There has already been much analysis of the anti-ICE response in Minnesota. Many have pointed to the important role that organizing groups like Faith in Minnesota and Unidos MN played in training tens of thousands of people, providing structure to the resistance, and channeling mass participation into strategic action. I completely agree with those who have argued how essential the culture of organizing in Minnesota was to the success of the resistance in the state. Rather than repeat these analyses, I have a few thoughts that build on them and that I hope will add to our understanding of the lessons from Minnesota.

1. Powerful organizing in the states can fundamentally reshape the national political terrain. The story of Minnesotans’ resistance to ICE is an important reminder that our political fortunes aren’t only determined only by what happens in Washington, D.C., the quality of candidates, or how much money is available for electoral campaigns. These things matter of course, especially in tight elections. But the larger political narrative—the issues that people care about and how they view them—arguably matters more. With their courage, tens of thousands of everyday Minnesotans have reshaped the national narrative, and they did so without running a single TV ad, or fielding a poll to determine the best message, or conducting a randomized controlled trial to “scientifically” determine the most efficient mobilizing tactics. By betting on organizing and leadership development over years, Minnesota-based organizations provided the scaffolding for this mobilization moment. They protected their neighbors, deployed ICE observers in every neighborhood, and shaped the story in every gut-wrenching, awful viral moment emerging from the occupation.

The scale of the mobilization—which far outstripped what organizations and unions could have produced on their own, if truth be told—commanded the attention of the public because it was the public. The massive civic response exposed brutal, naked authoritarianism and the dishonest “shoot first, lie second, blame-the-victim third” playbook the administration used. Minnesotans put the administration on its heels on no less than its signature issue of immigration and seriously damaged MAGA’s political standing as we head into election season, not just in Minnesota but everywhere.

2. Politics as culture. We often hear the refrain that “politics is downstream from culture.” While this idea captures an important insight, it is also too neat and reductive. The reality is that political and cultural forces act on each other. In fact, if we’ve seen anything in recent years, it is the power that politics has to shape our larger culture. Consider Donald Trump and MAGA, for example. With his focus on controlling cultural and media institutions, from the takeover and renaming of the Kennedy Center to intervention in media ownership fights, Trump is using raw political power to attempt to alter the cultural content that we consume. It’s also impossible to disentangle the administration’s attacks on Ivy League institutions from its strategy of projecting an anti-elite narrative, which resonates with Americans who resent wealthy, out-of-touch ivory tower intellectuals while they are punching a clock or working gig jobs (or both) to make ends meet.

In Minnesota, political action tapped into and amplified a different set of cultural values and narratives. The viral moments from Minnesota we all saw—the videos of the murders of Reneé Good and Alex Pretti, little Liam in his blue bunny hat and Spiderman backpack, and the 75,000-person march in subzero temperatures—shook the country’s conscience about the Trump administration’s policies and its disregard for fellow Americans and immigrant families and children. When these images and videos rocketed around social media feeds, they carried an unmistakable and ominous story: any one of us could be next. But the images also broadcast the extraordinary solidarity and courage of the people in Minnesota. Ordinary day-to-day life in Minnesota was reorganized around solidarity and “being a neighbor” to someone in desperate need. People who in December couldn’t envision taking risks were following ICE vehicles as “constitutional observers.” Others stepped in to drive children to school not just on one day of the week, but every day. The political actions of tens of thousands of ordinary people in Minnesota had deep cultural resonance because they reflected values we hold dear and aspire to: bravery in defense of innocent people, courage when needed to confront injustice, and looking out for our neighbors and those less fortunate.

These American values provided the cultural currency that grabbed and focused our attention in a way few other moments have done or sustained.

3. Corporate elites are cowed or accomplices. Or, more likely, both. Experts on authoritarianism say that rolling back autocracy requires that pro-democracy forces drive wedges between the regime and elite actors and institutions. The scale of civil resistance in Minnesota was astounding. By some estimates, a full quarter of the state’s population participated in the general strike at the end of January—making it the largest mass economic action in the United States in several decades. And yet, while organizers directed power and pressure on major Minnesota corporations, demanding that Target, 3M, and US Bank cease cooperating with and speak out against the administration’s immigration enforcement policies, these corporations refused to make a clean break with the administration. For all intents and purposes, they remained silent.

Their refusal to budge despite the scale and scope of civil resistance underscores a key challenge we face. The fear the titans of business have toward Trump and MAGA is tremendous and difficult to overcome—or perhaps they benefit from the status quo too greatly to listen to their employees or their consciences. And yet we must somehow induce or force corporate leaders and elites to let go of their cowardice and capitulation—or their avarice—and take a stand with the people and for American democracy.

Corporate inaction in the face of the authoritarian blitzkrieg in Minnesota surfaces a deeper vulnerability hard-wired into our political system: the all-but unfettered ability of corporations and billionaires to deploy their vast wealth and resources to buy influence with our elected officials. Trump has gone further than any politician in recent memory to manipulate our system to both enrich himself and forge a corrupt and compliant corporate class. The range of legal and extralegal vehicles Trump and MAGA have set up to amass millions in tribute is astounding. There are the “normal” ways for the wealthy and corporations to offer contributions, such as through Trump’s inauguration fund, presidential library, independent expenditure committees, and so forth. And then there are extraordinary vehicles like investments in Trump’s crypto currency and Truth Social, donations to the East Wing demolition and renovation, and opportunities to finance his development projects all over the world. And Trump’s operation knows how to keep score. In our system, corporations and billionaires can buy off politicians; and Trump has laid bare the corollary principle that an autocratic politician can shake down corporations and billionaires.

Let me preface this next point by acknowledging that I’m an optimist. In the near future, when we reach the stage in this country where we are reimagining the structures and rules of our democracy, it’s clearer to me than ever that we need a serious national conversation about breaking the economic and political power of corporate elites. Despite flag-waving ads or gauzy statements on the Fourth of July, we should never forget that the American corporations and their CEOs that so dominate our economy and politics aren’t intrinsically for democracy—they are for their own bottom line. They have accrued a massive share of our national income and wealth and removed nearly all constraints on their ability to deploy their outsized resources to influence our political process. They seem to have little compunction about getting into bed with a dictator when it serves their financial interests. And it will be hard to get them out of that bed even when the times call for it. Even when their home cities are invaded. But reining in their influence is essential, perhaps existential, and we must think big and with urgency about the strategies, and build the power, to do so.

What’s encouraging to me is that organizers all over the country are both inspired by and learning from Minnesota’s success—both as a call to deepen their organizing practices now and as a guide for what to do if ICE shows up in their communities or at polling places. There are vastly more strategists, organizers, funders, and others who are awake now to the authoritarian threats and the responsibility to meet it than before January. Vastly more. Minnesotans threw ICE out, largely, at great cost personally, financially, and emotionally but they have hardened the resolve of patriotic, pro-democracy Americans in every corner of the country.

