Can We Change the Democratic Playbook?

Two prominent progressive organizers argue that it's time we prioritize relationships and networks over data-driven transactional targeting, while a third asks hard questions about power-building.

I’m on a family trip to attend a beloved nephew’s high school graduation right now, so this week’s edition of The Connector will be relatively brief. I just want to flag two new posts for your attention, both on a topic that I’ve often called “the poverty of Democratic organizing” but which could also be described as “changing the playbook.”

First, see this post, titled, “Does any of this work?” by Charlotte Swasey from May 23. Swasey is a self-described “political data nerd” who is steeped in the world of Democratic data analytics, having worked for Civis Analytics, the 2020 Elizabeth Warren campaign, Data for Progress and other groups. Like me, last week she read the new Political Tech Landscape report from Higher Ground Labs and was struck by the question—will doing even more data-driven campaigning help Democrats get out of the hole they’re in?

She admits that she has a lot of anxiety about whether many specific programs aimed at reaching voters actually work, or if “we’re lighting money on fire.” She also admits that it’s really hard to say if, in the aggregate, we have reached the point of diminishing returns, but to her credit, she’s not suggesting that folks keep doing the same thing and hope it works better next time.

What Swasey does in reverse though, is question whether the counterargument, made by lots of folks (including yours truly) that Democrats and progressives should invest more heavily in “more “power building” or “organizing” or “long term work,” is feasible. She asks tough questions:

We have poured money into “power-building” organizations for at least 2 cycles now. Has civic infrastructure in battleground states recovered? Are those organizations even *around* anymore? Not that I have seen. I would love to be wrong- please, feel free to show me your civic engagement org that has existed for >4 years and has people voluntarily turning up to meetings in off years. But what I have observed is that this is mostly another way for us to light money on fire, just one that happens to make you feel a bit better about yourself.

The impulse to organizing/power building is, imo, a longing for a time when the Democratic party was a functional institution, with local branches that served a significant community function. This is a yearning for a time before our culture became Like This. It sounds great, but “simply undo the direction of our entire culture” is not a compelling pitch for a way to win elections. Plus, this sort of work is doubly subject to the problems of a rapid-turnover industry that is constantly running out of money. No one really cares if the org running ads has a different name than the org that did it 2 years ago. If you set up community meetings and got volunteers engaged, it’s a bad look when a completely different organization tries to do that again after you vanish.

So, yes, I would love us to live in a different and better political culture. I would love local civic institutions to be a thing again. I strongly believe that change would need to come from the Democratic party itself, rather than the shifting constellation of associated organizations. And I don’t see much hope of that happening when, as usual, the whole DNC evaporates every 4 years. No amount of funding one off local groups can fix that.

I don’t agree, but I appreciate a good debate! I don’t think it’s true that our side "poured" money on local community organizing groups in 2024. The Movement Voter Project, which was one of the main conduits for funding such work, was constantly begging for money last cycle, putting out "bat signals" and making clear that the groups it works with in the battleground states were all being forced to shrink their programs as the year began rather than grow them. No late surge of money after Harris switched in could fix that.

Beyond that, I think those of us in the power-building camp would expand the horizon of what’s needed to also include investments in leadership development akin to what the Right does with PragerU, the Leadership Institute, etc.. There is nothing comparable on the progressive side that invests in finding and uplifting young leaders or building leadership cohorts at scale. So, it's not like we're even trying to make this model as robust as the right’s version. If anything, we could use more research on other strategies that progressives can use to build up self-sustaining bases that nourish ongoing political action, and that also respond to onslaught on public goods and workers now underway. Before 2025, I found myself speculating (with some help from Haley Bash of the Donor Organizer Hub) about proto-political groups like CSAs and cycling clubs and practices like craftivism, and whether those could evolve in more explicitly political directions. Now, as Defiance rises to the weekly level of #TeslaTakedown protests and constant pulse of immigrant watch groups, the conditions seem ripe for more experimentation.

Time for a new approach. (Photo: Royal Ontario Museum, 2021, by Maksim Sokolov)

But, I do believe Swasey is right that the larger culture is very atomized now, and while a billion dollars invested in, say, renting and staffing local progressive community centers in a thousand towns might be money much better spent than a billion on TV ads, it still might not shift the culture that much on its own.

