Bat Signal 4: Democrats’ Underfunded Ground Game

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Dear colleagues in progressive politics and philanthropy:

One year ago today, the Movement Voter PAC team launched a series of memos called the Bat Signal to sound the alarm about a dangerous funding drought that threatened our ability to win in 2024. The voter engagement field was in contraction, with layoffs across the board. In response, hundreds of donors stepped up to make their biggest investments ever. Thousands more chipped in as well.

Thank you. It is because of your investments and organizing that we have stabilized the voter engagement field and now have a fighting chance to win this fall. Your contributions changed the trajectory of this election.

I’m writing to you today to share the fourth, and hopefully final, Bat Signal of the 2024 cycle. (Lucky for you, it’s also the shortest!)

The election is upon us (North Carolina is supposed to begin mailing out absentee ballots today!) Historic turnout is predicted on both sides. This is a memo about how we can finish strong to secure a Blue Wave and a Democratic governing trifecta, pass amazing policies, and set ourselves up for a better future.

With so many toss-up races in the House, Senate, Presidential election, and down-ballot, the difference between winning everything and losing everything could easily come down to a relative handful of votes. 

Let’s win this,

Billy Wimsatt
Executive Director
Movement Voter PAC

ps- If you find this analysis helpful, please share it widely. We especially want major Democratic donors and decision-makers to be aware of the large remaining gaps in battleground state field budgets – see below.

pps- So as not to bury the lede: You can give online here or by other methods here.

A Potential Blue Wave (if we fund it)

We have just witnessed the most amazing turnaround in modern Democratic campaign history. Thanks to the audacious shake-up at the top of the ticket (which MVP is proud to have advocated for), we are now competitive in all seven top battleground states.

Our side has momentum and money. Harris and her team are running an energetic – and in many ways joyful! – campaign. There is a real potential for a Blue Wave (see three scenarios below).

Now is the time to be clear-eyed and leave nothing to chance. We cannot allow a repeat of 2016. As the polls tighten (we’ve dropped about a point in aggregated polling over the past two weeks), it’s important to address our key vulnerabilities – including the one glaring problem that is eminently solvable: The funding gap in our ground game.

Asian Pacific Islander Political Alliance (API PA) in Pennsylvania. This year, API PA will knock 500,000 doors and make 4.5 million phone calls, including 15,000 calls to non-English speaking voters.

Democrats’ Underfunded Ground Game

Maurice Mitchell, National Director of the Working Families Party, put it eloquently during a recent MVP briefing — there are three indispensable components of victory:

1. A Presidential campaign that is inspiring and well-funded.
2. TV ads and digital outreach by Super PACs to reach a lot of voters very quickly.
3. A ground game to engage, persuade, and mobilize voters through direct person-to-person contact — not just the “party faithful” but lower-propensity Democratic voters who can tip the closest battleground states and races.

The Harris campaign has money. Check. The super PACs have money. Check. But if you look beneath the coconut memes and joyful vibes, there is an alarming gap below the surface: hundreds of little-known organizations who do the vast majority of the work of actually talking to tens of millions of voters — AKA “the grassroots ground game” — are not yet on track to fund their largest possible voter contact operations this fall. 

Sampling of Battleground Budget Gaps

To give you a sense of the scale, here are the most recent budget gaps for some of MVP’s state-based partner organizations – all of whom have proven track records of engaging sporadic Democratic-leaning voters. Again this is a sampling of hundreds of partners MVP funds across our top 9 states, not necessarily representative. For legal reasons, we are only listing partisan political gaps, not their entire voter engagement budgets.

Note: These are estimated c4 and PAC gaps as of August, shared with permission, to give a sense of the overall scale of funding gaps. For funders interested in helping fill these gaps, please contact your MVP Advisor or [email protected] and we can give more detail and make connections to specific organizations, as desired.