However, if we want to pull out of the doom-loop cycle of electoral victories and defeats and achieve durable, pro-democracy governing power, it is crucial that we have a proper diagnosis of the challenge we are facing. At the root of our crisis is a growing belief that democracy isn’t working and that collective participation and government cannot deliver for ordinary Americans. A sense of disconnection, isolation, anger, and lack of power has caused many people to disengage from politics. Others are throwing in with a strongman who scapegoats the vulnerable and tramples on democratic norms and institutions.

How do we solve this crisis of democracy? It is, fundamentally, a crisis of belonging, agency, and power. To resolve it, people must believe that civic life can work, that engaging in politics and the democratic process can improve their lives and communities. Simply mobilizing people for elections is inadequate to the task: we need to create experiences of power and agency, where people unite in successful efforts to get government to deliver tangible benefits for their communities.

Activating the Politically Disengaged: Pennsylvania United and the 2024 Elections

The work of building civic power and agency is core to the mission of my organization, Pennsylvania United (or PA United). PA United was founded in 2017 as a multiracial, multigenerational power organization uniting working-class people across urban and rural areas in Western and Central Pennsylvania.

PA United runs large-scale voter contact programs and helps elect candidates who stand for our priorities, with a particular focus on running our own members for office. Our goal goes beyond winning elections or voting Democrats into office. From years of organizing poor and working-class people across Western Pennsylvania, we see the ways in which the national Democratic Party often does not provide a vision that engages and inspires them. For the millions of working people who are disillusioned and disconnected from politics, building their faith in the democratic process starts with local organizing and collective action that can deliver material wins on the issues that matter most to them: ensuring access to quality, affordable housing; reducing youth violence and promoting community safety; curbing pollution; and more. Rebuilding a pro-democracy coalition that can confront authoritarianism and win elections requires us to instill in poor and working people a sense of their own collective power and agency. If we’re ever going to change the rules of the game so democracy works for everyone and make government more responsive to our needs, it will take a major upswell of people-power to demand it.

A key part of this work is electing candidates who come out of these very same communities and who are deeply committed to an inclusive, multiracial, populist agenda that serves the interests of working-class people. They are the kinds of candidates and elected officials who can restore working people’s belief in the democratic process and cut the legs out from under authoritarianism. And when more candidates like them run under the Democratic Party banner, the party can begin to redeem a brand that has lost credibility among a broad swath of its historic, working-class base.

In 2024, PA United and more than two dozen other state-based power organizations in 10 states participated in an expansive research project sponsored by the Pro-Democracy Campaign, the Organizing Lab at the State Power Fund, and DPI Action Fund. The research has given us important insights into the reach and impact of our electoral and organizing programs.

Our voter engagement programs, which included door-to-door canvassing and one of the largest community-driven phone banking operations in the country, reached 442,000 people in 2024. An analysis that the Democratic Data Exchange (DDx) undertook as part of the research project revealed that we contacted nearly 130,000 voters that no other Democratic campaign or progressive, independent GOTV operation reached—including well-funded campaigns like the Harris-Walz campaign. And our contact rate–the percentage of people we successfully reached by phone or door knocking—was 22%, more than four times the average contact rate of Democratic and progressive GOTV operations according to the DDx analysis.

How were we able to reach so many people whom no one else could? What lessons does our work hold for engaging people who are disillusioned with politics or drifting towards authoritarianism?

On one level, the success of our programs rests on its solid tactical and design features—the quality of our lists, scripts, and volunteer and staff training. At a more foundational level, our ability to reach people that other campaigns and voter contact programs haven’t been able to is due to our deeper engagement in our communities, our understanding of community members’ most pressing concerns and interests, and our work to connect voting to local issue campaigns that deliver real and tangible benefits.

Building Community and Belonging in Aliquippa

For example, our Beaver County chapter organizers have been working to build community, a sense of belonging, and power among residents of Aliquippa, a city of approximately 9,000 people in the greater Pittsburgh metropolitan area. Aliquippa is an economically distressed former steel town—a site of one of the original Western Pennsylvania steel mills—and also a football powerhouse that has produced NFL Hall-of-Famers Mike Ditka, Tony Dorsett, Ty Law, and Derrell Revis. Police brutality is endemic; in September, an ATF agent shot and killed 18-year-old Kendric Curtis.

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris both made campaign stops in Aliquippa in 2024. However, despite this short burst of attention, many Black members of the community remained skeptical about their candidacies. Katrina Gamble, Terrance Woodbury, and Roshni Nedungadi, researchers who have studied the Black electorate closely, use the term “rightfully cynical” to describe a segment of Black voters who are distrustful of politics because they have experienced the consequences of long-term institutional failures in their communities—struggling schools, poverty and lack of economic opportunity, and gun violence—and the failures of government to adequately address these problems. A candidate making a one-time appearance during election season is not going to overcome this skepticism about the political process. Nor is a four-week GOTV blitz.

Heaven Lee is our lead organizer in Aliquippa, working alongside our year-round canvass team there that is made up of four people who are all under the age of 25. They all grew up in Aliquippa, and have been working in and with the community every day for the last six years. They’ve knocked on the door of every house in town perhaps a dozen times, connecting people to resources, organizing around issues, and urging people to vote. But more importantly, they have worked diligently and lovingly to build a sense of community cohesion and belonging: hosting trunk or treats for neighborhood kids and organizing vigils and Friendsgiving dinners for people who’ve lost loved ones to gun violence, as well as countless community events over the years that have provided culturally relevant on-ramps to bring people into organizing and that have built deep trust with people. Now, when tragedy strikes, community members turn to Heaven and Beaver County United to both find a space for grief and healing and a space to take meaningful action together.

This hard-earned trust is what it takes to overcome the well-earned cynicism people in Aliquippa feel about politics. It is the kind of deep commitment and engagement we need to nurture the faith and participation of people who have been let down by our political system.

Organizing Mobile Home Residents in Meadville

Some 90 miles north of Aliquippa lies the town of Meadville. While Aliquippa is 37% Black, Meadville’s 13,000 residents are overwhelmingly white. In 2021, our Crawford County chapter helped elect Mayor Jaime Kinder, the first ever Black person and the first woman mayor of the city, and elected our own members into a majority on the Meadville City Council. In the elections last month, PA United helped Mayor Kinder win re-election and won two city council elections, giving our members a 5-0 governing majority on the council. With real co-governing power in the city, the Crawford County chapter has developed a broad vision of housing affordability that is directly meeting the needs of poor and working class people: creating a rental inspection program that has fixed up dozens of properties in town, passing an anti-retaliation ordinance that protects tenants who are advocating for their rights, organizing people into tenants unions, taking over the local Housing Authority board, and partnering with a housing cooperative to build new tenant-owned affordable housing.

Over the last year, PA United leaders and organizers have organized residents of two mobile home parks on the outskirts of Meadville. A New York-based company bought the parks and in short order jacked up the rents. Our Crawford County chapter organized the residents of the mobile home parks into a tenant union and helped them win repayment of rents that the company had charged illegally, a new lease with enhanced tenant protections, and recognition of the tenant union.

