With Millions Disaffected from Politics, An Answer Beckons: Belonging.

New research on "the disaffected electorate" and how to engage people in the long process of revitalizing civic life. Plus a quick take on the good news coming out of Maine.

A quick thought about the news coming out of Maine right now, followed by my main piece of reporting/analysis for this week.

After Graham Platner withdrew from being Maine Democrats’ US Senate candidate on July 9, the state Democratic party decided to hold a special delegate convention to pick his replacement. Moving with impressive speed and technical competence, it set up an open process whereby any registered Democrat could put forward their name to be one of 500 delegates who would vote (along with the 101 members of the party’s state committee) to pick that person on July 25. By any measure, this process has been a rousing experiment in bottom-up party democracy. More than 20,000 people pre-registered to vote in one of sixteen counties, and more than 85% voted, taking advantage of a secure online voting system that would put the Iowa Democratic party of 2020 to shame.

Even more intriguing, many of the volunteer leaders who coalesced around Platner’s campaign and built much of its local infrastructure issued an open letter to the state party, stating a set of core commitments that would earn their collective support for its nominee. More than 500 signed on as part of the Maine People Powered Movement, insisting on “healthcare as a right, housing that isn’t a Wall Street commodity, an economy that isn’t rigged for billionaires and corporations, real support for workers and veterans, and a foreign policy that doesn’t treat endless war as the cost of doing business.” They also called for reforms on taxes, money in politics, and term limits.

In some respects, these developments are reminiscent of the progressive power-building work that drove the so-called Minnesota Miracle of 2023 (albeit on a much shorter time-frame), when Democrats elected with the backing of a broad faith-centered organizing network enacted a package of sweeping progressive legislation. That’s because in Minnesota, the Democratic-Farmer-Labor party relies heavily on a system of local, county and state delegate conventions to nominate its candidates, making politics more about community organizing than big-dollar fundraising.

Could there be a lesson here for grassroots Democrats elsewhere? I asked Daniel Schlozman, the co-author with Sam Rosenfeld of The Hollow Parties, a seminal book on the current state of American politics. He was cautiously optimistic, saying, “We’re not putting the primary genie back in the bottle and no system is perfect, but what’s happened in Maine is a good indication of how caucus-convention systems can actually be participatory, deliberative, and helpful in getting a strong nominee with buy-in across the party.” And he added, “Also if you want a party that does things, then the party should do things!”

Footnote: Don’t miss “The DNC Against Itself,” a great overview of the Democratic Party, that Schlozman just wrote for the New York Review of Books.

The State of the Disaffected Electorate

Meanwhile, back in the rest of America, it is not news that a huge number of our fellow citizens are deeply disaffected from politics. Many question the value of voting and, indeed, about 90 million out of the total potential electorate of 245 million didn’t bother to vote in 2024. But here’s the interesting wrinkle: not voting doesn’t correspond to not participating in civic life. And there are some encouraging signs that when people feel a greater sense of belonging, they are more likely to take part in the political arena.

A new, comprehensive multiracial survey of the disaffected electorate, done by Dr. Katrina Gamble for the Democracy & Power Innovation Fund, found that members of this demographic are just as likely as the overall population to talk about politics with a friend or family member, search online for political information, contact an elected official, go to a protest or volunteer for a political or civic group. If anything, they are more likely (by a modest degree) to do things such as sign a petition, boycott a product, make political art or music, or help neighbors with childcare or other forms of support. Like the rest of the population, about six in ten of the disaffected electorate say they would like to “feel more connected to people in my community.”

But what makes them different from the rest of the population is a much higher feeling of disillusionment and distrust in institutions. They are younger and have fewer resources, which undoubtedly explains their greater disaffection; the cost of living is a significantly greater concern for this group. They also have lower feelings of agency and higher feelings of powerlessness. And they expressed a significantly lower intention to vote in November, just 56% saying so compared to 65% for the overall population.

Last week, I talked with Dr. Gamble about this new study, which involved a total sample of 4.506 respondents, including 1,147 who were Black, 1,154 who were Hispanic, 1,691 who were white and 1,092 who were Asian/Pacific Islander. She made several additional points.

