The Outsider Democrats Who Built the Blue Wave
By MICAH L. SIFRY at the New Republic
https://newrepublic.com/article/152130/outsider-democrats-built-blue-wave
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After the disaster of Trump’s election, there was no organizing structure in place to come rescue the party. Into that vacuum came a new cohort of activists. To begin with, older women and younger but more experienced Democratic campaign staffers launched Indivisible. From a Google Doc started by a group of young congressional aides, it spawned 6,000 local chapters (at least two in everycongressional district). The Women’s March prompted the launch of thousands of local huddles. And soon, a long list of new groups emerged to direct campaign knowledge, data, and resources wherever they were most needed.
The most notable aspect of Democratic midterm organizing in 2018 was that it operated without any central command. It was more like a swarm than an army, surging to places that traditional Democratic consultants never bothered to go. In Texas, Beto O’Rourke’s Senate campaign, which nearly brought the first statewide win to a Democrat there since 1990, hired people like Bernie Sanders’s deputy digital director, Zack Malitz, and built a large paid staff of 800, focusing on one main goal: a massive, decentralized base of volunteers. At the end of October, the O’Rourke campaign reported that its supporters had made 19 million phone calls to Texas voters, and sent more than one million texts each day. Nationally, Democrats were sending so many texts that Ann Lewis, MoveOn’s chief technology officer, has said that countrywide cellular networks were overloaded. On the weekend before Election Day, MiniVAN, an app Democratic canvassers use to keep track of their interactions with voters, was trending on the Apple store’s top ten list.
The fundraising landscape has also become more decentralized, even as billionaire megadonors like former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg and Tom Steyer spent heavily on the election. ActBlue—a Democratic online fundraising platform that allows people to send small donations to a wide range of candidates or causes, not just ones prioritized by the national leadership—processed a record 7.7 million donations between July and September, and the $385 million raised on the platform was almost five times the amount collected during the same period in the last midterms. Data for Progress—a small think tank co-founded recently by Sean McElwee, a New York journalist best known for coining the “Abolish ICE” slogan—worked with Run for Something and FutureNowUSA (two other new groups) to create “Give Smart” lists of strategic state legislative races where Democrats might be able to pick key seats to tip control of a chamber. Over a few days in October, following a few tweets from @DataProgress, some $750,000 flowed to the accounts of candidates who had previously been operating on small budgets.
Volunteers poured in, too. On the day before the election, Mobilize America, a new clearinghouse for volunteer organizing that was used by nearly 500 campaigns this cycle, reported that 370,000 volunteers had used its platform to sign up for 737,000 shifts over the course of the cycle, nearly half to canvass. (The real level of engagement was likely considerably higher, as many people brought a friend or took on an extra shift.) All told, according to organizations like Movement Voter Project, which raised more than $12 million for over 350 local groups, and Action Together Network, which connects more than 800 leaders across every state, the number of volunteers mobilized over the last 18 months exceeded two million people—nearly matching Obama’s 2.2 million in 2012. The left, in short, has rebuilt the muscle he let crumble after his first campaign.
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