How to beat Trump during a pandemic
Lessons from Pete for America’s National Organizing Director
If Democrats are serious about beating Donald Trump this November, they have to adopt new campaign tactics — and fast.
Democrats are already at a disadvantage. Brad Parscale, Trump’s Campaign Manager, led his 2016 campaign’s digital efforts and revolutionized how campaigns use online ads — and he’s spent the last three years building an enormous war chest, data infrastructure, and robust digital community. Trump’s campaign has been in a general election since the day he was inaugurated. Democrats have had a nominee for less than a month.
In any other year, this disadvantage wouldn’t be so stark — but this is not a normal year. The COVID-19 pandemic has driven us into our homes and eliminated physical contact with people, which plays right into the Trump campaign’s strategy: building echo chambers around voters, circling them with targeted propaganda, and insulating them from reality. But it’s also making it more and more clear how political leadership directly affects our lives.
Here is our dire reality: Trump’s campaign has a three-year head start over Democrats. So how can Democrats set up a campaign to win in the middle of a pandemic?
The answer is: Democrats have to organize, like always — but they have to organize smarter.
Democrats have to adopt a new playbook that doesn’t rely on physical contact with voters. The most effective way to pierce the echo chambers that Trump’s campaign has built around voters is to train Democrats to talk to their own social networks. Increasingly, the messenger matters even more than the message — and Democrats have to teach their supporters to share Democrats’ message themselves by talking to their friends, family, church groups, neighbors, everyone.
This organizing strategy is called “relational organizing,” and we’ve already seen it work this year. It’s how Mayor Pete Buttigieg won the Iowa caucus.
By all historical measures, Pete should not have won Iowa. When he formally launched his campaign, he had no money and no political network to speak of. But we built a different kind of organizing program that empowered our supporters to organize their own communities, talk to the people already in their lives, and deliver Pete’s message themselves. We capitalized on the wisdom of our volunteers by asking them to organize who they thought would be most receptive to Pete’s message rather than putting blind faith into some micro-targeting model.
We made a point to try to hire people who are from the communities we organized — and in places we couldn’t, we asked organizers to embed in the communities, meet people, and build relationships. They sat down with people who were interested in Pete and trained them to talk to their friends, family members, neighbors, everyone. Organizers coached these supporters one-on-one on how to have meaningful conversations rooted in values. Instead of measuring how many phone calls organizers were making or how many doors volunteers were knocking, we measured how many people were talking to their friends and family and how many conversations they were having. In Iowa, thousands of volunteers talked to tens of thousands of people they grew up with, worked with, and saw at church every week.
We were able to deliver Pete’s message to voters over and over because we asked our supporters to weave politics into their everyday conversations with friends, families, and neighbors. Even if your mom has talked to you about politics every week for the last two months, you’re likely to pick up the phone when she calls — not so for campaign cold calls. Politics is an exercise in building trust — and we were able to cut through cable news talking points by recruiting and training trusted messengers.
This kind of relational organizing will be critical this year. Building trust will be more difficult than it’s ever been — especially with the Trump campaign (and possibly foreign governments) running active disinformation campaigns. Democrats will have to cut through propaganda to reach voters — and they won’t be able to do so with a face-to-face conversation. (Even if social gathering bans are lifted, would you go knock on the doors of possibly sick strangers’ homes? Would you answer the door if you saw a stranger standing there wearing gloves and a face mask?)
Democrats cannot just rely on reaching people through ‘digital’ tactics alone. The Trump campaign is already investing in “relationship organizing” to reach supporters. If Democrats run a campaign solely through social media or digital ads, they will leave behind the same voters they didn’t reach in 2016. A digital ad won’t be enough to convince a single mom with three young kids to risk getting her family sick by going to vote in person in states where voting by mail isn’t possible. Online outreach will be critical this cycle, yes — but it won’t replace the organizing work that needs to be done to get Democrats’ message in front of the voters they need to reach.
One fair criticism of relational organizing programs is that talking to one’s own networks doesn’t necessarily reach every voter. That’s true. We will need to run other programs as well to reach voters — there is a place in campaigns for advertising and for ‘cold’ direct voter contact. But we also know the 2016 election was decided by 77,000 votes in three states. Persuasion will be an important component to building a winning electoral coalition in 2020. Democrats need to invest in building an organizing program that can facilitate more effective conversations with these voters. We all know Trump voters and non-voters in our lives, and we understand them better than a stranger volunteering on a campaign ever will. It’s on us to have those conversations.
As the realities of COVID-19 reshape our daily lives, Democrats will need to build a nimble and adaptable campaign that takes risks, tries new things, and trusts its volunteers. That’s the only way they can catch up to Trump and his campaign’s massive head start. Ads alone won’t reach the voters we need to reach, especially if they’re surrounded by echo chambers of propaganda. Democrats must quickly adapt to train supporters to pierce those echo chambers by having real conversations with the people in their lives about what’s at stake. David Plouffe and David Axelrod, the architects of Obama’s 2008 and 2012 wins, agree — in an op-ed, they argued that relational organizing will be one of the ways Biden can beat Donald Trump.
In order to beat Trump, Democrats need to invest in what works. To start, they should take a look at how the mayor of Indiana’s fourth largest city organized his way into winning the Iowa caucus.
