Good things vs good tactics

A response to the response to my writing about organizing

I wrote a fairly offhand paragraph in my Does Any Of This Work? Post about how I am skeptical of power building/ long term community organizing as a path forward for Democratic tactics. Because it was offhand, I wasn’t as specific as I could have been about the contours of my skepticism. There have been several interesting responses- from Micah Sifry to the folks at We Choose Us to Amy Pritchard, which I appreciate! Since that original post didn’t really focus on that much, and I think this is a topic that deserves consideration, I’ve decided to come back to it.

Field vs Organizing vs Power Building

There’s so many terms and they all sort of mush into each other. I want to be clear about how I am using them for the purposes of this piece.

Field: A catchall term for in-person outreach conducted during the course of a campaign. Includes door to door canvassing, attracting and training volunteers, events, outreach by staffers placed on the ground, etc. There are a lot of different types of activity within “field”. Notably, most field falls into campaign-cycle short term electoral tactics, and not the thing I am being skeptical of in this piece.

Canvassing: Aka door knocking. Going door to door to talk to strangers during a campaign and ask them to vote/vote for you/whatever. Usually assumed to be done by either campaign staffers or volunteers that those staffers are managing. Short term, and decently well measured by research.

Paid Canvassing: The same thing as above, but you pay the people who are walking to knock doors to do it.

Organizing: Another catch-all term. This runs you into trouble because it can mean “getting people to come to an event” or “getting people to commit to an organization long term”, especially since it has a specific meaning in labor union contexts that isn’t the same as the meaning in political contexts. There’s a good piece from The Ground Game proposing differences between organizing and mobilizing, and I’m included to use that definition here. So, organizing: building networks of people who share a common set of causes or interests, such that the structure persists after a single campaign is over, with a particular set of goals. I.E. building a community group focused on making public transit better, that shows up to community meetings, does leaflet campaigns, talks to electeds, etc, and crucially *still exists when the original organizer leaves*.

Mobilizing: 80% of the time, this is what people mean when they say organizing, see The Ground Game above. Getting people to show up to a specific individual event or take a specific individual action.

Power Building: I personally hate this term. I usually see it used to mean actions that, long term, increase the political effectiveness of a given group. This can either be by building long term investment in the political process, leading to higher turnout, or by increasing their likelihood of running for office. My beef with it is that “power” is too broad, and can encompass a set of not-always-correlated behaviors.

GOTV: Get out the vote. In campaign terms, this is a strategy of finding people you already think will vote your way and making sure they actually do vote. Not a specific mode of outreach, but a type of strategy that can be executed in many ways.

Persuasion: Convincing people who weren’t going to vote your way to instead vote your way. This includes outreach to people who were going to vote for the opposing party, and to people who were going to vote third party. Contrasted to GOTV in terms of being a type of strategy that can be executed many ways.

Relational, or Relational Organizing: Aka peer to peer. Getting volunteers to reach out to people they already know and encourage them to take some action. The super common model rn is via text messages (i.e. text your friends, tell them to vote!) but it doesn’t have to be, this can be via any mode.

Short Term Vs Long Term

You may notice that the strategies described above fall into two rough categories. There are strategies that seek to work within a specific electoral cycle to increase vote share, and strategies that seek to work across cycles. These things can blend together a bit. The general literature on persistence of campaign effects points to very very little long term effect from something like canvassing or mailers or ads. In theory, you could kick off a long term organizing program with an effort that turns out a ton of votes immediately? I haven’t seen great evidence for this, and most of the writing about these programs seems to imply they are *not intended* to work in the short term. Which is completely fair, that would be a fast turnaround.

Grading Strategy

Generally I am inclined to grade programs on the basis of whatever they declared their goals to be. If you say you’re a program that turns out progressive voters, I would want to see evidence that you did successful GOTV. If you say you are building the next generation of candidates, I would want to see evidence of program participants doing political action (maybe running for a very local office, or getting involved with the party).

This gets tricky when organizations have declared goals that are, well, squishy and intangible. If your goal is “build power” or “create collective agency in communities”, I’m not sure how to measure that. Especially since I don’t know the communities in which folks are working and I am not really inclined to argue with their assessment of the “agency levels” of people they know better than me. You could totally put together a survey design to test this (and if you want to do that, hit me up, I think that would be fun) but it’s not something I have access to right now.

Good Things Aren’t Always Good Tactics

I think it’s great that people are building relationships and helping community members meet each other. I want citizens to feel like they can go to their local government or community for help, and to feel like they understand how government works, and that it’s serving them. Having organizations help with this seems extremely good.

However, when I am evaluating the tactics of the campaign arm of the Democratic party, really all I care about is “does this make Democrats more likely to win?”. And there are two ways to make Dems more likely to win, mechanically- make more people be Democrats, or make more Democrats vote (or, make Republicans less likely to vote, but that’s out of scope here).

That narrow focus means that all the positive goods that could be produced by these programs don’t really matter to my evaluation unless they help Democrats win. Which may feel harsh, especially since the line between “Democratic party organization” and “general nonprofit” is sometimes thin. But if you’re functioning or marketing yourself as a Democratic organization, or getting funding that is intended to help Democrats win, that’s the outcome I am interested in. All the other positive effects are at best a nice bonus.

This doesn’t mean I am imposing a time bound on possible effects- “this produces a bunch of Democratic votes, but not for like 5 years” would be a great effect. Difficult to prove, but great. I’m mostly trying to narrow the discussion from “things which are good” to “things which help Democrats win”.

