What Our New Research (and Charlie Kirk) Teaches Us About Power
Groundbreaking new research on the electoral impact of state-based organizing groups
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.
We urge you to dig into the report and explore what its findings mean for your work. Drop comments or questions in the comments below.
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, only 70% of people taking part in organizing events participated more than 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.