If necessity is the mother of invention, then—all things considered—the past year was a good one for the ragtag army of Americans I have been calling The Defiance. Millions of us have responded to unprecedented attacks by the Trump regime on democracy, the rule of law, and all kinds of vulnerable groups and institutions with a wide array of timely and creative actions. K. Starling’s crowd-sourced list of protests, rallies, vigils and demonstrations tallied an estimated 60,000 for the past year—in thousands of locations. While the biggest days of action (Hands Off, MayDay Strong, No Kings I and No Kings II) have gotten the most attention and the largest numbers, there have also been weekly recurring protests at nearly all the 300 Tesla showrooms in America as well as weekly Visibility Brigade actions on something like 350 overpasses. In many cities, tens of thousands of people have gone through training to become active in neighborhood watches against ICE, wielding whistles and making it harder for masked federal agents to kidnap immigrants from their communities. And while we don’t have a formal clearinghouse for sharing resources and ideas, the social web is a clunky but good enough substitute—how else would the idea of wearing silly blow-up costumes to mock ICE agents have spread so quickly around the country?
No, we still haven’t found a unifying symbol, despite efforts to get people to “wear yellow” and the like. Nor have we figured out how duplicate the success of the “Boycott Disney” campaign in the wake of their short-term firing of comedy host Jimmy Kimmel. If anything, the academic research on stopping and toppling wannabe autocrats, which informed much of last summer’s “Million Rising” push to get activists focused on undermining the various “pillars of power” that typically buttress authoritarian regimes, hasn’t quite congealed in the way that many had hoped. But I’d rather view that glass as half-full rather than half-empty.
Yes, we still have an opposition party whose titular leaders largely don’t what they’re up against, and a campaign-industrial complex that is still far more obsessed with raising money for paid media and polls aimed at winning an election a year away than with raising hell and organizing now. But there are also signs that serious people in the professional political world do understand the mess we’re in and are developing new strategies and tactics for dealing with it. Today I want to feature one such example: Ground Truth, a new project from Swing Left that is attempting to get their arms around a hard problem: why are so many ordinary people alienated from the Democratic party and how to fix that.
If you are on Swing Left’s mailing list, you may already be familiar with the basic contours of Ground Truth, which they started rolling out last September in a handful of swing House districts and are taking national starting the weekend of January 24-25. In a nutshell, it aims to be “a new approach to canvassing where we listen to voters (instead of lecturing!), understand what’s motivating them, and use those insights to strengthen House campaigns across the country.” By starting early (you mean not waiting until the last two months before the election?), knocking every door (wait, seriously?) and investing in better data and technology, Swing Left is aiming to give Democrats the strategic edge needed to win back the majority this fall.
As Yasmin Radjy, Swing Left’s executive director, explained in an announcement about the program, her own experience knocking on doors with a team of volunteers in NY’s 17th district, currently held by Republican Mike Lawler, was that “Democrats need to get better at listening to voters. And people are hungry to be heard.” But, she adds, “Before we persuade, we have to listen.” The early gleanings from their pilot efforts should be a wake-up call:
Traditional targeting misses many persuadable voters: About one in four voters coded as Republican (either through registration or modeled partisanship) expressed explicit concern about Trump, openness to voting for Democrats, or alignment with progressive priorities—indicating that conventional voter contact efforts are overlooking potentially persuadable voters.
Voters are open to these conversations. Two-thirds of the people who answered their doors held a meaningful 10-15 minute conversation with a volunteer.
There’s a lot of frustration to tap: In nearly half of conversations, Republicans, Democrats, and Independents alike expressed disillusionment with both political parties, distrust of institutions, disappointment in leaders, and a sense that “no one is looking out for people like me”—a theme not systematically tracked by federal or state party entities in their canvassing and voter files.
People are cross-pressured: In more than 80% of conversations, voters brought up at least two motivating issues, suggesting traditional single-issue categorization is insufficient for understanding what drives voter engagement.
And most encouraging: Swing Left says that 93% of the volunteers who participated in a Ground Truth canvass would recommend that a friend do it too.