• AZ – Living United for Change in Arizona (LUCHA): $12.4 million
• AZ – Our Voice Our Vote (OVOV): $10.3 million
• AZ – Chispa AZ: $2.9 million
• AZ – Rural Arizona Action (RAZA): $ 2.2 million
• AZ – Fuerte Arts Movement: $1.2 million
• AZ – AZ Poder: $800,000
• AZ – Arizona Asian American Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander Advocates (AZ AANHPI Advocates): $600,000
• GA – Black Male Initiative (BMI) Fund: $5.2 million
• GA – Asian American Advocacy Fund (AAAF): $1.3 million
• GA – 1000 Women Strong: $1 million
• MI – Michigan United Action: $1.4 million
• MT – Western Native Voice Action Fund (WNVAF): $500,000
• NC – A. Philip Randolph Educational Fund (APREF): $1.1 million
• NC – Down Home North Carolina: $500,000
• NV – Make the Road Action Nevada: $600,000
• PA – Asian Pacific Islander Political Alliance (API PA) Votes: $2 million
• PA – One Pennsylvania: $1 million
• PA – Make The Road Action PA: $850,000
• PA – Pennsylvania United: $428,000
• WI – Voces de la Frontera Action: $500,000
• Multistate – Mi Familia Vota / Mi Familia Decide (AZ, CO, CA, FL, GA, PA, NC, NV, TX): $18.3 million
• Multistate – Working Families Party (GA, WI, PA, AZ, NC, MI, OH): $18 million
• Multistate – UNITE HERE (NC, NV, OH, PA): $11.8 million
• Multistate – Equality Federation (GA, MI, PA, WI, AZ, NC, MT, OH, NV): $6.4 million
• Multistate – Black Voters Matter (GA, MI, NC, OH, PA): $6 million
• Multistate – Community Change Action (WI, MI, PA, NC, GA, AZ, NV): $5.7 million
• Multistate – Empower Project (GA, WI, MN, PA, MI, MT, NV, AZ, NC & OH): $5 million
• Multistate – NextGen America (AZ, MI, PA, NV, NC, NH, TX, VA): $4.6 million
• Multistate – Color of Change PAC (multi-layered program in CA, FL, GA, MI, NC, OH, PA, WI; digital-only in AZ and NV): $3.5 million
• Multistate – Center for Popular Democracy (CPD) Action: $3.5 million
• Multistate – Student Turnout Projects (Strategic Victory Fund) – (MI, NC, PA, WI): $3.5 million
• Multistate – Care in Action (GA, NC, AZ, NV): $3.2 million
• Multistate – Alliance for Youth Action (AZ, FL, GA, MI, MT, NC, NV, OH, PA, WI, and more): $3.2 million
• Multistate – People’s Action (MI, NC, PA, WI, and more): $3 million
• Multistate – Climate Emergency Advocates (Field program: GA, NC, OH, PA, WI, MN, LA; Digital program: MT, FL): $2 million

At the risk of repeating ourselves: This is just a quick sampling of some of the larger gaps, not in any way a comprehensive list or an attempt to highlight which gaps, organizations, or states are most important. There are a lot of excellent, important organizations with large gaps not listed here.

How Did We Get Here?

You might be wondering: “How did this happen? How is our ground game so sorely underfunded, less than two months to the election?” The gaps above are so large they are almost hard to believe. Yes, they are real. We can show you their plans. Remember: collectively, they are operating at a much larger scale than the Harris campaign. More in a moment on how we got here; first, let’s look at the solution.

Our Voice Our Vote in Arizona, leading one of the largest grassroots mobilizations of voters of color. Their 2024 plan includes 635,000 doors, 500,000 phone calls, & 500,000 texts.

The Overall Need: $200-$300 Million

We estimate that the grassroots electoral field in the top nine Presidential and Senate battleground states has a current partisan budget gap of at least $200-$300 million. Based on our direct check-ins, we can now estimate partisan gaps of well over $165 million from our grantee partners alone.

At MVP, our ambitious goal for the 2024 election cycle is to move $100 million in partisan funds to these groups on the ground. As of September 6, 2024, we have moved over $55 million.

If this sounds like a lot to raise with two months to go, it is. But consider that the Harris campaign raised over $540 million between July 21 and August 25 alone, and AdImpact estimates that 2024 cycle political ad spending will top $10.2 billion.

Our partners have a huge undertaking. The top 9 states alone encompass 53 million eligible voters (more than California and Texas combined – in a 50% bigger geographic area). And that’s not even counting House races. 

The scale of our partners’ work is enormous. We can and must do big things. And the amazing surge of funding for the Harris campaign has proven that we can close funding gaps with record-breaking speed, joy, and fervor if we want it badly enough. Let’s do it!

Michigan United Action, whose goal is to make 2.6M voter contact attempts to a universe of 1.4M voters.

The money is there (see stats on charitable & political giving, and on the millions of modest millionaires among us). We just need to channel a sliver of the wonderful enthusiasm for the Harris-Walz campaign into the grassroots turnout operation that is crucial to getting them elected.

