I worked at the polls on Election Day here in Queens. My precinct had a mix of people that’s typical for my neighborhood — we needed the Bengali and Mandarin interpreters a few times — and about a third of voters wanted us to walk them through how the ballot worked in Spanish. When I looked at the results, that district went 35% to Trump.
I’ve been doing more hands-on voter registration locally to me this year, mostly through Headcount and belatedly through NYC Votes. I was also able to do a shift of door knocking with the AOC campaign before the primary. I’ve looked for hyper local political groups in my neighborhood and come up short. I’ve told the one guy who’s the only one ever petitioning my block that I want to help out and have never heard back. Eight years ago I was willing to gather in a community center basement with a bunch of strangers for weekly meetings where we tried to find ways to help out. I’m proud of the work we did — I was in the coalition that ousted the IDC here in NYC — but I’m not willing to spin up something like that again. I do still write postcards weekly, even if you think they’re ineffective. It’s one of the few activities that anyone’s suggested that I can sustainably do.
When I think about what we asked newbie activists to do right after the Women’s March, I’m actually sort of sad about where that energy went. Millions of (mostly) women gave their time. For me, it made volunteering a weekly habit, and I’m grateful for that, but we’re making big promises, asking people for a lot of their time and treasure and not really giving them much in return. I’m especially not feeling great about how much campaigns seem to cost and how ineffective things were this time around. A friend on a budget cut back on all her streaming services so she could send money to campaigns. There are better ways to spend billions of dollars. For all that ad spend, we could have just given everyone in the US a cupcake or something.
I’ve learned a lot of things by talking about voting to strangers. One is that there are a lot of people who sit diagonally to everyone else politically. They have a major issue that isn’t covered, or find that their values conflict with both parties. I’ve also see how often people complain about getting too many political texts. A friend said that her texts were unusable because it was nearly all spam, and when I looked, she was mostly getting PACs texting her, not candidates. I’ve had a few people refuse to get voting reminders because they don’t want more texts.
Mary: Thank you so much for sharing your story. It really resonates for me and I bet a lot of other people. At the local local level where most of us get to organize as volunteers, the challenges are frustrating. It's hard to get a group together of people who like and trust each other; it's hard for groups to stick together when they run into adversity; and groups that are open to newcomers also have all kinds of challenges absorbing new people, some of whom as you point out come with agendas that are diagonal to ours or only overlap partially. If the Democratic Party existed year round AND had a clear platform in theory it would do these things, but it's been MIA for decades. Instead it falls to local volunteers to figure most of this out on their own. Everyone comes with good intentions but given how big the Democratic coalition is, inevitably conflicts arise. We need better models for how to do this.
I see so much of my experience as a volunteer and activist reflected in the issues you've raised for years. I wanna do good things in the world with the chunk of my time that I can give, and there's a real disconnect between the good intentions of most grassroots volunteers and the lousy outcomes we get because we're not actually supported (or maybe even wanted!) by the folks stacked above us.
I don't believe that we should have so much money in politics, so I've tried to put that in action by giving my time instead. It's been a mixed bag. I really believe in community building, but I look at the headwinds for some of my other volunteer groups vs the headwinds for my activist groups and it's pretty obvious what's harder. I also volunteer for dance/art/cultural groups and ironically that's much, much easier and less drama-filled!
Kamala ran a beautiful, flawless 100 day campaign. the problem was that the only infrastructure and model she had to use is fundamentally flawed.
For thirty years, the Democratic party created by the Clintons and other "Davos Dems" has relied on a corporate model of big money, outsourcing fundraising (ActBlue) and organizing to a crazy quilt of interest groups and nonprofits all competing for the same donors, and relying on volunteers to canvass and write to strangers. It worked initially because the Republican party was doing largely the same thing, but it stopped working when Trump made his supporters feel seen and heard.
And that model ran headfirst into the era of Bowling Alone (I always comes back to that book) and an atomized, lonely, distanced citizenry. This was a devastating, under examined (except by you, Micah!) combination. And Trump filled the void. His “cult” is actually a church, a place of belonging for people who feel left out and ignored. They know one another, which is why they didn’t need volunteer canvassers bused in.
