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How Did Democrats Forget These Four Things about Field Organizing?
Those of us who want to keep a constitutional democracy have a lot of persuading and mobilizing to do. That process will include conversations with voters across the country, the more of them face-to-face the better. But is Democratic field organizing up to the moment?
Many Democrats (including me) thought that the party had a big advantage on Election Day 2024, regardless of what else had gone wrong that year. We were told that our robust and well planned field operation had been built to turn out enough of the right voters to win close elections, even in the face something like Elon Musk’s pricey but chaotic Republican equivalent. Needless to say, that prediction didn’t turn out too well.
Could a better field campaign have overcome the Biden hangover and low Dem voter enthusiasm? We’ll never know. But judging from the earful of complaints I’ve received from field organizers since the fall, including at February’s RootsCamp, too many Democratic campaigns and organizations have forgotten some of the basic practices that fueled grassroots success a decade ago. I’ve honestly been shocked to hear how much the Democratic state of the art seems to have slipped, in four areas in particular.
The Obama Example
First, let’s start with a shining example of grassroots competence: Obama’s 2008 and 2012 campaigns, which turned out voters with data-driven precision and a whole lot of hard work, helping him win the ’08 primary and beat Republican candidates for president twice. One key to his success? His campaign standardized its field operation across the country, as I described in my 2009 ebook on the ’08 digital race:
How the Obama field operation organized their volunteer teams deserves special mention, in part because their grassroots GOTV technology depended on it and also because it provides an excellent model for community-based organizers of all flavors. The structure evolved in the primaries and went national during the general election season. Its critical features:
- The campaign developed a clear team structure for the volunteer operation, replicable just about anywhere and with standard roles for each member. Each volunteer team included a leader (to hold everyone accountable), a data manager (because data doesn’t exist unless it gets in the system), a phone bank coordinator, a campus coordinator and a volunteer coordinator.
- Training was absolutely vital, both for team members and for the individual neighborhood volunteers they organized.
- Teams had clear vote-getting and voter-contact goals and were held accountable for them.
- Example: for the general election, the Obama organization fielded 400 teams in the state of Missouri, supervised by paid campaign staff, with each team covering 8-12 voting precincts and starting work weeks or months before November 4th.
One thing stands out about this system: it required a lot from volunteers, both in terms of training and in actual sweat. To keep them working, the campaign was careful to let them in on the kind of strategy details that campaigns usually strive to hide. One trick to motivating people: let them know how their efforts fit into a larger framework, in this case via David Plouffe’s online video briefings, so that they know that their work has context and is actually valued. If you want to create a successful national grassroots outreach effort, focus on context, training and accountability. I.e., take your people seriously and they’ll return the favor — they want to know that they aren’t just blindly making calls or knocking on doors.
A lot of campaign wisdom in a short block of text! Let’s look at three areas where today’s Democratic campaigns seem to be missing opportunities.
Starting Early
I’ve heard repeatedly from field folks that campaigns were already into GOTV season by the time grassroots organizing got rolling in 2024. That left little time to:
- Recruit volunteers
- Train them, including via mock voter conversations
- Contact voters in person repeatedly to begin to build relationships
- Update voter data with canvassing results
- ID Dem voters who needed shoring up
- ID persuadable voters
- Reach them enough times to make a difference, whether in what they felt about the candidates or in the likelihood they’d turn out.
Instead, since they started so late, canvassers could often drop literature and do little else.
Had they started months earlier, grassroots volunteers and staff could have begun contacting voters well before traditional campaign season. They would have worked in a more relaxed political environment, before TV and digital ads flooded people’s screens and their opinions hardened. As an experienced campaigner pointed out on a recent panel I attended, election season is the most difficult time to start building a narrative. By starting late, Democrats missed the opportunity last year to talk to people when they may still have had an open mind.
They also missed the chance to talk with people repeatedly to build rapport. Instead of catching targets every few weeks over a period of several months, they could only knock on doors or make calls at the last moment and hope someone would answer. They also had fewer chances to hold conversations around less campaign-centric settings such as community gatherings, church services or the local coffee shop, which would allow for serendipitous meetings with voters who may not have appeared on a priority list generated by a data model but whose votes might be up for grabs.
Instead, Democrats need a SUSTAINED presence in communities where elections are likely to be decided, and anywhere else they can afford it, too. Persuasion is a long-term game, and when you start at the last minute, you don’t have much chance to change hearts and minds.
