Hell yes, grassroots campaigning still counts!

In campaign postmortems, there's the usual angst-filled punditry out there that says nothing the Dems did, and especially nothing the grassroots did, mattered at all. 

Bull-bleep. As the season geared up, I described what we were going to see as a "hot and cold running volunteer" election and I stand by that. Vast numbers of people turned out to do the difficult job of direct voter contact in various forms. That's what happens when people really care and/or feel truly threatened.

And their efforts show up in the results. Where there wasn't much of a Harris-Walz campaign -- in the reliable blue states which saw only national ads and online media -- the shift toward Trump from 2020 was in the 6 percent range. Lots of Dems and Dem leaners didn't vote. But in the battleground states where money was invested and activism thrived, the shift was closer to 3 percent. Still too much obviously, but quite different. Yes, there was a red tide coming in, but some places Democratic (and small "d" democratic) activism came much closer to stemming that tide.

Ben Wikler, chair of the Democratic Party of Wisconsin, sent out an informative message which aims to describe what party efforts, including at the grassroots, meant in his state. Some of what he saw:

... The shift here was just one quarter the size [of the national deficit]: a 1.5% swing from 2020. Not because Trump was weaker here than elsewhere, but because we were stronger.

Thanks to tens of thousands of heroes—our candidates, the campaign, party infrastructure, allies, and volunteers—we persuaded and turned out even more voters for Harris than we did for Biden in 2020. We lost Wisconsin by just 0.9%—the smallest margin of any state in America.

2024 was a high turnout year, second only to 2020 nationwide. But in most states, turnout went down slightly. In Wisconsin, overall turnout went up—by 1.3%, the most in the country. 

He describes the configuration of forces, groups, and miscellaneous people who made up the Wisconsin campaign: 

... Roughly 100,000 volunteers this year took part in the fight in Wisconsin.

The presidential campaign in Wisconsin and the WisDems core team worked together, hand in glove, on a constant basis. That integration was the product of years of work, relationships, and strategy. It was also made possible by the powerhouse Coordinated Campaign. ...

Every one of the 100,000 people who volunteered, including tens of thousands who knocked on doors and made phone calls in Wisconsin this year, helped Tammy Baldwin win Wisconsin, helped make huge gains downballot, and helped ensure that Harris came closer to winning here than any other battleground state.

The middle class built America, and unions built the middle class. ... Enormous thanks to all the groups involved in mounting an absolutely blockbuster field and communications operation in Wisconsin. 

Elections rely on a three-legged stool: the candidate campaigns, the party and volunteers—and allied groups. ...

Wikler's picture of the three-legged stool may be particular to Wisconsin. He heads one of the most effective Democratic parties in the country. In much of the country, especially bluer states, the three legged stool of progressive campaigning probably looks more like 1) candidates and party infrastructure of varying quality; 2) union workers where such exist; and 3) para-campaign and civil society groups like Seed the Vote, the ACLU, and enviros who've internalized that they have to play in elections to survive. 

But whatever organizational form that the wider democracy campaign assumes in the future, it will demand what Wikler enjoins:

... we organize in every corner and every community in Wisconsin, year-round.

Under-recognized is that the experiences and connections made when literally millions of people are activated in a campaign changes many of the people who participate. As legendary California organizer Fred Ross asserted: 

No good organizing is ever lost.

The period ahead may seem bleak, but there are a hell of a lot of us, we've seen each other, and we can get organized and feisty.

Halloween on the phone bank

The dialer got into the spirit of the day on the UniteHERE phonebank yesterday.

 

While waiting for someone to pick up in Philly, it displayed screens like this with the phone icon jiggling.

 

Gotta keep the phone crew amused. We'll be on through the election, chasing down voters for Harris-Walz and supporting a couple of thousand canvassers in the battleground states.

Women finding a way; it's traditional

The MAGAs don't like women. In fact, we scare them. We might just think for ourselves.

Note from a public women's bathroom

So contends feminist journalist Jill Filipovic. 

There is ... conservative rage and panic over the prospect of their wives voting for Kamala Harris and simply not telling them. Harris supporters have launched a strategy of telling women that their votes are private, and no one has to know who you cast your ballot for — including your Trump-supporting husband. Fox News’s Jesse Waters griped that a woman voting for Harris and not telling her husband is “the same thing as having an affair... that violates the sanctity of our marriage.” That, he said, “would be D Day.” (Waters, it’s worth noting, divorced after he had an affair and is now married to his former affair partner).

Donald Trump, for his part, has doubled down on his Big Daddy pitch to women: “I want to protect the women of our country,” Trump said at a rally. “They said sir I just think it’s inappropriate for you to say… I said well I’m gonna do it whether the women like it or not.”

Which doesn’t sound so far from “when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.”

This is the misogyny election. It’s the election of abortion bans. It’s the election of conservative husbands who are enraged at the very thought of their wives having minds of their own. It’s the election of a man who boasts about sexual assault and demeans women who challenge him in the crudest of terms. ...

Here's hoping women can bring this contest home. The polls show an enormous gender gap between the voting intentions of men and women. It's girls against the boys. And the boys may get all hot up -- but do they vote? In general, women cast a considerable majority of ballots in presidential elections.

• • •

None of this is entirely new. I've written here before about learning how to work elections from my Republican committee-woman mother and her diligently maintained turnout lists. She patrolled her precincts and woe to the Republican voter who didn't show up. "Too busy; went fishing" said one indignant note on a voting record.

Yet in the 1964 presidential contest between Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater, I was always sure she secretly pulled the lever for the Texan. She had dragged me to the kick-off for Goldwater's running mate, the local forgettable Congressman from nearby Lockport, William Miller. He was a small-minded, abrasive McCarthyite. She distributed the Goldwater lit. But Goldwater scared her. She couldn't vote for a man she thought both rigid and dangerous. So I am pretty sure she didn't.

My father dutifully turned out for Barry. But none of this stuff engaged him.

My mother remained a Republican until she died in 1999. I wonder whether she'd still be a Republican today? Upper middle class white women with college degrees in cities, like her, have mostly "evolved," now voting as Dems whether they trumpet it or not.

If Harris wins, a lot of women will have found their own way.

Political action for efficacy: uncoordinated and very well coordinated

Political scientist Lester Spence, who describes himself as an Afro-realist, has observations about the 250,000 people who've canceled the Washington Post in outrage at Jeff Bezos' decision to kill the paper's endorsement of the Harris-Walz ticket.

Political scientists who study comparative politics came up with a term to describe a certain type shift from democratic states to non-democratic ones. "Democratic backsliding." They came up with that term to describe transitions that didn't happen immediately, through a military coup, or something like it, but slowly. And they've recently begun using the term to describe the US. Free press tampering is often something that comes with backsliding--either politicians or oligarchs gradually or abruptly reduce the ability of journalists to report.