About ten years ago, I met the head of NYC’s SEIU. He lamented that the newer, younger members just saw the union as an insurance company providing benefits. They didn’t have a sense of community or connection to other members and the union writ large. I asked him what they were doing to build community and the answer was nothing.
The function of the Dem party needs to change from being transactional during election time to being relational all the time.This is the gift of this election, the opportunity to build the next chapter in political parties.
Before the TV era, political parties were organized around precinct captains (aka district leaders or ward heelers) who were in charge of a precinct and knew their party's voters - and the particular issues each one cared about. It was "relational organizing" 101. Then TV came along and highly-paid media consultants copied Madison Avenue and created ads designed to "persuade." That advertising mentality now includes mailers, social media ads, and doorknock scripts. And instead of actually knowing what each voter cares about based on conversations, data analysts create "models" to guess what they care about. Unfortunately talking "at" voters (advertising) based on issue models cannot compare to genuine relational organizing.
There are a few threads here that are coming together for me, which I've also seen from past local campaigns I've participated in: we HAVE to build bases of local organizers on the ground. When I participated in Vanessa Agudelo's bid for Assembly in 2022, we had so many volunteers showing up to knock doors, but outside of a core group, a lot of them were from either the city or parts of the Hudson Valley pretty far outside the district. That field program reached a lot of people, but we still lost. Similarly, one of the complaints I heard from the local staff during the Bowman campaign was that they'd recommended local people for some of the paid field roles and those jobs went to people from out of state instead. We can't keep bringing in outside people without ever building up local talent.
When I knock doors, I often get asked where I live. I have two small kids and a non-political job, so I don't travel to canvass for big campaigns. I can truthfully tell people that I'm local (or local enough) and it helps to build a connection. I may be a stranger, but I'm not an outsider. When they ask that question of people who are coming from out of town, I have to wonder how much that influences the weight they give to the out-of-towner's perspective.
If all politics is local, why aren't we equipping local people to do it?
Yes thank you for laying this out so clearly, and for calling out postcarding, for example, as the form of self-care that it is.
The Democrats have committed malpractice for 9 years now. I have heard reports of people who were eager to step in and lead county parties, for example, who were ridiculed and shamed (with attempts to smear their reputation) into deserting the party altogether. This is an old guard who a) thinks they know what they are doing and they DO NOT b) are stuck in high school popularity contests and c) are actively thwarting new, creative energy out of some sense of "how things are done." It is an abomination.
I know that this is just one star in a constellation of problems, but it makes me so very angry precisely because it's so unnecessary, given all that we are actually meant to be dealing with. Everything they do is based on flawed reasoning divorced from even basic intuition about how human beings feel. Frankly, think almost the entire Democratic Party and campaign machinery needs to be fired.
1). It always was going to take a miracle for the incumbent party to win. No incumbent party has ever won with wrong track numbers like these (65 percent of voters thought nation on wrong track)...and worldwide the results have been similar in elections. Harris gave it her all but could not defeat the voters feelings on the economy.
2). Liberal elites parachuting into swing states on weekend trips was and is always hubris.
3). GOTV activities (activity vs results) like postcard writing are extremely not important. Mostly they give campaigns (and other folks) something to give volunteers to do to keep them occupied and thinking they are helping.
4). Privacy and interrupting people's lives. I don't know about you but I hate people interrupting my privacy and life with knocking on my door and making my dogs bark.. And waking up the baby. The political industrial complex doesn't give a crap about what voters want and how they want to be communicated to. They have never asked.. It is spam spam spam.
At the end of the day.... Voters wanted change and the dem establishment was not it.
I can't really speak to the ground game in PA. I'm not shocked that the center-slight-left political party full of career politicians that begs for donations has troubles being inspiring: that just seems like an "of course" to me, not a place for great cynicism, how did we think the world was going to work? It is their careers, they do need to raise that money, there is no magic answer.
I feel like I'm witnessing the lack of oomph farther left from the center of politics. I grew up politically with "if the people lead, the leaders will follow." And we are not. I live in Berkeley amongst self-styled cutting-edge radicals and the biggest contribution I saw — thank you thank you thank you to those who did it — was things like post-carding and a few people making calls. The Bernie Sanders group I was part of spent it's energy in-fighting: I saw just about nothing from my immediate community that was radical AND inspiring. I experienced a huge blue wave of saying "vote blue" and a huge left-wave of criticizing the blue and each other.
