The organizing model that failed the Democrats

By Greta Carnes

In 2024, Democrats knocked more doors and made more phone calls than any campaign in history, but we still lost the presidential election (including every battleground state), the Senate, and the House. There are many factors that led to Democrats losing – a historically unpopular incumbent, a late-in-cycle top-of-ticket candidate swap – but the 2024 election directly revealed the limitations of our current organizing strategy, and what needs to happen as the midterm elections enter full swing.  

Democratic campaigns are still running the same outdated organizing model that we’ve been running since 2008, rooted in making phone calls, knocking doors, and mass texting voters. But our entire world is different than it was in 2008. People don’t answer their phones anymore: in 2024, Democrats made 300 million phone call attempts, with only a 3% contact rate. (That number fell to 2% across Democratic campaigns in 2025.) We are all inundated with text message spam, so much so that Apple’s most recent iOS update now filters calls and texts from unknown numbers. Trust in institutions and in each other is steadily declining, meaning people are also much less likely to change political behavior based on what a stranger says to them.

Democratic campaigns have achieved enormous scale in terms of attempts, but we’re struggling to reach and win over voters from every demographic. While we’ve made solid progress in reaching voters and potential voters online, we still struggle to connect and engage with people in an ever-evolving digital landscape. It is past time to adapt our organizing programs to meet today’s challenges.

Last year, we formed a working group of organizing, digital, data, and tech practitioners to put together an extensive report about the Biden (and then Harris) campaign’s organizing strategy. We interviewed and surveyed nearly 100 staffers from the campaign, including leadership in Wilmington and organizers across battleground states; we also analyzed campaign data, training materials, and results from early organizing pilots. Our report digs into where the campaign’s “Blended Model” of organizing failed, both in how it was designed and how it was implemented. It also outlines recommendations for Democratic campaigns going forward. Read the full report here >>

After those months of conversations and interviews, here’s the TL;DR of what happened in 2024: The 2024 Biden campaign attempted to address the limitations of traditional organizing programs by creating a so-called “Blended Model” of organizing (meant to blend offline and online organizing). Instead of integrating online and offline organizing, the Blended Model’s design – specifically its introduction of “engagement organizers,” which were turfed staffers alongside traditional field organizers but responsible for the “online” organizing – siloed digital tools and tactics within the overall organizing program. Staff also reported there wasn’t enough training and support as states tried to implement this new organizing model: in fact, nearly 1 in 3 first-time organizers said they received no training or insufficient training. The campaign also struggled to measure the impact of the “engagement” vertical of the organizing program. These were all already issues before the candidate switch; once there was an influx of enthusiastic volunteers signing up to volunteer for Kamala Harris, many state teams reverted to what they knew how to do, which was the traditional model of knocking doors and making phone calls. The campaign made a historic number of voter contact attempts – but unable to actually reach or persuade voters at scale, we lost. 

Our report dives into three recommendations for Democratic campaigns going forward. 

#1. Every Democratic organizing program going forward needs to incorporate “relational” organizing throughout every phase of their programs, training and scaling conversations between people who already know each other.

This doesn’t mean never knocking another door or making another phone call, but it does mean investing in leveraging trusted messengers, which we know are more persuasive and durable than strangers at the door. Data shows relational conversations as 2.5x more effective than outreach from an unknown person. It won’t be possible (yet!) to reach every voter through someone they know and trust, and campaigns should still be using a constellation of both warm and cold tactics to reach voters – but where we can leverage an existing relationship, we must. Trusted messengers will help campaigns cut through the noise of misinformation and AI-generated content from the right or outside groups. 

#2. Campaigns need to finally actually integrate online and offline organizing.

We talk about this every cycle, but we still haven’t achieved this – especially at a national scale. Campaigns need to train organizers and volunteers to work across all channels where supporters naturally engage, from neighborhood-based app groups to community events to group text threads. Campaigns also need to give organizers access to and autonomy over digital tactics, tools, and content creation to help them organize more effectively and more efficiently. While the 2024 Blended Model attempted this, future efforts require moving beyond parallel, siloed organizing and “digital” (or “digital organizing,” or “distributed organizing,” or “mobilization,” or “engagement”) departments; instead, digital tactics and tools must be fully integrated into an organizing department. 

#3. Campaigns need to hire agile, senior teams that have room and freedom to innovate.

Organizing programs should hire smaller, more skilled teams trained to adapt quickly, experiment, and iterate. Organizers should never again spend the majority of their time sitting at a desk making cold voter contact attempts with a 2% contact rate, and we should not continue to lose brilliant innovations from organizers forced to hide their “rogue” successes. We also need to invest in training (and re-training!) our talent between election years to ensure we have the strongest possible pipeline prepared to lead the next cycle’s campaigns, as well as prioritize elevating staff who are committed to innovation and adaptation, not just doing things the same way they’ve done before.

Some readers may be skeptical that anything about campaign organizing needs to change. After all, Democrats have overperformed in nearly every 2025 and 2026 election so far. But these successes in off-year and small-scale special elections do not mean we don’t need to adapt how we engage supporters and contact voters. Democrats are on a winning streak because our candidates are good, our message around cost of living is effective, and most importantly, the kinds of voters that choose to vote in off-year elections are angry at Trump and Republicans, predictably voting against the unpopular president and his party. We saw the exact same trends during Trump’s first term. 

Now is the time to modernize our organizing programs to be ready for 2028, when the fate of our democracy relies on Democrats effectively reaching, persuading, and mobilizing as many voters as possible.

To test and refine these recommendations into real implementation plans and best practices, this cycle myself and others will be working with campaigns and organizations to run organizing pilots to experiment and test new outreach tactics (you can read a sample set of them here). If you’d like to talk more about running organizing pilots and trying new things, or if you’d like to discuss the findings of our report more, you should reach out to me here!

Greta Carnes is a longtime Democratic organizing strategist who has served in various roles, from National Organizing Director on Pete for America, to co-founding relational organizing startup Relentless. 

A new analysis from DC political blog NOTUS found that “millionaires are overrepresented in the U.S Senate—by a lot.” At least 73 of the 100 Senators in Washington are millionaires, with at least 30 of them worth over $10 million.