What happened to the Post and the  [LA] Times is a sign backsliding is taking a turn for the worse. The Post IS NO LONGER FREE IN THE WAY IT WAS LAST WEEK. Once he makes this move, what prevents him from coming after the news next? Take a look again at the quote above. What prevents HIM from coming after those things now that he's done this?

THIS is what people responded to. And people chose this, WHILE UNCOORDINATED, because this was the best signal to send. Far better than canceling Amazon Prime (although that could be next) because an amazon prime cancellation can be read in a dozen different ways.

Now on that response. You're suggesting that mass cancellation can only hurt. But compared to what? What other action would've been better? If there's an action that could've been better...why didn't Post staffers coordinate it? why didn't you coordinate it? I'm pretty sure a draft of the endorsement exists. Why didn't the board send it out? Anonymously even?

I suggest that we're already down a dangerous path. Instead of telling people "STOP" in the absence of ANY OTHER ALTERNATIVE...the answer should be to tell people "GO." And use that energy to develop the internal institutional strength to contest the changes in the paper. ...

Like Spence, much as I doubt the efficacy of uncoordinated political actions, I am thrilled by the volume of the uncomplicated response to what feels a moral political offense.

We have a few more days to prove that Jeff Bezos bet on the wrong horse. Let's keep working.

• • •

And since I'm sharing from Spence, here are some fragments from the Johns Hopkins University professor's own first experience canvassing Philly for Harris-Walz.

I didn’t know what I’d expect to see because I’d never done door to door canvassing before. But there were about 150 or more of us, and of this group I imagine maybe four or five were paid by the campaign (not the Harris Walz campaign but by the group we were working with). The rest of us were volunteers. The youngest I met were in undergrad. The oldest I met were in their sixties and early seventies. It was a multiracial group, and, tellingly, international.

(Foreign nationals cannot donate money or participate in decision making in any domestic political committee but can volunteer their time in other ways.)

... Although the vast majority of these door knocks went unanswered, maybe about 20 percent of the time someone answered the door. The bulk of these folk were fervent Harris supporters—again this last push is about getting people we already know are likely to vote for Harris to do so. There were a few exceptions.

The white brother who answered the first door our crew knocked on spent twenty minutes telling us how scared he was of the Democratic Party, in part because of their response to the George Floyd Protests, and when January 6 was brought up, he said “that was four years ago.” ...

... Perhaps the best story of the two days happened on Saturday. Near the end of our run one of the crew ran into an elderly voter who wasn’t able to get to the polls because she wasn’t mobile, and she was concerned that her mail ballot wouldn’t get to her in time. I went to talk to the sister myself and collected her information so I could help her. My plan was to talk to people at the top of the food chain because technically there was only so much we could do. Maybe we could get a ballot and bring it back to her.

I ended up running into an election judge around the block from her. She wasn’t on our list—I think she stepped outside and saw us door knocking, and I told her what we were doing. She then told us who she was, what she did. So I took the opportunity to ask her how we could help her neighbor. She gave us permission to go back to the neighbor with her information. We told her the neighbor’s name but she didn’t recognize it.

When we went back to the neighbor, the neighbor laughed. “Oh. I know her. I taught her son!”...

 

That's how elections like this one are won -- one vote scratched out at a time, finding our people. 

This afternoon I go back to this work, calling into Pennsylvania with the UniteHERE national phonebank.

Voting together

The east coast branch of the UniteHERE national phonebank took a short turn through North Carolina last week to help on-the-ground organizers turn out voters to this Power to the Polls festival in a Charlotte park and their march to vote. Looks like they had a good time.

It's great to see our work is succeeding.

This effort, like many across the nation, aims to restore some sense of community to the election process though which we make our national and local democratic decisions.

Not long ago, there was only Election Day voting unless you submitted an excuse to vote by absentee ballot. But states in the Pacific Northwest experimented with mail-in voting and discovered this increased turnout (sometimes). Some states added early in-person voting options. The COVID year further encouraged many states to implement various systems of mail, drop box, and other options which reduced crowding and responded to some people's fears of being around others.

So, really, we no longer have Election Day as so much as Election Month. This year almost all states use some version of voting options distributed over time. 

A friend describes what living through the transition felt like:

When we lived in Colorado, we were some of the very early voters in line to cast our votes on Election Day, and at first I really didn't like that we couldn't have that moment duplicated here in Washington State. But now I have grown to prefer it this way, because we can be assured that our votes will definitely be counted and not manipulated in any way.

Early in the transition to early voting options, I was uncomfortable. An election is the most collective experience we participate in as citizens of a huge, wildly diverse, country. As Karl Kurtz wrote way back in 2007:

[Early voting] eliminates the notion of a national civic convocation of the American people on election day...

We've made voting a solitary action for many of us. Is this good? Certainly it is good for campaigners; we push early voting with gusto and profit by it because it reduces the number of people we have to reach on Election Day. (And early voting relieves voters in contested areas of that relentless flood of calls and texts.)

But I'm glad to see more and more groups creating public events like Charlotte's Power to the Polls march to remind people they are in this big thing together.

After all, voting is a chance to join in a celebration of the best aspirations of this country, even in these terrible times!

We even have election parties in San Francisco.

Getting Out The Vote: a tale

From the UniteHERE phonebank: we're calling into Pennsylvania. The state is most likely to be one of the closest elections in the nation.

The job is to contact all the people who've requested mail-in ballots, identify whether they are Harris voters, make sure they actually received their ballot from the county, help them with any details about how to submit the slightly complicated pile of envelopes and required signatures, and make sure they get their vote in on time. 

UniteHERE union canvassers (you can join them via Seed the Vote) have been helping people they meet at the doors in Philadelphia for weeks to request mail-in ballots -- and naturally, many other citizens request them without our encouragement. But in Philly, a lot of mail-ins come because of this door-knocking program. 

So I'm on my last call of a 3 hour shift yesterday ... what sounds like a nice young man answers.

I'm friendly and he agrees to talk for a few minutes. I ask whether he's for Harris -- "hell, yes!"

I ask whether he's got his ballot yet? "Oh yes. And I already mailed it in."

And then the kicker. "I'm doing what you are doing on the doors ... I'm working with a union -- UniteHERE."

I just laugh and we trade notes for a bit on what it's been like on the streets in Philadelphia. He didn't know we had a whole phonebank calling the people they'd pushed to use mail-in ballots. He did know, a lot of Philly people love them some VP Harris!

