Following the 2024 Election, Popular Democracy convened Executive Directors and senior staff of the grassroots power building organizations that make up its network. The meeting took place before President Trump was inaugurated and included a panel of organizational leaders reflecting on some of the post-election “hot takes” and lessons about their own work and their own experiences. The organizations who joined the panel had worked with Popular Democracy over the past year on civic engagement strategies intended to use the electoral moment to strengthen their base. This included building a “voter to member” pipeline to bring more leads from voter contact work into the base of the organizations and a “Guardians of Democracy” precinct leader program in which grassroots member leaders are assigned a voter contact universe of their immediate neighbors.
Their reflections have been lightly edited for length and clarity below.
DaMareo Cooper, Popular Democracy
We started this conversation almost a year ago and one of the things we’ve been saying all year is the importance of using the moment to build our base. We said that no matter who wins the election, our organizations, grassroots groups that organize working class people and people of color, need to make sure that we have a bigger base, more members, more leaders, more people ready to take action and throw down when it’s over than we had when it started.
And there’s this thing that happens every Presidential election where there’s money flowing into certain states and people end up building what we think of as these electoral sandcastles. These big programs are funded with political money, but then when the money stops after election day those programs just sort of melt away like they were never there. So we want to talk about how y’all are putting rebar in those sandcastles. What are the strategies and tactics that you are using to not just get people to vote but to build something for the long term so we’re not just in this same boom and bust situation, so we have a bigger and stronger base after the election than we had before?
Sara Cullinane, Make the Road New Jersey:
In New Jersey, the racial voting gap has expanded over the past decade –– although white voters are becoming a minority overall, they vote with higher frequency than voters of color. As a membership-based and predominantly Latinx organization, we are taking on this voter engagement gap head on. In 2024, our work was about engaging BIPOC voters and community members to both turn out in the elections but also to listen to them about what issues matter to them most, recruit them to join our organization, become dues-paying members, enroll in our leadership school, and become leaders, canvassers, and organizers in their communities.
We knocked on more than 40,000 doors, had thousands of conversations, and started leadership committees that meet every week to take on the issues most pressing to our communities. For example, one of the issues we heard most about on doors during the 2024 election cycle was affordable housing. Our organizers created a housing committee to work on rent control and access to safe, affordable housing. So the election may be over but those committees continue to build and hold officials accountable, organize around issues that voters care about, and will be stronger for the next election.
We’re not only out on doors, encouraging people to come out and vote, but also building a connection into the organization into leadership pipeline so that the same people whose doors we canvass in September become a volunteer canvasser in October on a rent control petition and then, going into next year, could launch committees to work on a housing campaign that will deliver real, material change for their communities.
Scott Holliday, Detroit Action
Before I joined the Detroit Action team, I was on the board as the chief of staff of an SEIU local in Michigan and then Executive Director of the Michigan SEIU state council.
When I was on the board, Branden Snyder was our Executive Director and one of the things that we both deeply agreed on was building an infrastructure of organizing. We talk about it differently. Brandon is much more eloquent when he talks about organizing and I’m a goddamn junkyard dog. But leading up to the election we were talking about what was our issue cut, how are we framing this election?
We tried a bunch of shit that did not work, but the issue that we knew was the hottest was rent –– our “rent is too damn high” campaign. So that became the focus, and we let our tenants and renters organizer, Ms. T, just lead on the work of building our program. And that really helped us build up our tenant organizing work that she was doing just by treating renters and tenants as their own canvassable universe.