One more note about Swing Left and its affiliate Vote Forward. From their start, they have always been focused on experimentation, testing, analysis and sharing those results with their members and the public. Last year, Vote Forward put out a report on its 2024 campaign to get tens of thousands of volunteers to write handwritten letters to nearly 10 million voters. After seeing significant results from this in 2020, Vote Forward admitted that letter-writing was now seeing “diminishing returns.” Among surge voters, the people who had skipped 2016 voted in at least one major election since then, “the impact was negligible.” Among low-propensity voters, handwritten letters boosted turnout by a very modest 0.2 percentage points. “While handwritten letters still drive voter turnout, the landscape has clearly shifted. Voters are inundated with outreach, and the same tactics don’t have the same impact they once did,” Radjy, who is executive director of both groups, said at the time. “If we want to win, we need to become more targeted and innovative in how we engage voters, especially in major elections.”
Going Deeper
My guide into the Ground Truth work has been Zack Malitz, managing director at Swing Left and Vote Forward. He joined them last April, after stints with Credo Mobile, Bernie 2016 (working with the national distributed organizing team that Becky Bond and Zack Exley built), NextGen Climate, Beto O’Rourke for Texas (field director) and The Social Practice, a consulting shop. Just before the December holiday break we had a long chat.
“We don’t think we know what the barriers to voting for Democrats are,” Malitz says. Everyone has their theories. So instead, Swing Left decided to “go spend a couple of months having conversations with people where we basically just ask them, like, what are your barriers to voting for Democrats?” Then, drawing on the experiences of hundreds of canvassers having thousands of conversations, they’ll develop a deep canvassing persuasion conversation.
He told me that Swing Left is trying to respond to several, deeply ingrained problems with how Democrats engage voters. First, he said, “Democratic campaigns start talking to voters way, way, way, too late.” Second, “They rely heavily on brief, transactional interactions between voters and volunteers” that are heavily scripted—something he admitted he personally had trained “thousands” of volunteers to do.
Third, he noted that “We rely on archaic tech and data infrastructure which doesn’t just suck, but also stymies tactical innovation, because it’s very opinionated about how we use it.” Instead of being forced to score people so their answers can be quickly loaded into a preformatted database, Malitz wants tech that is “agnostic and flexible, such that campaigns could come up with new ways of using it, not envisioned by the people who build it.”
So instead of relying on NGPVAN’s Minivan tool, they’re working with Everybody Techworks, a startup cofounded by Becky Bond and Jin Ding, to pilot their People canvassing app. The app allows users to collect data on any person they talk to, whether or not that person is matchable to a voter file record. Swing Left is also piloting a new CRM, developed by long-time veterans of the progressive tech ecosystem, that can ingest and analyze any data that canvassers collect.
Fourth, unlike traditional campaigns that focus on highly likely voters (the so-called “triple primes” who have voted in every recent election), Ground Truth volunteers knock every door in a neighborhood and talk to whomever is home. Afterwards, volunteers record their observations about the conversation into a voice-to-text program for further analysis by a mix of AI and human reviewers.
Swing Left is working the New Conversation Initiative, which came out of the LA Leadership Lab and which has worked with academics David Broockman and Josh Kalla on their studies of the effectiveness of deep canvassing. The core of the conversation at the doors, which can take 10 to 15 minutes, is listening.
Malitz says Swing Left is looking for hard data on things that “polls can’t capture, which is stuff we wouldn’t think to write into a question, things that voters are thinking about, but that they we actually might not think to ask them about in the first place, but they only bring up when we ask open-ended questions. As well as the flavor of how they talk about things.” He adds:
“Everybody knows affordability is important, but when somebody says affordability, what does that mean? Are they talking in a really nuts and bolts way of ‘I want these three policies to make my bills go down,’ or is it ‘What I mean when I say affordability is that the people in power don’t care about me,’…? A lot of what we’re finding is that, for both Republicans and Democrats, it’s ‘the people in power don’t care about me.’ It’s a really anti-system thing that is not like reducible to issue preferences, but a deep sense that the people in power just do not care.”
What they’re after is something very hard to nail down, Malitz argues. “Right now, we talk to a really narrow subset of voters, and we make a lot of assumptions about who’s persuadable. I think we sort of infamously have never come up with a good persuasion model. Like, it’s actually really hard to figure out who in the electorate is going to be persuadable. And I think in part that’s because the tools we have are not that good. After A/B testing and rigorous measurement, what you see between the best and the worst messages is tiny, tiny, tiny differences in a country where we have to fundamentally change how politics works, or we’re going to be stuck in the same doom loop that we’re in.”
