The survival of American democracy is literally a race between how much organizing Democrats can do between now and November 2026 and how successful Trump will be in suppressing the right to vote and rigging the count. One piece of hopeful news, as I reported in my post yesterday, is that the preponderance of people who voted for Biden in 2020 but stayed home in 2024 were not succumbing to apathy but were pocketbook progressives who were looking for leadership that they didn’t find.
What kind of organizing will it take for Democrats to have a decent shot at taking back the House in 2026? Who is doing it well, or badly? I put those and related questions to one of America’s premier organizing veterans and students of organizing, Michael Ansara, whose just-published book is The Hard Work of Hope. You can watch the full interview here.
Here are some of Ansara’s key points.
On the Democratic Party:
“The Democratic Party is a hollow shell. It is primarily about moving money and consultants and trying to dictate which consultants the campaigns use. But it’s not a party. It can’t deliver votes. Its leaders aren’t held accountable by anybody. The people that are elected aren’t held accountable by their voters.
“The second tragedy of the Democratic Party is that for the last 40-some years it has been enthralled with elites. Now our elites are, you know, include some university presidents and some charming actors and a few sports players, but they’re still elites, and there’s still an awful lot of hedge fund managers and tech billionaires who have been in the elite of the Democratic Party and who the Democratic Party has pandered to. I don’t see either of those changing, and so I think the renewal will have to come from candidates and insurgent organizations.”
On social media, field operations, and organizing:
“The Democrats, particularly on the presidential races and the Senate races for the last ten years, their view is all persuasion is done by advertising, digital or television. The field operation is usually paid canvassers who don’t live in the neighborhood knocking on doors. They are paid by the number of doors they knock on, the number of IDs. So of course they’re going to go fast to maximize revenue.
“They knock on a door. And they say, Who are you for? Someone says I’m uncertain. I’m unclear. They say thank you very much, and mark them down as uncertain, and move on. There’s no engagement. None. So why should you care?
“The only path for us is to organize so deeply and so broadly that we turn out a massive number of voters in the 2026 election, despite whatever suppression.
“There is, unfortunately, a paucity of organizers, and to go back to our statement before, I don’t think we can wait for trained paid organizers. I think we have to figure out how to get thousands, tens of thousands of volunteers who are going to protests to become organizers in their own community.
“I think we’re doing reasonably well on the mobilizing scale. Right now, I think that’s happening and is going to continue to happen. I’m very worried that there’s not enough organizing. We have a host of issues. We could be organizing young people about student debt and student loans. We could be organizing veterans about what’s happening in the VA. We could be organizing rural people about the fact that they’re going to lose their rural hospitals, and their health care is going to cost a whole lot more, if not being out of reach entirely.”
On Democratic New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani:
“He made great use of the innovative public financing laws in New York. But the other thing that doesn’t get remarked on nearly enough is that he built an organization of 50,000 volunteers. Let me say that again, 50,000 volunteers, primarily young people. And they knocked on well over a million doors, and they were amplifying those social media posts to all their friends, and they were talking to all their friends, and for what I think is the very first time in any New York election ever voters under 45 equaled voters over 45. So he dramatically expanded the electorate.
“The creative use of social media was combined with organizing a massive field operation of volunteers, particularly young volunteers. It is in that interplay that we get something worth replicating.”