Why Are the Budget Gaps So Big?

To be clear, our partners have already raised a lot of money toward their budgets. There are four main reasons why they still have big gaps:

First, Democratic donors dramatically decreased their giving after 2020. On the one hand, it’s understandable: Presidential elections are big, urgent, and attention-grabbing. On the other hand, we would never expect a tech company, a hospital, or any other organization to perform at full potential if its funding peaked every four years only to plummet in between! 

Had we collectively kept up sustained funding for progressive grassroots infrastructure from 2021 onward, we might be enjoying polling leads right now that were safely outside the margin of error. Starting in 2025, let us commit to a new approach of steady, multi-year funding so we can reap the benefits in 2026, 2028, and beyond.

Second, everything costs more than it did four years ago, and local in-person voter engagement is no exception. Budgets to pay canvassers and canvass managers are higher than they were four years ago as wages, rents, and the cost of living have risen across the board. Inflation has risen at a time when donations have shrunk – creating a squeeze from both sides.

Third – and this is a good thing – our political and civic engagement sector as a whole is bigger and stronger. For better or worse, we are in a political arms race: The other side has way more money and is growing bigger and stronger, too. They have effectively taken Florida and Ohio off the table as Presidential swing states, just as we have taken Colorado and Virginia. As this arms race escalates, donors on our side are now spending a lot of money acquiring media properties, figuring out digital comms, countering misinformation; strengthening state Democratic parties; and investing in state legislative, Supreme Court, and other down-ballot races. None of these were a big focus five to ten years ago. There is more money overall, but it’s being spread among a broader array of strategies. A lot of donors who funded the ground game in 2020 have pivoted to other strategies, leaving an outsized gap.

Fourth, the recent amazing surge in money has understandably gone directly into the Harris campaign (as it should have). Unfortunately, most Democratic donors, big or small, have not yet learned how or why to also strategically invest in the hundreds of under-the-radar organizations that play a critical but often underappreciated role in talking to voters in a warm-touch, person-by-person way on the ground. The money is there. The will is there. The mechanisms are there. But we haven’t yet succeeded in educating donors en masse to seize these investment opportunities. 

What is the Money Needed For? 

Grassroots organizations are carrying out four key functions in the electoral homestretch: Voter registration, voter persuasion, voter mobilization, and election protection. How? Tried-and-true methods like door knocks; innovative tactics like relational organizing and deep canvassing; tailored media; GOTV events; and crucial efforts to counter voter suppression and improve election administration. (For details, see our 2024 plan and recent highlights from our partners’ work on the ground).

“Isn’t the Democratic Party supposed to do this?”

Yes and no. The grassroots ground game doesn’t replace official Democratic efforts, it strategically complements and augments them by filling essential gaps. The Harris campaign has a real ground game now, which is fantastic. But frankly, the grassroots ground game is an order of magnitude larger.

The “Coordinated Campaign” (i.e. the joint effort by the Democratic Party and its candidates) is optimized for turning out Democrats who vote each cycle, but it’s less effective at reaching new, infrequent, and skeptical voters who we need to win. Local organizations excel with these low-propensity (read: high-opportunity) voters, because they deploy trusted messengers who are not from the campaign to be validators, speaking from a shared cultural context, with messages they resonate with.

We’ve written a lot about the efficacy of local voter organizing — see our Guide to Strategic Giving, our evidence and research, and our impact reports from 2020, 2022, and 2023.

In 2022, MVP partners had an unparalleled win record in close races. In 2020, our partners turned out far more voters than the margin of victory in Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin — the three closest Biden-won states (see page 9 of our recent report).

Biden’s 2020 margin of victory, along with voter contact attempts made by MVP local partners

“OK, I’m fired up – What can I do?”

Want to do something right now to close these critical gaps? Thank you! Again, we know many of you have already invested big – and early – in making sure we win this election and have been organizing your friends and family. We can’t thank you enough. 

If you haven’t already, one of the best things you can do is find a friend to brainstorm with: Go through your phone, email, and social media networks together. We all have like-minded friends and family members who haven’t yet been invited to the party! Just write a note and share the opportunity. A lot of people are looking for things to do right now in addition to writing postcards. You’ll be surprised how many people thank you for sharing the information! 

“Where do I give?”

A simple option is to give through MVP and we’ll redistribute according to our electoral strategy optimized for winning the Presidency, Senate, House, and key down-ballot races.

