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Democrats Need to Grow Up and Move Beyond the Myth of the 'Ground Game'
Believing the current style of door-knocking wins campaigns is the same as believing in Santa Claus.
Dec 26, 2024
Once upon a time, in a precinct long, long ago, there was a campaign that built voter contact programs solely from those who lived in the targeted neighborhood. The entire community shopped at the same grocery stores and even saw one another at the bank, gym, and library. In other words, this was totally different from today's "ground game," manned by people who drive from hours away, armed with clipboards, shiny new campaign t-shirts, and ready to tell residents exactly how they should vote.
While a ton of articles have been written about the importance of the "ground game" in the final days of the Harris campaign, no one is discussing the increasing problems and decreasing rate of return of this tactic. Time Magazine's October election article, "Democrats Bank on Ground Game Advantage in Pennsylvania," opens with the author observing that "most of the people on Elana Hunter's list weren't answering the door," but does not dig into the actual problem. The same is true with campaign analysis in hundreds of other news outlets. The New York Times wrote a lengthy piece comparing Vice President Kamala Harris' in-house door-knocking operation to the Trump campaign's outsourced field operation. The article highlights both sides bragging about how many doors they knocked on and how much paid staff was hired. But, neither side (nor the writers) discuss how few people answer their doors or even care what the stranger is selling.
This analysis misses the real problems of modern-day door knocking: Voters don't open their doors anymore, voters do not know their neighbors, and undecided voters are more skeptical than ever when it comes to talking about politics.
As Democrats, we should know that a last-minute paid "ground game" that gets dropped into the battleground days before an election hasn't worked in years.
Year-round precinct work with "local captains" who knew their "turf" and how each neighbor would vote disappeared as the campaign industry grew and political parties stopped building traditional ward systems. Instead, they were replaced with volunteers and paid voices that only knocked on doors during major elections. This transition from a known, trusted neighbor to an unknown door knocker has made modern campaigning a data-driven competition that ignores effectiveness as it optimizes toward knocking on the most doors.
Nonetheless, message and messenger still matter in all aspects of campaigns, especially in the field. Door-to-door salesmen are a relic of history (Even the legendary Fuller Brush company started transitioning out of door-to-door sales in 1985).
Public safety studies show neighborhoods are more responsive to community policing programs when public safety officers know the people they serve. Why would political campaigns be different?
Technology has also had a major impact on door knocking. It's now been a decade since the invention of video door camera technology. According to a 2024 Consumer Reports study, 30% of Americans use video door cameras. These changes in neighborhood dynamics and consumer behaviors are realities that must be faced.
The rite-of-passage, where a volunteer gets lost in below-freezing weather canvassing an unknown precinct or gets bitten by a dog while knocking on doors, needs to be relegated to history. While campaign war stories are fun, it's time to be honest about the changing times and begin a new chapter: These age-old tactics are neither sacred nor effective. If no one is home or no one is answering their door even if they are home, political campaigns need to change with the times.
To win more elections, target voters with appropriate messages and messengers. It's time to explore better ways to use scarce time, people, and money to achieve the desired victory. Are there better places to send volunteers to work more efficiently and rally potential voters?
This is not to say that field organizing should be discarded or that campaigns should go completely digital. (Lots of criticism is being written on the current problems with these newer tactics that will hopefully be fixed.) But, as the Democratic Party's messaging and mobilization are transformed, an honest assessment of all tactics is needed to understand what works and create better ways to win.
Remember, just because a tactic worked on one campaign, it will not always continue to work the same four years later. We have tried this with auto-calling and text messaging technologies and know they have diminishing returns each cycle. Now is the time to dig deep and have honest conversations with field organizers and volunteers to learn what tactics need to be retired and start adopting new approaches.
Let's stop pretending that more "fake neighbors" door-knocking is the solution to the Democrats' problems and focus on how to best reach targeted voters with a message that resonates, delivered by respected voices that matter, while we have time now to build a real organic field effort.
As Democrats, we should know that a last-minute paid "ground game" that gets dropped into the battleground days before an election hasn't worked in years. It didn't work on Howard Dean's well-funded 2004 campaign that flew tons of staff and volunteers to Iowa. It's now 20 years after the infamous Dean scream, and we continue to blindly follow the same failed "orange cap" tactics of these past campaigns: inserting last-minute volunteers and door-knocking teams instead of thinking about how to create long-term community-based approaches.
We all have to grow up at some point and face the truth. Or you could keep believing in Santa Claus and see what gift he brings you in the next election cycle.