This was a true experience of a campaign working the way it is supposed to work: my call closed the loop on a process that is what campaigns call Get Out The Vote -- GOTV. Find the voters who support your candidate and do whatever it takes to make sure they actually do vote. That's the task for the next 12 days!

Amid the horror, there's no stopping ...

Almost two weeks ago while phone banking to turn out Harris voters in Charlotte, North Carolina, I was a little surprised that no one mentioned the late-September hurricane which had devastated the Appalachian west of the state.

I know something about campaigning in the wake of a natural disaster since I was leading a political canvassing campaign when the Loma Prieto earthquake shook San Francisco in 1989. That event, despite collapsed freeways and bridges, was not nearly as horrific as the depredations of Hurricane Helene. But the shake shook us all.

Electoral calendars stop for nothing and people enmeshed in them have to stay on track. Yet after such a disaster, the universe feels unstuck and normal life seems frozen -- perhaps because we have lived such violent emotions. People feel lost, in shock, as they do what they must in a changed world.

Being a political person, I have wondered what the hurricane, flooding, and destruction near Asheville might mean for getting out the vote in those hills. Though clearly the electoral contest is not the main emergency for people without light or heat, who have lost homes and livelihoods, the election does go on.

A friend of a friend -- one Fen Druidin -- from the Asheville area described going to the early voting polls:

Everywhere around here, people check in with each other. "Are you okay? Where are you located? How bad was it?"

We all know which parts were hit hardest. At the early voting site, I overheard the poll worker interacting with the woman who had been in line behind me. She'd been quiet and serious the whole time we were in line, not laughing when we did, though others interacted with us.

The poll worker asked her where she lived.

"Swannannoa," she said. [A particularly hard-hit location where many died.]

There was a hush. We all know what that means. It's hard to describe what I mean by a hush. Just. A held breath.

Then, "Are you okay?" The poll worker asked.

"Our house is gone," said the woman.

"Oh, my gosh, I'm so sorry. Do you need anything?"

"We're just waiting on insurance and FEMA to finish their assessments," said the woman. "Then we can move forward. But we're okay for now."

Politico sent a reporter and a photographer to report on the election in the Asheville area. Some excerpts:

They lost their homes and possessions. They’re showing up to vote in NC.

When Hurricane Helene swept through Yancey County, the flood waters took Byrdene Byerly’s home and nearly all her possessions. She escaped from her house with only the muddy clothes on her back and her pocketbook.

But despite all the devastation, on the first day of early voting, Byerly was at the county Board of Elections to cast a ballot for Kamala Harris.

“I’m soon to be 82 years old, and I’ve voted since I was 21,” she said outside the polling place Thursday. “I always vote.”

... The situation, despite remaining dire in some areas, has improved in most places. In an interview two weeks before early voting started, Anderson Clayton, chair of the North Carolina Democratic Party, fought back tears as she processed how to balance the election with the immediate devastation many in her state were living through.

“Everyone keeps asking me about voting locations and everything,” Clayton said on Oct. 3, nearly a week after flood waters swept through western North Carolina. “There are still people who have not been found.”

... In the immediate aftermath, the state’s Democrats had paused campaigning in the region, including all texting operations besides checking in on people and suggesting where to find storm-related resources. But now, despite the Democrats’ continued work on local relief efforts in the region, they’re back to deploying volunteers to help mobilize voters, according to a Harris campaign official and activists on the ground.

... “Everything came to a halt that we’d been working on,” said Dalton Buchanan, chair of the Henderson County Young Democrats. “It became not a priority for a bit. It was just in the backside of our mind, that there was politics happening.”

But the reality of the election crept back in, Buchanan said, “when we had to deal with the right-wing extremist people making threats to FEMA, and bad misinformation spreading everywhere.” He said he had to urge some of his own family members, distrustful of the federal government due to some of the GOP’s propaganda, to apply for aid after losing their homes. 

This past weekend, the county party was finally back to canvassing and phone banking.

I recognize some elements of these descriptions. A field campaign apparatus, a mass of volunteers accustomed to going door to door, is well designed to spread good information to people isolated in a disaster and to collect help from those who can. We did that in 1989.

A natural disaster also serves as a breach of the normal which unleashes extremist nightmares into the daylight. Our campaign for legal recognition of LGBT partnerships was accused by right wing preachers of having caused the earthquake. I won't be surprised that some people think Democrats or Donald Trump caused the hurricane.

We in San Francisco persisted as do the people of western North Carolina. That's a good country at good work.

Door-knocking story from Pennsylvania

We have arrived at the stage in the seemingly interminable election when, after all the ads, and phone calls, and the flood of mail, it's voter-to-voter contact that seals the deal. In the places where there are close contests -- nationally the seven presidential battleground states, but also innumerable local races we hear less about -- it's the people talking with people that make this season our semi-annual festival of democratic engagement with the country's better aspirations.

So here's a canvassing story from suburban Pennsylvania, by @MattHardigree, grabbed from Xitter.

I door-knocked today for the Harris campaign in Bucks County, PA, one of the most important counties in one of the most important states. I've done a lot of door-knocking in a lot of elections, including this cycle, but what I saw definitely changed my view of this race.

Of course, this is just a single day covering about 90-100 doors. But it was also a persuasion run. We were hitting Ds but also had a list that included Independents and even a few Republicans who were considered possibly persuadable. Only had one pro-Trump door the whole day.

This isn't what I expected. This is a 50/50 county and the part we were in skewed Republican. My cousins Joe and Deb, who are wonderful, help organize this area and know their community well. It's a good community full of hardworking, nice folk, but it's not an easy one for Dems.

When I got there I saw a lot of Trump signs. Their [his cousin's] house stood out because it had a giant Harris-Walz sign, albeit one that was slashed by three men in hoodies a few nights before. It's a street fight out here.

The first neighborhood we hit was a fairly representative middle-class part of the county. We saw a mix of Harris and Trump signs, though more Trump signs. And, sure enough, the first door I knocked there was an older woman who told me "Democrats are ruining this country."

"Ah!" I thought, "it's going to be one of THOSE kinds of days." I wished her a nice day and went to the next house. I had a few nice interactions, a few people weren't home, and then I went to a door to find an older gentleman. He'd passed away and his wife was a lifelong R.

She wasn't on my list, but she was all-in on Harris. She couldn't imagine anyone voting for Trump. This was the first time I heard this from a Republican, but it wouldn't be the last time. The more doors I hit, the more Republicans or former Republicans I met who said the same.

I met an older Jewish gun-owner, a Republican who became Independent in January 2020. I met parents who were registered Republicans but whose daughters became engaged and persuaded them to vote Harris. They asked me to put up a yard sign for them.