One more thing that Swing Left hopes to build with Ground Truth: an infrastructure for institutionalizing volunteer organization between elections. A recent FEC ruling may make that easier. Historically Swing Left didn’t run its own in-house voter contact program because it was expensive to sustain, and instead recruited volunteers that it funneled into candidate campaigns and into state party coordinated campaigns. Some campaigns run pretty good voter contact programs, Malitz noted, “and in others, there’s a disastrous experience with the volunteers.” But last year, Texas Majority PAC asked the FEC to consider if canvassing a public communication regulated by campaign finance rules. It said no, so now anyone can spend unlimited amounts of money on canvassing, specifically in coordination with campaigns.
Malitz offers an expansive vision of what this will make possible: “That opens the door to us taking a really challenging road, which is to change a whole bunch of stuff, but in a way that doesn’t just mean we end up with our own walled garden of amazing, innovative programs, but actually can change how things work for everybody.” Data that Ground Truth volunteers collect will be shared with state parties and with candidate campaigns. This means, Malitz says, “we can push on the whole infrastructure, in big ways, by trying to persuade people that there’s a different way to do things, by having an exemplary model that people can look to for inspiration next cycle. But also by generating a whole bunch of canvassing data and sharing it out to the ecosystem to improve the voter file for everybody.”
For 2026, Swing Left is focused on taking back the House using a distributed model to reach scale. “We rely on Swing Left groups and unaffiliated volunteers who raise their hand say, ‘I’d like to run a canvas where I live,’” Malitz says. The organization says it currently has a million members and about 450 active chapters. “And then we provide training and support for those people based on the assumption that we will never have a staff structure large enough for an in-person staffer to be able to train every volunteer that we need to. So we rely on a layer of highly-trained, well-supported volunteers who are essentially like part-time, or in some cases, full-time organizers in their community, and who have the skills to train other volunteers because they’ve done so much door-knocking.”
Ending the Poverty of Democratic Organizing?
If you’ve been reading The Connector for a while, or if you’ve been a volunteer canvasser for any amount of time, hopefully this is all music to your ears. For too long, Democratic campaigns have run cookie-cutter field programs and ignored the possibility that there were many more potential voters to be reached than just the most active ones in the Democratic voter file. They’ve also treated volunteers as anonymous interchangeable inputs to be handed walk-lists and pushed out the door rather than human beings passionate to do whatever they can to elect better representatives.
Malitz notes that, “The voter file is a valuable input for campaigns, but the way that we use it right now actually forces us not to talk to people, which is insane.” Or it sends volunteers to doors where someone hasn’t lived in years. Malitz says, “Instead we should start with the places that people live, talk to the people who live there, and then figure out what data to use to represent the results of that conversation.” He also notes that Swing Left has been heavily influenced by a 2021 study of the three main voter file used by partisan groups (Catalist, Targetsmart and the GOP Data Trust) that found that in 2012 about 23% of potential voters weren’t even in them, “an incredible number of people to not talk to.” Eleven percent are unlisted while 12% are mislisted (not living at their recorded address). The “politically invisible” are far more likely to be Black or Hispanic (40% unreachable via traditional voter lists compared to just 18% for whites), younger, and less wealthy. Astounding.
Like any good strategist, Malitz is eating his own dog food. He told me, “I ran the first canvas here in Oregon’s Fifth District, and I knocked on this woman’s door, and first she said, ‘You don’t want to talk to me, I’m a Republican.’ I said, ‘No, I definitely want to talk to you.’ And I managed to muddle through several minutes of conversation about Oregon sports, which I don’t really follow, so I did my best. And, then she said what bothered her is that the Republicans are so old, the Democrats are so old. And I said, I’ agree, it’s terrible. I find it embarrassing, too.’ And then, ten minutes into this conversation, she’s said ‘I sometimes vote for Democrats.’ Oh, do you now? It was amazing.”
He noted that these kinds of listening conversations can be transformative for both participants. “The raw, unfiltered experience of the voters is pretty eye-opening. The caricatures of people that you get, especially in Beltway commentary, just do not match the on the ground reality of what people are like, what their lives are like.” According to Malitz, Ground Truth volunteers also find the experience more fun because their conversations at the doors are more natural.
Malitz told me he was enjoying the freedom that came with this less-scripted approach to voter engagement. “I think having a more human, less stilted conversation, is way easier for people. I think once we get to storytelling and persuasion, that’s where it’s going to get really difficult. But part of what we’re doing is institutionalizing as standard practice things that volunteers have done against the wishes of campaigns for a long time, like talking to people who open the door and want to talk to you, even if they’re not on your list. Every volunteer does that, no matter how many times you tell them not to, like knocking on a door because there’s a yard sign outside that makes it clear that there’s a supporter who lives there who we should talk to. All of this stuff is so human and intuitive that people do it no matter how many times you tell them not to. It feels really good to me to finally just say you have permission. And that’s the point--the thing that you do that is intuitive and human, that’s the thing that we should be doing.”