The residents of the mobile home parks hold a broad spread of political opinions and include many Republicans and people who voted twice for Donald Trump. As we’ve brought them into campaigns to improve conditions and address rent gouging in their communities, our organizers and chapter leaders are challenging them to relate strategically to elected officials of both parties based on their shared interests. At the local level, our members on Meadville City Council and Mayor Jaime Kinder—who are Democrats—have been strong champions for the residents’ campaign. In contrast, not one of their local, Republican state legislators has weighed in to support the residents in their efforts to secure a tenant union contract.

When I was knocking doors in Meadville last month to do voter turnout the weekend before the election, I had a Republican white man in his 40’s say to me, “Oh I know Mayor Jaime, she’s with the renters. So I’m with her.” The combination of a clear housing agenda that is delivering for people and direct support for tenant organizing has created a strong brand for our member-elected officials that crosses party lines and moves us closer to a powerful and durable pro-democracy voting coalition.

The Lessons of Aliquippa and Meadville

These two communities shine a light on why PA United was able to connect with so many voters that well-funded Democratic and progressive GOTV campaigns neglected or failed to reach in 2024. Most Democratic political campaigns steer clear of communities like the mobile home parks in Meadville because their data shows they are likely Trump voters—never mind that they are working-class people with economic concerns that align with poor and working class voters in urban areas. And for far too long, Democrats have taken places like Aliquippa for granted, assuming that Black voters, with no better options, will respond to short-lived, election-year campaign appeals.

In contrast, our chapters have invested deeply in the people of these communities, creating a sense of belonging and working with them on long-term strategies to build co-governing power and mobilize the resources of government to solve the problems that are vexing their families and neighbors. As important as the material benefits that can come from successful organizing, our members are finding purpose in coming together with others to make a difference in their communities. After our election victories earlier this month, one leader told me the experience of working on the election was like finding their church in PA United.

If we’ve learned the right lessons from 2024, we know that neglecting places like Meadville and Aliquippa is both a losing electoral strategy and bad for democracy. Without constructive pathways to political engagement that give people a sense of agency and produce concrete results for their families and communities, more and more working-class people of all races will disengage from politics or worse, move toward the politics of authoritarianism.

On the other hand, when we provide a vision for a bold, inclusive, populist agenda; create spaces for belonging, collective action, and local wins that deliver tangible materials benefits to people; and elect people who champion working-class issues and co-govern with us, we can build faith in the democratic process among people in places like Aliquippa and Meadville. We can unite poor and working-class people, including those who in their cynicism have turned towards a strongman, and build a pro-democracy coalition that can change the direction of our country.

Alex Wallach Hanson is the Executive Director of Pennsylvania United, and its 501c3 affiliate, Pittsburgh United. Pennsylvania United is a grassroots group that supports working-class families in Western Pennsylvania through chapters led by its members.

Elections matter. We are the executive directors of two state-based power-building organizations: Our Voice, Our Vote Arizona (OVOV), which builds multiracial working-class power and serves as the political home for the Black community in Arizona, and Asian Pacific Islander Political Alliance (API PA), Pennsylvania’s first and only statewide pan-Asian civic engagement, political, and advocacy organization. We have each helped to build voter turnout programs that are among largest and most effective independent electoral operations in the country. In 2024, across our two states, we contacted 272,000 voters, including 59,000 people no other progressive or Democratic GOTV program reached. We saw increases in turnout among our core constituencies compared to 2020: Asian American turnout increased in Pennsylvania by 20,000 votes, and Black voter turnout in Arizona increased from 69% to 71%, despite flagging turnout among communities of color across much of the rest of the country. And during this year’s elections, API PA helped secure victories in Pennsylvania’s crucial Supreme Court retention elections that will uphold a Democratic majority for the next ten years, as well as county and school board races in Bucks County, home of the swing 1st Congressional District. OVOV played a pivotal role in Adelita Grijalva’s special election victory in Arizona’s 7th congressional district.

We know how vital it is to build effective voter mobilization programs that can help us get to 50 plus one. But we also know the limits of focusing only on elections. Each of our organizations has helped candidates win who later acted against the interests of our communities, because we hadn’t yet built the power to hold them accountable after the election: legislators who supported anti-immigrant laws, voted against fully funding our schools, favored the interests of billionaires over working-class immigrant neighborhoods, and more.

Our power cannot rest solely with the politicians we help elect to office. We also need to build power to fight for ourselves and to co-govern.

Building governing influence

So how do we build people’s power to not just tip the scales on an electoral outcome, but to shape governance in ways that make their lives better?

The key is building teams of grassroots leaders who are committed to engaging others in collective action to hold their elected leaders accountable and to push for policy reforms that benefit their communities. If the metrics we value in electoral programs are contact rates and turnout, the metrics that matter for governing influence are the number of leaders we are recruiting and developing who sustain their involvement in our organizations, bring others in with them, and have an impact in the governing arena.

Our two organizations participated in a large-scale research initiative in 2024 sponsored by the Pro-Democracy Campaign, the Organizing Lab at the State Power Fund, and DPI Action Fund. The project collected an unprecedented trove of organizing data to analyze the reach and impact of state-based power organizations’ organizing and electoral programs. Among the many research findings, an observational analysis showed that organizations that have developed a base of 200 or more highly committed leaders (people with sustained participation in organizational activities) were able to achieve significant state-level policy wins. Those with at least 80 leaders had policy successes at the county and municipal level, while those with fewer than 50 leaders struggled to wield meaningful governing influence.

As executive directors of power-building organizations, these findings were eye-opening. The analysis puts concrete numbers to the scale of leadership organizations need to drive policy changes for their communities. We don’t necessarily need thousands of leaders—we can gain influence with a few hundred highly committed leaders. Finding, recruiting, and developing those leaders takes deliberate effort, focus, commitment, and diligence.

NIA: Building base with purpose in Arizona

OVOV has always focused on electoral mobilization and organizing and leadership development, both of which are integral to its goal of building governing power in Arizona. However, over the last two years, OVOV has made a strategic shift to center and deepen its organizing work, undertaking the consistent, intentional work of building its base through listening sessions, house meetings, door-to-door conversations, and one-to-one meetings.

OVOV’s base is anchored in “NIA Circles.” NIA stands for Network of Impact Architects; “nia” also means “purpose” in Swahili. These grassroots leadership teams, which OVOV has organized strategically at the neighborhood level in targeted base and competitive legislative districts in Arizona, engage in a process of deep listening to discern common issues and concerns, research to identify solutions and the decision makers who can implement them, and collective action to seek solutions and accountability from those decision makers.

For example, in Tucson and Phoenix, NIA Circles are working to get city council members to adopt tenant’s bills of rights. Another leadership team is driving OVOV’s Clean Energy, Clear Lungs campaign, which is pushing to remove a state ban on gathering data on greenhouse gas pollution in Arizona, and ultimately to win anti-pollution measures that will reduce skyrocketing asthma rates in Black communities.

