After 2024, pro-democracy actors are looking for lessons. One key takeaway: political campaigns must shift from data-driven marketing to valuing local organizers’ expertise to rebuild trust, mobilize voters, and counter illiberal threats.
Following their decisive loss in the U.S. presidential elections, Democratic campaigners and observers have engaged in an extensive blame-game. Many commentators claim that party leadership failed to focus on the issues that voters care about. But there is an alternative to these post-mortems of campaign spending and messaging. Rather than participating and assessing what exactly the Democrats did wrong in terms of messaging, this article engages in a thought experiment and proposes a different call to action: namely, to put the expertise of local organizers at the center of campaign strategy.
Understanding the American Context
The American economic system, underpinned by a neoliberal order, exacerbates widening income disparities by rejecting social safety nets. In the last six decades, U.S. income inequality has exploded, with those earning any amount below the 90th percentile recording significant losses in economic power. Alongside this, there is a growing gap in wealth, education, social capital, and status between those who participate and benefit in democracies and those who do not (Davis, 2010). Meanwhile, reaching political office has become heavily intertwined with having immense wealth or the support of those who do. From 2023 until June 2024 alone, the Federal Election Commission documents campaign expenditures of $586.4 million by presidential candidates, $1.8 billion by congressional candidates, $1 billion spending by parties and $6 billion by Super PACs. That amounts to nearly $ 9.4 billion spent on U.S. election campaigns within one and a half years: Political campaigning has become a billion-dollar industry.
The Blame Game and What to Make of It
Reflecting on the Democrats’ performance in the 2024 elections, commentators speak of voters who “don’t want to feel that they are being told what they can or cannot say", who “grew tired of being lectured at”, who were being talked to “as if they are school children”. On the other hand, voter turnout was supposedly depressed because the Democratic candidate Kamala Harris platformed former Republican Congresswoman Liz Cheney, or because Democrats shifted rightward on economic issues, or because they were perceived as too progressive on social issues. In these debates, none of the pundits clearly define the term “voters”. They could refer to any group that the campaign failed to mobilize: from core democratic voters to swing voters. However, distinguishing between different voter groups is an important exercise, because not doing so foregoes the question of who the Democrats should be mobilizing in the first place.
While many opinion writers criticize the inadequate response of Democrats to voter concerns, people reflecting on this should turn to local actors for more evidence. Local organizers are closest to the electorate and know what their communities care about. They are relevant democratic actors who have the potential to facilitate productive environments of political exchange, be it through door-knocking or organizing town halls. By proximity, grassroots organizers and canvassers gain a specific form of expertise on what citizens care about - an expertise worth highlighting, exploring and making use of.
Campaign Strategies and Canvassing
In the American context, campaign strategists are above all political marketing experts. They draw their expertise from the data they collect. Through their lens, informed by rational choice theory, the political campaign is a service provision, a transaction between voters (customers) and politicians (providers). Voter preferences are assumed to be fixed and identifiable, which means that political actors in electoral competition are presented with limited options on what to sensibly advocate for (Savigny, 2003). These strategists are interested in quickly persuading voters, gathering data from polls and focus groups; not in fostering conversations (Savigny, 2011).
In the wake of the election loss, the Harris campaign leadership discussed their campaign in terms of approval ratings, voters’ perceptions reflected in numbers and polling margins. Since canvassing has been shown to be one of the most effective ways in which voters can be mobilized (Gerber & Green, 2000), the Harris Campaign spent around 50 Million Dollars investing in professional canvassing, cooperating with a number of different organizations (including non-profits) to sustain their mobilization efforts across the country.
Canvassing typically involves volunteer door-knockers who talk to people in person about their intent to vote and advocate for one particular party or candidate. Nowadays, professional campaigning looks like this: Polling potential voters in order to define targeting, message and resource allocation, microtargeting by means of data analytics, and sending in grassroots volunteers to deploy the message and gather more data (see: Bolger, 2023). A typical canvassing situation has come to involve a target number of households to reach, an app where progress can be documented, small group debriefings and a personal performance assessment.
