Moving From Lists to Leaders
What Democrats and progressives should learn from organizing, in time for 2026
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.
So well-said!