OVOV’s leadership development efforts are not only focused on holding elected officials accountable through collective action; they are also aimed at building a pipeline of candidates to run for and win office who share OVOV’s vision and priorities, and who will co-govern with the organization. This year, OVOV launched a new political education and candidate training program for Black leaders who are seeking elected office, called We Got Next. The first cohort of 10 candidates is six weeks into the inaugural program, and a second cohort of candidates will begin the program in January.

Cultivating Asian American leadership and agency in Pennsylvania

Like OVOV, API PA is undertaking a deliberate effort to deepen its membership and organizing program. This work has required reorienting the staff to focus on organizing rather than activism, training them to discern and unite people around their self-interests and to make hard asks to bring people in and build power, and holding staff accountable to the number of leaders they are recruiting and developing—not just the number of doors they’ve knocked or people they’ve mobilized.

API PA currently has three leadership teams working on local campaigns in Philadelphia, Bucks County, and Central Pennsylvania. These grassroots, volunteer leaders are lobbying state legislators to support bills promoting public awareness of the 988 mental health emergency hotline, distributing know-your-rights information to protect Asian American immigrant communities from ICE raids, and organizing neighborhood committees to save Philadelphia’s Chinatown from the threat of urban redevelopment projects.

The issue campaign work is dynamic and requires sustained commitment on the part of volunteers. Investing in their leadership and agency is essential to success. After a year of curriculum development, API PA is poised to launch a new leadership and political education program which will train grassroots leaders in core organizing and power analysis skills. Beyond skills training, the program aims to cultivate the political agency of Asian American leaders, who often experience erasure and invisibility in the US. The curriculum includes a history of Asian and Asian American social movements. By seeing how their communities have been at the center of social change in the past, Asian American leaders can begin to imagine themselves as drivers of change in the present and future.

Our democracy depends on organizing

Recruiting and training leaders and building strong teams capable of coordinated, strategic, collective action are year-round capacities that are critical for our organizations to wield governing influence. These capacities are also distinct from those necessary for large-scale voter turnout programs. They require focused and sustained investment and attention.

We also know the challenges in front of our communities and states are big, and that no single organization has the power on its own to address them. That’s why a core part of our organizational strategies are to partner and align with like-minded organizations that are building grassroots power in our states on coordinated plans and campaigns.

For us, building organizing capacity is essential, because our end goal is not only to elect people to office, but to help our constituencies and communities solve their shared problems and improve their quality of life. When we are successful in doing so, people develop a greater belief in their power and agency and are also more likely to vote. This virtuous circle between organizing and electoral mobilization is one reason organizations like ours have a unique ability to activate voters who are disconnected and disillusioned.

Nurturing the organizing programs and practices that enable people to make government work for their communities should also matter to all those who care about democracy. Donald Trump and the MAGA movement have gained power by exploiting people’s disillusionment about the failures of institutions to deliver on people’s needs. We have a broken health care system, struggling schools, and a housing affordability crisis. Many of our communities are facing epidemics of gun violence and brutality at the hands of police and ICE. People are buffeted by the increasing cost of living and jobs that fail to pay a living wage.

Until people build collective power to address these failures and problems, the forces of autocracy will gather strength as they continue to feed off people’s distrust and cynicism. But strong organizing can cultivate the agency and power people need to make democracy work.

Sena Mohammed is the Executive Director of Our Voice, Our Vote Arizona (OVOV), which builds multiracial working-class power and serves as the political home for the Black community in Arizona.

Mohan Seshadri is the Executive Director of Asian Pacific Islander Political Alliance (API PA), the first and only statewide organization directly advocating for the needs of all Asian Americans in Pennsylvania.

Download our new Civic Power report here

Ten days ago more than 90,000 people attended the memorial service for conservative activist and Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk. While many in the press pointed to the vastly different messages from Erika Kirk and President Donald Trump, my mind was on the people who filled the stadium from top to bottom. Yes, they were there to mourn someone few of them had met in real life; but they were also attending a political organizing event at which people came together to make meaning of his life and assassination. Speakers fused together a narrow view of America centered in Christian faith and driven rapidly forward by MAGA-inspired retribution.

Turning Point USA has built real power through their ability to help young people find belonging and collective agency at a time that is marked by an epidemic of loneliness. I am reminded of what one of their senior staff told the New York Times last December about their electoral activity: “We weren’t focused on door knocks and door-hangers hung and things like that. Those are kind of filler stats. We were more focused on relationships built. So when you’re focused on relationships built, you actually know who that person is, something about them, what makes them tick, what moves them.”

When an organization measures and prioritizes “relationships built” instead of “filler stats,” it makes different choices. It invests in people and roots its work in curiosity about other human beings and what helps them feel connected to one another. It focuses on what people can win together to improve their common lot while experiencing a sense of collective agency and power. It certainly doesn’t only talk to some community members about doing only one thing—voting—and then not show up again for two or four years.

I, for one, am really curious about when and why Turning Point made this important choice. I don’t know the answer.

What I do know is that state- and locally-based grassroots organizations on the left all over the country have made or are making similar choices to ground their work in building relationships and cultivating people’s belonging, agency, and power, rather than simply aim for mass mobilization outputs. To help shed light on what that means for both electoral and organizing programs, the Pro-Democracy Campaign (with the Organizing Lab at the State Power Fund and the DPI Action Fund) is issuing Civic Power: The Role and Impact of Independent Power Organizations in Expanding the Electorate and Building Governing Influence. It was co-authored by Joy Cushman, director of the research program at the State Power Action Fund, and Elizabeth McKenna, a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School and the director of its Civic Power Lab. The report analyzes 2024 electoral and organizing data from 26 paired 501(c)(3) and 501(c)(4) multi-entity “independent political organizations” (IPOs) across the country and shares recommendations for the importance of their work ahead.

These 26 IPOs achieved significant scale in their electoral work in 2024. They made more than 5 million successful contacts of voters, or one out of every eight made by all Democratic candidates and progressive organizations. The vast majority of these contacts were made on the phones or at the doors. The IPOs covered by this report made 1.3 million unique contacts that no one else reached. These voters were more likely to be people of color younger, and have infrequent voting records. Over 820,000 of these uniquely contacted voters cast a ballot.

They also are organizing in their communities to improve people’s lives. While campaigning on education, housing, flood relief, and more, these IPOs prioritize relationship development and team-building—activities we believe, and this research suggests, help to explain why they were so successful in reaching hard-to-find and hard-to-motivate voters. Over the course of 2024, organizers and leaders at these IPOs recruited 86,000 people to participate in organizing events like team meetings, house parties, community gatherings, and sessions with elected officials.

The research findings corroborate what community organizers and directors of grassroots organizations have long believed to be true: that connecting with people personally, listening to their concerns, and engaging them in local efforts where they find a sense of agency, belonging, and power, are the keys to activating the millions of Americans who are disengaged from and disillusioned with politics and voting. The evidence in Civic Power makes the case for an expansion of funding into mobilization work built by organizing groups, and organizing work done by organizations that mobilize voters. It’s a virtuous cycle that leads to more power.