While canvassing has the potential to be topical and deep canvassing especially can be considered a form of community engagement, professional campaign canvassing is primarily geared towards getting and influencing the voter-opinion on candidates. As such, conversations are generally kept short. The professionalization of canvassing effectively maximizes data gathering and identifies target voters. However, the goal is not to encourage deeper political discussion and thought. The intention is not to take in constructive testimonial feedback of voters that could then inform policies. Information gathered is documented in canvassing apps such as Reach or MiniVAN and primarily intended to inform and polish further campaign messaging. These apps do feature notes sections, but there is no direct incentive for volunteers to make use of it.
Throughout, the state and nature of the feedback loop between local actors and their party remains rather untransparent. What can be observed is a formalization of data gathering in election campaigns, which, for the sake of efficiency, likely goes hand-in-hand with a deprioritization of qualitative feedback. In other words, one has to wonder, if political campaigns focus more on data points, how much valuable feedback from the electorate is lost along the way? While focus groups are intended to close this gap in hope that they are statistically representative, they can hardly replace paying close attention to conversations that happen on the ground. It is fair to ask whether the Democratic Party has been neglecting detailed qualitative feedback from voters in response to professionalizing campaigns, but it is a tricky question to answer: Local organizers might know more about this.
Why is it risky for a party to neglect testimony and local expertise?
Risk #1: Misunderstanding policy concerns
Ignoring the specific expertise and knowledge that local grassroots organizers bring to the table risks missing or misunderstanding key policy issues that voters care about. As these actors build personal and informal relationships with citizens, they are going to have an in-depth understanding of the issues that voters do and policy makers should care about. Direct engagement with local organizers could provide crucial context and nuance to campaign data that top-down managerial interpretations cannot. Moreover, if parties want to build trust with voters, they need to acknowledge and incorporate the deeply local context and perspective that only organizers and local community leaders can provide. At a time when illiberal actors seek to capitalize on an unhappy and disregarded citizenry, this ought to be a matter of focus for democratic leadership.
Risk #2: Lower trust in political figures and canvassing
Neglecting to encourage local expertise-building in favor of professionalized canvassing turns the personal interactions between canvassers and voters into performative and transactional communicative acts. Canvassing becomes less about encouraging political reflection and convincing voters via ideas and policy suggestions, and more about selling an image or a message. Essentially, voters are left to decide who is the most trustworthy salesperson. Because political campaigns are too focused on constructing an image of an ideal candidate in response to this, they risk deprofessionalizing political representatives (Davis, 2010, p. 157). The utility of a candidate becomes a question of their ability to construct a convincing cultural performance (Serazio, 2017, p. 231) and not their leadership potential or policy vision. The whole campaign becomes about the trustworthiness of the candidate and not a genuine conversation about policy or voters’ concerns. As Sorensen (2023) has argued, this mechanism creates an environment in which voters question the authenticity of democratic representatives and become uncertain if their message matches their convictions or policies. If a candidate performs unconvincingly, so do canvassers, removing trust in the integrity of these important local interactions from the equation.
Risk #3: Demobilizing canvassers and organizers
If local actors who organize and mobilize others for a party perceive that the party is not interested in their expertise, they are bound to be demobilized. While organizing efforts remained at a high level among Democrats during the 2024 Harris campaign, a reason for it were the stakes of specific interest groups and vulnerable populations in preventing a second Trump presidency. However, if the “state of democracy” is not important enough of a topic to persuade voters in their decision-making, democratic parties cannot rely on this message alone to fuel mobilization, especially in the long run. Since local organizers and civil society are key to the success of a democratic political movement, democratic parties cannot risk alienating them by not incorporating what they have to say. At best, this demobilization might encourage further professionalization of canvassing, which, due to its challenges with authenticity, has already been criticized in this piece. At worst, this signifies the loss of those who believe in a parliamentary democratic movement, want to strengthen its roots and keep it grounded in reality.
Risk #4: Discouraging collective political deliberation
If the ways in which politicians engage with the electorate are not informed by acknowledging the merits of localized testimony, we cannot expect them to allocate resources to spaces for democratic deliberation. Social spaces of discursive engagement with people of other opinions are vital to the development of a shared understanding of reality and civil identity within the political process. Granted, canvassing is not the same as holding a town hall meeting. But it is intended to mobilize voters. Rather than mobilizing people to “buy a product” and collecting data about individuals, canvassing can also be mobilizing towards collective political engagement. Given a different level of attention by democratic parties, canvassing interactions could be a precursor to town halls and other spaces of collective political deliberation. But if campaign management already does not value localized testimony, it makes little sense for them to sufficiently invest in a mobilizing effort that actively incorporates citizens as authentic speakers and democracy-builders.