Taking Volunteer Training Seriously
Face-to-face conversation is one of the few things that can break through and reach people in an insanely crowded media environment, but only if those conversations go well. Late-starting field campaigns also give themselves little time to train volunteers to go back-and-forth with voters, some of whom will be skeptical or even hostile.
I’ve heard from 2024 field organizers that their volunteers would usually show up full of enthusiasm, but that too often it didn’t last. They might find themselves stuck in an office with little to do, or they might be sent out to canvass voters without much training or even understanding of how their work fit into the campaign. If they encountered hostile voters, they may not have known how to handle the situation gracefully, leaving them frustrated and demoralized.
When they did manage to hold a successful conversation on the phone or at someone’s door, their lack of experience with the miniVAN or other campaign apps meant that the data they gathered could be inaccurate or unusable. In that case, the campaign wouldn’t really know WHICH data was corrupted, making it harder to trust any of it to be accurate.
By contrast, as we saw above, Obama’s campaigns poured resources into volunteer training, much of which took place remotely via digital video. Zoom wasn’t even a dream in 2008, but YouTube already existed, as did video hosting inside individual websites. Training ensured that members of volunteer teams knew their jobs and knew each other, giving them the confidence to go out and meet voters in the wild.
It also helped them step into their roles before campaign staff were on hand to organize them, letting the campaign build a national field presence months before the general election. Once the campaign itself moved into a particular state, whether in the primary season or as they built out the apparatus in the fall, staff could parachute into an operation that was already running and help it work more efficiently and effectively. They didn’t have to build an entire field operation from scratch and on the fly.
Motivation & Context
Let’s take another look at David Plouffe’s weekly videos from 2008. A problem field campaigns often encounter is finding ways to put people to work productively. Sometimes, they get so many volunteers at once that they don’t have much of substance for them to do. Instead, they may be left stuffing envelopes with little interaction with others or much idea of WHY envelope-stuffing matters.
Naturally, top-down campaigns usually suffer more from this issue, since they leave relatively few decisions to grassroots managers in the first place. And since political people tend to be cagey about campaign strategy on a good day, they’re often reluctant to let junior staff in on the details, much less unvetted volunteers.
By contrast, Plouffe’s videos reflect a mindset that respects volunteers and the grassroots organizing they do. He took a risk by speaking openly on web videos about what the campaign was trying to accomplish, but it paid off. I know Obama volunteers who devoted forty hours a week or more to the campaign for months on end, buoyed by the understanding that their work fit into a well planned machine. By taking volunteers seriously, the campaign ensured that the volunteers would take their work for Obama seriously, too.
Voter Data Feedback Loops
Because Obama’s people trusted their volunteers and invested in their success, the campaign could also trust the data they reported after talking with voters. Unlike Clinton in Michigan in 2016, Obama’s staff used it to help make real decisions about where to put people and money. David Plouffe said after the campaign:
…In our own campaign, polling was just one way we viewed how we were doing in a state in the general election. We had a lot of voter identification work. We had a lot of field data. So we’d put all that together and model out the election in those states every week. So we’d say, okay, if the election were held this week based on all our data, put it all in a blender, where are we? And obviously, with technology today, we could measure this very carefully. We don’t have to wait for a state to report in how they did that night; we can look at it, down to the volunteer level, because we trusted our volunteers. We gave them the voter file, we said here are the people on your block, you go talk to ’em, you record the result of the conversation. We in Chicago could look at that…
…It makes you enormously agile. You’ve got real-time data, and that makes you make scheduling decisions and resource-allocation decisions and where to send surrogates and you’re adjusting those by the end multiple times a day. Not just down to the media market, but down to chunks of voters in those media markets. We’re not doing as well as we need to here, so we’ve got to throw a lot of our resources in there. These guys are making a surge in a media market, we’ve got to go try and correct that.
In 2012, if I remember correctly, those decisions included where to send high-level surrogates such as Michelle Obama herself. After the president’s reelection, Democrats continued to enjoy the fruits of his labors, including in Virginia’s 2013 off-year elections. Terry McAuliffe won a tight race for governor that year in part because of a statewide turnout machine that incorporated the same kind of voter-data feedback loops the Obama campaign employed. But not for long: By 2016, Hillary Clinton’s campaign was happy to tell grassroots staff and volunteers what to do but was much less interested in listening to what they were hearing from voters on the ground.