I was surprised that the Republicans and Independents were actually the most excited about the election and felt strongly about voting for Harris. Democrats were mostly split into two groups: Older women and younger families.

Older women are extremely active and looking for a fight. At one door I was looking for the daughter and the mom asked me if I was there for Harris or Trump. I said Harris and she said "Good! I keep getting mail from Trump and I keep ripping it up!"

She was hilarious and had whipped her family into caring about voting. She even had her mail ballot and was going to return it to a drop box so she made sure her vote counted. These are high propensity voters and they're voting early.

And they also want signs, partially because they don't want to be intimidated by their Trump-supporting neighbors. This is pretty much the opposite of the experience I had with young Dems and Dem families.

Younger Dems, especially those with kids, are calling relatives and getting people to vote but they're also more nervous. Very few wanted signs and multiple people told me it was because they were afraid of their "Trumper neighbors." All the signs made them nervous.

The next neighborhood seemed slightly more upper-middle-class and signs were about 50/50 when we got there, but more Harris tilted when we left.

Overall (TL/DR), Dems are motivated, not a single Independent was voting for Trump and instead voting for Harris, moderate Republicans were all voting Harris. Other than the first door I didn't meet a single Trump voter.

Dems are active and voting by mail ballot and taking nothing by chance. There are a lot of Trump signs and I think it'll still be close, but a lot of people were happy to tell me they were voting Harris even if they didn't want their neighbors to know.

Some observations on this story:

• Campaign organizers hate election signs. They are bulky to store and distribute. The presence of many of them doesn't promise you'll win an area. But signs matter to voters who need to express themselves as in this neighborhood.

• In our present moment, it's often older women who are carrying the struggle for the Dems. We've had it. We won't go back!

• You can call what these guys are encountering "Republicans for Harris" but you can also just call it realignment. Middle class, sane, white Republicans are becoming Dems in the suburbs, much to the their own surprise.

The nation is in a race between grievance and hope for the future -- who will prevail?

Might we have to admit that this is an agreement with Hell?

These are "times that try our souls" wrote revolutionary agitator Thomas Paine in 1776. And the sentiment speaks to current times as well, while also demanding of us unrelenting patient pragmatism while we strive to push MAGA and their 2025 Project to the fringes of national life.

Michael Podhozer is a former political director of the AFL-CIO. And he suggests, to use another antique expression, we will have to someday "grasp the nettle," take the pain, and accept that our current anti-democratic, Constitutional,  national election framework in the electoral college is Legal but not Legitimate. If this is a country whose system is supposed to mean that the people rule, the Electoral College must be reformed. This is not optional.

One reaction to my last post [writes Podhozer], “Kamala Harris Will Win the Popular Vote,” has been some variation of a smug suggestion that I take a civics class because the next president will be decided by the Electoral College. Another has been a bit less condescending, something like, “Sure, but what matters is the Electoral College.”

I have a respectful suggestion for anyone who had those kinds of reactions (other than “read the post”). I ask you to consider what it means that we collectively shrug off such an anti-democratic structure as “just the way it is.”  

Because when we do that, we align ourselves with those who in their times scoffed at the abolitionists, the Radical Republicans, the suffragists, the modern civil rights movement, and those who called for the direct election of senators and “one person, one vote” in legislative districts. All of these people had the courage in their own time to call out the ways in which American elections were legal but not legitimate, either by universal standards of democracy or even by the Declaration of Independence’s central claim – that governments depend on the consent of the governed, legitimately ascertained.

... But, as long as systematic reform is so easily swatted away merely by embarrassing those who would wish otherwise as being too naive or insufficiently “realistic,” we’ll bounce around the room like a Roomba, with serial diversions like “Democrats need a better message.”

This is as true now as it was in the 1960’s when James Baldwin wrote:

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

Which is why I would rather count myself with those who, in their times, had to acknowledge that enslavement, the disenfranchisement of women, the indirect election of senators, egregious gerrymandering, and Jim Crow were legal – but never conceded that they were legitimate.

Here Podhozer places himself in the proud tradition of William Lloyd Garrison who, in the 1830s contemplating the curse of enslavement, insisted that the Constitution was a "covenant with death" and "an agreement with Hell."

Rule by popular majorities is what the people of this country want. We cannot forever note that fact and shrug, thinking getting there is just too hard. In previous eras, we found ways to make impossible, unthinkable, improvements in the structure of government. We need to do this once again or the country will die.

What if the polls are distorted by bull-bleep?

I try not to ride the poller-coaster prior to an election that I care about. That is, the rare election in which there are polls; in many there are too few polls to pay attention.

But a month out from the presidential vote when we're drowning in polling news, I think it is worth passing along Simon Rosenberg's analysis of what may be going on amid the deluge. Who is Rosenberg? -- he's one of the few Dem analysts and activists who got the 2022 Congressional contests more or less right. He didn't believe there was going to be a "red wave" sweeping Democrats away and there wasn't, except perhaps in a few districts in New York State and Cali where Dems weren't paying much attention.

He has a theory about what leads to dire polls for Dems as we approach the vote. Republican operatives can buy them ...

... Given what happened in 2022, it would have been wise for the polling aggregators and forecasters to acknowledge the rise of an entirely new type of polling, right wing “narrative polling.” There are independent media and academic polls, partisan polls by campaigns and party committees, and now a third kind, right-aligned polling. While there is a smattering of polls from Democratic and progressive aligned sources, they aren’t many, nowhere near the level of what we are now seeing coming from the right. 

This close to an election spending money on anything other than things that help you win is an extravagance. Thus the right must view spending so much money on these polls as something that helps them win, which makes them a new form of partisan political activity not “polling” as we understand it.

It is time for national political commentators to acknowledge this new third type of poll - the right wing narrative poll - and to start breaking their data out from the independent polls. To be clear breaking out the right wing polls from the averages in 2022 was a central way I got the election right when so many got it wrong. The late independent polls in 2022 showed a close, competitive election. 

The right wing narrative polls showed an election 2-3-4 points more Republican - a different election - and there were enough of those polls in the battlegrounds to move the averages to a red wave not a close election. Without those polls it is very unlikely we would have been talking about a red wave in the closing weeks of the election.

Given that the project to move the averages and create a narrative the election was slipping away from Democrats was successful in 2022, we should anticipate that the right will try it again this year. 

What would that look like? We get a series of polls from these pollsters showing the election moving towards Trump perhaps 2-3 points in key battleground states, maybe nationally too. The polling averages will then start to move a little ... The right then declares their strongman is using his “strength” (not money, ads, debate performance, ground game, external events, the early vote or any other plausible explanation) to win the election, and that it is slipping away from [Harris]. The whole right wing noise machine then amplifies, and presto - another red wave! Trump is winning and strong, Harris is losing and weak. Energizing for them, demobilizing for us.

