Last week I received an email from DNC chair Jaime Harrison. Here’s how it begins:
“We've heard you loud and clear, Robb: Democratic organizers cannot just knock on your door the day before the election. We need to be organizing and building power year-round.”
If you have been following this newsletter and my social media posts, you’ll probably understand why for a split second I thought this email was addressed specifically to me instead of being another fundraising solicitation.
Referring to “organizing and building power year-round” suggests to me an awareness that short-term election-year organizing is not sufficient. But it is not the party that can best do this type of organizing, it is community-based organizations that organize residents and workers in rural and urban areas throughout the country. For that reason, I am looking at this DNC initiative as a potential step in the direction of support and partnership with community organizing - even though that is not what Harrison is proposing.
Last November, shortly after the election, I wrote: “Democratic Party organizations – particularly those that can raise money – [should] partner with community-based organizing groups all around the country. These party organizations and PACs should raise money for polling that also helps fund the canvassing work of local progressive organizing groups. There are a number of good reasons to do this, from supporting the work of progressive organizing on an ongoing basis (rather than only at election time), identifying and supporting rising community leaders, making better connections between local issues and state and federal policy, and establishing closer ties between community organizing and electoral work.”
At that time and since I have been arguing that progressives must start to treat community organizing as a political imperative and find ways to support that work and partner with those efforts year-round and on an ongoing basis. Harrison seems to be positioning the national party towards those ends, but his email was of course a funding solicitation. Until we see the party donating significant money to progressive community organizing groups without strings attached, I think progressives are better off donating directly to local organizing efforts in their own communities and in those communities where such efforts can help progressive candidates win elections.
I am not suggesting that Harrison’s initiative is a bad idea, to be clear. (Although I do have some criticisms and concerns. See below.) The party should be putting resources into organizing. One important question for me is whether small dollar individual donors should be doing so through the party, and my answer to that is no – at least not with their entire donation budget.
I have in the past recommended donors to give directly to campaigns, bypassing the party structure. The reason for this is that the party is primarily an incumbent protection machine, and many progressives might see their hard-earned money supporting centrist incumbents against progressive primary opponents. Even if that is not a concern for some, it is still valuable to donate directly to candidates. Understanding races and candidates, and investing in them directly, better helps politically engage donors. They are more likely to pay attention to specific events and agree to phone bank or text bank – or participate in other persuasion and GOTV activities – for the candidates they support. For others who would rather let someone else decide where to direct donations, the party is a good solution. However, it is important to know that your cash goes farther to more directly it is donated (i.e., there are fewer overhead and transaction costs involved).
One of the reasons I started Margin of Error Blog was to help potential campaign volunteers and small dollar donors make informed decisions about who to help and where, how, and when to participate. The “Trifecta Reports” were created for this purpose, and later I created a matrix to advise folks on where to direct donations to Senate Democrats. But I have suggested that donors match their political contributions with donations to community-based organizing groups – even if it means they must halve the political contributions they were intending on making. Without the ongoing organizing that community and labor organizations engaged in over the past decade or so, there would have been no political victories in Arizona and Georgia this year.
The case of Sara Gideon is instructive. The now-former Maine state House Speaker raised about $75 million in her losing campaign to Senator Susan Collins (R-ME), but the total amount is not of most interest. Her campaign had a $11 million remainder from that race. This tells us a few things: (1) she did not need to raise $75 million. She did not win – in fact, it wasn’t close in the end – which brings us to that baseball maxim about spending: it might make you competitive, but it does not win you championships. (2) At least $11 million of what Gideon raised could have been put to other uses. Imagine if that money were invested into community organizing in Maine. Maybe it would not have changed this year’s outcome, but it would have an impact down the road. Even so, it probably would have had some impact on the election because a robust community canvass throughout the 2nd Congressional District would have provided valuable intelligence to the campaign about why folks there were disinclined to support Gideon.*
Let’s take a closer look at what the DNC is proposing to do in this email. The DNC plans to invest $20 million in states to ensure Democrats win in 2021 and 2022. Harrison claims that this is the DNC’s “earliest and largest midterm investment ever.” There are three parts to this investment strategy.