No one is stopping us from building a radical movement alongside the Democrats. Of being kind to each other while we do it, and normalizing that. Of making a world where people looked at the career politicians and of course said "meh, responsible but disappointing" and THEN looked at a beautiful and radical alternative on the left and wondered if they could be hopeful enough to risk it —> in this election, the only clear alternative to career politicians being realistic was the hatred and conspiracy thinking from the right. We — my "we" is farther left than Democrats — we failed to create a left-edge to the Overton window that left Biden and Harris as the right-edge of reasonable. Harris and Biden were trying, while my friends were infighting.
It has been said over and over that we need a call-in culture not call-out, and I don't know how to get us there. I don't think that Biden and Harris doing their best was really the weak spot in 2024. What should our movement have looked like?
What three issues should we have focused on that could have both supported and challenged the Democrats, uplifting rather than undercutting their half-measures? Who were our communication experts? The trolls have developed techniques to get people arguing, what communication techniques create solidarity? You and I will never fix the Democratic machine's weak ground game, but we could build a movement that made them look corporate and boring *from the left* so that the right doesn't own rebellion.
Fintan O'Toole in the NYRB mentions "Trump's uncanny ability to turn the world upside down.". I believe he's referring to Trump's projection, an odious trait which never received sufficient attention.
yes and also his broad proclamations like "I alone can fix this." He communicates at a level of hubris and bullshit that Democrats would never use - and never figured out how to turn against him.
I worked at the polls on Election Day here in Queens. My precinct had a mix of people that’s typical for my neighborhood — we needed the Bengali and Mandarin interpreters a few times — and about a third of voters wanted us to walk them through how the ballot worked in Spanish. When I looked at the results, that district went 35% to Trump.
I’ve been doing more hands-on voter registration locally to me this year, mostly through Headcount and belatedly through NYC Votes. I was also able to do a shift of door knocking with the AOC campaign before the primary. I’ve looked for hyper local political groups in my neighborhood and come up short. I’ve told the one guy who’s the only one ever petitioning my block that I want to help out and have never heard back. Eight years ago I was willing to gather in a community center basement with a bunch of strangers for weekly meetings where we tried to find ways to help out. I’m proud of the work we did — I was in the coalition that ousted the IDC here in NYC — but I’m not willing to spin up something like that again. I do still write postcards weekly, even if you think they’re ineffective. It’s one of the few activities that anyone’s suggested that I can sustainably do.
When I think about what we asked newbie activists to do right after the Women’s March, I’m actually sort of sad about where that energy went. Millions of (mostly) women gave their time. For me, it made volunteering a weekly habit, and I’m grateful for that, but we’re making big promises, asking people for a lot of their time and treasure and not really giving them much in return. I’m especially not feeling great about how much campaigns seem to cost and how ineffective things were this time around. A friend on a budget cut back on all her streaming services so she could send money to campaigns. There are better ways to spend billions of dollars. For all that ad spend, we could have just given everyone in the US a cupcake or something.
I’ve learned a lot of things by talking about voting to strangers. One is that there are a lot of people who sit diagonally to everyone else politically. They have a major issue that isn’t covered, or find that their values conflict with both parties. I’ve also see how often people complain about getting too many political texts. A friend said that her texts were unusable because it was nearly all spam, and when I looked, she was mostly getting PACs texting her, not candidates. I’ve had a few people refuse to get voting reminders because they don’t want more texts.
Mary: Thank you so much for sharing your story. It really resonates for me and I bet a lot of other people. At the local local level where most of us get to organize as volunteers, the challenges are frustrating. It's hard to get a group together of people who like and trust each other; it's hard for groups to stick together when they run into adversity; and groups that are open to newcomers also have all kinds of challenges absorbing new people, some of whom as you point out come with agendas that are diagonal to ours or only overlap partially. If the Democratic Party existed year round AND had a clear platform in theory it would do these things, but it's been MIA for decades. Instead it falls to local volunteers to figure most of this out on their own. Everyone comes with good intentions but given how big the Democratic coalition is, inevitably conflicts arise. We need better models for how to do this.