My emphasis. They want to scare and depress us and since they aren't very good at on the ground campaigning, they have figured out how to render polling averages unreliable. We just need to dig in and work this campaign in all our various ways.

A mixtion and a puzzlement

Looking for how to get involved? Sign up to knock on doors in Nevada and Pennsylvania with Seed the Vote. Or contact me to phonebank along with the worker-members of the hospitality union UniteHERE.

GOP ground game? Is it real?

'Tis the season ... the moment in election campaigns when major media try to report on the field campaigns being mounted by the various electoral combatants. For many of the reporters sent out for this purpose, the ground game is mysterious foreign territory.

I focus this post on several articles about the Trump/GOP efforts, largely on door-to-door canvassing apart from TV, other media ads, and even phoning, texting, and GOTV postcards. 

In August, Semafor reported: 

Donald Trump’s unconventional ground game is making Republicans nervous.

The Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee are betting the race on an unconventional approach, opting to outsource much of their turnout operation to dozens of conservative groups like Turning Point Action, America First Works and the Elon Musk-backed America PAC.

Interviews in swing states did not encourage GOP commentators:

A ... Republican strategist in a swing state said they’ve seen “no ground activity at all” and complained more typical volunteer work had been crowded out by “election integrity” efforts.

“They’re really only focused on recruiting folks to volunteer to be poll watchers,” the third Republican strategist said. “I mean, they do a lot of that shit. But what’s the point of watching the vote if you haven’t turned out the vote?”

The Washington Post pointed out that Republicans seem to be shaping their efforts based on a new Federal Election Commission ruling which allows closer cooperation between the legal Party and candidate campaigns and outside supporting groups.

... In March, the Federal Election Commission issued new guidance that opened the door for campaigns and outside groups to collaborate on turnout efforts. In the past, campaigns and official party committees, which are subject to contribution limits, generally observed a firewall that blocked information-sharing with super PACs and nonprofits that accept unlimited contributions.

Now, campaigns and outside groups are free to share messaging and exchange data. That new opportunity has allowed the Trump campaign to supplement a bare-bones in-house field program with allied programs fueled by megadonors.

Hence the Trump campaign's reliance on the likes of Turning Point USA to do its door knocking and to Get Out the Vote -GOTV.

Meanwhile, the Democrats -- the state parties and the Harris-Walz campaign assisted by unions like UniteHERE -- are not changing their past practices.

What could go wrong for the Trumpists? Plenty.

Philip Bump is a rare experienced observer of these things:

... Like the Trump Organization before it, the GOP is mostly just a collection of brands under the control of Trump himself.

This brings us back to voter outreach efforts. Such efforts, generally categorized as “get out the vote,” or GOTV, has not traditionally been one of the Republican Party’s strengths. The Democratic Party, bolstered by labor unions, had a history of strong GOTV efforts in part because its voting base was less likely to turn out of its own accord. Only in more recent elections did the national GOP match that push, investing in GOTV and in building a database of voters that could be used over multiple cycles and by multiple candidates.

For the party, this offered two benefits. It made their candidates more likely to win, given the increased ability to target specific low-propensity voters and push them to vote. More importantly, it built the party. It allowed Republicans to collect new data on voters and on volunteers. It gave them something to offer to candidates — data and resources — that could help them shape candidate campaigns and policies. This increased the institutional power of the Republican Party.

But since Trump first became the front-runner for the Republican nomination in the 2016 presidential contest, he has made obvious that he intends to suck every drop of institutional power out of the GOP for his use. ...

If, because Donald is cheap and perhaps needs the money for legal expenses, parallel organizations are left to do the door to door canvassing, do they really have the same institutional interests as the campaign? Bump doubts it.

... Who benefits from outsourcing GOTV efforts to Turning Point Action (TPA)? The youth-focused group can send its data ... back to the GOP, but it’s safe to assume that won’t be a priority. TPA is interested in building its own institutional power, and is using its strong relationship with Trump to do so. It’s building its database of volunteers and using the lure of volunteering to help Trump to do so. And, importantly, its effort will be an institutional success even if Trump loses. The central incentive is on raising and spending the $100 million Turning Point Action is budgeting for this year.

Because of the financial incentives for the organizations running these things, these para-campaign canvasses are more likely than the Dems to depend on a random collection of paid canvassers who have little personal commitment to the project. The head count becomes an important metric, regardless of what canvassers accomplish. 

This work is hard. It is exhausting. It's a lot easier to just hang door hangers and count doors reached than to engage with voters. Sometimes it is easier to just go out for coffee and still get paid. And very often, that's all Republican canvassers actually do. 

And now Elon Musk thinks he can buy an off-the-shelf field operation for North Carolina. A Republican is doubtful:

Whether the committee is targeting the North Carolina voters that Trump needs to carry the state is less clear. The mailers and door-hangers obtained by The Post were delivered to a longtime conservative operative in the state who was already committed to Trump and votes regularly in federal elections.

“It’s a little screwy that I’m on their list,” said the individual, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss campaign tactics candidly. “Stupid to waste money on someone who is a guaranteed Trump vote.”

Color me extremely skeptical that the affiliated PACs and parallel organizations can do the job as well as the organized Democratic field offices and unions can. 

We saw something like this in Albuquerque during the 2004 presidential cycle, John Kerry running against George W. Bush. Some quirk of the campaign finance rules that year allowed big foundations, for the first time, to pour money into nonprofits working in parallel to the Democrats. And they did.

And it was a mess. Multiple organizations failed to communicate; door knockers carrying different flyers ran into each on the same blocks. Other areas, especially Spanish-speaking neighborhoods, never saw any campaigners at all. Groups running canvasses competed to hire from the small pool of people available to do the work; the daily rate for walking in the city climbed; canvasses had huge employee turn over. And in those early days of computerization, it was never very clear that what information canvassers collected about voters and their intentions could or would be made useful for getting out the vote. 

I am reminded that that was the last year when Dems lost New Mexico at the presidential level. No one fears that any longer. The New Mexico Democratic Party has made itself enough of a coherent force that they have made a true blue state. 

As Simon Rosenberg always insists, "I'd rather be us than them."

You can sign up to get involved in canvassing for Harris-Walz alongside community partners in battleground states at Seed the Vote.

MAGA at work

Isaac Arnsdorf's Finish What We Started: The MAGA Movement’s Ground War to End Democracy is a fascinating piece of election journalism, perhaps most especially to a practitioner of campaign mobilization like me. But it's also a book for anyone who, confronted by the spread and endurance of the MAGA movement, finds themselves asking, "what's wrong with these people?"