If you need help figuring out how and what to give, the MVP team is here to help. If you’re not sure who to talk to, email [email protected]. We strive to serve as honest brokers to advise or help you to move money, by any form or method to maximize impact – whether through MVP or elsewhere. We are the opposite of the annoying political fundraising emails and spam texts you’re getting. We are real people who are here to help. 

In addition to giving through MVP, we’ve also put together recommendations for national organizations, and we can go deeper in any area of interest such as this list of Black voter engagement organizations where there are acute gaps and great opportunities to make an impact. We’ve also partnered with allied donor networks Way to Win, Democracy Alliance, Committee on States, and others to launch Building for Democracy (BFD), which monitors state election gaps and is a great resource for donors and advisors looking to make the most strategic allocations in the final stretch. There are so many good ways to give – so many gaps that need filling. The key is to pick one and be decisive. 

Three Major Election Scenarios 

Let’s zoom out for a moment and look ahead to November 5th. Broadly speaking, this election will likely go in one of three directions. These scenarios largely match our predictions a year ago – with some important updates. The main political update is that it looks clearer now that if we lose the Presidency, we’re most likely to lose it in Pennsylvania. If we lose the Senate, we’re most likely to lose it in Montana. These states in particular require a full court press.

Western Native Voice Action Fund (WNVAF) in Montana. WNVAF is mobilizing Native voters (who comprise 6% of the voting-eligible population) for Senator Jon Tester’s toss-up race, which could decide control of the U.S. Senate.

Let’s take the worst scenario first…

Scenario A: MAGApocalypse

This is the nightmare scenario: We scrape by in Wisconsin and Michigan, but it’s not quite enough. We lose the Sunbelt (Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, North Carolina) by a few thousand votes. Everything comes down to a recount in Pennsylvania. The whole country waits with bated breath for weeks. In the end, we lose… by less than a thousand votes. Similarly, we lose the Senate in Montana by a thousand votes and we come up short in the House (similar to in 2022). By the narrowest of margins, we elect Trump as President, backed by a loyalist MAGA Congress, Supreme Court and no guardrails. 

I don’t have to tell you how bad this would be. They will implement Project 2025 full blast. Obviously we will fight back. We will do everything we can at the state and federal level. But we will spend the next 4-8 years counting down the days to 2029 or 2033 — filled with dread – and regret that we could have done more back in the “good ol’ days” of 2024.

Scenario B: The Mediocre Scenario

In the mediocre scenario, we avoid the worst-case outcome of a Trump trifecta. We win Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. We secure 270 in the Electoral College. Phew! But the race is extremely close. We lose most or all of the Sunbelt. We lose the Senate race in Montana so we’re down to 49 votes in the Senate. And we either win or lose the House by a few seats. And all of this is after huge fights over ballot curing and election certification.

In this scenario, governing is difficult. President Harris will have to beg Lisa Murkowski and Susan Collins to appoint cabinet members and judges. She’ll struggle to pass any federal legislation. If MAGA controls the House, it will be hard to pass budgets and there will be constant trumped-up investigations. Our base will feel demoralized. The MAGA base will be riled up with grievances, claims of election theft, and political violence, and will be extra terrible toward President Harris as a woman of color. 

We’ll have to wait until 2026 to even try to win back the House and Senate (against midterm headwinds and a bad map) to be able to accomplish anything at all. In this scenario, we will be forced to focus entirely on state-level policy only — but if we barely scrape by in the Presidential race, we’ll probably lose ground at the state level. The Mediocre scenario isn’t hell. But it will start to feel like purgatory. We will think: If only we had done just a little more!

Scenario C: Blue Wave

In a Blue Wave scenario, we win the popular vote by 8 million (improving on the 6-million vote margin Biden won in 2020). We win the Great Lakes and Sunbelt battlegrounds, racking up 319 votes in the Electoral College.

In this scenario, we save the Senate (Ohio and Montana) and we flip the House. We win major victories down-ballot: We run the tables on abortion rights and democracy ballot measures; we flip state chambers in Wisconsin and New Hampshire; we win the governorship and break the MAGA supermajority in North Carolina. We strengthen our Democratic trifectas in Michigan, Minnesota, and Pennsylvania, and we win veto-proof supermajorities in Nevada. The cherry on top: We win a trifecta in Arizona (where we are currently one seat away from parity in each state chamber). And if we’re extremely lucky, we might even pull off a surprise victory like the dark horse Senate race in Nebraska. 

