From the New York Times:
The Trump Campaign Knows Why Obama Won. Do Democrats?
Before Republicans will send their organizers into early primary states, the organizers reportedly must read and pass a test on “Groundbreakers,” the story of how Barack Obama revolutionized campaigning by putting his faith in hundreds of thousands of volunteers.
I was a top organizer in his 2008 campaign and trained thousands of the campaign’s staff members. I and the book’s authors fear that the wealthy elites on the left have less respect than ever before for the strategies that got Mr. Obama elected. If Democrats want to win in 2020, they must get back to investing in the power of everyday people through organizing.
Republicans know how President Obama won, yet there is a contentious debate among progressives about how to run campaigns. One side says you engage your most excited supporters, organizing them into local leadership teams and helping them host trainings, house parties and voter registration drives so that they can build support and gather accurate data about their neighborhoods.
This creates the capacity for millions of authentic, person-to-person conversations about families’ experiences, and their hopes and fears — the kinds of conversations that can expand an electorate, energize a base and demobilize the opposition. Data and technology are tools to improve this work, not the machinery for controlling people.
The other side, louder and better funded, says that data, technology and analytics should drive campaign strategies and voter outreach programs. So campaigns hire tech companies to create lists of potential supporters based on algorithms and statistical modeling. And they develop apps through which supporters are meant to blast, but not actually engage, their social networks. Staff members and volunteers parachute into communities to knock on doors and recite poll-tested scripts.
Over the past decade, the party elites — consultants, strategists and donors — have caught the data-and-analytics fever and largely abandoned organizing. This has meant that entire neighborhoods have been politically redlined out of engagement in our most fundamental democratic practice.
Those of us who have spent our lives talking to regular folks on campaigns now walk around neighborhoods with lists created by someone at a computer far away. We have skipped many doors and missed entire families because the data experts didn’t have addresses or phone numbers for poor people, young people, people of color or people who moved a lot — many of those who carried Barack Obama to victory.