A question for Democrats: How did you spend the weeks around Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration? Moping? Doom scrolling? Ordering in?
Mike Zimmer had no time for any of that. He was running in a special election for an Iowa State Senate seat, in an eastern pocket of the state that had gone for Mr. Trump by 21 points in November. A longtime educator, Mr. Zimmer spent January introducing himself to voters via phone banking, social media videos, podcasts, postcards, media interviews and relentless canvassing. In a month’s time, Team Zimmer knocked on more than 7,700 doors.
“I am not going to sit here and talk about, ‘Oh, at every doorstep we knocked, everyone’s having policy conversations,’” Mr. Zimmer said with a chuckle in a recent phone interview. “They were like, ‘I saw you on the television, I’ve gotten three of your fliers, and oh, by the way, you’re letting $20 worth of heat out the door.’”
Nevertheless, he persisted. And, defying the odds, he won, flipping a Republican seat and beating his opponent by around four points. He was just sworn in to the Iowa Senate.
After the electoral thumping the Democrats suffered in November, it will take more than a down-ballot upset here and there for the party to regain its mojo. But this is how the rebuilding starts. The wounded party begins clawing back voters and territory, often in unglamorous contests.
Practically speaking, it can be easier to win these one-off contests, far from the presidential scrum. The Democrats can test-drive messages and candidates mostly under the radar of the national Republican Party (and political media). The candidate can focus on bread-and-butter issues with less risk of getting swept into the polarized chaos of the national scene. This happened for Democrats with special elections in 2017, after Mr. Trump’s team dominated the 2016 cycle. And Mr. Zimmer’s unexpected success has some in his party dreaming of a similar surge this year. In recent weeks, his campaign team has been fielding calls from Democratic strategists and players far beyond Iowa, all eager to know how the campaign did what it did and which elements could be exported to other places and races.
It goes without saying — but let’s say it anyway — that candidate quality matters. And “you couldn’t use a computer to generate a better candidate” for his district than Mr. Zimmer, said Tyler Redenbaugh, the executive director of the Iowa Senate Majority fund and the chief architect of the Zimmer campaign. The candidate grew up in the area and after college worked as an educator in schools all across the district. His campaign motto was no frills — “Iowa raised, Iowa values: hard work and fairness.” And his focus was on kitchen-table issues like lowering costs, raising wages and improving public schools.
“We stayed on the economic,” Mr. Zimmer said. “Going down the cultural wars right now, that’s not going to get you anywhere.”
With only a few weeks to introduce himself to voters, Mr. Zimmer went all in. “He talked to everybody, from the big Quad Cities TV stations to random podcasts,” Mr. Redenbaugh said. “We went everywhere and talked to as many people as we could. That was the secret sauce.”
That sauce included a big dollop of social media. “He did a lot of short-form videos, unscripted, with him going straight to camera talking about whatever issue was on his mind,” Mr. Redenbaugh said. The videos, like the campaign overall, were done on a tight budget, and they are unpolished — much like Mr. Zimmer. But that was part of the appeal, Mr. Redenbaugh argued. “We were creating content that was humanizing.”
It helped that the Republican in the race did not seem as keen to do interviews or public appearances. At a public forum hosted by the local Chamber of Commerce, Mr. Zimmer was the only candidate to show up. (His opponent reportedly was ill.) “That left me with the whole hour to answer every question from wind turbines to carbon sequestration to public funding. You name it!” he recalled.
The candidate’s charms aside, the campaign’s ground game was on point. Special elections are odd creatures: The timeline is compressed — this one lasted about a month — so the party needs to get its candidate up and running quickly. The Democrats did that, Mr. Redenbaugh said, thanks to their Senate leader, Janice Weiner, who reached out to party players in the district as soon as it was known that the seat was coming open. (The seat’s previous occupant, Chris Cournoyer, a Republican, had been appointed to serve as lieutenant governor.)
Despite the bad odds of taking a G.O.P.-held seat in a Trump district, the campaign began aggressively executing the tricky two-step called for in special elections. These races “are all about turning out your base,” Ms. Weiner said. Ideally, you want to mobilize your party’s supporters in a low-key, focused way that avoids reminding your opponent’s supporters that there is an election coming up at all. The campaign was “really careful about how it targeted people,” Ms. Weiner said. “It was not our goal to get out all voters. We just wanted to get our voters out.”
To guide this process, a campaign needs good survey data about which doors to knock on and which phones to call. Targeted mailings and targeted digital messaging are more effective than blasting out ads across mass media. Also, it’s wise to go easy on yard signs in certain neighborhoods.
As for reaching friendly voters, the campaign relied on a lot of old-fashioned “elbow grease,” Ms. Weiner said. This meant casting a wide net for volunteers. “We pulled in volunteer power from neighboring counties,” she said, “as well as phone-banking help from counties not so close by. It was also a great opportunity for county parties to organize and help, as well as trade unions.”
“This really makes all the grass roots folks here feel really good,” Ms. Weiner said. “We essentially banded together, organized and got it done” — and without the financial support of the national party. “It is obviously a big boost.”
Stella Sexton is among the Democratic officials looking to capture some of that energy for her state, Pennsylvania. As the vice chair of the party in Lancaster County, a red enclave about an hour’s drive west of Philadelphia, she is working on the special election of James Malone, the Democratic running for the State Senate in her district.
Ms. Sexton has been talking with Team Zimmer, and her biggest strategic takeaway is that “they really did everything they could not to remind Republicans that there was an election.”
There are, of course, other takeaways — and plenty of similarities between the two races. Mr. Malone, the mayor of East Petersburg, is running in a district that went for Mr. Trump by double digits. Like Mr. Zimmer, he is focusing on bread-and-butter issues such as housing, education, support for first responders and “lowering the cost of everyday essentials,” as his campaign literature pledges. Also like Mr. Zimmer, with Election Day set for March 25, he has vanishingly little time to get his message out.
“I’m phone banking and door knocking and trying to make personal contact,” Mr. Malone told me. “And we’re trying to use phone and text and social media to get the word out where weather and time constraints limit us on hitting doors.”
Pennsylvania’s Senate districts are far larger, in population terms, than Iowa’s, Ms. Sexton acknowledged. “We’re going to have to get creative to get the word out to everyone,” she said. She has been recruiting and organizing volunteers from all over. “We’ve got phone bankers from as far away Florida and Wisconsin,” she said. And she is expecting people from Massachusetts, Connecticut and New York to come down for door knocking closer to Election Day. “I’ve been calling people around state asking, ‘Do you have any groups that you worked with last year?’” she said. “We’ve got to get out there and talk to folks.”
Even if his campaign runs a perfect playbook, Mr. Malone remains a long shot. But these races are well worth the “blitz” of effort involved, Ms. Sexton insisted.
“They have a ripple effect,” she said, hopefully. They boost morale. They help with organizing. They help build the farm team. They remind members of both parties that voter sentiment is ever shifting.
“There’s definitely a lot of folks still feeling burned out,” Ms. Sexton said. But there are also a lot of “folks feeling like they want to do something. And this has really given people a place to focus their energy.” That’s no small thing when so many Democrats are hungry to do something in the face of a Trump administration run wild.
Races like Mr. Zimmer’s and Mr. Malone’s may not lead the party out of the wilderness, but they can help point the way back. It starts with the basics, and doing them well.
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