Democrats should stop mocking Trump's ground game and start learning from it [View all]

[Jk23]

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2024/nov/25/democrats-organizing-get-out-the-vote

(Note this is a very long piece and I found it very informative.,I highly recommend people read the whole thing.)

Since campaign season began, experts have assured us that Donald Trump had “no ground game”, a phrase that generally refers to a campaign’s effort to mobilize voters through local outreach offices, phone calls, text messages, and door knocks. Pundits, politicos, and partisan observers repeated this charge and scoffed at his ramshackle, amateur, and fraud-riddled efforts, with some seasoned Republican operatives even sounding the alarm.

A slew of articles and commentary unfavorably compared Trump’s “paltry” get-out-the-vote operation to the Democrats’ supposedly well-oiled and professionally managed machine. Alex Floyd, the Democratic national committee’s rapid response director, issued a confident statement in April: “Donald Trump’s Maga takeover of the [Republican national committee] has left the Republican party in shambles, lacking the ground game and infrastructure to compete this November.”

And yet many Democrats remain reluctant to reassess their views, both of Trump’s ground game and, perhaps more importantly, of their own. Soon after the election, Tom O’Brien, chair of the Democratic party in Lancaster county, Pennsylvania, told the New York Times that Republicans “really didn’t have a ground game”. The Democratic strategist Christy Setzer went further, telling the Hill that “Trump had no ground game and ran only on rambling hatred”, while insisting that the loss “wasn’t the fault of Kamala Harris”, who had “the best campaign any of us has ever seen”. But if that’s true, why did Trump succeed where Harris failed?

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A few weeks before the election, in Greensboro, North Carolina, Nikki Marín Baena was outside her home when she was approached by a canvasser from Libre Initiative, a Koch-backed organization that targets Latino communities with a libertarian agenda. The canvasser told her about all the services the group offers: Spanish language workshops for parents on how to apply for scholarships, English language tutoring, computer classes and more. In Baena’s words, Libre’s goal is to get people in a room, help them meet their basic needs, and then preach the gospel of small government.

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Having people in the community help each other is much more effective than people parachuted in to knock on doors every two or fours years and endless texts begging for money. We are missing the effectiveness of what the Republicans are doing. They may mock community organizers on a national level, but they are using them in underserved communities and working class enclaves around the country. (And yes, I know one of the reasons the communities are underserved is Republican policies. The irony is not lost on me. )