Why Are We Still Living with VANxiety?

Despite a widespread consensus that Democratic tech needs a total upgrade, not much has changed since 2024. Better tools exist, but what's missing is money and will. Plus, what Hungary may portend.

A quick note about the election in Hungary, and then on to today’s main topic. I’m sure we are all relishing the defeat of Victor Orban by opposition leader Peter Magyar on Sunday. Given how much the MAGA movement here has embraced Orban, with the head of the Heritage Foundation saying, “Modern Hungary is not just a model for conservative statecraft but the model,” seeing Magyar’s Tisza Party crush Orban’s Fidesz Party at the polls and win a supermajority in Hungary’s parliament is thrilling. Look closer, though, and Magyar’s rise offers a clear warning to Democrats who think merely being anti-Trump will deliver their party a convincing mandate in 2026 and 2028. Magyar was a renegade from Orban’s Fidesz party who took a brave risk and told the public the truth about the regime’s corruption. Then he created a non-party movement called “Rise Up Hungarians” and brought it into a relatively new centrist, pro-European, and populist party, Tisza. As a new party, Tisza was unblemished by corruption and could make that its central issue, while sidelining the other opposition parties as too much part of the old system. To me, what Magyar’s rise suggests is that an independent, populist truth-teller (think Ross Perot) could do very well in the 2028 presidential election. Or, maybe a Democratic renegade—but one thing we know from past elections is the Democratic establishment is still strong enough to block such contenders.

Stuck With VANxiety

A month ago, Ezra Levin, the co-founder and co-director of Indivisible, told grassroots Indivisible group leaders some important news about the tools they use to organize with. After a careful review of its options, Indivisible was going to be sticking with Bonterra—the foreign conglomerate that runs NGPVAN, EveryAction, Mobilize and ActionKit—for the 2026 cycle. Despite many concerns about these legacy systems, which the entire Democratic and progressive ecosystem has been dependent on for more than a decade, the challenge of transitioning off them to better ones was too costly and time-consuming to consider.

A glance at the latest reports in the Federal Election Commission database shows that Indivisible is not alone. Dozens of House and Senate campaigns and a plethora of blue-leaning PACs and advocacy organizations are cutting regular checks to Bonterra or one of its subsidiaries. And the biggest Democratic committees, the DNC, the DCCC and the DSCC are at the head of the pack, paying NGP VAN more than $500,000 in just the first two months of 2026 (and that’s a partial count since the quarterly reports aren’t complete). Like it or not, we are going to go through another election cycle relying on outdated tech.

This is a crying shame, a collective “own goal” if you will. The case for a new suite of tech tools for engaging with voters has been evident to many Democratic operatives and activists for a very long time, years before I documented how everyone was “Living with VANxiety” in a long report I published in April 2023. Indeed, it was nine years ago this May that a collection of tech upstarts called UnlockTheVan launched an effort to get the Democratic National Committee to open up access to the voter data then managed, with the party’s full agreement, by just one de facto monopoly, NGPVAN. That monopoly was indeed loosened in time for the 2024 cycle, and there are now a bevy of impressive startups whose offerings run circles around Bonterra.

But the overwhelming odds are that the hundreds of thousands of volunteers who are going to do the grunt work of contacting and engaging with voters this cycle, along with the campaign teams that manage them, will be stuck using lousy tools that make them less good at their work and using lists that are missing the correct information (or any information) on millions of likely or registered Democratic voters. To just give a few examples:

• Canvassers that use Open Field instead of Minivan to guide their door-knocking are ten to twenty percent more productive, because the former allows them to work more easily in teams and to add new names to the voter files as they encounter voters.

• Campaigns relying solely on the current Democratic voter file (which is what VAN works with for everything from cutting turf to logging voter contacts) actively miss millions of potential supporters. A 2021 study found that these “politically invisible” voters are far more likely to be Black or Hispanic, younger and less wealthy than the ones in the file.