John R. Taylor III, founding co-chair of the Black Male Initiative Fund, describes their thinking like this: “Getting you to vote is just getting you into the amusement park. It doesn’t get you on any of the rides. From there, we talk about the legislation, the policy... all [the] work that we do to inform and enhance and change the laws to benefit our community.”

This remark underscores that voting and elections aren’t the only thing that define a democracy. That’s why even high rates of voter participation don’t equal, on their own, a vibrant democracy. What’s needed is an engaged citizenry, one that strives towards self-governing. That takes a sense of our collective power and agency.

Cushman and McKenna also explored how IPOs are building leader-led organizations through internal structures that assist an organization in building power. Across the 13 groups whose organizing data was robust enough to discern findings, those IPOs that maintained a strong practice of leader-run team meetings and who recruited and retained more than 200 “super” leaders (those who participated in at least five organizing events), were prepared to run impactful campaigns in their states with a serious chance to win. Notably, 68% of people taking part in organizing events participated only once. There is a large, untapped reservoir of potential leaders that organizations are mobilizing that they could be absorbing into their leadership to build more influence and power. How effectively they do that is one of the biggest questions facing funders and organizers alike. How scaled it must be to reverse the consolidation of authoritarianism provides us with the urgency to figure this out.

You may have heard about Harvard University’s Erica Chenoweth’s research on authoritarianism posits that protest movements can topple a dictator when they achieve the sustained participation of 3.5 percent of the population. Chenoweth’s calculation might work in America. We don’t know because we’re not there yet. At the historically massive “No Kings” actions in June (the Crowd Consortium called it the largest mobilization in American history), pro-democracy forces reached half the 3.5 percent figure, or 6 million of the “needed” 12 million Americans. But there’s no evidence that it would qualify as sustained at this moment in time.

Measuring progress towards that one number in isolation—let’s say 12 million people in the streets—as an audacious goal obscures the actual day-to-day work that can help nurture the growth to get there and sustain it. While 12 million is not quite a “filler stat,” we ought to be as or more interested in the number of trained leaders who are building local teams. We will need thousands of these building blocks to scaffold a movement and keep it going. Another way to think about it is if the people who are being asked to attend a protest or vote have little to do between mass actions and election day, any momentum could peter out. Joining mass actions and casting ballots are essential—show up please!—but they can’t be all we do. Otherwise we’re only building houses of cards with flimsy structures that collapse, or sandcastles that wash away with the next tide.

The point I’m making—and one that the authors of Civic Power and a growing chorus of people are making—is this: Participation on its own, however widespread, is not power. Discovering a sense of belonging (so that volunteers keep coming back) and agency (so they feel like what they do matters), and doing so at scale...that can add up to wielding power.

We started with Charlie Kirk, but let’s end with Jason Dunkin. Jason is a volunteer leader with Down Home North Carolina, based in the town of Oxford in Granville County. My colleagues profiled his story last month. After attending a Down Home leadership training, he was inspired to organize a local campaign in Oxford to win county funding to restore a local playground and basketball court that had fallen into disrepair. The success of this local campaign gave Jason and his team a sense of their own power, and they were inspired to do more. Long story short (click here for the details), that victory led them to get involved in electoral work. They helped elect the first-ever Black Sheriff in Granville County, flipped a North Carolina House seat by 228 votes, and helped cure ballots for Allison Riggs, who narrowly won her North Carolina Supreme Court seat by 734 votes.

Jason’s story, one of many, shows how local leaders and teams, when trained and supported, can contribute significantly to reshaping the larger political landscape.

How could the politics of North Carolina be transformed if our focus was finding and developing a thousand Jason Dunkins? Could we reshape American democracy if we reoriented our priorities towards developing 50,000 or 100,000 leaders across the country, embedded in or connected to organizations, who offer community members constructive pathways to improve their lives and to make government work for them, their families, and their neighbors?

I bet dimes to donuts that many of those 50,000 or 100,000 people we need are already active in some way in their communities. How we help them find their collective agency and power—beyond and between the one-off mobilizations and elections—is what is needed to reimagine and create an America that is kind, just, and free.

As the executive directors of two state-based power-building organizations – Faith in Minnesota, a faith-based statewide organizing group, and Down Home North Carolina, a multi-racial organizing group in rural counties – we see firsthand how strong, sustained organizing work rooted in local leaders and their interests can fuel powerful electoral programs, lead to wins that have statewide significance, and make democracy work for people after election day.

From the Basketball Court to the Supreme Court in North Carolina

In the town of Oxford in Granville County, North Carolina, Jason Dunkin, a grassroots leader with Down Home, wanted to revive a neighborhood park and basketball court. The town had cut funding for the park in the 1990s, a time when Oxford was struggling with high unemployment and a drug crisis, citing budget shortfalls and claiming the park was overrun with criminal activity.

It is worth a brief foray into the town’s past. In 1970, white residents of Oxford murdered a 23-year-old Black veteran named Henry Marrow. They were later acquitted by an all-white jury. The Black community mobilized, holding a series of marches and protests and coordinating a boycott of white-owned businesses. This organizing bore fruit, including progress in desegregating downtown businesses and Oxford’s public schools and expanded job opportunities for Black residents who had for years been shut out of hiring. The town’s history, with its deep scars of racism and proud legacy of powerful organizing, is an important backdrop to Jason and Down Home’s organizing in Oxford.

Down Home organizers met Jason for the first time during a series of listening sessions they held in Oxford in 2022. He and other residents raised concerns about the lack of public spaces and activities for young people in their community. Following the listening sessions, Jason and other emerging grassroots leaders from Oxford attended a Down Home leadership training – or “boot camp” – during which they conceived a campaign to restore funding for and renovate the park. They mapped out power relationships in the county and mobilized residents to put pressure on county officials. During the campaign, they recruited older basketball players who used to play on the court – and some of whom had gone on to play college ball and professionally overseas – to speak at county commissioner meetings. For most, it was the first time in their lives they had attended such a meeting. One commissioner, Bryan Cohn, worked closely with Jason and his team to champion their cause.

Ultimately, Jason and his peers succeeded in getting the county to allocate unused federal COVID recovery funds to restore the park.

This victory energized Jason and other Down Home members and they plunged themselves into electoral work. In 2022, they helped elect Sheriff Robert Fountain, Jr., the first-ever Black sheriff in Granville County’s then 276-year history. And when Bryan Cohn – their champion from the Granville County Commission on the park campaign – decided to run for a North Carolina House seat in 2024, the team endorsed his candidacy, ran a phone bank, and contacted more than 4,700 people through door-to-door canvassing to get out the vote on his behalf. Cohn beat the Republican incumbent by 228 votes. His victory broke the Republican supermajority in the North Carolina state legislature, restoring the Democratic Governor’s power to veto a slew of harmful bills cooked up by the Republican-led state legislature.

