Grassroots Groups Know How to Win This Campaign—Do They Have What They Need to Pull It Off?

With Election Day less than a week away, we face a stark choice between democracy and dictatorship. Polls in the seven battleground states—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, North Carolina, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—remain extremely close. Who wins, and by how much, will come down to the strength of each campaign’s ground game. Unfortunately, while the Harris campaign has a great deal of money, the grassroots groups most effective in turning out voters for Democrats do not.

Given the stakes, campaigns can’t afford to overlook a single voter. Hillary Clinton lost Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin in 2016 in part by taking voters in those states for granted. As the number of registered Independents and crossover voters grows, campaigns have to do all they can to give lower propensity, disaffected, and new voters a good reason to show up for their candidate. But the campaigns themselves are often not best positioned to engage with specific communities, especially those that feel unseen. For instance, given legitimate fury over the Biden administration’s unmitigated support for Israel’s war on Gaza, the campaign is far less suited than trusted community leaders to argue that Muslim and Arab Americans should vote for Harris. And those leaders might well be inclined to see a vote for Harris as a “chess move,” in the words of Working Families Party National Director, Maurice Mitchell, “not a love letter”—an approach that underscores they will continue to press for change.

Money is a necessary but not sufficient condition for an effective ground game. The Harris-Walz campaign raised more than one billion dollars, (including funds raised by affiliated PACs) in the abbreviated first quarter of her campaign (the third quarter of this year). The Trump campaign, Republican National Committee, and PACs raised roughly $417 million. At the end of September, Harris had about $350 million left to spend to Trump’s $287 million. There’s a lot of money being spent.

For both major political parties, the ground game is focused on a transaction: Lay out your agenda and get people to vote for it, whether or not that agenda really speaks to the priorities or ambitions of a given community. Campaign staff are sent to states, local offices rented, and a tidal wave of ads, fliers, calls, texts, TikToks, and door-knocks are deployed to convince people to vote. After the election, the offices close, the staff leave, and the outreach is over. It’s not that these campaigns are superfluous; they are simply not enough.

While the amount of money spent does not per se determine the quality of a campaign’s ground game, several news reports (including those by CBS, the New York Times, The Guardian, and The American Prospect) agree that Harris’s ground operation seems far better than that of Trump-Vance. In late September, for example, several Republican strategists lamented Trump’s “paltry get-out-the-vote effort” and “untested strategy of leaning on outside groups to help do field work.” And reporting on America PAC, a separate field operation funded by Elon Musk, has found that it is beset by mismanagement and potential fraud.

Yet “better” does not necessarily mean good or effective. An analysis by Priorities USA of spending by Democrats in the 2020 election found that “while Democrats outspent Republicans, [they were] not spending smart enough to maximize our chances of winning elections moving forward.” The Democratic Party and the Biden campaign spent more on traditional media than on digital, even though Americans get much of their news—for better or worse—from numerous online sources. A lot of what campaigns raise is spent on TV, which is increasingly inefficient, a lot is spent too late in the campaign, and substantial sums are often spent targeting people who have already voted. Moreover, while there are some stellar state parties like Wisconsin Dems led by Ben Wikler, most state parties are underfunded and some very disorganized, which further undermines a campaign’s ground game.

If election campaigns are by their nature transactional, the work of organizers is intended to be transformational. These groups, deeply rooted in their communities, work year-round to build lasting relationships with, and, critically, the collective long-term power of their communities so they can advocate for their own priorities at the local, state, and national levels beyond any single election or any specific elected official. While they often work with the official party infrastructure, they can’t be compromised by becoming part of it because that would defeat the purpose of independence and compromise their later advocacy.

Still, progressive organizing absolutely benefits Democrats, even when the party is far behind the movement in terms of its policy positions. In 2020, progressive groups left it all on the field to elect Biden despite being wary of his past positions on issues like abortion. A decade-plus of investments in movement-building, civic education, and turnout work of independent, progressive grassroots organizations, also led to wins in numerous states. One example was the election of Democratic Governor Tony Evers in 2018, and the successful first step toward taking back the Wisconsin Supreme Court in April 2020.

Concerted efforts by both national groups, such as Asian Americans Advancing Justice, and state-level organizations, like Arizona Asian American Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander Advocates (AZ AANHPI Advocates) in Phoenix, led to a dramatic increase of more than 20 percent in AANHPI voting in 2020 over 2016, especially in key states like Arizona and Georgia, where the Asian American share of the total population is growing quickly. A coalition of Georgia groups representing everyone from domestic workers to Black farmers to college students to Asian and Muslim Americans and everyone in between not only won Georgia for Biden but turned around to face a runoff and send two Democratic senators to Washington.

Emgage, an umbrella group that works to increase political literacy and civic participation of the Muslim community, turned out a million Muslim voters across the country in 2020. Milwaukee-based Leaders Igniting Transformation used their ongoing connections to and deep work with high school and college students over several years to turn out record numbers of young voters in Wisconsin, while Voces de la Frontera galvanized Latino communities. During the pandemic, the Hmong American Women’s Association provided pho and other food and supplies to Hmong, Chin, and Karen populations in Madison and Milwaukee while using culturally and linguistically relevant materials to conduct civic education and register voters. These efforts, replicated across the country, increased voter registration and turnout among many new and infrequent voters rarely ever touched by campaigns, which in any case are not trusted in the same way as deeply familiar community organizers. And they made the difference in states like Georgia and Wisconsin that Democrats won by only several thousand votes.