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Harris’ Historic Gains With Seniors Show They Are the Secret Weapon Progressives Need
The organizing I’ve been a part of has shown not only are seniors engaged, but they are ready to take on fights progressives care about, like protecting public healthcare and fighting back against privatization.
Nov 09, 2024
U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris lost the election, but when all the votes are tallied, she may have won the senior vote. If so, she would be the first Democrat to do so since Al Gore did in 2000.
As of September 29, CNN reported that the average poll had Kamala Harris up with seniors by three points. Harris’ strong ratings continued to hold in a poll of likely voters by ABC/Ipsos, released a week later, showed Harris up 51-46%. CNN Exit polling has the two candidates tied with voters over 65, a group Trump won by 7%, and 5%, in 2016 and 2020 respectively.
Senior citizens took a beating over the last year, as the primary conversation about older people was centered on the two older men running for president, especially President Joe Biden. I get it, and was glad Biden stepped aside, but by the time he did there’d been plenty of collateral damage. Mainstream news media and popular culture took potshot after potshot at Biden, and sometimes Trump, with jokes about dementia. One Stephen Colbert bit featured Trump being inaugurated with a stack of Depends instead of a book of scripture.
One group that I think few would think we should more aggressively court, fold in, and organize with are seniors, but that is a self-defeating path if we want to realize significant change down the road.
I learned of Biden stepping down while among a hundred people, almost all seniors, filing into a meeting of a County Board of Supervisors in rural Wisconsin. They were there to protest a plan to privatize their beloved county-owned nursing home that in one form or another had been part of the county for more than a century. So many people showed up that the county had to create an overflow room to accommodate everyone. Then, one by one, older Democrats, Independents, and Republicans took to the podium and expressed their ire at the idea of selling off a venerable community institution that they had all paid into for years or a lifetime. It was a fight for publicly funded and run healthcare, and against privatization, and had cross-partisan appeal.
They were not alone in this fight, as small-town seniors in a handful of counties were doing the same, flooding into county board meetings, marching (or driving their tractors) in local parades, and giving pro-privatization county board members hell every step of the way.
In these meetings and marches, I experienced people, 75, 80, and older, having a third, even fourth, act, building relationships across partisanship, doing things for the first time, and some fighting for what was right with their very last breath. None of these fights to protect public healthcare would be possible if not for the leadership of people over 65. They have time, wisdom, and experience to contribute, and we need every bit of it.
In community organizing circles, there is a dearth of organizing of older working class people. The push has been to get younger. I get it, and over the years have trained hundreds of young organizers to organize younger people. But I would encourage us to think about the role of older people in building movements and a “larger we" that can get us to the other side of this tumultuous period in American history.
For those of us who crave significant change, whether as sweeping as doing away with the Electoral College, or an expansion of Medicare, or a reinstatement of some basic voting rights, It will require more than razor thin majorities coming to an agreement. It will require super majorities of people being in agreement on many things and across many states. If we want big change, we need a lot more people.
In many states older people are the fastest growing age demographic, becoming a higher percentage of the electorate, and will have a lot to say about who wins elections. Between 2010 and 2022, the 65-and-over population grew by 48%.
As swing states have been a hot topic of conversation, here’s how the aging of America is playing out in a few of those. The number of Wisconsinites aged 75 and older is projected to grow by 75% over the next two decades. Michiganders over 85 are the state’s fastest growing age group, and Pennsylvania’s over 65 population is already at more than 2.2 million. That’s a lot of people.
Seniors consistently turn out at the highest rate of any age group. According to the U.S. Census, voter registration numbers for those over 65 to 74 hover at 78%, higher than any other age group.
The organizing I’ve been a part of in Wisconsin has shown not only are seniors engaged, but they are ready to take on fights progressives care about, like protecting public healthcare and fighting back against privatization.
Seniors have united across partisanship to save their public nursing homes. In the spring elections, they took that energy to the ballot box and a number of county board members who led the charge to privatize, including the chairs of two counties, were voted out and replaced by candidates who supported keeping their nursing homes publicly owned. People in the community expanded who was in the fight, and they won.
There’s been a tendency among some progressives to look to narrow who is in, to slice us into smaller groups, and to not work in coalition with people unless we agree on all the things. One group that I think few would think we should more aggressively court, fold in, and organize with are seniors, but that is a self-defeating path if we want to realize significant change down the road.
If we want big things, we need more people. Let’s look to expand, not narrow, who is in, and, considering the fact that older people are becoming a larger percentage of the population, it would seem a major mistake to not place more focus here.
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US Unions Must Look Beyond Themselves to Save Themselves
Either we think about unionism in new ways and establish new ways of joining other movements, or most of our unions die a long, slow, painful death.
