Elections Matter, but Organizing Builds Lasting Power

This November’s sweeping electoral victories were an important step in the effort to roll back the threat of autocracy. Victories in municipal and state legislative races, gubernatorial and state supreme court elections, and many other statewide and down ballot elections have begun to shift the balance of power and have built momentum for the pivotal 2026 midterms.

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.

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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.

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