• “A lot of folks have assumed that this frustration and disillusionment means that people are totally checked out and not participating. And I honestly went into this thinking we would find something similar, but one of the most interesting findings we found is that this the impact on participation is very specifically impacting voting. That folks who have this sense of disaffection aren’t necessarily unengaged in civic life; they’re just choosing to do other things outside of voting, which is interesting--they’ve made some calculation that they’re only going to spend their time doing what matters, and they’ve decided that voting is not one of those things.”

• “The frustration that people are feeling is very specifically about the federal government. Sure, not that the trust at the state and local level is through the roof, but the things that they were describing that were making them feel let down and disillusioned about politics were very specifically about this administration and some of the things that the federal government is doing.”

• “After a regression analysis, where we controlled for a whole host of other factors, we found that belonging was the biggest predictor of whether the people who are disaffected would take some form of civic participation. It you go from the lowest level on that belonging scale to the highest, your likelihood to vote in 2026 goes up by 25%. That’s a hard thing to do, right? To move someone from zero to one on that scale, but if you translate that even into an incremental change, so you went from zero to 0.1 of some sense of increased belonging, the data suggests that that in itself would also increase your likelihood to vote in 2026 two-and-a-half percent relative to someone who’s on the lower end.”

I’m a big fan of DPI’s work and the kind of civic homes that it is investing in building. But I wanted to know if there was anything in the research that said that the kind of belonging or home that would work to address this combination of frustration and distrust trends in the direction of small-d democratic. After all, Turning Point Action or a local gun club or an evangelical church are also places that offer people a strong sense of belonging. Gamble agreed that the right and the left can both create civic homes for people. But she added that the disaffected voters she was focused on also clearly want places that accept them as they are.

“When we talk to folks in the focus groups, we did ask what the qualities that a place, like an organization or a space, would need to have in order for you to join? And folks talked about it being a place where they feel trusted, where they feel safe, where they feel comfortable. So, basically, people want to feel accepted. They want to feel included. They also talked about the fact that they wanted to be a place where they’re getting something out of it, and that’s not necessarily transactional. They talked about making more connections with friends and things like that. They would go with someone that they trusted, who invited them into that space. And so, none of those qualities is about a particular ideology. It’s really just about how people feel and how they are relating to the other people in that space. And so, to your point--there have been people creating civic homes for people to move them in ways that are antithetical to our democracy. But it also means that there is an opportunity for folks who are champions of democracy to create those same spaces and bring people into those spaces.”

One model of this work that Gamble pointed me to is an organization called Power Interfaith in Pennsylvania, a faith-based organizing group that is part of the DPI network. For the last few years, it has been experimenting with hosting “soul food dinners” for small groups in community spaces where people share a meal and have an open-ended conversation about how they’re feeling about what’s going on in their community. “There’s not an immediate ask to do something or vote for someone or turn out for an election,” Gamble noted. Power Interfaith is finding that some people want to continue meeting, and “over the course of that, they’re starting to see that people who come back into those spaces in a in a consistent way have a higher sense of agency.” She added, “It’s still early and they’re still pulling the data. But that’s an example where organizations are just trying to find spaces of community first, build that sense of belonging, like the sentiments that people want, and then kind of move towards the work of building agency and then moving people to take action. It’s just it’s a slower process.”

Gamble argues that the implications of this research and experimentation is clear. “It’s the most significant way to actually move that segment of the electorate in a way that’s sustainable. In some of the focus groups, people talked about this idea that most of their interactions around elections is really transactional. They talked about how people come and they make all these promises and then they don’t deliver and they don’t ever hear from them again.” She added, “I do think that in some ways, the way that the political industry has treated people--there’s almost this assumption that they don’t understand that they’re being used--but people are very clear that they’re being used, and that’s part of what’s driving the frustration. There was like one young woman in a focus group who said ‘I used to really care about elections and I turned out to vote and nothing really happened and I never heard from these people again. So now I don’t bother with it. I just do what I can to take care of my family.’ And so in some ways, we’re actually doing harm by treating, especially this group of people who already have a sense of distrust, in a super transactional way, because it’s only feeding into what they already believe is a system that is not really meant for them and is not engaging them in a real way, but just using them for their vote.”

“Organizing is the antidote to authoritarianism”

After talking with Dr. Gamble, I got in touch with Rev. Greg Edwards, the executive director of Power Interfaith since January of 2025. He told me that when he took over, he decided that, “we would center our work on developing agentic leaders who could make a choice about having a public life, and that we would do that by doubling down on base building and establishing a culture of rigor around organizing at Power Interfaith.” As a result, he said, “We don’t really do a lot of voter registration work or what the industry calls ‘turn and burns’.”

