Door knocking — both where to do it and whether it is still effective in a digital age — is being studied by Democratic strategists to identify what went wrong in 2024.Credit...Kristian Thacker for The New York Times
Ken Bensinger
If there is one point of consensus in the deeply fractured Democratic Party, it’s that the old ways of doing business just aren’t cutting it.
And so, many of the party’s most analytically minded strategists have begun focusing their energies on dissecting the tactical and technical decisions that led to last year’s devastating defeats, and dreaming up proposals to overhaul the machinery of progressive politics.
This work is not about the big picture of what the party stands for. It is about the nuts and bolts of how to get candidates elected: which potential voters to target; whose doors to knock on, and whether door-knocking is still effective in a digital age; and when and where to advertise, whether online, on television or by mail.
There is also a concern that too many of those decisions have been made by party officials on high, relying too heavily on polling to guide their choices on policy positions, messaging and advertising, and ignoring other important signals that could help influence voters.
“We need to rethink things,” said Danielle Butterfield, executive director of Priorities USA, which was once the party’s premier super PAC and spent $45 million, including its nonprofit arms, in the 2024 election. “The same elitism that is abundant in our party exists in the way we make decisions.”
Priorities USA is spending $8 million on three pilot programs this year to explore some of the surprise findings from 2024. One such finding was that some of the Democratic group’s most effective ads turned out to be those that ran on YouTube channels favored by Republican voters who were seen as unpersuadable.
Nick Ahamed, the group’s deputy executive director, said he wanted to “re-envision” its role. Rather than existing mainly to run huge numbers of ads in the homestretch of a campaign, he said, it could be more like a venture capital firm, making a number of smaller bets on a wide range of initiatives and funding only the best performers — and using the incubation process as a way to learn about what works and doesn’t.
That mind-set will be on display on Tuesday in Washington when many of the party’s keenest number-crunchers are gathering for a closed-door meeting of the Analyst Institute, a progressive nonprofit that focuses on data-driven campaign tactics, to discuss where the party went wrong in 2024.
One participant, Movement Labs, a tech-centered nonprofit that is known for huge, targeted text-message campaigns, will be promoting a plan to offer cash prizes for ideas that increase turnout in this year’s statewide elections in New Jersey and Virginia. The “Prove It Prize” would use randomized controlled studies to evaluate entries and offer the most successful a cash prize of at least $100,000, with the goal of offering larger awards during the 2026 midterm elections.
Yoni Landau, the chief executive of Movement Labs, said he hoped to raise $5 million for such prizes to move past what he described as a broken business model for innovation on the left. Right now, he said, there are two ways to fund a project: “You know rich people, or you do email-fund-raising spam. Those don’t seem like useful fits for saving democracy or winning elections.”
Because the findings from each prize entrant would be studied and shared, the broader progressive ecosystem could also learn what doesn’t work, which could be almost as valuable, he said.
Another idea is to bring transparency to tactics and experiments that fail, said Yasmin Radjy, executive director of Swing Left, which helps organize Democratic donors and volunteers.
Last month, Vote Forward, an affiliate of Swing Left, released a study of a costly effort that it funded last year to have 78,000 volunteers mail roughly 10 million handwritten notes to voters. Similar efforts had worked well in 2020 during the pandemic. But the impact of the new effort among roughly five million occasional voters targeted with letters was “negligible.” And turnout barely budged among less likely voters, rising by just 0.2 percent — not enough to justify the time and expense.
Rather than hide that disappointing finding, Ms. Radjy said her group publicized it, so other Democrats would abandon the tactic for more effective ideas.
“We need to fix the Democratic brand and that requires rebuilding trust and listening,” Ms. Radjy said. “We can’t be involved in small tweaks anymore.”
One of Swing Left’s new ideas, which it is calling “Ground Truth,” aims to enlist volunteers to knock on every single door in tightly contested congressional districts, not just on targeted ones.
That’s a huge endeavor, given that each congressional district has about 300,000 households. Ms. Radjy said it would start this fall in a handful of battleground districts and expand to as many as 25 seats by early 2026 with a budget of at least $12 million.
“This will be the most ambitious thing we’ve ever done,” she said.
The group plans to have door-knockers record their interactions with voters in voice memos that would then be analyzed using artificial intelligence. Thanks to recently loosened Federal Election Commission rules, the results of that analysis could be shared directly with the candidates in each district.
“We need to ensure that we’re not just talking to as many voters as possible, but more importantly, listening to them,” Ms. Radjy said. “The cost of knocking every door is astronomical and a little bit terrifying, but we have to do it.”
Chauncey McLean, an adviser on the “Prove It” prize project and the president of Future Forward, which was the Democratic Party’s biggest super PAC in the 2024 cycle, said that trying to accurately measure what works and doesn’t was essential.
“Measurement is not always possible, but it should be the norm and not the exception,” he said. “I like any program that tries to honestly capture their impact even when it’s hard. Not just, ‘This sounds like this is a good idea and you’re a charming salesperson so here’s a lot of money.’”
Some Democratic groups
chafed at the dominant financial position that Future Forward held in aiding the Democratic presidential ticket in 2024. Future Forward and its aligned nonprofit
raised over $900 million during the election cycle, much of which went to television ads that were heavily tested for their effectiveness.
Priorities USA is funding three pilot programs focused on digital advertising this fall. One, called Nest, gathers data from sources like podcast transcripts and online comments to try to make ads more timely and appealing. Another is focused on building new audiences of potential voters to target on YouTube, an outgrowth of discovering that watchers of politically right-coded content were more influenced by Democratic messaging than any other cohort. The third aims to use search tools on social-media platforms like TikTok and Instagram to reach younger voters.
The three programs will be tested in North Carolina, Virginia and Pennsylvania, which hosts a closely watched race for three state Supreme Court seats this November.
Ms. Butterfield said a Democratic focus on digital ads was overdue.
“As a party, when we allocate money to digital, we’re still treating it like an extension of television or an extension of field or an expansion of mail,” she said. “We’re going to put all of our eggs in the basket of how are people consuming content on the internet.”