I see so much of my experience as a volunteer and activist reflected in the issues you've raised for years. I wanna do good things in the world with the chunk of my time that I can give, and there's a real disconnect between the good intentions of most grassroots volunteers and the lousy outcomes we get because we're not actually supported (or maybe even wanted!) by the folks stacked above us.
I don't believe that we should have so much money in politics, so I've tried to put that in action by giving my time instead. It's been a mixed bag. I really believe in community building, but I look at the headwinds for some of my other volunteer groups vs the headwinds for my activist groups and it's pretty obvious what's harder. I also volunteer for dance/art/cultural groups and ironically that's much, much easier and less drama-filled!
I'm really happy people are finally ready to confront how much money we waste on elections and how our approach and messaging simply doesn't work.
Kamala ran a beautiful, flawless 100 day campaign. the problem was that the only infrastructure and model she had to use is fundamentally flawed.
For thirty years, the Democratic party created by the Clintons and other "Davos Dems" has relied on a corporate model of big money, outsourcing fundraising (ActBlue) and organizing to a crazy quilt of interest groups and nonprofits all competing for the same donors, and relying on volunteers to canvass and write to strangers. It worked initially because the Republican party was doing largely the same thing, but it stopped working when Trump made his supporters feel seen and heard.
And that model ran headfirst into the era of Bowling Alone (I always comes back to that book) and an atomized, lonely, distanced citizenry. This was a devastating, under examined (except by you, Micah!) combination. And Trump filled the void. His “cult” is actually a church, a place of belonging for people who feel left out and ignored. They know one another, which is why they didn’t need volunteer canvassers bused in.
About ten years ago, I met the head of NYC’s SEIU. He lamented that the newer, younger members just saw the union as an insurance company providing benefits. They didn’t have a sense of community or connection to other members and the union writ large. I asked him what they were doing to build community and the answer was nothing.
The function of the Dem party needs to change from being transactional during election time to being relational all the time.This is the gift of this election, the opportunity to build the next chapter in political parties.
Before the TV era, political parties were organized around precinct captains (aka district leaders or ward heelers) who were in charge of a precinct and knew their party's voters - and the particular issues each one cared about. It was "relational organizing" 101. Then TV came along and highly-paid media consultants copied Madison Avenue and created ads designed to "persuade." That advertising mentality now includes mailers, social media ads, and doorknock scripts. And instead of actually knowing what each voter cares about based on conversations, data analysts create "models" to guess what they care about. Unfortunately talking "at" voters (advertising) based on issue models cannot compare to genuine relational organizing.
a reasonable question to ask -- how many precincts have DL's or captains? is there data on turnout with a captain vs not?
There are a few threads here that are coming together for me, which I've also seen from past local campaigns I've participated in: we HAVE to build bases of local organizers on the ground. When I participated in Vanessa Agudelo's bid for Assembly in 2022, we had so many volunteers showing up to knock doors, but outside of a core group, a lot of them were from either the city or parts of the Hudson Valley pretty far outside the district. That field program reached a lot of people, but we still lost. Similarly, one of the complaints I heard from the local staff during the Bowman campaign was that they'd recommended local people for some of the paid field roles and those jobs went to people from out of state instead. We can't keep bringing in outside people without ever building up local talent.
When I knock doors, I often get asked where I live. I have two small kids and a non-political job, so I don't travel to canvass for big campaigns. I can truthfully tell people that I'm local (or local enough) and it helps to build a connection. I may be a stranger, but I'm not an outsider. When they ask that question of people who are coming from out of town, I have to wonder how much that influences the weight they give to the out-of-towner's perspective.
If all politics is local, why aren't we equipping local people to do it?
Yes thank you for laying this out so clearly, and for calling out postcarding, for example, as the form of self-care that it is.
The Democrats have committed malpractice for 9 years now. I have heard reports of people who were eager to step in and lead county parties, for example, who were ridiculed and shamed (with attempts to smear their reputation) into deserting the party altogether. This is an old guard who a) thinks they know what they are doing and they DO NOT b) are stuck in high school popularity contests and c) are actively thwarting new, creative energy out of some sense of "how things are done." It is an abomination.