Arnsdorf is billed as "a national political reporter' for The Washington Post, but in this volume he goes local, looking at the on-the-ground antics of MAGA in Arizona and Georgia.

He explains his project: 

... The movement now called MAGA has long existed in the American political bloodstream ...this movement's ideology was and is loosely defined by nationalism and tradition social values, fierce opposition to liberalism as a slippery slope to communism, and a tendency toward paranoia and conspiratorial thinking....

... In the story of the mass radicalization of the Republican Party, Trump is a singular, indispensable actor. But his perspective is not where the drama and tension unfold. This book turns the camera around from its usual focus on politicians and operatives, focussing instead on the faces in the crowd: what makes them believe, what motivates them, what stirs them to action. ...

Arnsdorf's story has two main protagonists;

• in Cobb County, Georgia, Salleigh Grubb, previously a casual suburban Republican, was so thrown off center by the convergence in 2020 of COVID, Black Lives Matter, and Trump's loss in November, that she became a vehement "Stop the Steal" activist.

On Facebook she posted an upside-down flag, widely recognized in right-wing circles as a distress signal.

Her energy was unabated despite repeated Georgia setbacks.  Eventually she was elected county chair and even met her orange-coiffed cult leader in person.

• in Maricopa County, Arizona, Kathy Petsas had served as a district chair for the Republican Party for decades, laboriously turning out voters for GOP nominees whether she thrilled to them or not. A post-2020 influx of new MAGA militants found her leadership too accommodating and practical for their virulent politics. They voted her out and overwhelmed party old-timers.

Behind both these stories in Arnsdorf's telling lurks Steve Bannon, the podcast proponent of burning the whole country down and MAGA's evil wizard. Bannon is clearly a bad dude, but I am not sure I would ascribe quite as much agency to him as Arnsdorf does. He is, after all, a mercenary con man who grabs onto whatever looks like a good thing with showy pomposity. A very American type. Plenty of MAGAs thrill to his style.

Bannon discovered one Dan Shultz, another familiar sort of rightwing crackpot, who had found his obsession in what he called the Precinct Strategy. If he could just convince MAGA true believers that political parties needed thousands of local precinct activists to turn out their neighbors and that these precinct chairs would then participate in intra-party elections for party office, MAGA could take over the Republican apparatus and elect its candidates to public office. Shultz, through Bannon, enjoyed good timing for his nostrum; Biden had won in 2020, Trump refused to concede, and MAGAs needed something to do. Riding Bannon's cred, pretty soon the Precinct Strategy was all the rage among MAGAs.

What Dan was offering was so pure, so simple -- seventh-grade civics. Bannon knew there was a hunger out there for that. ... The Precinct Strategy could help restore that missing [social] connective tissue. ... There was already a structure, an organization, a hierarchy. ...

For Kathy Petsas in Arizona, this new crop of enthusiasts (and fantasists) engulfed her district leadership.

.. she started getting deluged with applications to become precinct committee members ... It was an obscure role and Kathy was used to getting two or three people a month who might express interest in become a PC. ... she invited the applicants to meet for coffee. ... if these strangers were asking to represent her party in her district, and she was going to exercise her discretion as chair to appoint them, then Kathy wanted to get to know them a little first. She had 132 coffees. ...

.. It was clear to Kathy from the start that Donald Trump was many things, but he was not a conservative. ... It wasn't just the Trump was rude, he brought out the rudeness in his followers; they were not winning anybody over by standing on street corners with Trump signs and guns. Kathy believed that elected officials were supposed to represent everyone, not only the people who voted for them. But everything Trump did was for his base. ... He didn't stand for anything but himself.

But she wasn't the sort of Republican to become a Never-Trumper (unfortunately). She been around long enough to suspect she might have to reconstruct the party if the fever passed. Still ...

... she wasn't going to go door to door for candidates she couldn't defend. .. [the new PCs etc] were like living, breathing manifestations of all the conspiracy theories and misinformation that had been swirling and spreading for two years now.

Neither of these two state parties -- not Georgia nor Arizona -- came out of the 2022 cycle successful. In Georgia, Trump-promoted Senate candidate Herschel Walker proved too crazy for the electorate. The Arizona party seems still fully MAGA-fied having nominated the batshit loony Kari Lake for the Senate in 2024. Trump is running again.. This story is not finished. Isaac Arnsdorf does a useful job of introducing some grassroots combatants.

• • •

I do have a major to bone to pick with this journalist however. He would have written a better book if he'd done some research into how precinct level party organization of all variants of U.S. parties have worked for decades -- perhaps even back to William  L. Marcy in New York in the mid-1840s. Smart party leaders have long known that neighbors engaging neighbors was the gold standard of electoral organizing. Dan Schultz' idea was no novelty.

My mother was Republican precinct leader in Buffalo, NY, in the 1950s and '60s; she kept a card file on every voter, recording whether she'd gotten them to vote yet! Such people were then and always the backbone of civic engagement. And she was a Nelson Rockefeller-Republican, not any kind of insurgent!

This is how functional elements of political parties have long organized themselves and their voters. Such organization is the strongest form of civic engagement this democracy knows; door-to-door canvasses from strangers, phone and text contact, and mass media don't hold a candle to year round persuasion by your neighbors. Where it exists, deep precinct organization is the way to go. Parties can seldom achieve it or maintain it over time. People get exhausted. The tone deaf MAGA antics Arnsdorf describes don't seem likely to age well ... but prediction is still foolish.

And if your door-to-door outreach is by an offensive MAGA nut ... perhaps not an attractive strategy as people like Kathy Petsas understand.

There's an arc to campus protests

A glance at Derf Backderf's meticulously researched graphic novel Kent State: Four Dead in Ohio seems right on time today.

This artist really did the work, in archives and interviews, to reconstruct the events of the Ohio college massacre on May 4, 1970. A barrage of gun fire from National Guard troops killed four students and maimed more in response to student protests. He tries to portray accurately what students, politicians, cops, and Guardsmen were thinking as the movement against the ongoing Vietnam war both intensified and shifted focus under ham-handed state repression. Overall theme: nobody really knew what they were doing!

Here are a few panels (click to enlarge):

Spring had come and students enjoyed the campus's grassy open lawn.

"Out of the bars and into the streets." During a boisterous evening in town on Friday night, some students interrupted a night of drinking and cruising to take common chants into the streets. The town police department had no idea what to do and bashed heads while intoxicated student rioters smashed store fronts.

The town called in the National Guard. No one seemed to know quite how to act in the aftermath.

Non-campus actors believed all sorts of myths about the mysterious campus activities. What had got into these kids?

