fact that Democrats need to shift their messaging in order to
increase their appeal to working class voters who have turned away
from the party or toward Trump. But while embracing the rhetoric of
economic populism would be a good start, tweaks to language are not
enough. Our definition of “ground game” must evolve as well –
“knocking on doors eight or nine times”, which is how O’Brien
described his party’s efforts, will not be enough to remedy the
Democrats’ current disadvantage or revitalize small-d democracy.

Committing to a cause

A few weeks before the election, in Greensboro, North Carolina, Nikki
Marín Baena was outside her home when she was approached by a
canvasser from Libre Initiative, a Koch-backed organization that
targets Latino communities with a libertarian agenda. The canvasser
told her about all the services the group offers: Spanish language
workshops for parents on how to apply for scholarships, English
language tutoring, computer classes and more. In Baena’s words,
Libre’s goal is to get people in a room, help them meet their basic
needs, and then preach the gospel of small government.

Beana is a co-founder of Siembra NC, which mostly organizes around
workers’ rights, in particular the challenges many immigrant
laborers face, including wage theft. Ideologically, Baena is
diametrically opposed to Libre’s politics, but she is fascinated by
their tactics. She has seen Libre staffers doing stunts outside
discount grocery stores, blasting Bidenomics and inflation. They offer
cash-strapped shoppers gift cards in the amount of money that
Democrats’ policies supposedly “stole” from them. People are
grateful for the help and so they stop to chat.

By capturing the Republican party, Trump positioned himself to reap
the benefits of decades of work by rightwing activists, donors and
strategists who aimed to strengthen the grip of conservative
ideologues and corporate interests on American political life. With
laser-like focus, they attacked labor unions, gutted campaign finance
law, captured the courts, reconfigured electoral maps and mobilized
key interest groups, from anti-abortion activists to gun lovers. And
they are actively broadening their reach.

When Democrats insist that Trump had no ground game, they ignore the
right wing’s investment and presence in spaces that are not purely
electoral and that engage people year-round, including groups like
Libre, along with the evangelical churches and student groups that
increasingly function as social clubs recruiting people to the Maga
cause. As Tiffany Dena Loftin details in the new issue of the Black
leftist magazine Hammer & Hope
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right wing has spent decades systematically attacking and defunding
progressive student unions and networks and building up their
conservative counterparts. The Charlie Kirk-founded and Republican
billionaire-funded Turning Point USA claims to have “freedom
chapters” at more than 3,500 colleges and high schools, which offer
young conservatives a sense of belonging and community, leadership
development, and pathways to political engagement, of which
get-out-the-vote (GOTV) efforts are just one part.

 
The Libre Initiative, a nonprofit funded by the Koch brothers to get
the Latino vote, hands out Spanish-language copies of the Nevada
Drivers Handbook in Las Vegas, Nevada.   (Photograph: The Washington
Post  //  The Guardian)
The Trump campaign built on this model, providing its base with
community and purpose and organizing them, in turn, to mobilize others
to turn out and vote. Before joining Trump’s team as campaign
co-chair, Susie Wiles spent years working to lock down Florida for
Republicans (she’s since been named Trump’s incoming chief of
staff
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Her tactics make people feel like an essential part of a group with a
clear goal. Wiles piloted the “10 for Trump”
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caucus program, which gave a subset of 2,000 volunteers the title of
“captain”, a limited-edition gold-embroidered hat, and the goal of
motivating 10 people in their precincts to turn out. In the general
election, specially trained volunteers were dubbed “Trump Force
47”
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tasked with developing longer term relationships with so-called low-
or mid-propensity voters, going beyond the usual door-knocking to
forge relationships aimed at converting these targets into Republican
loyalists. The campaign also used Trump’s false claims of election
fraud to recruit and train tens of thousands of hyper-vigilant poll
workers and Maga acolytes.

“Trump or someone around him is quite bright about the definitional
difference between mobilization and organization,” Tory Gavito,
founder of Way to Win, told me. Mobilizing people to turn out and cast
a ballot is not nearly as powerful as organizing people to adopt an
identity, commit to a cause, and join a collective effort to push for
change. That’s why Way to Win, a progressive donor network, directs
funds to groups that do year-round organizing, rather than
helicoptering in days or weeks before an election or relying on
high-profile celebrity endorsements.

In Gavito’s estimation, Trump’s GOTV effort probably mattered less
in the end than what she calls the “organizations and institutions
that shape worldviews” and engage large numbers of people in their
daily lives. That’s where the Democrats’ super polished, pop-up
ground game fell short.

‘Knocked on too many doors’

Ironically, the right not only has its own (often lavishly funded)
political and cultural infrastructure; it also benefits from
infrastructure’s absence in a way the left does not. Widespread
feelings of isolation, loneliness and alienation help their cause. The
conservative culture warrior Christopher Rufo, for example, has
boasted about how a lack of social trust works to his advantage.
Distrust makes it easier to spread lies and misinformation and pit
communities against each other – to divide and conquer in order to
shrink government, raise corporate profits, and concentrate power.