I know that this is just one star in a constellation of problems, but it makes me so very angry precisely because it's so unnecessary, given all that we are actually meant to be dealing with. Everything they do is based on flawed reasoning divorced from even basic intuition about how human beings feel. Frankly, think almost the entire Democratic Party and campaign machinery needs to be fired.
On target as always. Thanks for this.
1). It always was going to take a miracle for the incumbent party to win. No incumbent party has ever won with wrong track numbers like these (65 percent of voters thought nation on wrong track)...and worldwide the results have been similar in elections. Harris gave it her all but could not defeat the voters feelings on the economy.
2). Liberal elites parachuting into swing states on weekend trips was and is always hubris.
3). GOTV activities (activity vs results) like postcard writing are extremely not important. Mostly they give campaigns (and other folks) something to give volunteers to do to keep them occupied and thinking they are helping.
4). Privacy and interrupting people's lives. I don't know about you but I hate people interrupting my privacy and life with knocking on my door and making my dogs bark.. And waking up the baby. The political industrial complex doesn't give a crap about what voters want and how they want to be communicated to. They have never asked.. It is spam spam spam.
At the end of the day.... Voters wanted change and the dem establishment was not it.
5) it's the economy stupid.
I can't really speak to the ground game in PA. I'm not shocked that the center-slight-left political party full of career politicians that begs for donations has troubles being inspiring: that just seems like an "of course" to me, not a place for great cynicism, how did we think the world was going to work? It is their careers, they do need to raise that money, there is no magic answer.
I feel like I'm witnessing the lack of oomph farther left from the center of politics. I grew up politically with "if the people lead, the leaders will follow." And we are not. I live in Berkeley amongst self-styled cutting-edge radicals and the biggest contribution I saw — thank you thank you thank you to those who did it — was things like post-carding and a few people making calls. The Bernie Sanders group I was part of spent it's energy in-fighting: I saw just about nothing from my immediate community that was radical AND inspiring. I experienced a huge blue wave of saying "vote blue" and a huge left-wave of criticizing the blue and each other.
No one is stopping us from building a radical movement alongside the Democrats. Of being kind to each other while we do it, and normalizing that. Of making a world where people looked at the career politicians and of course said "meh, responsible but disappointing" and THEN looked at a beautiful and radical alternative on the left and wondered if they could be hopeful enough to risk it —> in this election, the only clear alternative to career politicians being realistic was the hatred and conspiracy thinking from the right. We — my "we" is farther left than Democrats — we failed to create a left-edge to the Overton window that left Biden and Harris as the right-edge of reasonable. Harris and Biden were trying, while my friends were infighting.
It has been said over and over that we need a call-in culture not call-out, and I don't know how to get us there. I don't think that Biden and Harris doing their best was really the weak spot in 2024. What should our movement have looked like?
What three issues should we have focused on that could have both supported and challenged the Democrats, uplifting rather than undercutting their half-measures? Who were our communication experts? The trolls have developed techniques to get people arguing, what communication techniques create solidarity? You and I will never fix the Democratic machine's weak ground game, but we could build a movement that made them look corporate and boring *from the left* so that the right doesn't own rebellion.
Fabulous insights, as always Micah! Great piece. Thanks for sharing.
I'd love some observational feedback on a related question so i opened the comments.
What did working class men tell us about Kamala and Trump when we knocked on their doors?? Comments are open. https://bobfertik.substack.com/p/what-did-working-class-men-tell-us?
This is spot on.
Micah -
Of partial relevance... I perhaps should have thought to ask this last year but... did no campaign use any AI chatbots for engagement? e.g.:
https://conorbronsdon.com/blog/how-political-campaigns-can-effectively-use-chatbots-and-ai
Fintan O'Toole in the NYRB mentions "Trump's uncanny ability to turn the world upside down.". I believe he's referring to Trump's projection, an odious trait which never received sufficient attention.
yes and also his broad proclamations like "I alone can fix this." He communicates at a level of hubris and bullshit that Democrats would never use - and never figured out how to turn against him.