Jason’s story illustrates how powerful local organizing and leadership development can cascade up to state-level impact. It was the campaign to restore their local park that brought Jason and his Oxford neighbors into a co-governing relationship with Bryan Cohn and motivated them to hit the streets to support his candidacy for the North Carolina House. Without a doubt, their efforts were decisive in pushing Cohn to his razor-thin victory.

And their impact went beyond breaking the Republican supermajority: Jason and his fellow leaders helped cure ballots in the election of North Carolina Supreme Court Justice Allison Riggs, who beat her Republican opponent by a scant 734 votes in last year’s election. When Riggs’s opponent initiated litigation to contest the validity of 65,000 votes in that election, Jason and his team were poised to mobilize a large-scale ballot curing campaign to ensure that every vote was counted.

Building Power in Manufactured Home Parks in Minnesota

In Minnesota, manufactured home parks have emerged as somewhat unlikely power centers in the state’s political landscape, thanks to deliberate and strategic organizing efforts. The parks are unique spaces. Some 180,000 Minnesotans live in manufactured home parks, and they are filled with racially diverse groups of working class people who are often apolitical or politically conflicted. At the same time, many of the parks are located in contested state legislative districts.

In recent years, private equity firms have bought up manufactured home parks in Minnesota. To drive up their profits, the firms have cut budgets for services and maintenance and hiked lot rents, often by hundreds of dollars per year. These rent increases are squeezing residents, many of whom live at the margins, are still paying mortgages for their homes on top of the rents, and – despite the moniker of “mobile” homes – are constrained from going elsewhere due to moving costs that top $10,000.

Faith in Minnesota has organized residents of manufactured home parks across Minnesota to fight for state legislation to cap exorbitant increases in their lot rents. During last year’s election, these leaders targeted a set of state legislators who have manufactured home parks in their districts, calling on them to champion legislation that would cap lot rent increases at 3% per year. One of those legislators, Democrat Matt Norris, became the lead author and sponsor of the bill. Because of his strong support for the legislation, Faith in Minnesota backed his re-election bid, contacting 1,139 manufactured home residents through door-to-door canvassing in his district and pushing him over the top in a race he won by just 410 votes. Norris’s victory in one of the Minnesota Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party’s most vulnerable seats was critical to enabling the party to keep a foothold on power in the Minnesota House, where they currently have a 50/50 split and a power sharing agreement with Republicans.

Two of the most important leaders of the campaign are Gwen, a middle-aged Black woman who retired from UPS and has since returned to the workforce as a Walmart security guard to make ends meet; and Tami, a white woman who retired from a career at an accounting firm. Gwen and Tami are comrades-in-arms in this campaign, who, despite their different backgrounds, both care deeply about the people in their community, believe private equity is screwing them over, and share a self interest in and commitment to fighting back against the economic predations they are experiencing.

The state legislature has advanced but has yet to enact the bill capping lot rents in manufactured home parks. Tami and Gwen and their peers understood that this would be a multi-year effort – that winning elections would be a critical part of a successful campaign strategy, but on its own insufficient to yield victory. They would need to build a strong base in manufactured home parks across the state and mobilize ongoing pressure on elected officials to back their interests. In short, they needed a powerful and sustained organizing effort – not just a one-time voter mobilization campaign.

Lessons

What can we learn from these examples? For starters, we know that if we go deep with our leaders, we can have a big impact.

When voting has a strategic connection to campaigns that aim to address concrete quality of life issues, people who are otherwise disengaged from politics and skeptical about the top of the ticket are more likely to participate. And when organizing groups like ours strategically engage candidates to secure their commitments to taking real steps to address these issues, and then back the candidates up with effective electoral mobilization, they can both tip the scales in a tight election and build real co-governing power to advance their policy goals.

The impacts of local campaigns like these can reverberate upward and outward in significant ways. A fight for a local basketball court and park can generate grassroots energy and power that leads to the breaking of a Republican supermajority and the election of a state supreme court justice. A fight over rent gouging at manufactured home parks can prevent a Republican takeover of the Minnesota House of Representatives and plant the seeds for a new policy that would materially improve 180,000 Minnesotans' lives.

And in less measurable but important and profound ways, these campaigns show people they have agency when they are part of an organized group, and that they can make government and democracy work for their communities. The Oxford basketball players who had never before set foot in a county commission meeting learned that their voices could make a difference in improving their community. The manufactured home park residents are learning that if they come together, they can fight deep-pocketed private equity firms and win. The experience of political agency that comes through winning local campaigns like these is critical to countering people’s sense of cynicism and hopelessness about politics and to realizing the promise of American democracy.

The campaigns we’ve described aren’t outliers. All across the country, there are organizations committed to rigorous organizing and grassroots leadership development that are achieving significant electoral impact, shifting the political dynamics in their states, and winning new policies that materially improve people’s lives. Funders who want to support successful election efforts and strengthen democracy should take notice.

Share

Dreama Caldwell is Co-Executive Director of Down Home North Carolina. Down Home North Carolina is building power with poor and working-class people in North Carolina’s small towns and rural communities.

Minister JaNaé Bates is the Co-Executive Director for Faith in Minnesota – a political home for people of faith who are acting boldly and prophetically to create a new, people-centered politics in Minnesota.

Subscribe now

Rules and structures matter. They shape outcomes. Just ask kids playing Monopoly. Or think about the way the dimensions of baseball parks alter how many home runs are hit.

So it is with American democracy. As imperfect as it’s always been, it’s the way self-government happens, how we decide who gets what and what our rights are. That’s why the rules governing democracy have always been contested. Indeed the long arc of American democracy can be described as a struggle between one side that has wanted to expand democracy and one side that wants to restrict it.

We’ve had incredible periods of democratic expansion—Reconstruction, the Suffrage movement, and the Civil Rights movement, to name a few. And there have also been stretches of time when the anti-democratic forces have won—Jim Crow, of course, and the period we’re living through right now. For two decades, we’ve seen a strategic focus by conservative forces to prevent the emergence of the multi-racial democracy imagined by the Civil Rights movement via aggressive, partisan gerrymandering; the Roberts Court’s decisions (Citizens United, Shelby, Dobbs, and giving Trump unprecedented power); and a wave of voter suppression laws.

What’s happening now is of another magnitude. The chaos and cruelty inflicted by Trump and the MAGA forces on our families, communities, and institutions isn’t simply an effort to restrict democracy to a narrower slice of Americans. It’s a strategy to flood the zone, instill fear, and seize the opportunity for corruption. Last week the Republicans passed a trillion dollar transfer of wealth to the richest Americans while 12 million poor people will lose health care and billions more in funding is diverted into capturing and deporting people without due process. This week’s example is the news that Texas Republicans will take up a proposal to further gerrymander the state’s congressional districts during the same special session when legislators will consider flood relief funding.