Firelands Workers United is an organization that brings together
working families to rebuild this tattered social trust, working in
rural Washington, including in counties where majorities voted for
Trump. They do so by organizing for good jobs, housing, healthcare and
fair taxes. The way they organized in 2024 offers a lesson in
class-based solidarity that the national Democratic party should learn
from.

This electoral cycle, Firelands’ base was focused on fighting
several ballot measures. Washington might be a blue state, but it is
one with a remarkably regressive tax system and perennial budget
problems. This year the California hedge fund manager Brian Heywood
spent $6m on four ballot measures that aimed to repeal popular
policies, including a recently passed capital gains tax. The result
would have reduced funding for affordable childcare and schools and
killed rural jobs. If the capital gains ballot measure had passed,
4,000 wealthy Washingtonians would get richer while everyone else,
non-immigrant and immigrant, would pay the price.

Through 2024, Firelands trained dozens of members so they could
educate their communities about this looming threat. They did so by
emphasizing a shared class interest, not partisan loyalties, which
allowed them to reach across cultural and political divides. “This
isn’t about Republicans
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People out here are frustrated with any politician who sides with the
rich over working people,” said the group’s co-founder Stina
Janssen.

Firelands members collaborate across very different backgrounds. A
Washington-born retired corrections officer and a Latin American
immigrant mill worker would canvas together and develop a real
relationship. They, in turn, would connect with voters over anger at
billionaires and inequality and invite them into a movement, opening
space for people’s assumptions and attitudes to change. “There
would not have been a chance to build these friendships or for the
people born here to learn and hear people’s immigration stories with
the same level of curiosity without this close work together,”
Janssen said.

Now the group’s non-immigrant members understand what it means for
someone to be facing deportation. And immigrant members feel less
alone as they understand they are not the only people struggling with
healthcare or rent. “Our organizing approach held and affirmed
everyone’s suffering and helped people see how their experiences
were tied together,” Janssen explained. This “dignity-based
solidarity”, as Janssen calls it, isn’t about asking people to
check their privilege. It’s rooted in the recognition that we all
suffer and deserve better: making ends meet shouldn’t be this hard
for me or for you.

This kind of deep organizing takes time because it aims at shifting
political consciousness and fostering enduring commitment. It also
requires resources. As Baena told me, groups like Turning Point and
Libre Initiative “can hire so many people because they have endless
money”. It’s easier to fund an organization that helps
billionaires’ bottom lines than one that threatens them.

Yet Democrats had plenty of money this year, much of which was
contributed by smaller donors. But they spent it on the standard
playbook. The Harris campaign spent billions blanketing the airwaves
with ads (outspending Republicans three to one on paid media),
bombarding undecided voters with text messages, and bussing
out-of-state volunteers to canvas neighborhoods. None of those tactics
leave a trace after the campaign pulls up stakes. They might as well
have set the cash on fire.

Like many other organizers I spoke to, Billy Wimsatt, the executive
director of Movement Voter Pac (MVP), believes those resources could
have been deployed more wisely. “What if, instead of spending
millions to keep cable news on life support, you had split that money
between strategically building up local organizing and online
influencer organizing?” he said. This year, MVP moved money to
hundreds of organizations that do year-round issue-based organizing in
key battleground states in addition to GOTV. That entailed everything
from mutual aid to media to ballot measures and candidate recruitment.
Wimsatt highlighted the work of Faith in Minnesota, a multi-faith,
multi-racial, statewide organization. The group organizes diverse
communities, including Muslims and manufactured home park residents,
around high-impact issues like housing affordability. This season,
Faith in Minnesota volunteers had thousands of conversations with
voters and helped protect the state house from flipping to
Republicans. “Real organizing wins. Superficial mobilizing loses,”
Wimsatt said.

Andrew Willis Garcés, another Siembra NC co-founder, puts it bluntly:
Democrats across the country actually “knocked too many doors”.
The party’s much ballyhooed ground game failed because it was
engineered to facilitate one-off conversations that stick to a script
instead of supporting local organizations and campaigns that engage
ordinary people around issues they care about. For the people Siembra
aims to reach, that means fights to recover stolen wages, stop local
law enforcement from collaborating with Immigrations and Customs
Enforcement (Ice), and win protections for mobile home tenants.
Garcés believes that these kinds of local issue campaigns can drive
voter engagement by helping people connect their lived experience to
candidates or campaigns that might otherwise seem distant, abstract or
uninspiring.

 
Prisi Hernandez, left, and Laura Hernandez, both with the
organization Siembra NC, help Nery Ocampo, 19, register to vote in
Burlington, North Carolina, in 2020.   (Photograph: Jacquelyn
Martin/AP  //  The Guardian)
That can make a difference in an election like the recent one, which
Baena describes as a three-way race between Trump, Harris and the
couch. In terms of sheer numbers, the couch came out ahead. While much
has been said about Latino men turning to Trump, Baena and Garcés
believe the real story is that lots of Latino voters, like other key
voting groups, “sat this one out”. All told, nearly 90 million
eligible
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36% of the overall electorate, stayed home.

