Too often, campaigns wait until the final months before Election Day to reach out to voters—and when they do finally start, they exhaust the same people with repeated contact, use bad, one-directional messaging, skip tough conversations, and overlook the 1 in 4 potential voters who don’t appear in the voter file.
Starting this fall—a full year earlier than traditional electoral organizing programs—we will pilot the Ground Truth program in targeted swing districts that’ll be key to flipping the House.
We’re going to knock every door, talk to every voter, listen deeply, and aggregate the ground insights we gather—creating the largest focus group ever.
And, taking advantage of a new federal election rule that lets us organize our own canvassing efforts while still coordinating directly with campaigns, we’ll share what we learn directly with campaigns and party committees to inform their messaging, targeting, and execution.
Where there’s currently a Democratic nominee in a competitive district, we’ll work in coordination with that candidate’s campaign. And in the districts where there’s a late primary, we can’t afford to wait a year to talk to swing voters. We’ll get to work building voter trust, deep local infrastructure, and a pool of valuable data that the eventual primary winner can use from day one of the general election.
This is a massive overhaul of Democrats’ existing approach. It will fundamentally change how Democrats understand voters’ real-life concerns—their ground truth—so we can rebuild trust and win more elections again.
We admit, knocking every door is an astronomical goal. But as we stand at the front door of autocracy, we need to think big and do the ambitious work that meets the moment.
At Swing Left, this is how we’ll direct the time, energy, and resources of our 1+ million members to voter contact that is strategic, meaningful, and early enough to matter. We can only do it with your help. We need to build in-district field teams, a national distributed organizing team, and an expanded data engineering team. Your support will be absolutely critical.
We know the headlines have been brutal, and it’s easy to feel powerless to change things, including Democrats’ messaging and ability to connect with voters. But Ground Truth is how anyone can create a real, tangible impact.