• VAN and EveryAction, its nonprofit twin, do not make it easy to track and measure the impact of friend-to-friend and online relational outreach, do nothing to capture rich conversational data that volunteers may collect from voters, and reward the tracking of contact attempts rather than the nurturing of relationships over time.

• Problems with high-volume access to VAN during last months of the 2024 election forced Democrats to scramble to keep the system functioning, as the New York Times reported.

All of these are solvable problems--but for the fact that almost no one cares enough to cough up the money to solve them. And we’re not talking about a lot of money—perhaps $10 million, though it is almost clearly too late to change course for 2026.

When you consider how much attention the entire Democratic arena pays to the problem of Republican voter suppression, as well as the new threat of the SAVE Act, which would potentially disenfranchise or at least severely inconvenience millions of currently registered voters, you would think that fixing the Democratic tech gap would rank even higher up on everyone’s priority list. But I suppose it’s much more on brand for Dems and their allied groups to complain about the horrible things Republicans do. And indeed, some of the worst “scam PACs” do great work extracting contributions from gullible seniors and others by bombarding them with sky-is-falling warnings about what the other side is up to.

Still, as Linda Loman says of her husband Willy in the new revival of the ever-current play Death of a Salesman, “Attention must be paid.”

Winning NASCAR in a Crank-Engine Studebaker?

Listen to Julia Barnes, the CEO of The Movement Cooperative, a centralized data infrastructure and technology hub for the movement made up of about one hundred progressive groups that share costs for software tools and data (plus hundreds of smaller groups that benefit from the lowered costs and services it makes available). She told me last week:

“If you care about winning elections and social change, you don’t need to understand tech, you don’t need to understand data, but you do need to understand that we’re racing the tech investment of the Right, essentially trying to win a NASCAR race in a crank engine Studebaker while they’re driving a top-of-the-line stock car built by and cheered on by GOP billionaires. From TMC’s perspective, what’s so frustrating is that we have organizing groups who are ready to adopt new, innovative tech or who are trying to build it with next to no resources. Just this year, if there were a funder willing to part with at least $10 million, we could have organizations - at scale - testing and using new tech, with money dedicated to that tech’s development. And everyone is having a damned hard time finding it.”

Which, to circle back, is why organizations like Indivisible, which support thousands of local groups, have little choice about what tools they can use at scale. And Dem tech - including NGPVAN - is at a comparable disadvantage in speed of innovation, development of new platforms, and technical agility when stacked up to the hundreds of millions of dollars the Right is throwing at their AI-based technology.

This is not for a lack of trying on the part of both independent outfits like The Movement Cooperative or by decision-makers at the Democratic National Committee. Last year, in the wake of Trump’s re-election, they both put out detailed RFPs (requests for proposals) to kickstart the next generation of Democratic tech, with an emphasis on driving authentic engagement. Dozens of companies responded. In October 2025, the DNC announced its support for four new tools: Winnable, an events platform that could replace Bonterra’s Mobilize and which enables volunteers to easily sign up for multiple events at once; Matchbook, a tool/database for tracking support and finding voters and volunteers more easily; OpenField, a canvassing app that enables the easy capture of qualitative data from conversations along with other improvements over VAN; and OutOrganize, which centralizes volunteer outreach information and provides organizers with valuable insights on past interactions to foster more personalized relationships with volunteers.

The DNC is also not being shy about highlighting the new for a whole new organizing playbook, which after all is what tech tools either enable or hinder. While I wouldn’t be surprised, dear reader, if you’ve heard about the controversy over the as-yet-unreleased DNC post-mortem on the 2024 election, or the fact that the DNC recently rejected a resolution condemning AIPAC’s influence on elections, since a lot of people are focused on the Palestine issue, I bet that you didn’t know that two weeks ago, the committee issued a 208-page organizing playbook. Designed for coordinated campaigns and state parties, this playbook explicitly embraces a critique that many of us have been making for a while about fundamental problems with how Democrats connect with voters.