That said, it’s also worth admitting that Democratic politicos had a role in making our political culture “Like This.” Twenty years ago, when the Internet was just becoming a factor in politics, a LOT of people were using the open web to self-organize from the bottom up in all kinds of inspiring ways. Then, starting in the mid-aughts, and accelerated by the Facebookization of politics—something the 2008 Obama campaign leaned heavily into rather than resisting—we became more vertically-integrated into lists and data and horizontally-disconnected from each other at the local level. The 2012 Obama campaign, which was arguably one of the main training grounds for the current generation of data-driven campaigners, chose deliberately to reduce the functionalities its online platform offered to supporters rather than allow them to self-organize. The thinking from inside Obamaland was it was better to channel supporters into the activities the campaign felt were most helpful to what senior leadership saw as necessary to win, but in the process they taught a generation of campaign strategists that grassroots were to be farmed, not cultivated. (See also: New Organizing Institute, “culture of analytics,” etc.)

Can We Change the Playbook?

This gets to the second post I want to uplift for your attention, from a spanking new Substack called We Choose Us, is titled “Moving From Lists to Leaders.” It’s written by David Donnelly, executive director of the Pro-Democracy Campaign, and Doran Schrantz, former director and founder of ISAIAH/Faith in Minnesota and founder of the Organizing Lab at State Power Fund. (Full disclosure: David is also an old friend and former colleague of mine from Public Campaign.)

Their post starts with a provocative observation: given Robert Prevost’s prior voting history, which show him voting mainly in Republican primaries, Democratic canvassers working his street in Chicago would likely have never knocked on the door of the future Pope Leo. Then they write:

This thought experiment above exposes a central failing of center-left grassroots political engagement. How did we get to where the lifeblood of a democratic society—the belief that if we come together we can change our communities, states, and country—is so utterly divorced from how we “practice” democracy? More importantly, with authoritarianism consolidating before our eyes, can we afford not to change these practices immediately?

Since the mid-2000s, Democrats and allied organizations, encouraged by political donors, have developed a top-down approach to voter mobilization that relies heavily on two things: 1) narrow, data-driven targeting based almost entirely on voting history, and 2) the use of randomized control trials to determine voter engagement tactics and get-out-the-vote messaging. When the findings are significant, campaigns apply the method in the next congressional or presidential election in contacting those voters who are relatively likely to vote. In the abstract, this makes sense.

In reality, these practices contribute to an impersonal marketing approach that builds no sense of community, replaces authentic two-way conversations with tightly scripted, check-a-box interactions, and assails people with a blitzkrieg of annoying text messages. It is an approach that values the cost-efficiency of a "tactic" above all else, rather than focusing on any substantive impact. And it constrains volunteers and paid staff—our most important human assets—to scripted, time-limited conversations with only those voters who will likely vote and will predictably vote for Democrats, rather than giving them the freedom to have real conversations with persuadable or would-be voters. In this paradigm, only some voters are worthy of attention, while tens of millions potential voters are not. We end up prioritizing transactional, one-off contacts, not relationships and networks.

Donnelly and Schrantz are arguing for a major shift: “a long-overdue scaled investment in community organizing around the country.” I agree 100%, especially because I concur with them that how we do politics now, as a purely transactional process of extracting votes from people, has contributed to the crisis of democracy and the allure of strongmen. But even if some major funders start prioritizing this work, getting the entire Democratic and allied political-industrial complex to throw out the data-driven playbook and replace it with prioritizing community organizing and relationship-building is going to take a LOT of hard work.

It also goes against many grains. The spammy emails and texts "work" in the sense that they bring in more money than they cost to make and send. Big donors have been trained to look at "cost per vote" to guide their political spending, so they keep funding the data-driven playbook rather than long-term community organizing. Campaign managers and field staff have been trained to trust the voter file and analytics built from the transactional voter contact programs that Democratic tech infrastructure prioritizes. And volunteers are largely kept in the dark and taught just to sign up for shifts and follow the scripts they're given. Not to mention that funding organizing rather than election-driven voter mobilization also threatens to build up power outside of the control of state or county party cliques--and party leaders in most states and counties are quite comfortably continuing to lose nobly rather than upset the status quo that keeps THEM and their way of doing things unchanged. The same with individual political incumbents, who are mainly focused on raising money to fend off challengers and advance their personal careers.

All that said, it’s great to see people like Donnelly and Schrantz making the case for changing the playbook. Welcome to the resistance!

—Bonus link: Win the Midwest’s report on the ten-year organizing project that led to a burst of progressive policy wins in Minnesota, which Schrantz played a big part in, is vital background.