Politics & organizing for Democrats everywhere. Prev @votefromhomeusa @letamericavote @jasonkander @sylvesterturner, etc. Together with @suzytweet, Will & Leon
Los Angeles, CA
Joined June 2010
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Ending this with a pitch to sign up for canvassing is proof that @MalloryMcMorrow is a guiding light for Democratic politics in 2026
As one of the candidates featured in these polls - the infamous one in late June that showed me plummeting into single digits (which was at odds with our internals) - here's the impact of this "experiment"
- Donations dried up
- Volunteers were devastated and pleading for guidance on what to do
- Reporters hounded me with calls to drop out
Sure, a point was proven. Polling is broken. But tens of thousands of people poured their hearts, time, energy, hard-earned money into something they believed in - for a year-and-a-half, and it was treated like a game. Our volunteers gave their all. And then some. I felt like I had let so many of them down.
To be extremely clear, Michigan Democrats are locked in to beat Mike Rogers. We WILL send @AbdulElSayed to the US Senate.
But between crap like this, endless fundraising texts that drive supporters away with spammy fake deadlines and trash "match" claims, scam PACs run rampant for firms to grift without actually supporting candidates, undisclosed content creators pushing content out either misrepresenting themselves as residents of states they don't live in or hiding whether they were paid and by who so they could make a buck, and the tidal wave of dark money ads -- I hope Democrats are ready to blow up the system with campaign finance and transparency reforms.
Trust is already at an all-time low. We don't get out of this mess without rebuilding trust.
And media - who loves to ride the drama of a pollercoaster - needs to take a hard look at what's legitimate and what's not.
If this teaches us anything - DON'T GET COMPLACENT AND DON'T TRUST THE POLLS.
LOCK IN. SIGN UP FOR A CANVASSING SHIFT. LEAVE NOTHING TO CHANCE OVER THE NEXT TWO WEEKS.
Can we someone write some kind of bot to auto-reply this chart every time some doomer bemoans how terrible and bad the world and modern society is today?
We can strive to grow and improve and be better while also acknowledging the incredible progress that has been made.
Ben Tyson retweeted
I know there are a bunch of really smart ppl in the Chargers building, but the tape is leaving me befuddled conceptually! It almost feels like they are trying things bc #Herbert is a freak and they think he can do things others can’t, but it makes little sense!
Yes, I felt Herbert was uncomfortable earlier in year & missed some OPPs being tentative, yesterday, he had a couple bad INTs, but so many concepts left me uncomfortable for him watching the tape!
Ben Tyson retweeted
Read all of Dan, but especially: "the Democratic lead in the polls comes primarily from gains with working-class white voters and Latinos...the two groups where polls have overestimated Democrats in the past." WNC voters in particular are sick fo Trump, but not in love with Dems.
Look, I don't think "the ability to tell a moral and ethical story" should supplant gas and food prices as a campaign talking point.
BUT there's a real need if Democrats want to talk authentically to have an ethical framework that matches the existential angst of our time.
So I read @adamconner 's piece, and it was very insightful and had some very good points. In general it's part of a much larger "why are we still operationalizing, structuring, and managing all levels of campaigns (basically) the same way as we were 10 years ago?" question.
But, on turf cutting specifically I will say, yes you certainly could use AI to cut turf and we probably should. Is that the biggest structural problem on campaigns though - is the fact that it takes 79 people to cut GOTV turf a huge problem on campaigns?
I'm much more skeptical of that. At that point on a campaign, frankly, there's not a ton else to do, and switching to AI turf cutting isn't going to allow campaigns to really hire less people and save money, it'll just mean everyone spends more time during GOTV scrolling Twitter or Bluesky or whatever.
So anyways, yes, let's definitely make our tools and everything better with AI, but let's not pretend like we'll do that and then "now we will win" will take over the campaign. It's a small piece of a much larger puzzle.
Ben Tyson retweeted
.@MitchLandrieu on @KamalaHarris and '28 broadly:
Let me tell you something. I have made the mistake in my life of telling people before you should run, you should not run, because this is what the voters think. And I have now realized as an older person that that is foolish. That you gotta let it ride. It would seem like you would go, “OK, well, this feels weird. She ran twice, she lost twice, is she gonna win again?” I ran for mayor twice before I won the third time. People said, “You can’t ever do that again. You can’t win.” How the hell are you gonna know? And so I’m not in the business of doing that anymore. And if she wants to run, let her run.
And you know what? The voters will figure it out. And voters are smart, too. And you should not put it past voters who voted for her last time to say, “I really like her, but I don’t think that’s what we need right now. And so I’m going to get off of her.” Or they could just say, “Hey, we think she got screwed last time, we’re going back into it.” But I would not presume that the same people who voted for her last time are gonna vote for her this time. She would have to do whatever she’s gonna do in a fresh new way. And you know what? Country may say yes, may say no. I just don’t know.
It’s the most wide-open race in decades.