Steve Paul, OnePA
For the past year, we’ve been super focused on building a pipeline that moves every voter we talk to into an ongoing relationship with One PA. We knew we were going to knock over 700,00 doors last year. But the real question for us was how to get some people to stay connected and become members. We ensured that every conversation, whether at the door or over the phone, included an invitation to a meeting or member orientation. I appreciate CPD’s phone banking team for helping us follow up with those voters and moving them into our weekly Wednesday orientations. Building a voter-to-member pipeline was our major priority. The second key strategy was our participation in the Guardians of Democracy program. We wanted to move beyond transactional engagement with our folks and deepen leadership development. Instead of just asking our members to work the polls, we challenged them to build real relationships in their neighborhoods. We asked our members to talk to their neighbors at least three times before Election Day. We recruited 42 people into this program. This investment in our folks is about growing their leadership. Both of these strategies –– the intentional voter-to-member pipelines and hyper-local leadership development –– were critical in making sure we weren’t just reacting to the election but actually using the moment to strengthen our base and build real, long-term political power.
Blanca Macias, Make the Road Nevada
We also refined our member pipeline to get more people interested in joining us. So when we were out knocking on doors, we would get questions that were not really a part of a script, like people asking about specific things that are happening in their families and their neighborhood. And we would invite people to give us their contact info so we can follow-up and within 48 or 72 hours they get a call from one of our organizers to talk about whatever topic came up in that conversation at the door. And the organizer then invites them to come to a one-on-one, or asks them “here’s a meeting we’re having, can you come?”
So when any new person who shows up, the organizer would find that person at the event and make sure to connect, get them a plate of food, and recognize them: “hey we have a new person joining us today let’s give them a round of applause.”
And when we have that one-on-one, we learn more about what this person is dealing with and what their needs are. And if someone does become a member we can refer them to our membership services department. We just created this department actually and it’s a team that really helps our members as a whole, helping them with anything from accompanying someone to the welfare office, or if we hear from people who are dealing with domestic violence referring them to services, or just directing them to where they can get help with getting clothing for a job interview or where you can get diapers and formula since you said you cannot afford that.
So we’re very proud of that but there’s also some lessons learned. Like for one thing the number of voters we’re talking to, the volume of follow up was hard to keep up with. So we need to figure out a way to have more people doing that follow-up to reach people within that 48 hour or 72 hour window. It’s a work in progress, but it’s what we need to be doing more of.
DaMareo Cooper:
We’re going to get into some stories in a sec, but first I want to read this quote from Patrick Gaspard in something he wrote reflecting on the election, and then we’re going to go into this next part.
He says: “In or out of government, the center-left must insist on investments to build nimble membership organizations on the ground—of, by, and for the working class—that are connected to material goals. There is far too much reliance on short-term tactical messaging and electoral door knocks as substitutes for actual organizing. Campaigns and their leaders are mercenary by necessity. As a former labor hand, I wince at how loosely the term ‘organizer’ is thrown around by well-resourced campaigns that leave little behind in their wake. Without that deep non-electoral infrastructure in key states, we are well and truly doomed.”
When I read that, I read it as basically a love letter to us and to folks like you and folks who do the work you all do.
So I want to ask about when we talk about organizing, building that kind of non-electoral organization of working class people, how does that add value to civic engagement and electoral work? Like, instead of just doing the knock and drag that we’re all used to and that most political field money goes to, how does investing in leaders, having a program like Guardians of Democracy, how does that fit with or build on the rest of the electoral work your organizations are doing?
Scott Holliday
We wanted to make organizing the center point for our electoral actions. I think that there was a moment of clarity for us because we wanted our electoral work to speak directly to what we were hearing from our base. You were asking about how organizing adds value to our electoral work and one thing is that, because we’re organizers first, we’re always in community with people and having conversations with people. So we’re listening for what is coming up in those conversations we were just like, yeah, it’s housing right now. So our housing organizer, Ms. T, was able to get I think it was 13 or 15 of our tenant leaders into the Guardians of Democracy program.
