Democrats should stop mocking Trump’s ground game and start learning from it

Since campaign season began, experts have assured us that Donald Trump had “no ground game”, a phrase that generally refers to a campaign’s effort to mobilize voters through local outreach offices, phone calls, text messages, and door knocks. Pundits, politicos, and partisan observers repeated this charge and scoffed at his ramshackle, amateur, and fraud-riddled efforts, with some seasoned Republican operatives even sounding the alarm.

A slew of articles and commentary unfavorably compared Trump’s “paltry” get-out-the-vote operation to the Democrats’ supposedly well-oiled and professionally managed machine. Alex Floyd, the Democratic national committee’s rapid response director, issued a confident statement in April: “Donald Trump’s Maga takeover of the [Republican national committee] has left the Republican party in shambles, lacking the ground game and infrastructure to compete this November.”

We all know how that story ended.

And yet many Democrats remain reluctant to reassess their views, both of Trump’s ground game and, perhaps more importantly, of their own. Soon after the election, Tom O’Brien, chair of the Democratic party in Lancaster county, Pennsylvania, told the New York Times that Republicans “really didn’t have a ground game”. The Democratic strategist Christy Setzer went further, telling the Hill that “Trump had no ground game and ran only on rambling hatred”, while insisting that the loss “wasn’t the fault of Kamala Harris”, who had “the best campaign any of us has ever seen”. But if that’s true, why did Trump succeed where Harris failed?

Trump succeeded, at least in part, because he is a man who will say anything and do anything to win. And of course he was boosted by conservative media – by Fox News talkshows, conspiratorial podcasts, manosphere influencers, deceptive deepfakes, targeted ads, and “First Buddy” Elon Musk’s transformation of Twitter into X. But he also won because he had a strong ground game, even if it occasionally blundered and often looked different from what observers and experts expected from a get-out-the vote drive, including its use of “untraditional” and “micro-targeted” strategies aimed at reaching low- and mid-propensity voters who didn’t fit the usual Republican profile, including Latinos, Black men, and Asian and Arab Americans. The rocky launch of Musk’s new political action committee, America Pac, which hired canvassers in key areas, became a punchline, but it was last-minute outreach that supplemented other efforts. (And America Pac is no joke: Musk has invested $120m in the project and is already planning for the 2026 midterms and beyond.)

Belittling and discounting Trump’s operation might make liberals feel better, but strategically, it’s self-defeating. This hubris leaves Democrats oblivious to their opponents’ achievements, while they overestimate their own approach. And it makes it harder to appreciate what needs to change if Democrats want to not only win elections but govern effectively and in ways that materially improve people’s lives.

Since Harris’s defeat, even moderate commentators are waking up to the fact that Democrats need to shift their messaging in order to increase their appeal to working class voters who have turned away from the party or toward Trump. But while embracing the rhetoric of economic populism would be a good start, tweaks to language are not enough. Our definition of “ground game” must evolve as well – “knocking on doors eight or nine times”, which is how O’Brien described his party’s efforts, will not be enough to remedy the Democrats’ current disadvantage or revitalize small-d democracy.

Committing to a cause

A few weeks before the election, in Greensboro, North Carolina, Nikki Marín Baena was outside her home when she was approached by a canvasser from Libre Initiative, a Koch-backed organization that targets Latino communities with a libertarian agenda. The canvasser told her about all the services the group offers: Spanish language workshops for parents on how to apply for scholarships, English language tutoring, computer classes and more. In Baena’s words, Libre’s goal is to get people in a room, help them meet their basic needs, and then preach the gospel of small government.

Beana is a co-founder of Siembra NC, which mostly organizes around workers’ rights, in particular the challenges many immigrant laborers face, including wage theft. Ideologically, Baena is diametrically opposed to Libre’s politics, but she is fascinated by their tactics. She has seen Libre staffers doing stunts outside discount grocery stores, blasting Bidenomics and inflation. They offer cash-strapped shoppers gift cards in the amount of money that Democrats’ policies supposedly “stole” from them. People are grateful for the help and so they stop to chat.

