MARYLAND DEMOCRATS HAD A 7-1 ADVANTAGE. THAT STILL WASN’T ENOUGH

Whatever you think about Democratic policies (and I disagree with pretty much all of them), their organizing philosophy is brilliant. It isn’t about television commercials, glossy mailers, or political celebrities parachuting into town three weeks before Election Day. It is about relationships.

The strategy is methodical and extremely successful. Pick a target state. Identify the counties that determine those states and the neighborhoods that determine those counties. Then go into those communities and stay there. Not for three weeks. For years.

They open community centers and nonprofit 501c3 and 501c4 organizations that provide free services to the community and are tailored for each community. After two years, the organizations become a trusted source in the community. They start hiring people who have gone through their programs and have allegiance to their organization to be the mouthpieces of their messages. When elections roll around, and people open their doors, they see someone who looks like them, from their own community, representing a trusted organization in their neighborhood. This is why we wake up one morning and suddenly states like North Carolina and Georgia are purple. 

Democrats win because they build organizations, provide useful community resources, recruit people from within the community, and develop trusted local leaders. They build relationships long before asking anyone for a vote. When election season arrives, the campaign isn’t knocking on a stranger’s door. A neighbor is.

That is the part the Republican Party still doesn’t seem to understand. Politics is ultimately about people, and people listen to people they trust.

Republican campaigns raise enormous amounts of money. Consultants are hired. Polls are commissioned. Ads are purchased. Mailers are printed. Text messages are blasted by the millions. Meanwhile, the people expected to actually make the ground game work are volunteers. They knock on doors after work, make phone calls between dinner and bedtime, and organize meetings while raising children, running businesses, caring for parents, and paying for their own gas. They are handed without cumbersome technology, incomplete data, or instructions designed by people who have never actually organized a neighborhood.

As a grassroots leader, I have literally had to abandon expensive political apps and go back to Excel spreadsheets, printed maps, and a simple instruction, “Here are the doors. Go talk to people.”

The fact is, it isn’t about how much money a campaign has; it’s how they spend it. A candidate’s “war chest” is only as good as their ground game. Democrats know that. Which is why they pay for their ground game, and handsomely. 

Yet every election cycle, Republican donors are presented with impressive-looking projections promising voter conversions and a myriad of metrics that sound like it means something. But you can’t put a metric on a mom texting 10 friends about a candidate or the ROI on someone who has spent five years building trust in a community. How many “impressions” equal a conversation between two parents standing outside their children’s school? We don’t need to parachute people in to get the job done. The people we need are already there.

Here’s the good news. Republicans don’t need to duplicate every dollar Democrats spend on organizing because we have something they don’t — passion.

There are millions of Americans who genuinely believe in limited government, strong families, parental rights, religious liberty, free enterprise, constitutional government, and the American experiment. They don’t need to be paid to believe those things or tell their friends and neighbors about them. What they need is infrastructure, trained grassroots leaders, usable voter data, and straightforward technology that works. Those leaders already exist. I was trained by one of the best of them. 

Fund the people who know how to build and lead grassroots networks instead of assuming the army will magically organize itself. Give them the tools to mobilize volunteers. Let them hire additional help where necessary. Encourage organizations to collaborate instead of duplicating one another’s work. And most importantly, start before Labor Day. You cannot build trust in six weeks.

I have taken versions of this strategy to Republican Party leaders on the state and national level for years, sharing this proven method for winning elections. The response has essentially been a pat on the back, followed by business as usual. Meanwhile, grassroots activists are expected to keep doing more with less, while millions of dollars flow into the pockets of political consultants who upcharge everything and sell donors on voter-conversion schemes that repeatedly fail to deliver. Yet people keep buying into it.

At some point, enough is enough.

If political donors operated their companies the way grassroots organizations are expected to operate, many of those companies wouldn’t survive. Imagine telling your sales department we aren’t going to pay your managers. We aren’t going to provide reliable customer data. We’re going to give you software nobody understands. Your salespeople can work whenever they have spare time. And by the way, you’ll need to pay for some of your own supplies. Now go beat a professionally staffed competitor.

Nobody would run a business that way. Yet Republicans routinely run elections that way.

Those 80 million voters who voted in the last presidential election are not going to come out in the midterm elections because they already got their guy. They aren’t sitting around wondering how they can become more involved with a political party. Most Americans aren’t even affiliated with a political party. They aren’t paying attention to what happens in Washington, D.C. They’re just focusing on rent, mortgage, putting food on the table, gas in the car, and if they’re lucky, a summer vacation. 

If you want those Americans to participate in the midterm elections, you have to meet them where they are and answer the two questions they’re asking: “What does it have to do with me?” and “Why should I care?”

As the midterm elections loom, and business as usual marches on, Republicans are going to have to re-evaluate their priorities and start “Funding Freedom,” as my friend Austin Jack says. 

So here is my challenge to every major political donor in America.

The next time a consultant walks into your office asking for millions of dollars to “win” a race, ask some different questions. How much of this money is reaching the grassroots? Who is organizing the neighborhoods? Who are the trusted local leaders? How long have they been there? What are you building that will still exist the day after the election? Are we building relationships — or buying transactions? 

And perhaps the most important question: “If I give you this money, are you building something that wins elections, or simply buying more politics?”

Republicans do not need another election-cycle miracle. They need infrastructure. They need relationships. They need a permanent ground game. And they need to finally start funding the people who have been doing that work all along.

Democrats learned years ago that elections are not won in television studios, consultants’ offices, fundraising dinners, or Washington conference rooms. They are won in communities. At kitchen tables. At school events. In churches, on sidewalks, at the grocery store, and on front porches.

Republicans can keep spending fortunes trying to manufacture enthusiasm every two years, or they can finally invest in the people who already have it.

Fund the ground game. Build the relationships. Earn the trust. Then win the election.

PROSECUTORS BUSTED THE BIDEN DEEPFAKE WITHOUT AN AI LAW. THAT’S THE POINT

It’s not complicated.

But it does require Republicans to stop doing what hasn’t worked — and start investing in what does. At this point, that would be a miracle.

Kimberly Fletcher is founder and president of Moms for America.