How Field Organizing Beats Big Money

If you live in Michigan’s Seventh Congressional District and have gotten a knock at the door from progressive Democrat Will Lawrence’s campaign, you’re in good company. In the final days before the election, Lawrence and his volunteers have launched a massive final push to speak with as many people as possible, including registered Republicans and independents.

By Thursday morning, the campaign had knocked on roughly 200,822 doors. Based on typical household size, that means volunteers have had some form of contact with nearly 500,000 people, about two-thirds of the district’s entire population.

The perpetual outreach is uncommon among mainstream political candidates, who more typically rely on financial support, TV ads, and fundraising events to buoy their runs for office. But it’s an obvious approach for a grassroots organizer like Lawrence, who co-founded the environmental activist group Sunrise Movement, and has used his campaign to organize and win gains for his district even before winning office, such as the food drive that benefited 5,000 people and the medical debt relief drive that canceled $130,000 worth of bills, as the Prospect reported.

Progressive candidates across the country are drawing on a similar ethic, fueled by the understanding that holding one-on-one conversations with as many people as possible can outweigh the heaps of money right-wingers are pouring into their districts to defeat them. As the Prospect reported earlier this week, Donald Trump’s newly formed Safety & Affordability PAC threw $4 million into the district to flood it with attack ads in a bid to save one-term Republican incumbent Tom Barrett. But Lawrence’s lead in the contest between the two has been growing for months, polls show.

Michigan Sen. Elissa Slotkin, who previously represented the district, and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer joined him on Wednesday; they are among the several elected officials who have lent their power to get Lawrence to D.C., including Reps. Maxwell Frost (D-FL), Ro Khanna (D-CA), Pramila Jayapal (D-WA), and Lauren Underwood (D-IL), all of whom joined him on the trail. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), meanwhile, joined Lawrence’s Lansing town hall via phone. Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) visited his campaign office.

Speaking with the Prospect shortly before Election Day, Lawrence said his canvassers would keep knocking on doors until the last minute. It was obvious to him and his team that talking with as many people as possible “would have to be the heart of our campaign,” which he credited with his primary win.

“Over the last several cycles there have been a lot of challenges to the idea that field organizing makes a difference at all,” Lawrence said. “There are literally people who can produce statistics that say ‘there’s no difference whether you knock a door or you don’t, it doesn’t affect the outcome,’ and I don’t buy that at all.”

His campaign doesn’t pay canvassers, so the volunteers are there because they believe in the project, not because they need to hit as many houses as possible to cash out, he added. That’s what Elon Musk has been doing through his America PAC, which spent nearly $77 million in the third quarter of this year to buy Congress for his far-right allies. Nearly half of that money has gone to companies that hire people to campaign for Republicans, Wired reported, such as Denver-based Blitz Canvassing, which is owned by GP3 Partners, a consultancy backed by the California private equity firm Seidler Equity Partners. Musk’s PAC has also hired various other volunteers-for-hire companies, including Echo Canyon Consulting, GEG Strategies, In Field Strategies, GEG Strategies, The Synapse Group, Threshold Strategies, and Patriot Grassroots.

Right-wing candidates themselves have followed suit, such as a group of Republicans in tight races in Oregon, which is spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on Blitz Canvassing, paying people $25 an hour to knock doors, though they don’t always know they’ll be doing that when they get hired.

But canvassers for Lawrence, who are visiting unlikely voters, independents, and those who have previously voted Republican, are supporters like Lora Newmeyer.

She’s a 73-year-old who lives in rural, conservative-leaning Livingston County, east of the district’s major population center, Lansing. She had done some canvassing previously, including for Kamala Harris and Elissa Slotkin with Livingston Democrats. After the results of the last presidential election, she and her husband “felt like the wind was taken out of our sails. We thought, ‘This is not possible, we’ve got to do something.’”

They began attending every protest and rally they could, and made it their mission to canvass for Lawrence every single day. They go out from 3 p.m. to 5 p.m. Her husband drives; she does the talking. It’s energizing to speak with like-minded Democrats, she said, but it’s conversations with conservative voters where she really makes a difference. Newmeyer connects with them over their shared anger toward Trump, his corrupt administration, and the high cost of basic necessities—issues that voters across parties raise as major concerns.

“They’re bringing up how they absolutely hate the Trump administration,” Newmeyer said. “A lot of times when you say, ‘What is important to you and your family?’ they don’t specifically say groceries or gasoline, they’re like, ‘Trump has got to go.’”

She encounters some conservatives, of course, who don’t want to talk to her, or repeat hateful or false talking points, or tell her to get lost. But that’s not everyone, and those who do take time for a conversation share concerns that are common regardless of party affiliation. “The cost of groceries, affordability, they blame [Trump] for everything, all of the failures,” Newmeyer said.

And when she moves the conversation to discuss Lawrence, she’s encountering goodwill and respect for his message among Democrats, and at least in some cases, a willingness to check out his website among Republicans.

“What they really have seemed to love about Will is the fact that he is so approachable and actually his age as well,” Newmeyer said. “We need some fresh people with new ideas who will re-energize this country and share their new ideas with us.”

Can a people-powered field campaign outweigh the power of Musk’s giant pile of money? Yes, Lawrence told the Prospect. He proved it when he was outspent in the primary and won anyway, and he’ll do it again next week, he says. Voters know they can’t trust what they see online or on TV, so that puts a premium on a face-to-face conversation.

“Real enthusiasm from a real volunteer is a thing you can’t buy and you can’t fabricate, so when people can see that, people can see that’s real,” Lawrence said. “When somebody real appears at your door, that cuts through 50 negative ads.”