May 26, 2024
The labor movement in the United States used to be respected and looked to for leadership; people cared about what positions labor took, watched when they mobilized, and noticed the causes they supported. This was especially true among the left. Today, for most of the country, crickets. Including much of the left. And yet, labor is a source of potential power unrivaled by any other bottom-up social grouping in the country.
As one who has written extensively about labor around the world and in the United States—see my list of publications with many links to the original articles—I have been thinking over a number of years about the future direction of the U.S. labor movement. But this thinking is not just based on writing or academic research; I’ve done that and also have years of experience as a labor activist and as one who has worked in blue, white, and pink collar jobs over the past 40+ years and in multiple locations across the country.
I argue that we haven’t had a labor movement in the U.S. since 1949, when the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) expelled 11 so-called “left-led” unions with somewhere between 750,000 and 1 million members; we’ve had only a trade union movement. What’s the difference? A labor movement looks out for the well-being of all working people in the country, while a trade union movement only looks out for members of its member unions.
We see workers creating reform movements trying to transform their unions for the benefit of the entire membership, if not all workers.
And, especially since 1981, when the trade union movement failed to defend the striking air traffic controllers in the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (PATCO) strike when attacked by then-U.S. President Ronald Reagan, the trade union movement leaders have done little but watch its ranks shrink, its prestige fall, and its power decline. Millions of jobs have been shipped overseas while the manufacturing economy has been decimated, and most of the service sector jobs since created have remained ununionized, underpaid, and with many fewer protections for workers. Yes, acting together, the trade union movement has worked to elect Democrats such as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama to office, but between signing the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1994, and the failure to pass a bill to enhance labor organizing, I’d say neither could be considered blazing successes. Individual unions have succeeded here and there, but only episodically and not consistently, and usually only because of some tactical feature that gave them a winning advantage in a particular struggle. Inspiring not.
The only consistent trade union success since the early 1980s has been in sucking up U.S. government money—often between $30-75 million annually—which has allowed AFL-CIO foreign policy leaders to act behind the backs of most of the organization’s leaders and all of its affiliated union members, in our name, in efforts generally intended to undercut foreign workers’ struggles against multinational corporations and U.S. government foreign policy projects.
Worse, even while nonetheless being helpful to foreign workers in a few cases, the AFL-CIO has acted to legitimize the imperialist National Endowment for Democracy (NED) by serving as one of its four “core institutes,” along with the international wing of the Democratic Party, the international wing of the Republican Party, and the international wing of its domestic archenemy, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, in NED’s on-going project of supporting and advancing the U.S. Empire.
Thus, the trade unions’ leadership has generally done little to advance the interests and well-being of U.S. workers, while acting in differential manners—usually bad—with foreign workers. I don’t think this was what Karl Marx and Frederick Engles were expecting when they echoed the French feminist, Flora Tristan, urging, “Workers of the World, Unite!”
Yet, despite the general failure of the trade union movement leadership, especially since 1981, the reality is that unions are one set of institutions that, at their best, are of the workers, by the workers, and for the workers. You see workers fighting to make their unions “real”—trying to make them part of a labor movement that serves the interests of all workers if not the entire society—over the years. We see workers creating reform movements trying to transform their unions for the benefit of the entire membership, if not all workers.
Perhaps the most famous of late has been the reform organization Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD) inside the United Auto Workers. UAWD came together to fight for direct elections of UAW leadership instead of the convention elections, which had led to a one-party state since 1946 and the election of Walter Reuther. Over time, a number of top-level UAW leaders were charged with corruption, and in a consent agreement with the federal government, the UAW had to shift to direct elections for top officers. UAWD put forth a partial slate headed by Shawn Fain, and then proceeded to win every leadership position they sought, ultimately gaining control of the international union’s executive board.
In turn, Fain and his administration led the 2023 fight against the Big Three auto companies—General Motors, Ford, and Stellantis, the parent of Chrysler—and won the strike in the fall. While the UAW did not win all of its demands in the strike, it clearly demonstrated the power of organized workers who have a leadership that will fight for and with them. And following that successful strike, Volkswagen workers at Chattanooga, Tennessee, voted to join the UAW, with help from the German union, IG Metal, although in the face of governors from six southern states telling them to not do so.
It is critical to understand that unions are important to many workers; that they make a difference in the workplace; and that they usually mean higher wages, better benefits, seniority systems, and a recognizable “rule of law” in the workplace, the latter which places some limits on management authority and discipline; a big difference from the situation of most workplaces where workers give up most if not all of their rights when they enter company grounds.
