Two national Democratic groups leading digital turnout operations in battleground states warned in a memo on Tuesday that the grass-roots organizations working to reach young Black and Latino voters were critically underfunded.
The memo by the Democratic super PAC Priorities USA and the progressive advocacy organization ProgressNow, obtained by The New York Times, argues that though Vice President Kamala Harris’s candidacy has reinvigorated the Democratic base, she has not yet completely consolidated support of the voters of color who receive much of their information online and will decide close elections.
It points to ProgressNow data that suggests Ms. Harris is trailing President Biden’s levels of support with Black, Latino and young voters in Arizona, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin in 2020 — and notes that the diverse coalitions Mr. Biden assembled were critical to his slim margins of victory.
“We cannot tolerate any loss of support and hope to win,” the memo reads. “Without an immediate investment in communication to these groups that is commensurate with their power in the electorate, electing Harris in November will become harder.”
The memo, which organizers said was distributed to Democratic donors, is the latest in a series of escalations from the organizations that helped push voters to the polls four years ago. The groups’ frustrations with the party’s donor class have been brewing for months, as leaders of voter mobilization organizations bemoan a lack of investment in their work in the presidential campaign’s final weeks.
It also aims to curb what the groups see as a false belief among some backers that Ms. Harris, who is Black and Indian, will galvanize voters of color without the need for persuasive messaging. Though her candidacy has excited Democrats’ base of Black voters, organizers emphasized that their willingness to turn out en masse is not guaranteed.
The memo’s findings mirror national polls that show former President Donald J. Trump gaining some popularity among a portion of voters of color, particularly young Black and Latino men. Conservative advertisements aimed at voters of color could sway them to support Mr. Trump or get them to stay home altogether — amplifying organizers’ fears that Democratic groups are ceding ground to the G.O.P. in targeted online advertising.
While the vice president’s campaign is one of the most cash-flush in American political history — in August her campaign and allied party committees raised $361 million, nearly tripling Mr. Trump’s campaign’s and allies’ earnings that month — it is barred by Federal Election Commission rules from coordinating with outside groups. But Ms. Harris’s team has tried to share the wealth by appealing to donors. Last week, it identified more than a dozen outside groups for Harris donors to support, including BlackPAC and Priorities, which have focused their work on mobilizing voters of color.
But concerns about funding still abound. Two days after Ms. Harris’s campaign put out the list of organizations that have said it needs help, leaders of several Black media companies and voter mobilization groups met with Wall Street allies in New York, according to two people with knowledge of the gathering.
Among the topics discussed was a lack of resources needed to mobilize Black and Latino voters. Top Black donors must encourage their white colleagues in the donor class to fund their work, the organizers in the meeting said, and quickly, according to the people with knowledge of the event.
Organizers stressed that their meeting in New York had long been scheduled and was not coordinated with the Harris campaign’s identifying allied groups. But the frequency and urgency of conversations about these groups’ financial straits — including in donor confabs and activist group war rooms — highlights the seriousness of the issue.
More money would allow these groups to expand their canvassing operations in battleground states and reach more of these voters across digital platforms and social media sites, the organizers wrote. And with less than six weeks until Election Day, they said donors should fund the political arms of these groups so they can target voters with an explicitly partisan message supporting Ms. Harris’s campaign.
“We can’t just take our c(3) money and allocate that to people of color and then call it a day,” said Danielle Butterfield, executive director of Priorities USA, referring to the allocated funds that allow only nonpartisan educational messaging. “We have to be deliberate, and we have to use our most aggressive persuasion tactics to target voters of color and young voters.”
Future Forward, the main super PAC supporting Ms. Harris’s campaign, has also raised a considerable sum, but has been more focused on making and buying advertisements than mobilizing voters in the way that other national groups aligned with Democrats are.
Still, even with the campaign’s blessing, some organizers say the money coming in from donors has been slow.
“The window for being able to absorb dollars to get to the place where we need to get to is closing,” said Adrianne Shropshire, executive director of BlackPAC, an organization Ms. Harris’s campaign identified as an ally to its donors. “And so money really does need to move. If money is going to move at scale for the kind of political engagement that needs to be done, it needs to move quickly.”
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