These are folk who are renters who came out of her committee and they got trained and those folks had thousands of conversations with their networks and other folks in their building or on their block –– like actually their neighbors. And they’re talking to them about rent –– rent as an issue –– talking to them about our “rent is too damn high” legislative package up in Lansing, getting them to take action by calling the Speaker of the House and some of the other state reps in leadership around him. But also having concrete asks of people to go vote and make sure that they’re voting for the “rent is too damn high” package and the people that are going to pass it. And so by centering everything through that, we saw that issue start to take precedence through everything, our phones, our field, everything we did echoed back to Ms. T and her work. And to this day, she and her committee members are still calling through hot leads from the election right now.
DaMareo Cooper
When you say her and her committee, who are the people on her committee? Who are those folks?
Scott Holliday
They’re Detroit Action members, her leaders, folks on her renters and tenants committee. She’s got 15 renters who are tested members who have gone through the training program to move people in their circles and in their neighborhood. And now are coming back and helping to comb through all those conversations that we’re having on doors and folks who basically raised their hand and said, yeah, I’m fired up about rent. So that’s all she’s doing right now, bringing them into intake meetings, which is like our new member orientation.
Blanca Macias
When you talk about the difference between “knock and drag” regular political campaign GOTV and organizing, I think the biggest difference is that year round organizing fosters trust. That’s not something you can create in, like, six weeks before an election. Organizing builds political power by fostering trust, long-term relationships, and a consistent presence in the community. At MRNV, we make it a priority to maintain a year-round, issue-based canvass so we’re staying connected with community members regularly, and those conversations are mostly not about politics or voting. They’re about addressing immediate needs and providing resources and information.
So, we’ve become a trusted partner in the community — one that people recognize and rely on. When we knock on doors, we’re not just asking for a vote; we’re building relationships and empowering our gente to take collective action on issues that matter to them. So yeah, organizing is what builds trust and long-term relationships, that’s the foundation for real and lasting change that “knock and drag” can’t achieve
Ben Zucker, Step Up Louisiana
At Step Up Louisiana, we ran an Organizers In Training (OIT) program with both phone and door responsibilities like a canvass or a phone bank, but then the majority of their time the OITs were building out a relational program more similar to what the Guardians of Democracy do. Throughout the program each OIT had three four-hour door-knocking shifts, and then they had two phone banking shifts for the last three weeks of the election. And through that work they knocked on 49,342 doors and made 94,243 phone calls for a total of 29,542 conversations. That was the more traditional field program, and we did best to move the folks from those conversations into our base. But I think the more interesting work that they were doing was the relational organizing. We had 43 Organizers in Training and each OIT was responsible for recruiting ambassadors, which is a volunteer member organizer who is going to move other people in their community to vote, to participate in Step Up Louisiana actions, et cetera. So those 43 OITs recruited 448 ambassadors, which is a bit better than a ten-to-one ratio.
And then each ambassador was able to recruit roughly over eight people each to vote and take action. The ambassadors used the Empower app with a lot of support from CPD to be able to push through to that next level of voters. And so it’s like a little bit over a 4,000 person structure right now.
DaMareo Cooper
I just gotta add: there is no vended paid canvass that got paid for any field program anywhere in the country that can say the shit that you’re saying. That’s true, period. Because you’re training people and they’re putting them through a set of experiences.
Steve Paul
Yeah, so I think the thing I’m really upset about right now is this question of whether field works. I think it’s not about whether field works. The question to me is about strategy, capacity, and quality of your program. And so in Pennsylvania for example, even just looking at traditional field programs, those should typically have about a 15% contact rate. And then you have all these big programs who are coming in from out of State who are doing 3- 5% contact rate, and no one’s talking about what kind of quality control program are you running, what kind of training are you doing for your canvassers? So even within the traditional program, there’s like a huge range in quality.
The other thing to us is most of these programs that come into the state, they knock on all these doors, millions of doors, and then they just go away. It takes a long time to build relationships with people on the ground in order to move people. And honestly, you’re not changing nobody’s mind in a five minute conversation. You might need a 20 or 30 minute conversation –– you probably need multiple conversations. And you need to invest time to train canvassers to move them into a position where they’re able to have hard conversations and build relationships.