For the students, their occupied campus was novel and insulting.

On Monday on campus, a small fraction of students reverted what they had been doing for weeks -- marching in protest. Students had a new target - the occupation of their turf by tired, frustrated, and uncomprehending troops. Many of the Guardsmen despised students they saw as privileged snots.

And so tragedy. A random crew of students were dead; all sides told their own stories. No one was punished. At the time, 58 percent of Americans thought the protesters had it coming to them.

I can highly recommended Backderf's reconstruction of Kent State events, much more detailed and nuanced than what I've offered here.

The book is not a great graphic novel because, for all the artist's efforts, all these characters seem to blend into each other, classic hippies in one stereotype and malevolent pols in another. He could probably have created a clearer visual experience with a lot of editing, but he's determined to report all the available historical strands and the result is not pictures which are easily understood. But this is a terrific effort to tell a complex story.

I got the book from the public library; I hope it is readily available in this moment.

• • •

A few observations from having lived similar events at UC Berkeley during attendance there from 1965-1969 and watching student protests over Gaza today:

• As at Kent State, most students can and do navigate around the edges of passionate protests, going about their lives. They may sympathize, but they are not there. The passionate activists are usually a small minority.

• Repression of campus protests draws a far larger fraction of students (and profs and staff) into the protests, for good and ill. College students, at least back then and likely still, come to think of campus as their place and broadly resent being invaded.

• This can create incentives among a small fraction of protesters to try to create a situation in which cops or others beat protesters' heads. I'm not saying that is all that goes on, but there are always provocateurs, some honest and some not.

• When under attack on campus, it becomes hard for protest leaders to keep the focus on the initial animating issue -- today the call for a Gaza ceasefire and for an end to US complicity in Israel's oppression of Palestinians. If the issue becomes mean cops, the movement is losing.

• Protest leadership demands teaching serious protest discipline. This is hard because the aim is to grow fast. And also, the power of campus protest is attractive moral creativity; apparent rigid automatons chanting only approved messages do not attract.

And we'd be a far worse country if students could never be moved by atrocity. So far, we seem to be that kind of country.

Organized fire

The news that Jane McAlevey has entered hospice care hits hard. If you didn't have the chance to meet her, know that Jane was a stalwart of the UC Berkeley Labor Center and hundreds of labor struggles over the last four decades. She communicated how people, collectively, can find their power and fight for themselves.

I've always liked this snap of Jane caught at a board meeting of the Applied Research Center in 2000.

Her organized fire, harnessing anger and pride for people power, has made a difference to so many.

• • •

The news about Jane puts me in mind of this from the wise Kareem Abdul Jabbar:

The past few years has been a relentless stream of days in which someone I care about dies and I grieve the loss. Worse, I’m at an age where I know I will have to face many more of those days. Death. Grieve. Repeat. I am no longer surprised when it happens, the inevitability has numbed me from shock. But not from the sadness. Not from the grief.

At the same time, I realize that each death is like a customer number being called at a bakery—each number brings us closer to our own digits being announced. Then—if you’ve lived your life right—others will grieve for you. Circle of life, blah blah blah.

I’m all for inspirational quotes that embrace the challenges of life with a positive can-do attitude. I do them almost every week. But to ignore the darker aspects of living is to trivialize them and leaves us ill-equipped to deal with them. In a way, the grieving process is a way of honoring your relationships and celebrating a life that is filled with people worth grieving over.

Each day I wake prepared to grieve again. I am not afraid of it anymore. Grief and I are friendly companions skipping stones across the infinite that spreads out before me like a calm lake with grandchildren frolicking on the shore.

It's a time of life. But some people go on too soon.

Whining with a side of extortion

Donald Trump, on trial for one of his many crimes, is sinking in the polls and attempting to imitate the mob bosses he always admired. 

His small donors are not forking over cash at the volume they once did. Maybe they smell a rat? Anyway, he whines for them.

For donors who can give contribute "bigly", the message is extortion. As political scientist Bruce Cain explained to Thomas Edsall: 

... some of the conservative victories in campaign-finance law have had the unintended consequence of strengthening “the power of elected officials to coerce donations out of the donors.”

There has always been, Cain wrote by email, “an element of hostile dependency built into campaign fund-raising. Businesses have always given money to gain access or avoid bad things happening to them if the people in power feel that certain supporters let them down.”

Until recently, Cain argued, the potential for extortion was limited by stricter campaign contribution laws before we loosened the system up post the Citizens United decision. The irony of inviting large donors and businesses to give large or unlimited donations is that the court strengthened the implicit hostile dependency relationship between donors and Trump.

Republican donors sought the elimination of restrictions on donors in the belief that such loosening of the law “would favor them,” Cain wrote. Instead, “the dog has caught the car just as it is backing up on it,” adding: “Trump’s mafia m.o. can be counted on to take this to the extreme.”

While greed and fear are powerful motivations behind the decision to make campaign contributions to a candidate, they are not antithetical. Rather, they reinforce each other, something Trump appears to be acutely aware of.

 Not a pretty picture.

I don't expect our plutocrats to know much history, but if they did, they'd be aware that the experience of men who thought they could buy protection from the autocrats they enabled has not been happy.

A bit of rant: let's be thankful for those small donors

Thomas Edsall's formula in his weekly NY Times opinion columns is worn out. He assembles a collection of "authorities," mostly political and social scientists, writing in obscure academic journals, all to tell us the reality is more complex or less dire than the headlines proclaim.

Edsall's luminaries may even be correct. But he's become a bore.

And sometimes his conclusions are just minimizing and silly. Exhibit A -- "For $200, a Person Can Fuel the Decline of Our Major Parties." 

Edsall sets out to indict the legions of small donors who have been funding campaigns during the last decade by asserting that their contributions have undermined political party control of candidates and campaigns. I have no real argument with the realization that political parties have lost control of the process. (I have plenty of argument with oligarchic big political donors, but that's not my subject here.)

Here in California, we saw an earlier iteration of the political party decay Edsall so regrets. In this state, beginning in the '90s and 2000s, the parties were overshadowed by functional ideological actors, like SEIU, the Sierra Club, and even NGO groupings such as San Francisco Rising. And it was in the interests of professional consultant gurus to make every candidate and political player a separate fundraising actor, since consultant income derives from the financial success of the people and causes they work for (plus a rake off for TV ads).

Edsall's column leads off by alluding to a stunning finding which goes completely unexplored. 

In their 2022 paper, “Small Campaign Donors,” four economists — Laurent Bouton, Julia Cagé, Edgard Dewitte and Vincent Pons — document the striking increase in low-dollar ($200 or less) campaign contributions in recent years....