So, where does this lead us?
I want to build off a study that I did originally for my doctoral dissertation in 2003. It was a comparative-historical sociological study of unionization in the steel and meatpacking industries in the greater Chicago area (including northwest Indiana) between 1933-1955, examining how the unions addressed racial oppression in the workplace, union, and communities in which these workers operated. Long story short: Despite drawing from the exact same labor pool—white ethnics from Eastern and Southern Europe, African Americans from the rural South, and some Mexicans—the steelworkers’ organizations ignored the issues of white supremacy and racism, while the packinghouse workers directly confronted it. In 1939, in racist, segregated Chicago, 8 out of 14 packinghouse local unions were headed by African Americans!
From this study, and differing from much research on the CIO—the labor organization both of these unions ultimately joined—I recognized there were two different conceptualizations of trade unions within the CIO; ultimately, I referred to that of the steelworkers as a “business” union and that of the packinghouse workers as a “social justice” union. And this was important because I found that how the members thought about their union determined subsequent organizational behavior.
Transforming business unions into social justice unions offers a solution: They build on their foundation in the workplace but join with community members—however defined—to work together in ways to improve life for all concerned.
And that brings things to where we are now: There are still two forms of unionism available to unions and their members. Business unions focus the power they are able to mobilize to fight for workers in the workplace, such as wages, working conditions, seniority, “rule of law,” etc. However, they generally ignore anything beyond the workplace, despite workers having lives outside of the workplace. Social justice unions focus that power in the workplace to not only address workplace issues, but they use the power in the workplace to also address things in workers’ lives beyond the workplace, including things such as racism, misogyny, and homophobia, as well as things like healthcare, education, the climate crisis, etc. Ideally, unions becoming or transforming themselves into social justice unions would consider the range of interests from the local to the global, ultimately seeking to join with unions and other people’s organizations around the world to make things better for all.
Recognizing these two different possibilities and what union members want to do in light of this understanding is important. It is important that these issues get discussed by the members of each union themselves; this is not limited to union leadership or even activists.
The reality is that the trade union movement today is so weak that unions rarely have a chance to win their battles without gaining public support. Unions have often recognized this and have appealed to community support to help them win. Yet, what do the communities get back from the unions? Often nothing. This one-way form of “solidarity” is simply not sustainable; you can only withdraw from the well so many times without giving back before it runs dry.
Transforming business unions into social justice unions offers a solution: They build on their foundation in the workplace but join with community members—however defined—to work together in ways to improve life for all concerned.
There are issues that simply cannot be solved on a local, regional, or even national basis; the climate crisis jumps immediately to mind, although there are other issues such as global sexual slavery and related issues, pandemics, war, and empire that can only be approached from a global perspective. We have to understand issues such as these from a global perspective and begin educating and organizing our union sisters and brothers on this level. But our ideas about our unions must at least allow for this, if not actively encourage work on this level by all members. Key to this is implementing an educational program that confronts these issues and encourages workers to think about how their union could work to address issues key to workers in this larger sense. The old slogan, “Think globally, act locally,” encapsulates these ideas.
This, however, is not going to change by itself: Activists in each union need to stimulate discussion within their organization about whether they should confine their unionism just to the workplace, or to use that power for the good of all.
I would suggest trying to find a group of union members that think having this debate within one’s union is crucial, and work to unify this core. Then they could create a campaign to spread this issue throughout the union, initially through one’s workplace and local and then through the national or international union they are affiliated with. It should be run the same way as any organizing campaign; and that is to win.
When confronted by this question—how do we want our union to go forward, alone or with our neighbors (from the local area to the globe)?—this is a question that encourages workers to think about these issues and get involved in participating in strengthening the union. Once a union is seen as something everyone participates in, or at least as many as possible, instead of just something that “others” do, we strengthen our individual unions. When we come to common responses, then we can extend our conceptualization of the union to other unions, locally, regionally, and nationally.
This can be extended globally when we find out what is happening elsewhere: There are workers across the planet seeking to join to fight for a better world for all. Yes, this is happening among workers in other imperial countries but, as we see in the case of Southern Initiative on Globalization and Trade Union Rights, workers in Africa, Asia, and Latin America are finding ways to unite across their geographical regions and the globe to organize. I think they would be delighted to have North Americans join in their project, and that can only happen when unions take that broader, social justice union approach.
In short: innovate or stagnate. The business unionism of the past 40 years (in particular) has been a failure. Either we think about unionism in new ways and establish new ways of thinking about and joining other movements, or most of our unions die a long, slow, painful death.
It’s time we start rebuilding the labor movement: for the good of all!
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