Can you imagine?

We would be dancing in the streets! 

UNITE HERE, one of MVP’s partners in North Carolina whose collective goal is to knock 4 million doors in 2024. North Carolina is neck-and-neck, and if we win, we will eliminate Trump’s most likely path to victory.

This Blue Wave scenario is totally doable – we probably have a 1 in 3 shot. Although the polls are close, there are indications that enthusiasm is running higher on the Democratic side (by 8-12% according to recent reputable polls from Gallup and Suffolk/USA Today). We just have to channel that enthusiasm into votes by funding the ground game. 

It wouldn’t even take that big a Blue Wave to win all of the winnable toss-up races. They could easily be decided by less than 1% – well within the “margin of effort.” If we build a big enough Blue Wave this fall, we will be able to do so many amazing things like pass sweeping legislation around voting rights, anti-gerrymandering, economic fairness, reproductive rights, and climate. We’ll be able to appoint thousands of federal employees, including hundreds of judges and potentially a Supreme Court justice or two. 

A Blue Wave in 2024 would be so good that it is worthy of our largest possible investment.

Spoiler alert: 2024 is just the beginning. As with anything we care about, long-term investment is the only way. Obviously, even with a Blue Wave, there will still be tons more work to do. But we will be doing it from an infinitely better place. And over time, if we’re committed to it, we could really and truly create a new progressive era that changes hundreds of millions of lives for the better. 

The Itsy Bitsy Difference Between Scenarios

A remarkable thing about these three scenarios is how incredibly close they could be to one another in terms of the sheer number of votes. It’s unreal how few people – on either side – will decide the course of history. 

Given the non-negotiable timeline imposed by the climate crisis, we won’t get this big a chance to make this big a difference in the future of the world for the rest of our lifetimes. This is it.

Notice: I am not equivocating here. I did not say “might” or “could.” This is a definitive statement. A Harris-Walz administration supported by a Democratic Congress from 2025-2028 is our best shot at stabilizing the climate, locking in an accelerated transition to clean energy, and saving our grandkids’ future. Period.

We must act purposefully and strategically. Given early voting timelines, we need to take action in the next week or so. 

We need to collectively close the budget gaps above as early in September as possible so that groups can leave it all on the field. September is historically the #1 month for election money to grassroots organizations. 

Despite the fact that we all complain about late money and how it’s not as effective as early money (true!), our partners are all still counting on a surge of September money to run their final vote programs. If a ton of late money doesn’t show up “early” enough this fall, they’ll have to dramatically stop or scale back their canvas and campus programs at the very moment when we need them to scale up as aggressively as possible. Money can’t solve every problem, but in the last two months of an election, it can sure do a lot.

Asian American Advocacy Fund (AAAF) in Georgia, where Asian American and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs) are Georgia’s fastest-growing voting bloc. In 2024, AAAF will knock 100,000 doors and make 1,000,000 phone calls, in addition to direct mail, ethnic media, digital outreach, voter education, relational organizing, and events.

LFG – Let’s Effing Go!

If you take one thing from this memo, let it be this: Whatever you’ve been thinking about doing to make a difference this election cycle, please do it this week. Whatever you want to contribute or do (so you can wake up on Wednesday, November 6th with no regrets) please prioritize doing it this week. Don’t wait until October.

Too many donors scramble a few weeks before the election to panic-donate. Savvy donors know that the earlier we move resources, the more cost-effective our investments will be — the more net votes our donations will yield. Yes, it’s all “late money” now, but there is a world of difference between mid-September and mid-October in terms of the effectiveness of your investment. Collectively, we are the supply line. We have to do our job so that the organizers on the frontlines can do theirs!

Please join us in doing everything you can this week. We look forward to celebrating our Blue Wave with you in November, next January – and for many years to come! 

Thank you for everything you do.

Let’s go win!

Bat Signal 4 was a collaborative effort, written primarily by Billy Wimsatt and co-written by Zo Tobi with editing and contributions from Rachel Gordon, Sarah Chaisson-Warner, Javier Morillo, Haley Bash, Rebecca Ennen, Betty Herschman, Rachel Hill, Helena Huang, Kevi Brannelly, Eugenio Smith, Zakiya Lord, Brandon Klugman, Tom Mendelsohn, Hallie Montoya Tansey, Talya Stagg, and many other MVP staff, volunteers, allies, and supporters – though Billy takes full responsibility for its final content :)