When a presidential campaign ends in failure, small things prepared for the victory die with it. Celebratory merchandise rots in boxes; laudatory magazine covers leak to social media instead of going to the printers. And, as the news moves on, election season narratives that hardened over the campaign float away. Moments away from becoming doctrine, these explanations are half-forgotten, never to be used by journalists and historians to authoritatively describe what Middle America is and what it cares about again. The way that politics will never be the same again end up never to be at all.
The campaign of former Vice President Kamala Harris had many such stories prepared to explain her victory. Remember when the election would be decided by the celebrity endorsements? Remember when—following a comedian calling Puerto Rico “garbage” at the Trump campaign’s capstone rally—Latino voters would reject Trump? Recall Harris winning enough of the “quiet female” vote to topple the right’s embrace of the manosphere? What about the theory (which I took) that pollsters might be overcorrecting for mistakes made in past Trump elections? There was even a final big headline to fit Harris’s main attack on the 45th president and gain the many moderates: Former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly declared Trump a fascist in the New York Times—which was made into a key push at the end of Harris’ campaign.
Each of these stories and theories gave those to the left-of-center reasons to hope that a margin-of-error election would end well. But, among all of these late-breaking reports and declarations, there was one anecdote hung above the rest. This was perhaps the narrative-of-all-narratives on liberal social media at the tail end of the election: that Harris had a major advantage over Donald Trump because of the strength of her “ground game.”
As the story—and real reporting—explained, Harris’ campaign had used their substantial financial advantage to build what was described as a “turnout machine”: a tightly-structured effort centered around 2,500 paid campaign staffers who went out to knock on doors, recruit volunteers, and get voters to the polls. Trump, on the other hand, had largely outsourced his field operations to a constellation of inexperienced, risible individuals. Most notably, he predominantly relied on PACs led by Charlie Kirk, mostly known for attempting to own the libs as a podcaster, and Elon Musk, the world’s richest and most brain-rotted by X man.
Reports seemed to confirm that this choice by the Republican was a disaster. On October 30th, Wired reported that a firm associated with Musk’s America PAC had tricked volunteers into signing up, moved them across the country in the back of U-Hauls, and threatened to withhold pay unless unrealistic quotas were met. Maybe that explained why The Guardian had reported less than two weeks earlier that canvassers associated with Musk’s PAC were committing serial fraud. Roughly a quarter of door knocks in Arizona and Nevada recorded were potentially faked, the paper said.
But then, disaster did not come. Once the election results rolled in, it was hard to find much evidence that Harris’ heralded field operation yielded her benefit. Trump swamped her in all of the seven swing states where her campaign had made their major investments. Campaign staffers, in post-mortems, have often noted the most fiercely-contested states wound up swinging to the right by less than the country overall. But it was hardly clear that even that was a direct result of her campaign effort. Three of the states most resilient to the national rightward shift (Washington, Utah, and Oklahoma) saw basically not investment whatsoever by either campaign.
Those who followed the 2016 election likely felt a sense of déjà vu. Hillary Clinton supposedly had a major advantage in “ground game” in her contest against Trump, too. Famously, Trump’s campaign office in one of the largest counties in Colorado had a 12-year-old as key in helping coordinate volunteers and the get out the vote operation. But, just like what happened eight years later, this supposedly insurmountable gap wound up meaning nothing. In the end, Trump won not just all of the truly important contested states, but also either contending in or carrying several places that Clinton’s supposedly sophisticated operation never even thought of as competitive.
It all begs the question: What is it the “ground game” that Democrats supposedly are winning? And why is it alluring to talk up, despite the fact that they keep losing?
Field operations are very far from new to American politics. In fact, for most of early American history, the activities that might be described as a “ground game” essentially encompassed all of American political activity. Parties were structured as vote-producing machines, with elections being won and lost based on the efforts by operations like Tammany Hall. As late as the 1960s, Republicans alleged political machines manipulated democracy, even outright stealing a presidential election. The “new politics” of the 1960s and 1970s were organized as an explicit revolt against this status quo, one that would ultimately triumph with the dismantling of the New Deal coalition by Ronald Reagan in the 1980s. Machine politics, it appeared, were out, and a politics defined by TV-style branding and polarization was in.
This consensus would prevail over American politics over the following decades, ultimately shifting styles towards a brand of telegenic centrism embodied by the likes of former President Bill Clinton and an early “compassionate conservative” version of former President George W. Bush. Over this period, as detailed in Sam Rosenfeld and Daniel Schlozman’s book The Hollow Parties, the structures of both parties would atrophy until they served little purpose other than raising funds from their favored batch of the rich.
A major break came—or, at least, seemed to come—with the campaign of former President Barack Obama. The then-young Illinois Democrat positioned himself as an opponent to the establishment. He adopted grassroots, and online fundraising—a direct social media presence combined with a robust “ground game” across the country. It followed in the geeky hope of Howard Dean’s campaign that was screamed out of existence. And the effort received substantial media attention, first during the campaign itself but especially after it seemingly brought results. Obama won in a landslide, and his field operations were immediately memorialized as one of the many innovations that allowed him to run laps around his old, stodgy opponents.
Studies found Obama’s field operations had a real impact. But, on reflection, they also helped enshrine an idea of “ground game” as simple effort and innovation: the political equivalent of Apple producing a better mobile phone than its competitors and the technocrat hope of Democrats generally to outsmart politics. There was a sense that Obama had essentially “solved” politics; that, in the words of one expert, “In the 21st century, the candidate with [the] best data, merged with the best messages dictated by that data, wins.”
Through this, one understanding of Obama’s success took a unique form. Rather than focusing on what he actually represented—his promises, rhetoric, and charisma—both the media and political establishment chose to fixate on the nuts-and-bolts of his campaign. His organization, not his message, was understood to be the thing that future Democratic campaigns needed to replicate. From this, we got the false promise of our modern “ground game”: a form of political organizing that didn’t require, well, politics.
In 2016, that idea met disaster. That year, Hillary Clinton—whose evident political liabilities were all but ignored by an establishment class who presumed to have hacked elections themselves—employed many of the same staffers from Obama 2012. Instead of crafting the kind of cohesive messages her opponents did, she tallied endorsements and often honed messages for swing voters based on specific demographics to be targeted. During the general election, she infamously left the campaign trail for nearly the entire month of August to tour the fundraising circuit, presumably to fund her expansive operation. Once the election finally came, her effort had everything you’d want for a successful campaign, but very little of what you would want for a successful candidate. In the end, it failed dramatically. The product itself mattered far more than how it was sold.
In the years since, these elements of Clinton’s campaign have been understood separately: a bizarre case where an effort utterly unable to define itself also managed to create a robust organizational structure. But, in light of the Harris campaign seeming to do the exact same thing often with the same Obama-era people in charge, it’s worth considering that this contradiction isn’t really much of a contradiction at all. Think about what it would entail if it actually were the case that better field operations were all that were needed to win national elections? You wouldn’t need to make any hard decisions or tough promises. No candidate would be any worse than any other. Politicians would come to power with no obligations to anyone besides the volunteers and the donors—especially the donors—who provided them with the resources to create their new political machines. If you’re the kind of person in D.C. who doesn’t hold any real beliefs other than the idea that it should be you working in the White House, it must sound like an absolute dream come true. It may even be appealing enough that you’d bet the country on it twice.
In and of itself, there’s nothing wrong with having a “ground game”—even a robust one. But if there is anything that the Trump era has made clear, it is that an effective organization is absolutely no substitute for a deficient product. After two attempts to push forward a deliberately vague candidacy on the back of field organizers, one can hope Democrats won’t assume a third time try will be the charm.