As the playbook’s introduction states, “Over the past decade, the Democratic campaign industry and its funders have become obsessed with massive, shiny output numbers from traditional tactics: Millions of calls made and hundreds of thousands of doors knocked. Yet this fixation with output has created an illusion of progress that fails to answer the questions that determine electoral success: how many voters were meaningfully contacted? What was the impact of those conversations, and what was the follow up? Which voters did we not reach through these traditional tactics and how are we effectively engaging those voters in other ways to ensure they turn out?”

It goes on, offering a glimpse at some of the data that is probably still locked up in that unreleased post-mortem:

“At scale, this organizing model rewards transactional voter contact: call the voter, repeat the script, log a result, and move on. This model provides no incentive for organizers and volunteers to actually build relationships with the voter, follow up, and feel ownership to move them closer towards turnout over the course of the cycle. The problem goes a step further: varying contact rates across different demographics using ‘traditional’ tactics has limited who the campaign can actually reach. In 2024, the Harris campaign contacted 28% of Black women registered to vote over the age of 65; meanwhile, they contacted only 7.5% of Latino men registered under the age of 25.

In this model, the role of an organizer has become significantly more narrow. When success for an organizer is defined by quantity over quality, they spend most of their day tethered to their laptop inside a field office, disconnected from their turf, focused on making hundreds of cold calls rather than showing up and building connections face-to-face with voters.”

Instead of sending canvassers out to identify likely supporters for a candidate and move quickly to a “can we count on your vote” closer, the playbook envision a new conversation model that might go something like this: “Hey there! I’m your neighbor, Brittany. I live/work just around the corner in [COMMUNITY] and I’m out listening to voters today with [CANDIDATE] campaign. How’s your Saturday?”…“I’m out here in the neighborhood today because costs are out of control - it’s really been a struggle for me and some of our other neighbors. How have things been for you and your family lately?”…“I really appreciate you sharing that with me. What things might you like to see a politician do to solve that/these problems?”/ “What makes you hopeful/ doubtful things will get better?”…“It sounds like a lot of politicians haven’t delivered on their promises and I know how frustrating that can be. I’m out knocking doors because l’ve been waiting for a candidate I can count on to actually deliver. I have gone long stretches without any medical insurance and it always left me feeling so vulnerable. I am so filled with hope because [CANDIDATE] has followed through on [X tangible plan] to make life better for people like us.”…“I can’t tell you how much I appreciate you sharing your thoughts with me - I know how personal these issues can be. Are you open to voting for someone like [CANDIDATE]?”…“I’m so glad we connected today, it’s been great getting to know you better. We get together every Thursday at [X Office] for dinner - we’d love to have you and your family sometime. Here’s an invite! I’Il swing by again down the road to check in, have a great day!”

If state parties and coordinated campaigns start doing this kind of sustained outreach, well, I’m tempted to say, I’ll eat my hat. But none of this is rocket science, and the fact that the DNC is putting this kind of playbook out can only be seen as encouraging. Imagine neighbors talking to neighbors, engaging in an empathetic conversation centered on listening to their struggles, and then not just seeking a vote but inviting them to dinner as a follow up. Amanda Litman, are you tracking this?

Of course, engineering this shift also requires a change in the infrastructure campaigns use to plan and manage their voter outreach. So it’s quite notable that the DNC’s new organizing playbook makes absolutely no mention of NGPVAN or any of the other Bonterra tools that everyone still relies on. Instead, it lays out lots of reasons why the status quo isn’t working: organizers spend too much time on manual and repetitive data entry and list-pulling rather than relationship-building, the tech they use customizes poorly to state-specific rules about voter registration, they waste too much time on unanswered phone-calls and door-knocks, campaign managers ignore feedback collected by volunteers, and existing tech requires multiple tools for different types of outreach. All of these, the DNC says, are solved by Winnable, OpenField, Matchbook and OutOrganize, though each of these platforms need more investment to improve further.

But that money is nowhere in sight.

As Julia Barnes told me, the problem is bigger than just an infusion of $10 million that would help these new platforms grow to the scale needed. “The other reason the left’s tech stagnation is so immovable is that we don’t have the resources to underwrite the change management required for these groups to try something else,” she said.

