There’s no miracle cure for organizing our way to victory in 2024. It’s going to be an all-of-the-above, victory-by-a-thousand-tactics type fight.
What’s exciting, in that context, is that the Biden campaign is embracing new tactics on top of tried-and-true tactics—like Reach, the relational organizing tool that I’ve loved ever since I used it in my own campaign for WisDems chair in 2019.
Traditional organizing tools help guide you towards contacting specific lists of voters, which (when paired with a good data operation), is critical. But the great thing about Reach is that it lets you go beyond that. You can use it to record info from conversions with anyone you talk to—for example, at a block party—or to find out which of your own friends and neighbors haven’t registered to vote. In other words, it takes the world’s oldest political tactic, “talking to people,” and lets you systematize and focus in a way that can update the underlying database the campaign will use to calibrate its targeting.
With the Biden campaign and their killer digital and organizing teams, we’re scaling up Reach here in Wisconsin, and it’s probably coming to a swing state near you. NPR did a story about it—listen here.
Or check out the app’s website here: reach.vote
None of this takes away from door-to-door canvassing, phone banking, or any of the other classics. In fact, we knocked on tens of thousands of doors and called tens of thousands of voters this past weekend. But what we’ve learned over the years is that different voters respond to different things. If you want to reach everyone, you’ve got to have multiple tactics in your toolkit. That’s exactly how Team Biden is approaching it.
That leaves one other critical ingredient: all of us. Are you ready to work your heart out this year?
Volunteer with the Biden campaign. Wherever you are, volunteer with us at WisDems to turn Wisconsin blue. You can get involved here.