By capturing the Republican party, Trump positioned himself to reap the benefits of decades of work by rightwing activists, donors and strategists who aimed to strengthen the grip of conservative ideologues and corporate interests on American political life. With laser-like focus, they attacked labor unions, gutted campaign finance law, captured the courts, reconfigured electoral maps and mobilized key interest groups, from anti-abortion activists to gun lovers. And they are actively broadening their reach.

When Democrats insist that Trump had no ground game, they ignore the right wing’s investment and presence in spaces that are not purely electoral and that engage people year-round, including groups like Libre, along with the evangelical churches and student groups that increasingly function as social clubs recruiting people to the Maga cause. As Tiffany Dena Loftin details in the new issue of the Black leftist magazine Hammer & Hope, the right wing has spent decades systematically attacking and defunding progressive student unions and networks and building up their conservative counterparts. The Charlie Kirk-founded and Republican billionaire-funded Turning Point USA claims to have “freedom chapters” at more than 3,500 colleges and high schools, which offer young conservatives a sense of belonging and community, leadership development, and pathways to political engagement, of which get-out-the-vote (GOTV) efforts are just one part.

The Trump campaign built on this model, providing its base with community and purpose and organizing them, in turn, to mobilize others to turn out and vote. Before joining Trump’s team as campaign co-chair, Susie Wiles spent years working to lock down Florida for Republicans (she’s since been named Trump’s incoming chief of staff). Her tactics make people feel like an essential part of a group with a clear goal. Wiles piloted the “10 for Trump” Iowa caucus program, which gave a subset of 2,000 volunteers the title of “captain”, a limited-edition gold-embroidered hat, and the goal of motivating 10 people in their precincts to turn out. In the general election, specially trained volunteers were dubbed “Trump Force 47” and tasked with developing longer term relationships with so-called low- or mid-propensity voters, going beyond the usual door-knocking to forge relationships aimed at converting these targets into Republican loyalists. The campaign also used Trump’s false claims of election fraud to recruit and train tens of thousands of hyper-vigilant poll workers and Maga acolytes.

“Trump or someone around him is quite bright about the definitional difference between mobilization and organization,” Tory Gavito, founder of Way to Win, told me. Mobilizing people to turn out and cast a ballot is not nearly as powerful as organizing people to adopt an identity, commit to a cause, and join a collective effort to push for change. That’s why Way to Win, a progressive donor network, directs funds to groups that do year-round organizing, rather than helicoptering in days or weeks before an election or relying on high-profile celebrity endorsements.

In Gavito’s estimation, Trump’s GOTV effort probably mattered less in the end than what she calls the “organizations and institutions that shape worldviews” and engage large numbers of people in their daily lives. That’s where the Democrats’ super polished, pop-up ground game fell short.

‘Knocked on too many doors’

Ironically, the right not only has its own (often lavishly funded) political and cultural infrastructure; it also benefits from infrastructure’s absence in a way the left does not. Widespread feelings of isolation, loneliness and alienation help their cause. The conservative culture warrior Christopher Rufo, for example, has boasted about how a lack of social trust works to his advantage. Distrust makes it easier to spread lies and misinformation and pit communities against each other – to divide and conquer in order to shrink government, raise corporate profits, and concentrate power.

Firelands Workers United is an organization that brings together working families to rebuild this tattered social trust, working in rural Washington, including in counties where majorities voted for Trump. They do so by organizing for good jobs, housing, healthcare and fair taxes. The way they organized in 2024 offers a lesson in class-based solidarity that the national Democratic party should learn from.

This electoral cycle, Firelands’ base was focused on fighting several ballot measures. Washington might be a blue state, but it is one with a remarkably regressive tax system and perennial budget problems. This year the California hedge fund manager Brian Heywood spent $6m on four ballot measures that aimed to repeal popular policies, including a recently passed capital gains tax. The result would have reduced funding for affordable childcare and schools and killed rural jobs. If the capital gains ballot measure had passed, 4,000 wealthy Washingtonians would get richer while everyone else, non-immigrant and immigrant, would pay the price.

