Read the whole essay here (PDF version here).

Featured Quotes

Movement Voter PAC

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.

“Real organizing wins. Superficial mobilizing loses.”

– Billy Wimsatt, Founder & Executive Director, Movement Voter PAC

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.

Siembra NC

MVP’s local North Carolina partner, Siembra NC, was also featured:

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.

[This was] a three-way race between Trump, Harris and the couch. In terms of sheer numbers, the couch came out ahead… All told, nearly 90 million eligible voters, 36% of the overall electorate, stayed home.

That can make a difference in an election like the recent one, which [Nikki Marín] Baena [co-founder of Siembra NC] 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.

Way to Win

MVP’s national ally, Way to Win, had this to say:

“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.

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.

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.

The whole essay is gold, and worth reading in full. Here is the conclusion of the piece, which is an incredibly clear case for sustained investment in the kind of year-round local organizing which MVP funds:

“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.”

ps. – If you haven’t yet, check out our preliminary post-election read-out, which details some of the elections we won from Congress to ballot measures and state and local races — all of which will help us mitigate the harm of Trump’s second term and set us up to win back power in 2026 and 2028. Reading this won’t make the losses sting less, but it will give you dozens of proof points that what we and our local partners did absolutely mattered.