The second thing that’s parallel to that strategic difference, we ran our Guardians of Democracy program. We recruited 42 people in the neighborhoods where we organize. For us it wasn’t just about the election, though that was obviously a huge priority. But whatever we do in this election, we need to build the kind of sustainable organization that can withstand and react to whatever comes next no matter who’s the President. And that was the intention of the Guardians program. Someone else may have said this, but for us this was like a precinct captain program. But we wanted to build that kind of structure outside the Democratic party.
So our Guardians or Precinct Captains were having conversations with a list of 150 people who live, like, right in their neighborhood. People on their block. People that go to church with. People they see at the grocery store. And for our Guardians –– I know I said before that in our traditional field program we were hitting like a 15% – 20% contact rate and that was high for that kind of program –– but the contact rate for our Guardians was like 30 -35%.
And I’ll be honest there was some adjusting we had to go through like in terms of quality control because this wasn’t the traditional electoral knock program but was more like a distributed thing. Like, if you train Jayden to be a Guardian, he’s not “doing a shift.” It’s not the way we traditionally think about it. He’s literally chilling on his porch. He sees Ms. Betty across the street and he’s like, “yo, you voted? cool.” Put that down. And it took us a while to decide, yeah that counts, right? So it was just different than the usual “from four to eight you’re going to knock on 120 doors.” A Guardian is not just walking around during a specific time knocking on some doors. They’re going to the store and, oh yeah, you know what? I just saw so-and-so and talked to her about when she’s voting.
DaMareo Cooper
One thing I’m really interested in is the synergy between your civic engagement and political program and cultural organizing. Can any of you share some examples of that?
Ben Zucker
I definitely want to shout out my Co-Director Maria Harmon who leads our cultural organizing work. We do a bunch of different stuff to meet our different communities where they’re at.
So for example, Southern University is in Baton Rouge. It’s a public HBCU and it’s a very important part of our political ecosystem and their homecoming is a huge deal. We had a municipal election this year for the parish government: the council and mayor president. And so we brought a bunch of folks out to the homecoming and did a huge outreach event and we were able to get a lot of people signed up on voter pledge cards and that’s just one example of many.
We co-sponsored NOLA Zydeco Fest, where our members and OITs entered a gumbo competition. We brought a bunch of folks out who worked the whole festival and we were able to get hundreds of pledge to vote cards. There’s lots of other cultural organizing things that we do like a drag brunch and a film screening. And when I say “we did these things,” I’m talking about the members and leaders and organizers in training. These are not top-down staff driven events. We’re always trying to bring that creativity out of our members and Member Retention Recruitment Committees and volunteers and organizers and OITs. People say organizing is an art and a science and we know the numbers, but it is through that cultural organizing that we’re able to tap into the magic and keep the movement vibrant.
Blanca Macias
So one thing we’re really proud of is the mural our folks made in collaboration with our Guardians, local artists, and CPD. It’s really beautiful, and it’s become a place for our people to gather in East Las Vegas. For example, we’ve launched canvasses from the mural. We launched a big march from the mural and then ended it in this big parking lot with low riders and indigenous dancers from Mexico and food from local taquizas. It was insane. So it was hitting it on a comprehensive approach but also making sure that we didn’t lose our identity because being Guardian is part of our culture as an organization now. So we made sure that we continue to uplift in a way that was authentic to us.
So y’all, when you’re in Vegas, our mural is famous. You should check it out!
Steve Paul
There’s a lot of respectability politics around Black folks in political spaces. Too often, people try to box us in saying that to be taken seriously we have to fit a specific mold, whether that’s how we speak, dress, or where we come from. It’s basically policing our humanity. But then, there’s another layer where people see the communities we’re building with as disposable. Because of where they live, their background, or even their past, they’re written off as “not going to show up” or “not interested” in politics. And we reject both of those narratives.