It is. Not only is it a wide-open race as to who the person’s gonna be, it’s a wide-open race as to what America wants to become and how we’re gonna get there. It should be an exciting time for the country.
youtube.com/watch?v=8KdXY-Ai…
Beyond proud of @JustinOnwenu. Was such a privilege to work with him. Not just for his personal intelligence, thoughtfulness, warmth, and integrity; but to see the next generation of leadership for our country come into their own was a very powerful experience.
Go Justin!!!!!!
It's very hard for me to come up with another elected official, current or former, whom I admire more than Hillary Clinton.
Not getting into a laundry list of policy positions or political approach or anything like that, but every time she speaks there's value and wisdom.
The atmosphere around the midterms is far too muted. Media coverage continually harping on Trump's unpopularity and the number of seats Dems will pick up glaze over the very real uncertainty here.
Let's not forget, 2022 was supposed to be a "red wave" year until it wasn't.
The proverbial staring contest going on across the donor class between the DSA and establishment (and yes, there are major donors on both sides), waiting to castigate the other for losing, and wanting to make sure their candidates are set up to win in 2028 is going to cost us seats in November.
Campaign strategists described the electoral map, eight weeks before Election Day, as teetering between a district-by-district knife fight and a Dem landslide.
But even the most optimistic Dem said it’s not clear they’ll have the cash to pull it off.
washingtonsun.com/2026-elect…
Current voter behavior and sentiment being driven by perceived and real loses of personal agency is a HUGE truth that we do not discuss or grapple with nearly enough.
As the parent of a toddler as well, not sure how I feel about comparing voters to them in general, or using this point to build that explicitly into messaging, but we can take a step back from all that to sit for a minute with and accept the underlying idea here. It's massively important, and I wholeheartedly believe that until we make this one of our core truths as a Party, we will continue to diagnose the symptoms and not the cause in our messaging and campaigns.
In my personal newsletter this week: My toddler theory of politics (or: what if we framed everything as giving people agency?) amandalitman.substack.com/p/…
Very grateful for this write up. I am super interested in what @swingleft is doing and it's awesome to see it playing out. I will say though that likely the best conclusion from this is the always unexciting take that canvassing (like most things) needs to be about the balance.
I do think we often over-target in our field programs and we should be prioritizing density and more conversations over highest efficiency targets. But, unless you also have a way to summon 5x the organizing capacity in terms of volunteers for campaigns without ballooning the costs, there's not a realistic budget for campaigns to adopt the full Ground Truth approach.
We can learn from this though. We should be building universes with higher density and more conversations in mind. Score recommendations and cutoffs on model scores in VAN or PDI are too often treated as inalterable gospel - never to go beyond or mess with them. That's just a bad use of data.
We can be better. Campaigns need us to be better, and we should always be willing to look for new approaches and never do something just because "well that's because it's how it's always been done."
So h/t for trying this out and writing it up, I hope campaigns and organizing programs out there are listening.
Interesting field case study: in Dubuque, knocking on every door yielded 5x more voter conversations & 3x more volunteer leads than the "standard" targeted MiniVAN walk approach, which required walking past 24 doors just to speak with 1 person.
grassrootsconnector.substack…
Maybe campaigns looking towards a potential inability to hire the "full suite" of traditional consultant and senior staff talent means campaigns should be looking more towards full, all-in-one, service firms to work with?
If you are, hmu, I have ideas and know some folks 😉
Is there enough talent to properly staff all the upcoming 2028 campaigns? @guycecil goes through the list.
CECIL: "I think people are going to have to think a lot more creatively and they're going to have to view roles differently."
Or if you want more tangible and intelligent thoughts on all this, just listen to Brennan:
xitter.cf/brennanmaragh/status/2… 🔑🙌
As someone who has worked as an organizer and hired / managed literally hundreds of organizers, I have many many thoughts on all this discourse.
But Twitter being still an unreliable cesspool for productive discussion, I'll just say here that I hope everyone having a hard time with the job ends up in a better place, or at least feeling proud about their hard work, at the end of the cycle.
Know that it's valuable work, even though it's hard doing the work dialing, knocking and executing the programs on the ground day in and day out.
If anyone ever wants to talk more, learn more, or share more, DM's are always open for everyone who wants to make organizing on Democratic campaigns better.
As someone who has worked as an organizer and hired / managed literally hundreds of organizers, I have many many thoughts on all this discourse.
But Twitter being still an unreliable cesspool for productive discussion, I'll just say here that I hope everyone having a hard time with the job ends up in a better place, or at least feeling proud about their hard work, at the end of the cycle.
Know that it's valuable work, even though it's hard doing the work dialing, knocking and executing the programs on the ground day in and day out.
If anyone ever wants to talk more, learn more, or share more, DM's are always open for everyone who wants to make organizing on Democratic campaigns better.
Crashes are always tough to see - from a casual Saturday ride to the world's GOAT at the peak of his performance. Watching @TamauPogi hit the deck is a painful reminder of how greatness can be cut short by random chance and how ephemeral the chase of our lives goals and pursuits can be.
Get better soon Pog. Cycling and our world is better when you're on the road. 🙏