(1) “Protecting the right to vote.” The DNC plans to launch its “biggest voter protection program ever,” focusing on Arizona, Michigan, North Carolina, Nevada, and Pennsylvania. Voter protection is an essential component of expanding and mobilizing the base, but it does not appear from the fundraising email that the party is planning to do more than target money at certain states. The programmatic voter protection work currently supported by the DNC appears to remain unchanged. If that is true, then this is not a new program. It is either an expansion or a focusing/targeting of an existing program. However, the email lacks enough detail to know for sure.
(2) “Modernizing the organizing process.” This part of the strategy is to harness the organizing potential from the “200,000 active online volunteers” and deploy them as volunteers for early voter engagement work. The focus here is in supporting “early distributed organizing programs” in Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. There were times in 2020 that the party and campaigns could not put all the digital volunteers to use because of technology obstacles, poor planning or unexpected high volumes of volunteers, and unnecessary steps that frustrated volunteers and discouraged them from participating. The DNC seems concerned with solving these problems and deploying volunteers to early voter contact in 2021. Although I am not clear on what Harrison means by “early distributed organizing programs,” it could mean community groups that are doing voter contact outreach. It could also refer to party organizations doing this work. This part of the strategy – while important for the party and for voter contact work – is not an investment in community organizing.
(3) “Investing in local talent.” Although the email does not include much detail on any of the three parts of the investment strategy, this is the part that has the least detail. It is also the part that appears to be closest to incorporating a community organizing partnership. Here’s how this part is described in whole: “We want to expand on the diverse, local talent pipelines we started last cycle -- both building at the entry-level and moving diverse, local talent up the organization to develop the next generation of campaign leadership for 2022, 2024, and beyond. Folks working on the ground know their communities best, and here at the DNC, we’re taking their lead.” The objective of this part seems to be developing organizing talent for campaigns, which is a valid goal. I am less persuaded that the DNC is going to “take the lead” of folks on the ground, but if they do it will be the most important development of this overall strategy.
The email concludes: “If enough people on this grassroots team come forward to support this work, we could have Democrats organizing on the ground as soon as this summer -- more than a whole year before Election Day 2022. But to make sure this investment makes good on its promise, we’re relying on your early commitment, Robb. It’s the only way our party will have the resources it needs to build upon our progress and make strategic investments ahead of high-stakes moments like the midterms.” (Emphasis in the original email.)
I am very interested to see how this new initiative from the DNC plays out. Investing in community organizing takes years to realize results. This initiative can help the party in the midterms next year, but the real payoff will come five, ten, and fifteen years down the line – assuming the DNC continues to prioritize the work. Yet, the email is focused on 2021 and 2022** – which could be tactical or it could be telegraphing short-term thinking by the party. We should be cautious that this initiative is merely a reaction to a political moment that is persuading (or threatening to persuade) donors to give directly to community organizing groups rather than to political candidates or parties, and that once that moment appears to fade the DNC will spend its money elsewhere and go back to old habits. There is also the potential that if significant gains are not realized in next year’s midterms (let alone if there are net losses), that the party will declare the project a failure and abandon it. This kind of short-term thinking is common in American politics. Yet the reason Democrats were successful in Georgia and Arizona in 2020 was not because of election-year party organizing or investment, but because of long-term community organizing commitments to build progressive agendas. It may seem in the public imagination that Stacey Abrams founded the work in the Peach State, but she actually built off of existing long-term organizing work (and she’ll be the first to tell you that).
If the DNC is really serious about partnering with community organizing groups doing year-round canvassing and power building, it will have to do better than what is outlined in the email. This could be an important first step to reorienting DNC priorities towards building the base through ongoing organizing over time. The party will need to invest in community organizing and embed such investment and partnership in its ongoing mission if it wants other states to follow the lead of ground-breaking work done by community and labor activists in Arizona and Georgia over the past fifteen years.
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* After the election I talked to a number of folks who called and texted voters in Maine to understand what happened with the Gideon campaign. The feedback I got from volunteers was that voters in the 2nd CD were turned off by the coordinated campaign (i.e., the joint campaign among Democrats up and down the ballot) because they called people too frequently and focused on arguments that the race was primarily an anti-Trump effort. Interestingly, the incumbent in the 2nd CD, Rep. Jared Golden (D), did not participate in the coordinated campaign and was reelected.
** To be fair, the email does say that this work will help set the stage for 2024. But my point about time frames is that the party needs to be thinking in terms of ten or more years on organizing strategies.