Risk #5: Losing to the antidemocratic competition
Populists and illiberal actors are ready to take advantage of the current political environment. Performative authenticity can easily be discredited via disinformation campaigns, but illiberal actors need not work that much on these campaigns if trust in democratic parties and systems is already low. These undemocratic actors have a distinct advantage in environments of dissatisfaction and mistrust because they are inherently disruptive to the status quo. Moreover, they are not required to follow through with their own campaign messaging because their political success goes hand in hand with the erosion of transparency and accountability. Framing elections as a vote of confidence in a candidate's image in an environment of low trust benefits actors who are perceived as outsiders to the democratic political establishment. Democratic parties’ failure to account for local testimony decreases trust in the responsiveness of parties to voter and community concerns, making it easier for populists to gain power and dismantle democratic systems.
Why do democratic actors need to care about this?
Ideally, door-knocking and town hall conversations foster spaces of engagement that may be likened to forms of political deliberation rather than pure image-making. On an individual level, it is hard to discount that these processes still occur. But presently, campaign strategists do not encourage them outside of focus groups. And the results of any substantial political engagement at someone’s door are most likely not being incorporated into policy making. In the U.S., most political campaigns are simply not designed to be responsive to local actors beyond engaging them for voter mobilization and data collection. This needs to change.
If democratic parties were to pay close attention to local expertise and incorporate it in a meaningful way, voters would be shown that their community concerns are valued, leading to increased and much needed trust in democratic policy makers. This is precisely why local expertise needs to be at the center of conversations about political campaigns. It does not make sense for campaign strategists to be accorded infinitely more expertise than people who directly engage with voters. While testimonial feedback is harder to work with than data gathered by focus groups and opinion polls, democratic movements are endangering their own viability if they neglect to take note of and respond to the messy, complex, qualitative information voters provide. Neglecting local expertise is endangering the larger political project of liberal democracy. If democratic parties want to formulate an effective democratic response to the far right, informal processes of engagement fostered by engaged individuals, collectives and civil society coalitions have to be in the spotlight, and their knowledge taken into account.
There needs to be an increased awareness that the highly professionalized marketing practices in political campaigns create specific vulnerabilities in democracies, not only in the U.S. but in Europe and Germany as well. There too, scholars, civil society and democratic politicians increasingly observe and anticipate democratic backsliding. Democratic parties are struggling to find an answer to illiberal and populist actors and are turning to a closer study of the electorate and marketing professionals to polish their campaigns. Cambridge Analytica’s influence on the Brexit vote did not only show the dangerous effectiveness of microtargeting in an unregulated media environment. It created an incentive for democratic parties to take note of the mobilization potential through political marketing. It did not introduce an awareness of the long-term democratic risks implied by running political campaigns on the advice of marketing experts. To call the 2024 elections a warning signal is an understatement. Democratic parties and scholars alike need to start looking closely at the negative effects of running primarily image-making campaigns. A first and essential step in this would be to reach out, talk and listen to what local organizers have to say.
References
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Davis, A. (2010). Political communication and social theory. Routledge. https://books.google.com/books?hl=de&lr=&id=QcotCgAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PP1&…
Gerber, A. S., & Green, D. P. (2000). The effects of canvassing, telephone calls, and direct mail on voter turnout: A field experiment. American Political Science Review, 94(3), 653–663.
Savigny, H. (2003). Political Marketing: A Rational Choice? Journal of Political Marketing, 3(1), 21–38. https://doi.org/10.1300/J199v03n01_02
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Serazio, M. (2017). Branding politics: Emotion, authenticity, and the marketing culture of American political communication. Journal of Consumer Culture, 17(2), 225–241. https://doi.org/10.1177/1469540515586868
Sorensen, L. (2023). Populist disruption and the fourth age of political communication. European Journal of Communication, 02673231231184702.