Republicans know how President Obama won, yet there is a contentious debate among progressives about how to run campaigns. One side says you engage your most excited supporters, organizing them into local leadership teams and helping them host trainings, house parties and voter registration drives so that they can build support and gather accurate data about their neighborhoods.
This creates the capacity for millions of authentic, person-to-person conversations about families’ experiences, and their hopes and fears — the kinds of conversations that can expand an electorate, energize a base and demobilize the opposition. Data and technology are tools to improve this work, not the machinery for controlling people.
The other side, louder and better funded, says that data, technology and analytics should drive campaign strategies and voter outreach programs. So campaigns hire tech companies to create lists of potential supporters based on algorithms and statistical modeling. And they develop apps through which supporters are meant to blast, but not actually engage, their social networks. Staff members and volunteers parachute into communities to knock on doors and recite poll-tested scripts.
Over the past decade, the party elites — consultants, strategists and donors — have caught the data-and-analytics fever and largely abandoned organizing. This has meant that entire neighborhoods have been politically redlined out of engagement in our most fundamental democratic practice.
Those of us who have spent our lives talking to regular folks on campaigns now walk around neighborhoods with lists created by someone at a computer far away. We have skipped many doors and missed entire families because the data experts didn’t have addresses or phone numbers for poor people, young people, people of color or people who moved a lot — many of those who carried Barack Obama to victory.
Going into 2020, Democrats cannot fall into the trap of being overly seduced by shiny tech-only tricks. They must get back to the hard work of pounding the pavement to organize the people who already want to vote for them. That’s how we’ll create the power to build a movement that attracts others. In fact, data from 2016 and 2018 show that organizing increases voter turnout more than any other single outreach method, including mail, TV and digital advertisements, and twice as much as contact from a stranger.
Part of the reason the debate has unfolded this way is because the story that took hold about how Barack Obama won, and has since permeated the voting industry, is that sophisticated data, technology and analytics twice won him the White House, not organizing or volunteers. That a few dozen tech nerds in the Chicago headquarters tipped the campaign to victory. This story, and the realignment of progressive interests and infrastructure around it, has baffled me and other top campaigners.
People won Mr. Obama’s campaigns. From the black beauticians in South Carolina to the white and black retirees in Pennsylvania to the Latinx supporters in Nevada, hundreds of thousands of volunteers knocked on doors and made calls from the primaries through the general elections. And Barack Obama saw them, spoke to them and loved them.
Barack Obama used both data and organizing to win. He did it better than anyone else. Dems need to get back to that era, where Obama took Howard Dean's 50-State Strategy and ran with it. I'm tired of hearing about "battleground states" like the other 45 don't matter, because we're giving away state legislatures in a Census and redistricting year.
We have to contest everything in 2020. Every seat, every vote, every legislature, every governor's mansion, everything.
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