How Did We Get Here?
Which brings us to the question of how we ended up here. The pandemic clearly played a role, since the Biden campaign and many other Democrats avoided in-person conversations with voters in 2020. Most field organizers are young, and many of those who were working to elect Kamala Harris last year would have had less experience with a robust grassroots operation than their predecessors a decade ago, in the immediate post-Obama era.
But another idea has come up in conversations with field folks: trust. Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign was run from on high, with little input from the staff and volunteers who were actually talking with voters:
The Clinton campaign was a top-down disaster. Early on at the Brooklyn headquarters, they had come up with a model of who her likely voters were, and a plan based on the assumption that they wouldn’t be able to change the minds of anyone who wasn’t already with her, and that it was about turning out more of the people who were. Nervous for weeks of the final stretch, staffers on the ground begged for more help and attention. They were turned down, told not to worry.
Worked great, didn’t it! In 2020, Covid hamstrung Democratic campaigns, but Biden’s team did have a couple of thousand paid staff on the ground and was at least holding conversations with voters over the phone. Still, with many people stuck at home, the campaign emphasized digital content along with advertising to reach the public.
By the summer of 2024, field seems to have become an afterthought. Biden’s state-level organizers pleaded with leadership for the resources to allow them an early start, but like other parts of the Democratic apparatus last year, the grassroots campaign seemed frozen. Harris’s ascension to the top of the ticket at least opened the spigots, but by the time funding made it down to the people knocking on doors, no time remained for the kind of in-depth voter engagement Obama’s team had emphasized in a dozen years before.
We Can Do Better
How do Democrats get out of this hole? Look to our own past, for a start. Michigan Dems were in a bad place after 2016, but instead of folding, then-Sen. Debbie Stabenow took money out of her own campaign fund to hire field organizers and begin a long-term canvassing operation in the state. From my own experience in Michigan, the state Democratic party also emphasized building the vote from the bottom up, by investing in down-ballot campaigns for state legislature and local offices.
Their work paid off in a Biden victory in 2020 and a successful midterm year in 2022. Trump won the state last November and Dems lost control of the state House of Representatives, but they held on to a U.S. Senate seat and suffered fewer losses down-ballot than they might have in a losing presidential year. Had the party not invested in the infrastructure to reach voters at scale and over time, I suspect they would find themselves in a far worse situation than they are now.
The people who give money to Democratic organizations and the people who run them must take notice. I’d argue that one of the biggest changes has to be cultural. I constantly hear the complaint that big Democratic donors don’t like to pay for infrastructure; they tend to want their name on something more exciting than office rent and the slow grind of talking to voters on the ground. Those among us who have funders’ ears must keep taking them practical plans for long-term persuasion, including field and digital outreach. Small-dollar donors can also help fund new infrastructure, though Dems will have to treat them with the same respect they need to show to field volunteers.
The leaders of Democratic organizations need to embrace the urgent need for sustained engagement, too. Dumping money into advertising at the last minute — much of it on broadcast TV — isn’t enough to win in today’s media environment. By the time voters see ads in September or October, most of them will already have made up their minds, if they see the ads at all.
Real persuasion has to start early, and when possible, it needs to include contact from people whom the targets trust. Those trusted voices can and should include influencers with relevant audiences, but deep canvassing and persistent field campaigning help Democrats talk with the same voters over and over, building rapport and (we hope) opening hearts and minds.
Digital, streaming, cable and broadcast TV advertising can also play a role in long-term persuasion, particularly when they’re reaching the same communities and people campaigns are also targeting for field outreach, as can organic content campaigns. Finally, Democrats can and should mobilize individual supporters and activists to become evangelists within their own social circles.
I’ll have more on those two topics soon, but for now, let’s end on a sober note. Grassroots Democrats have the motivation to help change minds, and many of them have the skills from past campaigns. What they need is resources, leadership and context. It’s up to donors and leaders to make sure they have them, and it’s up to campaigners and practitioners to push donors and leaders to do it. Will we rise to the moment? We’d better.
For more on how Democrats can adapt to 2025’s political and media environment, see:
- How Democrats Ended Up in the Digital Media Ditch
- Sen. Chris Murphy’s Master Class in Modern Digital Communications
- Will Robinson’s recent work, including Building a Media Ecosystem to Meet the Moment
– cpd
Top image: 2008 Obama field team, via Wikimedia
