‘The system is broken’: grassroots Democratic group aims to revitalize outmoded ground game | Democrats

Pope Leo came top with 42%. Donald Trump was just behind with 41%. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) scored 38% and TV host Stephen Colbert 35%. Trailing behind all of them was the Democratic party, viewed positively by just 30% of voters in a recent NBC News poll. About 52% view the Democrats negatively.

Among the reasons for the distrust, argues Swing Left, a national grassroots organisation, is a broken voter contact model in which Democrats are too transactional, too last minute and too dependent on outdated technology. It is aiming to fix the problem ahead of November’s midterm elections.

Last weekend Swing Left ran a voter-listening canvass in Kingston, New York, with congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and congressman Pat Ryan joining more than a hundred volunteers.

Part of Swing Left’s Ground Truth campaign, these initiatives aim to overhaul the Democrats’ ground game with “deep canvassing”. Rather than parachuting into neighbourhoods just weeks before an election to chase reliable supporters, volunteers are hitting the streets well ahead of the midterms and knocking on every door.

Volunteers are encouraged to speak to anyone they encounter instead of rigidly sticking to a targeted list and specific communities. And rather than forcing voters’ opinions into rigid categories, canvassers hold old-fashioned, open-ended conversations that are then analysed with the help of AI.

The responses in Kingston offered a snapshot of voters’ thinking.

A Democratic-leaning resident who had recently moved back from Rhode Island spoke with canvassers through her Ring camera while she was out at a sushi restaurant. She said she “tries not to think about politics” but still took the time to talk about her concerns.

A Republican-leaning resident and mother of young children told canvassers she felt the country is too divided and that Democrats and Republicans should work together more. Another resident said voters often feel as if they are choosing between the “lesser of two evils” and expressed frustration with the options available in politics.

One Kingston resident told canvassers he did not vote and did not believe the political system works, saying he felt it was “rigged against working people”. Even so, he stayed outside and talked about what life feels like day to day – waking up, going to work and paying the bills – and shared frustrations about the cost of living.

Ocasio-Cortez said in a statement: “The conversations this kind of canvassing enables are transformative not only for the person opening the door, but also for the canvasser. We’re in a moment where engaging with genuine curiosity and openness feels almost countercultural.

“The Ground Truth volunteers I met shared story after story about how surprised voters were that someone wanted to take time to hear their perspective. That says a lot about where our politics is right now and how much work we have to do to change it.”

Democrats used to be good at this. Barack Obama’s revolutionary approach to online organising and social media campaigning helped propel him to victory over Republican nominees John McCain and Mitt Romney in the 2008 and 2012 elections, respectively. But the party has struggled to keep up the pace.

Yasmin Radjy, who was an Obama campaign field organiser, lamented: “We have not substantively evolved as a party since the 2008 Obama campaign model. We are just iterating on the edges of that model.”

Radjy, now the executive director of Swing Left, which launched in the wake of Trump’s election victory in 2016, continued: “Year after year, cycle after cycle, the way that campaigns reach out to voters is consistently too late, consistently too transactional, and sitting atop some outdated technology and data infrastructure that has not evolved at the pace that we need it to.

“We’ve always known those things, but our role has been to channel volunteers to the infrastructure as it is to win marginal races. After the 2024 election we looked at ourselves in the mirror and asked the hard question of what does it mean to achieve our goals and to have tremendous scale if we are losing elections? What could we be do differently in the future?”

In 2024 the Federal Election Commission issued an advisory opinion that permits federal candidates to directly coordinate paid canvassing efforts with outside groups such as Super Pacs and non-profits. This means that, rather than waiting for a candidate to raise the dollars they need to organise tech and data infrastructure, Swing Left can now essentially build campaigns-in-waiting.

It is scaling the programme across the 33 most competitive congressional districts ahead of the midterms. Radjy said: “We are going out and having open-ended deep listening conversations, not just with the traditional Democratic-based voters that we typically limit our interactions to, but with everybody, meaning we are knocking on every door.

“In between doors, if there is a voter walking their dog, if there’s someone washing their car, we’re talking to them too. We’re taking to anybody that we can interact with.”

Previously, canvassers used highly restrictive apps that forced them to distill complex conversations into a one-to-five scale or tick a single-issue box, such as “the economy” or “abortion rights”. If a voter was not on the app’s targeted list, volunteers were essentially instructed to ignore them.

Now volunteers use an app that allows them to simply dictate their notes, much like a doctor recording a patient visit. Large language models process these sprawling, unstructured paragraphs of text to identify true voter sentiment. The insights are then aggregated and shared with campaigns and state parties.

Radjy recalled: “As a fresh-out-of-college organiser in 2008, I would type up notes of what voters said, hoping it would go somewhere and someone would do something about it. There was no capacity for anyone to read through that because there was a lot of stuff going on.

“AI unlocks our ability to bring more rigour into the qualitative space that is so important and provides campaigns and state parties and national parties with the texture of not just a pulse check of how people feel about an issue but the colour between the lines of why they care about it and what’s underneath what they’re saying. We need to be as rigorous about that as we are on the quantitative.”

Radjy notes that voters rarely think in the single-issue frameworks favoured by political strategists. Instead, among Republicans, Democrats and independents, the overriding theme is a profound and unifying sense that “the system is broken”.

She believes the Democratic party must close the gap between its elites and the realities on the ground, noting that the party’s trust problem is evident in nearly every voter conversation.

“If we just continue serving reheated leftovers – whether we’re doing that from a desire to become more moderate, more progressive, more working class, more corporate – if we’re disconnected from the ground, we’re going to lose.”