Get Your Head in the (Ground) Game

After Iowa and New Hampshire, here’s what we know: we have a long way to go before we have a nominee. So other than registering to vote in your primary or caucus, what in god’s name should you be doing now to help win in 2020?

Glad you asked. The problem with a long primary is that candidates focus on winning ad wars instead of building the ground game we need to win. Right now, organizers need to get out into communities across the country and talk to voters about the future they want to see so they can help turn out those voters in November. 

That needs to start happening now. 

Fortunately, there are already groups in the field that are doing just that. But they need our help. That’s why we launched the Leave It All on the Field Fund—to support groups who are building their general election ground game right now.

This month, our fund will be supporting Organizing Corps 2020, a project of the Democratic National Committee that is recruiting, training, and paying 1,000 organizers building the ground game for the eventual Democratic nominee. These organizers are being recruited from the communities that we want to organize ahead of the general election in eight key battleground states: Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Arizona, Minnesota, Georgia, and Florida.

Here’s what they’re doing:

• Recruiting and training volunteers to get out in their communities to talk about the issues that matter to them
• Registering new voters, including ones on high school and college campuses
• Reaching out to those new voters, active voters, and infrequent voters to make sure we get out the vote in the places it matters most
• Setting up field offices to help organize neighborhoods for the work ahead

This is it. This is where your energy needs to be right now, in the field. Because Donald Trump is using his enormous war chest to message directly to voters and build out a field operation that could dwarf anything our nominee will be able to build alone in the last few months of the election. And we have to start fighting back now. So if you have the opportunity to donate and want to know where your money is most critically needed, leave it on the field. Because that’s where we’ll win this thing.

Let’s do this.

Explore more on the VSA blog