Through 2024, Firelands trained dozens of members so they could educate their communities about this looming threat. They did so by emphasizing a shared class interest, not partisan loyalties, which allowed them to reach across cultural and political divides. “This isn’t about Republicans or Democrats. People out here are frustrated with any politician who sides with the rich over working people,” said the group’s co-founder Stina Janssen.

Firelands members collaborate across very different backgrounds. A Washington-born retired corrections officer and a Latin American immigrant mill worker would canvas together and develop a real relationship. They, in turn, would connect with voters over anger at billionaires and inequality and invite them into a movement, opening space for people’s assumptions and attitudes to change. “There would not have been a chance to build these friendships or for the people born here to learn and hear people’s immigration stories with the same level of curiosity without this close work together,” Janssen said.

Now the group’s non-immigrant members understand what it means for someone to be facing deportation. And immigrant members feel less alone as they understand they are not the only people struggling with healthcare or rent. “Our organizing approach held and affirmed everyone’s suffering and helped people see how their experiences were tied together,” Janssen explained. This “dignity-based solidarity”, as Janssen calls it, isn’t about asking people to check their privilege. It’s rooted in the recognition that we all suffer and deserve better: making ends meet shouldn’t be this hard for me or for you.

This kind of deep organizing takes time because it aims at shifting political consciousness and fostering enduring commitment. It also requires resources. As Baena told me, groups like Turning Point and Libre Initiative “can hire so many people because they have endless money”. It’s easier to fund an organization that helps billionaires’ bottom lines than one that threatens them.

Yet Democrats had plenty of money this year, much of which was contributed by smaller donors. But they spent it on the standard playbook. The Harris campaign spent billions blanketing the airwaves with ads (outspending Republicans three to one on paid media), bombarding undecided voters with text messages, and bussing out-of-state volunteers to canvas neighborhoods. None of those tactics leave a trace after the campaign pulls up stakes. They might as well have set the cash on fire.

Like many other organizers I spoke to, Billy Wimsatt, the executive director of Movement Voter Pac (MVP), believes those resources could have been deployed more wisely. “What if, instead of spending millions to keep cable news on life support, you had split that money between strategically building up local organizing and online influencer organizing?” he said. This year, MVP moved money to hundreds of organizations that do year-round issue-based organizing in key battleground states in addition to GOTV. That entailed everything from mutual aid to media to ballot measures and candidate recruitment. Wimsatt highlighted the work of Faith in Minnesota, a multi-faith, multi-racial, statewide organization. The group organizes diverse communities, including Muslims and manufactured home park residents, around high-impact issues like housing affordability. This season, Faith in Minnesota volunteers had thousands of conversations with voters and helped protect the state house from flipping to Republicans. “Real organizing wins. Superficial mobilizing loses,” Wimsatt said.

Andrew Willis Garcés, another Siembra NC co-founder, puts it bluntly: Democrats across the country actually “knocked too many doors”. The party’s much ballyhooed ground game failed because it was engineered to facilitate one-off conversations that stick to a script instead of supporting local organizations and campaigns that engage ordinary people around issues they care about. For the people Siembra aims to reach, that means fights to recover stolen wages, stop local law enforcement from collaborating with Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (Ice), and win protections for mobile home tenants. Garcés believes that these kinds of local issue campaigns can drive voter engagement by helping people connect their lived experience to candidates or campaigns that might otherwise seem distant, abstract or uninspiring.

That can make a difference in an election like the recent one, which Baena describes as a three-way race between Trump, Harris and the couch. In terms of sheer numbers, the couch came out ahead. While much has been said about Latino men turning to Trump, Baena and Garcés believe the real story is that lots of Latino voters, like other key voting groups, “sat this one out”. All told, nearly 90 million eligible voters, 36% of the overall electorate, stayed home.

As Baena sees it, the Democrats didn’t have much to offer working people, whatever their race, gender or ethnicity, in terms of tangible improvement to their daily lives or a clear and compelling vision of why the future under Harris would have been better. At the door, there wasn’t much to say besides “the other guy is bad”. You can’t win people over by telling them everything is fine when they can’t afford groceries, rent, and gas, or when they are upset about the war on Gaza.

