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Here is the story of Progressive campaigns, how we got here, our challenges, and what we are doing to fix it.
We’re losing elections in large numbers. Aside from currently controlling the Senate and the Presidency, Democrats have lost an enormous amount of legislative control. Specifically, we have lost power in down-ballot races, which don’t have large budgets and teams of experts. Since 2008, we have lost 44 seats in Congress, over 1000 state legislative seats, and control of 18 legislatures.
There is no single answer that explains why Dems are lacking electoral success. Common lines of thought include; messaging, candidate quality, national mood, and other issues as contributing factors. Our intent is to focus on the role of campaigns themselves.
Technological and behavioral shifts are driving major changes in the way voters communicate and engage. Everyone understands that landlines have gone the way of the pager. The campaign community responded by shifting to cell phones + landlines. But now an ever-decreasing percentage of people will answer their cell phones. Together, these are limiting the impact of phone-banking, which is one of our most relied-upon tools. A similar story is emerging for door-knocking, which is being squeezed by fewer people willing to welcome visitors to their doors. Voters receive a literal onslaught of direct mail the 3-4 weeks before an election, despite research that shows paper mail has little impact. All of this is even more pronounced for Democrats and Progressives because so many younger voters, who lean Democratic, live primarily online. In response, social media has understandably become a common channel for campaigns, but we have virtually no knowledge of whether our efforts are effective at anything related to electoral success.
So far, the response to this outcome is (mostly) to do more of the things we already do – recruit more volunteers, knock on more doors, make more calls, raise more money, buy more ads, etc.
Correspondingly, spending on campaigns is growing fast. In 2006, we spent around $6 on federal and state campaigns. By 2024, that amount was $24B. Yet, the spending is not correlated to wins.
According to the Center for Public Integrity, in the 2016 elections, Democrats substantially outspent Republicans on television advertising for state-level elections and still faced losses across the board.
Progressive political campaigns are increasingly ineffective and rely on outdated methods. Every year, we invest billions of dollars in Democratic political campaigns. These campaigns send out mail, make calls, knock on doors, place ads, set up yard signs, and more. Some of our candidates win and some lose. Then, the next cycle starts and every campaign is executed with the same plan that existed before. Same campaign professionals. Same plan. Same tools. Different candidates. The one constant is a lack of measurement and improvement in how we execute these campaigns.
The lessons we do learn don’t make it into campaigns. Every year, organizations conduct research to understand what worked and what didn’t. Articles are written and published with lessons learned. Many of these indicate that current tactics did not work well. These lessons rarely result in any meaningful change in the way we execute our political campaigns and the old tactics continue.
If we’re willing to spend over $20B per cycle on political campaigns, then clearly, they must matter. And if they matter, then why do we continue to execute the same campaign tactics with little knowledge of what works, and what doesn’t, or any mechanisms for improving campaigns for the next cycle?
Today, we measure campaigns with metrics like; dollars raised, calls made, doors knocked, and more. But do these metrics matter? We just don’t know and we don’t have the systems in place to learn. Our campaigns are getting more expensive every cycle with no correlation to success. What we can infer is that doing more of the same but with higher levels of funding is not the answer.
We must begin to understand how a rapidly changing media and communication landscape affects the tactics we use to win elections. It is not enough to raise more money to make more calls and knock on more doors and hope for the best.
Fortunately, a lot of things have changed with technology in the past 10 years that significantly change what’s possible and within reach. Data gathering and analysis was very much out of reach 10 years ago but is easily available today. AI is on the horizon and has the potential to disrupt everything – from which races to invest in, where to invest money in the final week, how to reach voters, and potentially many other ways, some predictable, some not.
By answering fundamental questions about what is working and then helping campaigns optimize, both cycle to cycle and in real-time, we can build a strategic advantage on Election Day for every level of Progressive campaigns.
At the same time, there are severe challenges in helping this group. Usability, ease of adoption, and the need for massive scale top the list. It is not enough to have new answers, data, and even new tools if only big budget campaigns can leverage them.
Our Mission is to fundamentally improve progressive campaigns into easily executed and highly effective operations that help Progressive/Democratic electoral efforts succeed.
To accomplish this ambitious goal, we have a multi-year plan to answer critical questions around voter behavior.
Measure and learn what works. We have to start with getting answers to some hard but important questions, such as “What actually motivates a person to vote on election day?” We know it’s not a stranger knocking on a door or a pile of mailers. At the same time, we have always known that personal relationships have an outsized influence. So how does that intersect with online or social media in a way that can be measured and harnessed?
Identify new trends. Another critical objective is getting ahead of new trends and changing media. it might come as a surprise to some that younger people are far less likely to turn to Google for search. And in the 2024 election, TikTok is expected to be a dominant channel. But it was barely visible in 2020 and may not be around during the next cycle. So how do we create a system that can constantly identify new tactics and mediums — without waiting for an entire cycle to complete before we finally adopt it at the state and local level?
Build evidence. Starting in 2026, we will invest in local campaigns that are looking to try out promising new campaign tactics and participate in a comprehensive measurement system. Our aim will be to solidify the capacity to measure tactics in real-time and at scale.
Propagate intelligent campaigns. Campaigns are fast-paced, pop-up, temporary organizations. To be able to run new, complex, optimized campaigns, the knowledge must be ‘built-in’ to the tools that our campaign use. Here, we create a cooperative movement that connects the Progressive-only tool providers into a common system that constantly measures and learns. This final piece will make it easy for any progressive campaign, of any size, with any level of sophistication, to run an optimized campaign in a modern media environment.
ProgressiveLabs is a Social Benefit Organization, dedicated to helping down-ballot Progressive organizations run effective, optimized campaigns that win on Election Day.