We did something powerful, and I’m proud of it. We threw 15 parties at polling places with bounce houses for the kids, food, and music. Our Guardians in those areas reached out directly to their people, telling them, “Bring your kids, bring your family, bring your friends. Just come, eat, and let the kids play.” And my polling place was poppin’ for five, six hours straight. People were there, eating, connecting, and sharing space.
We also partnered with local rappers, organizing parties at clubs. We had a battle rap event with 15 rappers, each bringing their followers. Afterward, we had an honest conversation about politics. It wasn’t just about talking at them; we listened.
Long-term, we’re thinking about how to keep these conversations going. I’m hoping we can do a battle rap every month with a new topic that speaks to people’s lives. We’re not just focused on political engagement; we’re creating a space where people’s voices are heard and respected.
DaMareo Cooper
There’s a lot of people talking about this kind of work right now, but they really have no idea what your organizations do. When they talk about “field” they think it’s just random people knocking on doors and reminding people to vote, that kind of thing. And there’s a kind of reliance on metrics that are based on that kind of sand castle mentality. I knocked on a million doors. Oh, I made this many calls. Those metrics don’t really capture the long term effect of the kind of work you all are doing. So what should we be measuring that would show the value of the work you’re describing?
Scott Holliday
Yeah, I think what Blanca said earlier about trust is really important. For a lot of people we’re trying to reach there is a real lack of trust in, you know, politics as usual. They’re infrequent voters or low-propensity or whatever you want to call it for a reason. And we’re not going to change that with just more knocks, more calls. What’s going to get that person to vote is that they’re hearing from people they actually trust. And our members and leaders can be those trusted voices and trusted messengers.
So in terms of what we measure, yeah, not knocks but how many leaders do we have and how many people are our leaders in relationship with and moving to take action. That spoke-and-wheel model. How many wheels do we really have and how many spokes on each wheel? That’s the key.
Ben Zucker
I appreciate what Steve was saying about quality control and training. And I think there are a lot of great examples among organizations in this room that are really investing in the field team as an important base that can help drive the work after election time and be able to hold people accountable year round. For us at Step Up, we really care about the people who are participating in-person in the organization. And so we really are focused on quantifying how many people show up, how many attended the meeting? How many people showed up at the protest? I’m proud of the 50,000 doors or the hundred thousand calls for sure. But if that doesn’t turn into any more people at the meeting after, or if our meetings in January are smaller than our meetings were in June, then we missed one of the steps along the way. And we need to be identifying that. So that’s one thing.
The other is, something at Step Up we call it the “light switch” moment. So it’s like, when did it switch on for you? When did you have that moment where you knew that you were part of something bigger than yourself and you had the power to make change happen? And so it’s like members of our committees, tiers of our leadership ladder, there’s a lot of ways that we try to quantify that. But we should be thinking about what the light switch moments are and how we are having those sets of experiences so people are able to have that type of transformation.
Sara Cullinane
Of course it’s always important to hit as many doors as possible and engage as many voters as possible leading up to an election. But the tendency is only measuring doors and not real conversations or the caliber of engagement in those conversations. Instead of just measuring the number of knocks and conversations, let’s also take into account how our programs develop members and leaders and how those folks are able to engage in campaigns that create real material change, like the fight to raise the minimum wage or create an after school program.
So it starts with knocks, but then it’s conversations and members and leaders and actions taken by those leaders to win campaigns and the outcomes of those campaigns so those leaders can point to those things and say “we did this.” When they feel that sense of accomplishment, that’s what inspires them to have more conversations and bring more people into this work.
It’s rare for any funder to ask for these kinds of long term impacts of a voter engagement program and to take a longer term view of how change happens. It’s a lot easier to measure “knocks” so that’s what people do. But the more important lasting impact that we need to figure out how to measure is the development of leaders and how those leaders are taking action and mobilizing others to win concrete changes in their communities.