The Pro-Democracy Center and the Pro-Democracy Campaign may be known for the support and assistance we provide to grassroots organizations building power through organizing campaigns and the electoral impact they have when they mobilize their communities to vote. That’s one “side” of our house. The other “side” is a clear-eyed focus on the rules of democracy and how they shape, for better or worse, who can vote, who can run and serve in office, and who has power. In shorthand, we were founded to bring organized people to the fights on democracy.

Since we started in 2022, with a few exceptions, our partners’ and others’ pro-democracy work has been primarily focused on defending voting rights and making important but incremental improvements in voter access and the mechanics of elections. Fighting new voter suppression policies. Expanding early voting both by mail and in-person locations. Ensuring votes are counted. These have been rational responses to the attacks and threats in front of us. By and large, when it comes to democracy policies and practices, we have worked to prevent things from getting worse.

Here we are. Things are now worse. But not because we didn’t succeed at siting more dropboxes, expanded early voting to Sundays and evening hours, and winning voting rights lawsuits. In fact, we won a lot of these fights by hunkering down into the role as defenders of the status quo. In doing so, we defended a political system that, if we’re honest, hasn’t delivered enough for Americans of what they want—security, prosperity, and progress. Being on defense has stunted our ability to convey a clear critique of how the structures of our democracy have failed us, or to share a compelling vision of what a functioning, unrigged political system looks and acts like.

It’s time for us all to find a way to be on offense rooted in an assessment of both how our democracy is rigged and what will make it work for all. No number of dropboxes (we need them!) or language-accessible ballots (we want them!) will create a democracy that consistently delivers for our communities. Here are some thoughts that are animating our thinking:

Let’s start with the basics: America’s political system is deeply flawed. Our structures have long favored wealthy and powerful interests and obstructed the possibility for broad democratic representation and meaningful self-governance for ordinary Americans. A vision for a truly reflective American democracy cannot only be focused on rolling back authoritarianism by defending the status quo; it must include proactive structural reforms that provide a greater voice in government for ordinary citizens.

Our democracy is literally designed to allow a minority to seize power and prevent majority rule. The structures of American democracy have always been more about who has power than what a fair process may be. To take the point above one beat further, from the composition of the Senate and the powers reserved for it, to rules banning a wide variety of electoral systems (fusion and multi-member districts), to Supreme Court decisions providing the wealthy and corporate America more say, we have a set of institutions and structures that limit the power of ordinary people to self-govern. The hurdle to amend the Constitution is set so high that few try. These anti-democratic features of our political system, coupled with a deeply cynical and dissatisfied electorate, have created the conditions for today’s authoritarianism.

There’s no going back, so let’s think beyond the short term. We’ve said this before, and we’ll say it again: if there was ever a “both/and” moment, it’s now. Electoral victories like flipping the House and/or Senate in 2026 and winning the presidency in 2028 absolutely are critical. But these can’t be the only goalposts. MAGA and Trump have exposed our political system’s many Achilles’ heels, which have been exploited to allow for minority rule and therefore the emergence of authoritarianism. Even if we can achieve historic electoral wins in the next few cycles, the current rules of our political system will leave us vulnerable to another autocrat down the road. To borrow from Mother Goose: if we accept that it’s broken, why would we ever want to put Humpty Dumpty1 back together again? We must use whatever political, people, and narrative power we can amass to make significant changes to our political system, as soon as we can create an opening.

The way the democracy field has been trying to create that opening misses the elephant in the room: we need more power. For too long, center-left democracy reform work has been led by DC-based good government groups, election lawyers, and policy experts without a role for state leaders. Recent additions of billionaire-backed, one-size-fits-all policy campaigns don’t fix this problem either, and these efforts faced historic defeats in 2024. National experts’ work is essential, but they often lack connections to grassroots power bases and organized constituencies that have the muscle to advance a bold and visionary agenda. For their part, most grassroots power-building organizations haven’t yet assumed leadership in advancing bold democracy changes. They are more focused on issues that have immediate resonance in their communities—improving schools, ensuring access to housing and childcare, and creating economic opportunity. If we are to build the necessary power to win big changes, organizing in states all across the country must weave an indictment of our current system’s failures to deliver what people need together with a proactive vision for a new political system that will actually deliver.

That’s why we need to bring power-building groups—community-based organizations, large national groups operating with an organizing model, labor unions, etc.—to the forefront of democracy work. Their power is critical to our ability to win elections, as we argued here, and structural changes. More importantly, their leadership is necessary to ensure that the changes we fight for will truly make our governments more reflective and representative of the communities that have long been excluded from our system. That involves reconceptualizing pro-democracy work as itself a power-building strategy. There is only so much power an organized base can have in a system with a tilted playing field. The vision for a new political system should be constructed around the kinds of rules that will enhance the power of organized, ordinary people.

The states are, and will continue to be, laboratories of democracy. With state partners, we (and others) are getting to work to build the power necessary to align around big and bold ideas to drive forward. This work is bespoke. Every state has different challenges and opportunities, and state leaders are beginning to dig into ideas that can dramatically restructure the rules at home and inspire people in other states.

What is obviously left out is a long list of changes that might make up a new political system that is reflective, responsive, and accountable to all Americans. Some will propose proportional representation, eliminating the Electoral College, expanding the Supreme Court, or some new version of H.R. 1, the Congressional Democrats’ grab-bag of reforms. We don’t have all the answers but we are confident that deep popular education of the flaws of our federal political system coupled with state-by-state experimentation will help get us there. Indeed, state-specific solutions can help light the path, both due to their content and their inspiration that we can imagine—and win—big changes.

Over the next few years, we will need to arrive at a place where powerful, organized bases of people in every part of the country are making a clear, common demand for forging a democracy that better meets the lofty language in our founding documents. One that delivers for everyday people. This will not happen naturally—it will require going deep before we can dream big.

Our team has received lots of responses and reactions to the “Moving From Lists to Leaders” piece – we really appreciate it, and thank you to everyone who subscribed to and shared We Choose Us with your followers and networks. We know we’re not starting a debate, per se, we’re joining one, which is what prompted this response piece. We look forward to continuing the conversation with this community on and off Substack, and want to hear your thoughts.

First, the majority of responses I’ve received to our central premise (that we need to bring more organizing principles to the practice of mobilizing voters), have boiled down to “hell yeah!” or “amen.” This is exactly the kind of energy we need around this work! And yet, why is it that we still find ourselves having to make this point? It’s because we’ve built a whole industry to measure the impact of its work through cost-per-vote metrics rather than the expansion of power. If our sole goal is only voters casting ballots, that might make some sense, but it can’t be our sole goal. It leads to every tactic being measured by how efficiently we can do that one discrete thing, narrows the electorate, and wrings out any bit of curiosity about people and their lives.

Second, I heard from several people who said, “But we still need to win elections and we want GOTV to be part of it, right?” Yes, of course! It’s just that the highly transactional nature of how we do it doesn’t build power or create any collective agency in communities. We’ll be exploring, soon and in more detail, what this actually looks like in practice from the perspectives of state organizations.