Swing Left is deep in a learning mode, tweaking its approach to Ground Truth as it continues to send volunteers out on canvasses. One approach they’re considering is to have volunteers go back to the same neighborhood several times, to ideally have multiple conversations with the same voters. Or they may try to follow up with phone calls. And then at some point later in the cycle they’ll shift from primarily listening to persuasion. Like the Mamdani field operation, they’re investing in building social capital with their canvas volunteers, bringing them together after each canvas to talk together about what they experienced and learned. Malitz is also wondering whether local Ground Truth teams should also be inviting voters to monthly get-togethers or town halls, to make their effort more visible and engaging, but it’s not clear if they have the capacity to scale that up this year. (Any big donors out there reading this?)
One of the things that is most important about Ground Truth’s effort to figure out how to persuade more voters to back Democrats is the plain fact that the national electoral map is badly skewed against today’s Democratic electorate. By 2032, something like 14 electoral votes will move from Blue states that Biden won to red states, because of how population centers are shifting. So if Democrats don’t figure out how to win over people who are in those red-shifting states, they’re doomed.
Right now Swing Left’s volunteers are supported by about two dozen staff. They’re hoping to double their budget in the current cycle. For a relatively small piece of the post-2016 resistance, they’ve carved out an important role at the intersection of volunteer energy and electoral campaign needs. If you’re not already part of their network, go check them out, sign up to volunteer with Ground Truth, and give them some of your time and money. It will be, I believe, well spent.
—To learn more about Ground Truth, watch this national strategy call from December 9.
On The Venezuela Morass
Political scientist Alexander Downes studied 120 examples of foreign-imposed regime change from 1816-2011 for his book Catastrophic Success and here are his main conclusions:
“Before the September 11 terrorist attacks, the United States was already the most frequent perpetrator of regime change, having upended (alone or with allies) thirty-one leaders in countries as diverse as Nicaragua, Honduras, the Dominican Republica, Mexico, Haiti, Germany, Japan, Iran, Guatemala, South Vietnam, Chile, Grenada and Panama. After 9/11, the George W. Bush administration dispatched US forces to take down two governments in a span of eighteen months….The Iraq debacle and the election of Barack Obama temporarily put talk of regime change on the back burner, but civil wars in Libya and Syria resulting from the Arab Spring brought it back with a vengeance…
The current structure of the international system dictates that the question of regime change will remain on the table. The United States spends nearly as much on its military as the rest of the world combined, fields highly trained military personnel armed with the latest technology, and is able to project force virtually anywhere on the globe in a manner of hours. The dearth of restraints on US power makes it tempting for US policymakers to use that power. The enormous capabilities at Washington’s disposal, however, are not matched by corresponding knowledge about the consequences of employing those capability for various ends. Upending the governments of weaker states is actually quite easy for a country as powerful as the United States; it is the aftermath that case pose seious problems….Policymakers need to be aware that what may follow regime change can be worse that the costs of inflicting it.”
“The problem lies in the fact that two states rarely if ever have isomorphic interests. By placing a new leader in power in a foreign country, interveners create a double principal-agent problem…Foreign interveners—the external principals—expect their agents to share their preferences and pursue policies congruent with those preferences. Yet once a leader is placed in power, she desires to remain in power and avoid suffering a sometimes violent and untimely demise. To maintain office, imposed leaders must consider the preferences not only of their external patrons but also those of an internal principal: the domestic constituency….Whatever choice an imposed leader makes, she faces a corresponding danger. For this reason, foreign-imposed regime change heightens the chances of both internal conflict in the target state – such as civil war and irregular leader removal – and external conflict between the intervener and target.”
End Times
Repeat after me, “2+2=5.” And then take this, to counteract it.
I love this and hope it goes somewhere... But the cynic in me says it probably won't. Why? Follow the consulting money which still rely on spending $ in the last months of the campaign on TV etc. Quantity vs quality.
The new "Ground Truth" approach is promising. People want to be listened to, and they want to be heard. Those are two different things. If both happen, people feel like they're understood, they're cared about, and they matter. There's a good chance they'll get out and vote for a party or a candidate who makes them feel that way.