This all goes back to the lack of trust. “People don’t trust people outside their families and they don’t trust politicians or the government,” Baena said. Parachuting canvassers into a community to have one-time conversations will never truly move the needle; you need to listen and earn trust before you can change minds. “The work of base-building is getting people to befriend strangers and build community outside of their families, and that’s a pathway to getting people to trust their neighbors and institutions,” he added.

“If liberals really care about winning elections,” Baena continued, “they need to reach these people. We need year-round organizing to really bring people in and to show them that they and their families can benefit from public investment and services. And we have to organize in a way that allows the base to feel they’ve helped win the election, not that the campaign won.”

That’s the feeling Firelands managed to inspire in its members – a feeling of being agents of change, not passive consumers of politics. On election day, all the regressive ballot measures were voted down in the rural areas where Firelands and their partners organized, including Grays Harbor county, where Trump won 51.5% of the vote but nearly 60% of voters said “no” to repealing taxes on capital gains. Groups like Faith in Minnesota and Firelands show that by emphasizing shared class interests and focusing on clear progressive policies, it’s possible to make inroads with voters who are skeptical of politicians and even sympathetic to aspects of the Maga movement.

People-centered, issue-focused organizing

Before the 2016 election, the New York senator Chuck Schumer made a now infamous pronouncement about the Democratic party’s electoral strategy: “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia, and you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.”

In 2021, on the other hand, the then US representative Jim Banks of Indiana (now senator-elect) shared a memo with the then House minority leader, Kevin McCarthy, detailing how the Republican party could “permanently become the Party of the Working Class” in part by appealing to “minority voters”.

Three years later, Banks’s proposal no longer reads as wishful thinking. Trump’s campaign made inroads with low-income communities and voters of color in urban and rural areas nationwide, including peeling off an alarming number of unionized voters. Meanwhile, Schumer’s plan of tacking to the center in order to target Republican voters at the expense of less affluent Democratic ones helped Harris get trounced.

Instead of aspiring to razor-thin margins of victory, Democrats must become more populist and more ambitious. But better messaging must be coupled with a disciplined strategy to expand the voting base and win resounding majorities so politicians can actually deliver on a platform that makes this country more inclusive, sustainable, and fair.

To accomplish this, Democrats need to find ways to win over some of the people who voted for Trump not because they are committed to Maga, but out of frustration with the status quo. And they also need to connect with many more of those millions of people who chose the couch. Instead of listening to the Liz Cheney-loving consulting class and the cable ad-buying gurus at Future Forward, Democrats need to muster the kind of political determination that drove Susie Wiles to swing Florida firmly to the right and enabled Republicans to paint Texas a deep red.

You can bet that conservative strategists are thinking about how to eat away at Democratic strongholds, including California. Where’s the 10-year plan to flip Texas and its 40 electoral votes back to blue?

The problem isn’t just a lack of vision or political will, but resources. The big money bundlers and special interests don’t want to cede control. According to Way to Win’s Gavito, the aftermath of Trump’s first victory brought together an unlikely coalition of Democratic donors, many of whom were not particularly liberal, let alone progressive, but who were concerned about threats to democracy and craving a return to normalcy. After Joe Biden won, many ceased to collaborate or invest in base-building efforts, wary of strategies aimed at empowering diverse working-class voters or delivering the kind of progressive policy measures that might appeal to them. Perhaps, now, some of these donors will realize that their cautious, center-hewing strategy has failed and reassess their approach.

But changes at the top won’t be enough if they’re not tethered to change on the ground. Voter outreach needs to be people- and place-centered, not data- and advertiser-driven. It needs to be issue-focused and year-round, not scaled in eight weeks and gone overnight. And it must offer more than an awkward conversation at the door and an alienating avalanche of texts treating recipients like little more than ATMs. People need a sense of belonging and a compelling and credible vision of a future worth fighting for.

In the end, the fate of democracy is too precious to leave in the hands of the Democratic party. Across the country, ordinary people are building the relationships, organizations, and power required to move this country forward. They are the ground game we need.

Source: US Politics - theguardian.com