Third, we received a number of suggestions of other viewpoints or things to read. I’d like to engage with one here. Micah Sifry’s The Connector contrasted our point of view with those of a Democratic data scientist named Charlotte Swasey, who wonders if any investment in “field” is worth it. She writes,

“We have poured money into ‘power-building’ organizations for at least 2 cycles now. Has civic infrastructure in battleground states recovered? Are those organizations even *around* anymore? Not that I have seen. I would love to be wrong- please, feel free to show me your civic engagement org that has existed for >4 years and has people voluntarily turning up to meetings in off years. But what I have observed is that this is mostly another way for us to light money on fire, just one that happens to make you feel a bit better about yourself.”

Well, that’s a provocative paragraph. I appreciate she would love to be wrong, because frankly, from my experience, she is. I can name dozens of state or local organizations that a) haven’t experienced buckets of money for their organizing work outside the mobilizing funding they get for elections, b) are very much around, c) have internal cultures of team meetings, community events, accountability sessions, etc. at which volunteers not only show up in “off years,” they actually lead, and d) steward resources well because they never know when the next foundation grant or annual major gift won’t be renewed.

If you’re interested in digging in more, here are some pieces or sites I would encourage folks to spend some time with: Alliance for Youth Action’s Dakota Hall’s piece distinguishing between organizing and mobilizing, George Goel’s Fundamentals of Organizing Substack, DNC Chair Ken Martin’s organizing principles memo, and Catalyst’s What Happened report.

Leave a comment

After the College of Cardinals elected Robert Prevost as the next pope, people searched for clues about his personal politics. They found a handful of shared social media posts that lifted up concerns about Trump’s policies, including on immigration. In short order, other reports shared his voting record, which shows he cast his first vote since 2018 by absentee ballot in 2024, and voted in Republican primaries in 2012, 2014, and 2016.

Let’s imagine Pope Leo XIV was living in the United States in October 2024. Virtually every Democratic campaign or progressive organization looking at this voting history would have concluded that the new Pope was an infrequent and solidly Republican voter—precisely the type of voter Democrats avoid. If canvassers had visited Pope Leo’s street, they would have knocked on his neighbors’ doors with “better” voting records, skipping the door behind which resided the person who is now the leader of 1.4 billion Catholics worldwide.

This thought experiment above exposes a central failing of center-left grassroots political engagement. How did we get to where the lifeblood of a democratic society—the belief that if we come together we can change our communities, states, and country—is so utterly divorced from how we “practice” democracy? More importantly, with authoritarianism consolidating before our eyes, can we afford not to change these practices immediately?

Since the mid-2000s, Democrats and allied organizations, encouraged by political donors, have developed a top-down approach to voter mobilization that relies heavily on two things: 1) narrow, data-driven targeting based almost entirely on voting history, and 2) the use of randomized control trials to determine voter engagement tactics and get-out-the-vote messaging. When the findings are significant, campaigns apply the method in the next congressional or presidential election in contacting those voters who are relatively likely to vote. In the abstract, this makes sense.

In reality, these practices contribute to an impersonal marketing approach that builds no sense of community, replaces authentic two-way conversations with tightly scripted, check-a-box interactions, and assails people with a blitzkrieg of annoying text messages. It is an approach that values the cost-efficiency of a "tactic" above all else, rather than focusing on any substantive impact. And it constrains volunteers and paid staff—our most important human assets—to scripted, time-limited conversations with only those voters who will likely vote and will predictably vote for Democrats, rather than giving them the freedom to have real conversations with persuadable or would-be voters. In this paradigm, only some voters are worthy of attention, while tens of millions potential voters are not. We end up prioritizing transactional, one-off contacts, not relationships and networks.

A healthy democracy depends on an active and agentic citizenry with the ability to influence governing institutions so that they deliver for the people. If we feel we don’t have a say in what the government does, we lose trust in democracy. That’s fertile breeding ground for the authoritarian politics of the strongman. Arguably it’s one of the biggest reasons why we’re at this moment. We need to start to reckon with how we’ve done politics has, in some ways, contributed to where we are.

There is a better way. Academic literature tells us that building deeper bonds within communities, and better bridges between them, are essential components to strengthen society’s ability to respond to crises and to withstand authoritarianism. Rather than simply creating lists of likely voters who are believed to be Democratic and handing them to canvassers, we must reimagine the way we engage voters and how we cultivate their democratic agency: their ability to make government work for them, their families, and their communities.

That’s what community organizing does. Nonprofits whose mission includes organizing help ordinary people come together and act collectively to address the issues that are impacting their communities: housing, childcare, good jobs, public schools, and much more. Organizing helps people build the skills, leadership, and collective power they need to influence decision makers in government and other institutions and solve public problems. It is based on an understanding that community power is built through leaders and networks, and that local institutions like houses of worship, community centers, unions and worker centers, and neighborhood associations are the foundation of a vibrant democracy. Organizing shows people that they can fight city hall, and win. And it’s not quaint or always local. Organizing campaigns are scalable and can generate local, regional, or statewide power to alter government decisions.

That’s where we are: to forge a new chapter in our democracy, we need a long-overdue scaled investment in community organizing around the country. Some foundations are already meeting this moment by doubling down on their commitments to support year-round organizing. For their part, many Democratic donors believe that the best strategy to slow Trump is to win the 2026 midterms. But organizing and voter mobilization strategies need not be mutually exclusive. We believe get-out-the-vote practices must evolve to incorporate the principles of community organizing. If there is ever a both/and moment, it’s now.

We know another politics is possible. Forthcoming research from our partners at Harvard University and the Democracy and Power Innovation Fund is exploring the impact of community organizing in eight states in 2024. Initial findings of our joint research project point to the unique ability of state-based community organizations to reach voters no one else contacted. In fact, two dozen of them engaged more than a million voters in battleground states that the Harris campaign didn’t reach. Plus, the stronger the organizing practices are within organizations—one-to-one meetings, team sessions of 10 to 15 leaders, and community events—the better they can scale their voter turnout efforts. Community and connectedness matter. More on this soon.

The far-right gets it. An official at the MAGA-aligned Turning Point USA told The New York Times in December, “We weren’t focused on door knocks and door-hangers hung and things like that. Those are kind of filler stats. We were more focused on relationships built. So when you’re focused on relationships built, you actually know who that person is, something about them, what makes them tick, what moves them.”

While we recognize that we should not throw out all we’ve learned and that we should not discount the importance of stewarding resources to win elections, we must also acknowledge that the world is changing and we’re playing defense. If we ever hope to once again be the protagonists of America’s story of justice and freedom rather than speed bumps in MAGA’s hellscape version, we—donors and practitioners alike—must view the midterm elections with the orientation that they are a means, not the end. If major funders are willing to seriously wrestle with this simple provocation, then their money will flow to grassroots organizing and field efforts that center people’s agency and build enduring capacity for both the election and for the fights in the days, weeks, and months that follow afterwards.