Candidates are battling it out to see who can get the better of Trump on November 3rd. That’s democracy in action! That’s great! Here’s what’s not great: While candidates spend their money on each other, Donald Trump is spending an enormous war chest on his ground game: organizing volunteers, messaging directly to voters, and building out a field game that could dwarf anything the final candidate could build alone in the last few months of the election.
To win in 2020, we need to organize volunteers, get out into communities across the country, and talk to voters about the future they want to see. We have to be in the field! And we need to start yesterday.
Fortunately, there are groups on the ground who have been doing all of this, but they need our help to do everything they need to do. That’s why we’ve launched the Leave It All On the Field Fund—to support groups who are building their 2020 ground game right now.
We’re taking a two-phased approach to make sure the right groups get resources when they need it most. We’re starting with Organizing Corps 2020, a project of the Democratic National Committee that is recruiting, training, and paying 1,000 organizers for eventual Democratic nominee. These organizers will be 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.
Org Corps needs a total of $8 million to hire all the field organizers we need. They’ve raised $5.5 million so far, and have a commitment of $2 million more. That leaves $500,000 left to raise. So that’s our goal. The money we raise now will go directly to Organizing Corps to train organizers, help pay corps members’ salaries, and allow the existing team to focus less on raising money and more on recruiting the best local and diverse talent ahead of the general election.
This is it. This is where your energy needs to be, in the field. Because whoever ends up being the Democratic candidate will not matter nearly as much as the ground game we’ve built. And we have to start now.