“Huge organizing groups that provide hundreds of millions of successful voter contacts or registrations are starving for resources. [Emphasis added.] It makes it even harder to pay inflated prices for tech and tools, to try new things, and to build new tactics that work on tech that will grow with them. It’s April of 2026. We can’t just take our midterm success for granted, and we certainly cannot pretend that winning the midterms is enough to turn the tide against the cultural rejection of our values and our candidates that we’ve experienced. Tech is tied to every single piece of work we do in political organizing. If the tech is struggling, we will not win. If the tech doesn’t evolve, we’ll never have long-term wins again. The Right will run away with the tech and data game.”

If you’re thinking, why worry – Democrats are going to have another Blue Wave in 2026 and these tech problems can be sorted out in 2027 – consider this argument about the realities of software development and deployment, which was made to me by a source in the thick of trying to fix this mess. Ideally, to get through the change management needed so that Democrats are all comfortable with these next-generation platforms by the beginning of the presidential primaries in early 2028, these new tools would be getting a major workout now, and some forward-leaning organizations would be getting the support they need to migrate off their existing constituent-relationship management systems to these new ones. Fixing bugs, adding improvements and learning how to manage usage at national scales (when several hundred thousand people might be simultaneously using these systems) takes time. That’s what $10 million could pay for now. Without it, none of these new tools are going to be ready to replace the Bonterra suite in 2027—they won’t be anywhere close to ready for prime time. But that’s where we are, in a field where if you just tread water, you fall behind.

Contact The Movement Cooperative here if you want to help do something about this challenge.

Related:

—Last week, Higher Ground Labs announced its latest funding round, seeking proposals for systems, platforms and tools that aim to support sustained engagement, surface authentic insights for “community-led messaging,” reach beyond traditional channels or use LLMs and agentic AI to make campaign systems more efficient. They are also looking to invest in tools that improve the relationship between institutions and the public, help people navigate how government works, or that strengthen connection, reduce polarization and support sustained community-building over time.

Notably, HGL, which has marshaled more than $50 million into several waves of tech-enabled start-ups since its founding in 2017, prefaces its call by stating that “The 2024 election exposed a hard truth: more spending and more outreach no longer guarantee meaningful impact. Rather than a failure of effort, the cycle suggested a failure of fit between existing infrastructure and the realities of today’s media and technology landscape: fragmented attention across hard-to-reach channels, messaging disconnected from community sentiment, and slow or incomplete feedback on what actually shifts voters. That gap is not just tactical, but structural. The progressive ecosystem needs new ways to adapt in real time, operate with better intelligence, and build capacity that persists beyond election cycles.”

—For more on how NGPVAN tools hinder organizing, read this recent piece by Susan Labandibar in The Grassroots Connector.

—And to learn more about many alternative options available, check out Higher Ground Labs’ Progressive CRM Guide.

Also Noted

—In the parallel universe that is focused on improving how government works using tech and design thinking, a fascinating debate is playing out over how much to push for the use of AI. Here’s Erie Meyer, a co-founder of the U.S. Digital Service, warning in FedScoop that “well-meaning civic tech reformers are getting quietly pushed by philanthropic funding with strings attached toward a single answer regardless of the question: AI.” Here’s Code for America founder Jen Pahlka responding that the question isn’t whether to use AI, but whether “we let it entrench the status quo or use it to finally put government in control of its own destiny.” And here’s Mikey Dickerson, who helped rescue Healthcare.gov and then becaome the first administrator of the USDS, standing in the middle parsing their arguments. And also sharing that he’s “running a project called Tech Viaduct, where we are trying to prepare for a bolder, more muscular progressive-ish presidency, should we ever get that chance.” Stay tuned!

—The anti-Trump group 50501 used Pol.is to crowdsource ideas on how to respond to President Trump’s threats to destroy Iran’s civilization. More than 900 people participated casting nearly 21,500 votes. No breakthroughs were made, but it’s still cool to see a big protest group trying new tools for mass participation.

End Times

More political ads like this one, please!