Even the DNC is really very messy about mixing generally good things with tactically electorally useful things. See Ken Martin’s “Visions for Organizing Everywhere” for an example.

2. We Build Up and Support Community Leaders

Organizers are the heart of our programs — and we will empower them as such. We reject the notion that organizers are temporary workers meant to execute static scripts or manage spreadsheets.

Instead, we will recruit, train, and support organizers as facilitators of community power. They will have the tools and autonomy to build volunteer leadership, train others, and reflect the values and culture of the communities they serve. Our organizing staff will not just execute tactics — they will lead local movements.

[obligatory DNC sidenote, I will believe this talk about not having people be temporary workers when I see it. Get through one of the usual between-election funding panics without firing people and then we can talk.]

As written, this reflects an explicit commitment to have Democratic organizers do stuff which sounds very nice and positive (lead local movements! nice!) but isn’t directly related to the cause of “Democrats winning”. That ambiguity of purpose is part of why I find this all so complicated to talk about.

Sidenote on Funding Gaps

One point against my idea that we have put money into these sorts of power building/organizing efforts that was raised by Micah Sifrey was that

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.

Out of interest, I glanced at their FEC filing. Here’s aggregate money raised by MVP by month over 2023 and 2024. For context, their full raising amount in 2020 was 14 million, which they hit in April of 2024. This looks like a surge of funding before Harris got in, in May? This isn’t the point of this article, I just wanted to take a look at it. For context, their previous cycle budget was like 14 million total.

I would argue that running “long term” work that must draw funding from the constantly-late funding environment surrounding elections means that your work *must* be robust to that funding model. It is very annoying that people donate so late, but it’s not new, and if your model can’t handle that, you need a different model.

Does this mean I will *not* spend every future cycle begging people to please donate earlier for once? No, people should donate earlier, it is a huge problem that money comes so late. I am just saying that it is the *reality* that money comes late.

The folks at We Choose Us frame it slightly differently:

I can name dozens of state or local organizations that a) haven’t experienced buckets of money for their organizing work outside the mobilizing funding they get for elections, b) are very much around, c) have internal cultures of team meetings, community events, accountability sessions, etc. at which volunteers not only show up in “off years,” they actually lead, and d) steward resources well because they never know when the next foundation grant or annual major gift won’t be renewed.

I don’t doubt that funding is much more limited in off years for organizing work. I think we actually agree here- it is the chucking money into long term projects on a short term timeline that I count as “setting money on fire”. That boom and bust cycle is part of why I’m so skeptical of long term oriented work! Our funding environment is a nightmare for anything that takes 5 years to pan out, and the strategy of “ask everyone very nicely to not boom and bust this time” doesn’t work. While I may also have questions about the strategies folks want to employ, watching that cycle happen has made me very, very doubtful of the frequent promises that we will build a thing that lasts this time, for sure.

What would convince me?

Since I am protesting that I haven’t seen anything to convince me of the value of organizing focused electoral strategies, I should be clear about what *would* do that.

I half-assed this in my original piece:

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.

So, I am looking for

1. Organizations that have survived for longer than a single electoral cycle

2. Remained focused on their initial stated purpose

3. Engaged people who are not otherwise engaged by Democratic and Democratic-adjacent programs, and crucially,

4. Produced new votes for Democrats at a cost comparable to other methods

That (4) is kind of complicated, but what I am looking for specifically is if these programs are effective at helping Democrats win, which means being as good at getting new Democratic votes as our traditional methods. This is a high bar, but it is the bar where we have the best information on alternatives. We know approximately what one new vote worth of texts costs, and that metric can be applied to this method as well.

The obvious immediate response is that this measure ignores the long term benefits of such organizing. To that, I’d say that I am completely open to methods of measuring “generating votes” that are outside the usual “who on your list voted” method. You could do something where you randomize the presence of your organization across several geographies, and look for increases in Dem vote share that way, or you could hold out a control set of potential volunteer contacts like people do to test relational programs. I will happily do this over a multi year period, if that’s what you feel is a fair unit of analysis. That’s going to be tricky and messy but do-able.

What I’m not happy to do is take “number of members” or “number of people at an event” as a proxy for electoral effectiveness. One of my big concerns about this sort of strategy is that it will primarily engage people who are already hardcore Democrats and already very likely to vote, with little effect on people not already prone to such engagement. I also worry about turning “engagement” into “votes” (or running for office, or other useful electoral actions).

I want to underscore how *difficult* this is. I am not skeptical because I think people are fucking up doing an easy thing. I think having electoral impact through nontraditional means is difficult, and doing that in a messy funding environment and crumbling civic society is even more difficult. I am not skeptical because I think this is easy, but because I think it is incredibly hard, and I worry people are overstating their confidence.

Placeholder

I know some likely responses are 1. Okay fine what would you have us do instead? And 2. What about the fundamental problem of our broken civic culture?

I have thoughts and feelings on both, neither of which will fit in this piece (because I am basically out of time to write it). This is a start at best. For 2, I would really encourage people to read The Hollow Parties, because that has informed how I think about civic engagement and what a party is. For 1, like I said previously, I think Democrats are really very good at campaigning. We’re good at doing tactics that are effective. The problem is that we’re pushing against massive headwinds, both from being an incumbent party during covid, and from our candidates not matching the opinions held by the median voter. Those are not things you can fix with tactics.

If you take nothing else from this, please try to understand that I can firmly believe that something is *good* while also not believing it is *effective* at the purpose am measuring. Your organization could be doing amazing, life changing things for individuals involved in it, and still not be an effective source of Democratic votes. These are different end goals.