How has MVP shifted its strategy in response to 2024?

In response to 2024, we are expanding our strategy while also refining our grantmaking criteria.

Why Did We Lose and What Did We Learn?

In analyzing the data from the 2024 elections (see Pew and Catalist), MVP has identified two crucial takeaways:

1. The bad news: Trump won because he gained vote share among young voters and voters of color, and actually won working-class voters and infrequent voters.
2. The good news: These voters are less fixed in their political convictions – we can win them back. But we won’t do it through shallow, transactional voter contact. We need to engage them in a deeper, year-round, online and offline “hearts and minds” organizing approach to create a sense of shared belonging and identification with the Democratic coalition.

Expanding Our Strategy

Drawing on our lessons from 2024, MVP is investing in grantee partners working across three connected strategies:

• Strategy #1: Build State-Level Power by investing in large-scale base building, state-level alliances, and “state hubs” that fulfill key functions across organizations.
• Strategy #2: Scale Up New Media to shape worldviews and policy agendas, win hearts and minds en masse, and build long-term power by organizing online communities.
• Strategy #3: Embolden Democrats, particularly at the state and local level, to fight for bold, popular policy agendas that can win back voters we’ve lost and expand our coalition.

Learn more about our strategy here.

Refining Our Criteria

The core approach underlying our strategy is base building: The work of bringing people together to exercise power as a unified constituency, while winning more and more people over to our side.

Funding base-building organizations has always been core to our work; however, since the 2024 elections, we have further refined our grantmaking to fund fewer grantee partners focused on larger-scale base building.

In other words: We're not changing direction, we're raising the bar.

In practice, this means we are funding a smaller set of organizations that are:

• Already engaged in larger-scale base-building, 
• On a clear path to engaging in larger-scale base-building, or 
• Playing a vital role in strengthening the "progressive ecosystem" in their state or nationwide (e.g., new-media organizing, candidate recruitment and training, research and communications, and other key functions).

What Donors Can Do: Break the "Boom-and-Bust" Funding Cycle

So much of our future success comes down to money.

In 2024, the Biden-Harris campaigns, the Democratic National Committee, super PACs, and other allied groups raised a whopping $2.9 billion — much of which went to ads and mostly superficial voter contact.

Meanwhile, the kinds of progressive local organizing and movement-building groups that MVP funds collectively received only a fraction of that, most of which came in late 2024.

As a result, MVP partners had to cut budgets, reduce staff, trim their most promising year-round voter engagement programs, and resort to superficial turnout operations staffed by temporary canvassers in the final months of the election season.

All of this meant:

• Fewer swing votes for Democrats.
• Fewer elections won up and down the ballot.
• A much weaker progressive movement in place after the election to counter Trump and MAGA authoritarianism.

The solution to this is clear: We need to fund organizing and movement-building work all year, every year. Join us.