Bouton and his colleagues found that the total number of individual donors grew from 5.2 million in 2006 to 195.0 million in 2020. Over the same period, the average size of contributions fell from $292.10 to $59.70. ...

If the assertion I have emphasized is correct, there has been an astonishing growth in the sheer number of citizens who think that what happens in our democratic politics matters and who choose to pay into that process. Edsall sees a nightmare because these citizens -- right and left -- are expressing polarizing desires from government. I see participation -- buy-in -- by ordinary people on a novel level. I don't have to like all of them to be heartened.

If democracy is to work, people have to play. We differ a lot, to the verge of violence. That's scary. But that risk is the cost of commitment to people taking a role in the direction of the country. An unprecedented fraction of us are trying to take part via our dollars.

All this small giving naturally leads to attempts to aggregate the money more effectually. This ad was a great example from the last election cycle. With the increase will come ever more of this also. Maybe they could reduce the flood of email?

The people push back

Amid the din of Trump spewing lies, DeSantis endorsing hate, and most GOPers enjoying the ride to strongman rule, it's worth noting more muted developments which signal majorities of us aren't ready to give up on a more equitable, more inclusive country. 

Ohio: Ohioans for Reproductive Freedom this week dropped off 422 boxes of signature petitions with the Republican Secretary of State, aiming to qualify an initiative on the November ballot to protect abortion rights through the state constitution. They claim these contain about 700,000 names, far more the 414,000 needed.

Campaigners must first contend with an August vote by which abortion opponents aim to increase the winning margin required to amend the Ohio constitution from 50 percent plus 1 to 60 percent. So right now abortion rights advocates are campaigning to keep the current rules. This will be a tough fight, requiring intense organization to prevail in a very low turnout environment. But polls show that if they can prevail, well over 50 percent of Ohioans want to keep abortion legal in the November election. 

We can help #ProtectChoiceOhio climb these tough hills by donating here.

National: If you are like me, your email at the end of June was flooded with appeals from Democratic candidates for cash they could report at a fundraising deadline. (And if you are like me, you try to be strategic about these urgent messages, using trash liberally.)

But a summary in The Hill reports small donors on the Democratic side of politics are punching above our numbers.

Democrats are more likely to have donated to a political campaign within the past two years than Republicans, according to a new poll. 

The NBC News poll of 1,000 registered votes found that, in total, 30 percent of registered voters made campaign contributions within that period.  

Out of those voters, 37 percent were Democrats, 26 percent were Republicans and 22 percent were independents, according to the outlet. 

“It speaks to the new era we’re in where the small-money Democrats are just swamping the small-money Republicans,” Bill McInturff, a GOP pollster with Public Opinion Strategies, told NBC.  

As a practitioner of retail politics, I try to remember that I can become mesmerized by visible signs of political enthusiasm, like candidates' lawn and window signs, and usually don't know whether such manifestations mean anything. But small donor contributions at this scale make for a meaningful measure, much as number of doors knocked and voter conversations do. One hopes the campaigns figure out how to use the money well, but simply collecting it from so many donors increases democratic (small-d) engagement.

New analysis of 2022 midterm elections: implications for Democrats

When you work on an election, pretty much everything you do is determined by the data. The data used to be called "the voter lists" despite living in a computer file, but perhaps became envisioned as the data when we moved away from paper and onto smart phones. The data is used to send campaigners to interact with a selection of voters. Which voters the campaign expends resources to interact with is the most fundamental choice made in designing a strategy. From the point of view of the canvasser or phoner, the reasons for any particular list can be opaque, though good campaigns teach their workers as much as is known about their target voters.

(Reuters published a nice visual about political data flow if you want a picture.)

The data is compiled from public sources and past campaigns by list brokers -- at the top end, TargetSmart for the Democrats and Data Trust for Republicans. Various organizations further massage the data, attaching additional information and speculation about individual voters. Think of this part of the process as marketing for politics; like all the businesses that create profiles of us to sell stuff to us, political actors use public information to decide who to pitch with what message and how to reach them.

On the Democratic side, the best of these enhanced data files come through a nonprofit outfit called Catalist. Here's how that entity describes itself:

Catalist compiles, enhances, stores, and dynamically updates data on over 256 million unique voting-age individuals across all 50 states and the District of Columbia. ... Our commitment is to strengthen the progressive community year after year by growing and maturing this community asset and related technology and services.

When an election cycle is over, Catalist refines its data, using it now, not for targeting, but to discern what trends and changes are happening among the voters. Every two years, Catalists publishes a What Happened. Findings about the midterm elections of 2022 are encouraging :

Gen Z and Millennials played a remarkable role in the 2022 election, voting heavily for Democratic candidates and exceeding their turnout from 2018. That makes this the second midterm cycle in a row where young voters have not only defied conventional wisdom about their willingness to turn out, but delivered decisive victories for Democrats....

From the late 1970s to the early 2000s, young Democratic support was routinely between 50% and 60% and even dropped below 50% in some cycles, according to exit polls. While support rose dramatically in the 2006 midterms amidst opposition to the Iraq War and in 2008 during President Obama’s first election, the midterm years of 2010 and 2014 saw a substantial drop in support among young voters, in part due to young Democrats sitting out those elections but also due to across-the-board declines in support for Democrats in a Republican wave year.

Support has remained incredibly strong since 2016, however, notably including the past two midterms: peaking at 68% in the wave year of 2018, and remaining high in 2022. This marks the first time that young people's Democratic support has been greater than 60% for two consecutive midterm elections, and now includes a midterm with a Democratic incumbent president.

Democratic support among young voters is partly due to the diversity of this group, as America becomes more diverse over time. But that is not the whole story. Democratic support was higher among young voters of color, both nationally (78%) and in highly contested races (also 78%). But support among young white voters rose between 2018 (53% national, 52% highly contested races) and 2022 (58% nationally, 57% highly contested races). This 5-6 point support change is notable, indicating a broad base of Democratic support among young voters across the country.

What Does This Mean for Turnout in 2024? For practitioners, high turnout cycles mean that more voters have registered, cast ballots and engaged with campaigns, meaning there is more opportunity to re-engage these voters over time because they are visible to voter files and campaigns. Voting itself is also habitual and people who vote once are more likely to vote again than people who have never voted at all. We may remain in a high turnout era, but voters’ perceptions of how competitive and salient an election is can change dramatically. Higher turnout does not automatically confer advantages to Democrats and parties have been able to fight to near-parity in the past several general elections.

Campaigns are about winning the immediate election -- and also about encouraging habits of participation among your target population. That's what we do out there. It's called citizenship and underlies functioning democracy.

Here's an historical artifact from the days when we used paper to teach about voter files. In Nevada, by the way.