When I asked him why, after years of being a church-based organizer and economic development leader in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and then trying a run for Congress, he had stepped into this role at Power Interfaith, he didn’t mince words. “I was clear that I wanted to lead an organization that is a power vehicle to actually interrupt the racial and economic crisis and injustices happening within Pennsylvania. Organizing everyday ordinary people is the only way to do that. Not necessarily by leading another charitable institution or organization. Organizing is the antidote for authoritarianism. Organizing is the antidote to being able to create more just neighborhoods and communities and create a livable society. It’s not going to happen simply through large turn and burns, or trying to reach a million people six days before a major election.

He added, “We need to create opportunities that are repositories for people to have a political and spiritual home, specifically given the moment that we’re in. And so that organizing is not transactional. Organizing is deeply relational. It’s done in the smallest replicable design through a one-on-one conversation. People talking to people individually and having a human interaction is the best way to enroll people into a thing in which they can no longer be a tourist in their own life, but actually have political imagination to create the life they want to have.”

This is different from issue advocacy organizing, he argued. “The issues that we organize on in those areas are issues that emerge from our staff having one-on-ones with lots of different people in lots of different places and lots of different congregations, and helping them get clear on what keeps them up at night. And then them having to make a choice whether they’re going to actually do something about it, or simply, in some cases admire the issue but be fearful of taking action. We say in organizing we help people cross a bridge that takes them from victimhood and from perhaps apathy and from admiration of the problem actually into their agency, in which they get to make a choice.”

That notion of “admiring” a problem was new to me, so I asked him to explain. He obliged: “I think in lots of circles we have lots of people who are not short on the diagnoses of what’s wrong with their school, what’s wrong with their neighborhood. We’ve got lots of folks who understand lots of problems, and so there can be the quagmire where you can get caught in the paralysis of analysis, or just white-papering your way. I can think of political parties that think that if people just have more information and another white paper, they will actually make a decision. It’s not actually that that causes people to make the decision.”

Power Interfaith is running its soul food dinners as a way to draw people into their world. “We consider our soul food dinners where we gather people the first step into people having a political home, and then what we do is base expansion and absorption,” Edwards said. “We’re expanding in concentric circles the number of people we talk to, and then for example, in this latest iteration, we invited some of the folks at the soul food dinner to join us in a very low risk opportunity. On June 2, we had our annual day of lobbying and advocacy, and we brought everybody to the state capital. We filled up busses, and there were hundreds of us. And some of the people that came were people who were attendees of our dinners. For many of them, that was the first time they actually had gone to the state capital, and then they were also trained on how to do a research meeting with their state representative, so it’s a way to move from the table to dipping their big toe into the water.”

Right now, with DPI’s help, Power Interfaith is continuing to experiment and collect lots of data on how well these intimate encounters and one-to-one conversations are growing their base. I expect we’ll see more information on the results in due course. But in the meantime I asked Rev. Edwards what his biggest needs were, what were the obstacles standing in the way of them doing more of this work. He replied, “Our biggest pain points always are in being able to hire and train the right kind of folk to be able to organize, both in general and in particular. Organizers don’t grow on trees. There’s no pipeline of people standing outside of my office saying sign me up because I want to actually have these conversations with people. I mean, we are in a society that mostly has built by folks who have benefited from very superficial transactional conversations, and so to actually be able to organize is both art and science, and also it’s a coming home to self. To find the right people who have, who are willing to be equipped and trained on how to do that is oftentimes a daunting task.”

He also added that the philanthropic landscape, which Power Interfaith and similar groups depend on, has gotten much tougher in recent years. “Most philanthropists and most funds or foundations don’t invest in the life cycle of our freedom or revolution. Folks will give you some money to do a thing for a specific period of time.” But he saw a silver lining. “I think that that’s beginning to change because people are understanding that if we do what we’ve always done, we’re gonna get what we always got. And so I think I’ve seen a move in philanthropy to actually try to better understand organizing on the ground and the impact that it can have, versus trying to build this large-scale thing that did a million things.”

Housekeeping Note

Posting will be light for the next two weeks as I’m going to a retreat and then planning to be on a beach in Cape Cod, but I reserve the right to pop in if circumstances warrant. Got any summer reading suggestions? Share yours below!