As Baena sees it, the Democrats didn’t have much to offer working
people, whatever their race, gender or ethnicity, in terms of tangible
improvement to their daily lives or a clear and compelling vision of
why the future under Harris would have been better. At the door, there
wasn’t much to say besides “the other guy is bad”. You can’t
win people over by telling them everything is fine when they can’t
afford groceries, rent, and gas, or when they are upset about the war
on Gaza.

This all goes back to the lack of trust. “People don’t trust
people outside their families and they don’t trust politicians or
the government,” Baena said. Parachuting canvassers into a community
to have one-time conversations will never truly move the needle; you
need to listen and earn trust before you can change minds. “The work
of base-building is getting people to befriend strangers and build
community outside of their families, and that’s a pathway to getting
people to trust their neighbors and institutions,” he added.

“If liberals really care about winning elections,” Baena
continued, “they need to reach these people. We need year-round
organizing to really bring people in and to show them that they and
their families can benefit from public investment and services. And we
have to organize in a way that allows the base to feel they’ve
helped win the election, not that the campaign won.”

That’s the feeling Firelands managed to inspire in its members – a
feeling of being agents of change, not passive consumers of politics.
On election day, all the regressive ballot measures were voted down in
the rural areas where Firelands and their partners organized,
including Grays Harbor county, where Trump won 51.5% of the vote but
nearly 60% of voters said “no” to repealing taxes on capital
gains. Groups like Faith in Minnesota and Firelands show that by
emphasizing shared class interests and focusing on clear progressive
policies, it’s possible to make inroads with voters who are
skeptical of politicians and even sympathetic to aspects of the Maga
movement.

People-centered, issue-focused organizing

Before the 2016 election, the New York senator Chuck Schumer made a
now infamous pronouncement about the Democratic party’s electoral
strategy: “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western
Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs
in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and
Wisconsin.”

In 2021, on the other hand, the then US representative Jim Banks of
Indiana (now senator-elect) shared a memo
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the then House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, detailing how the
Republican party could “permanently become the Party of the Working
Class” in part by appealing to “minority voters”.

Three years later, Banks’s proposal no longer reads as wishful
thinking. Trump’s campaign made inroads with low-income communities
and voters of color in urban and rural areas nationwide, including
peeling off an alarming number of unionized voters. Meanwhile,
Schumer’s plan of tacking to the center in order to target
Republican voters at the expense of less affluent Democratic ones
helped Harris get trounced.

Instead of aspiring to razor-thin margins of victory, Democrats must
become more populist and more ambitious. But better messaging must be
coupled with a disciplined strategy to expand the voting base and win
resounding majorities so politicians can actually deliver on a
platform that makes this country more inclusive, sustainable, and
fair.

To accomplish this, Democrats need to find ways to win over some of
the people who voted for Trump not because they are committed to Maga,
but out of frustration with the status quo. And they also need to
connect with many more of those millions of people who chose the
couch. Instead of listening to the Liz Cheney-loving consulting class
and the cable ad-buying gurus at Future Forward
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Democrats need to muster the kind of political determination that
drove Susie Wiles to swing Florida firmly to the right and enabled
Republicans to paint Texas a deep red.

You can bet that conservative strategists are thinking about how to
eat away at Democratic strongholds, including California. Where’s
the 10-year plan to flip Texas and its 40 electoral votes back to
blue?

The problem isn’t just a lack of vision or political will, but
resources. The big money bundlers and special interests don’t want
to cede control. According to Way to Win’s Gavito, the aftermath of
Trump’s first victory brought together an unlikely coalition of
Democratic donors, many of whom were not particularly liberal, let
alone progressive, but who were concerned about threats to democracy
and craving a return to normalcy. After Joe Biden won, many ceased to
collaborate or invest in base-building efforts, wary of strategies
aimed at empowering diverse working-class voters or delivering the
kind of progressive policy measures that might appeal to them.
Perhaps, now, some of these donors will realize that their cautious,
center-hewing strategy has failed and reassess their approach.

But changes at the top won’t be enough if they’re not tethered to
change on the ground. Voter outreach needs to be people- and
place-centered, not data- and advertiser-driven. It needs to be
issue-focused and year-round, not scaled in eight weeks and gone
overnight. And it must offer more than an awkward conversation at the
door and an alienating avalanche of texts treating recipients like
little more than ATMs. People need a sense of belonging and a
compelling and credible vision of a future worth fighting for.

In the end, the fate of democracy is too precious to leave in the
hands of the Democratic party. Across the country, ordinary people are
building the relationships, organizations, and power required to move
this country forward. They are the ground game we need.

_[ASTRA TAYLOR is a writer, organizer, and documentarian. Her books
include the American Book Award winner The People's Platform: Taking
Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age
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May Not Exist, but We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone
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Her most recent film is What Is Democracy?
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* 2024 Elections
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* Working Families Party
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* Bernie Sanders
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* Our Revolution
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