In late March, several thousand angry demonstrators gathered at a park in Milwaukee for a “No Kings” protest to denounce President Trump’s administration. For the crowded field of Democrats running for governor of Wisconsin, the event was the perfect chance to engage fired-up primary voters.
Only one campaign appeared to show up in significant numbers: Francesca Hong’s.
In weather so chilly that attendees could see their own breath, a small army of volunteers wearing Hong T-shirts set up a tent and fanned out in the crowd. Clipboards in hand, they gathered support along with the lifeblood of organizing: cellphone numbers and email addresses, to be used later to recruit volunteers and turn out voters.
Ms. Hong, a democratic socialist and chef, is now the front-runner ahead of the Democratic primary on Tuesday, outlasting and outworking better-funded rivals in the party establishment, including a past lieutenant governor and the current one. Both of them exited the race in recent weeks.
“From the start, there was an ambition to the organizing,” said Harry Walton, a senior adviser to Ms. Hong’s campaign. “I put a lot of miles on my car.”
Around the country this summer, underdog democratic socialists and their allies have scored a series of victories over traditional Democrats with superior messaging and organizing tactics that have terrified the party establishment, caused them to burn through gobs of cash and left them asking: How do progressives keep getting away with this? The latest example came last week in Michigan, where Representative Haley Stevens lost in a Senate primary race to Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, a progressive former public health official, despite her massive spending advantage.
The left’s recent victories make clear what has worked: face-to-face campaigning, personal testimonials from supporters and an easy-to-embrace outsider message. The campaigns themselves say the secret is in the basics. They have built old-fashioned ground games, harnessing the anger and energy on the left to recruit armies of volunteers, who in turn have greeted the moment’s protest movement with open arms.
These campaigns have also offered specific, bold messages: that universal health care is a right, that the Democratic Party is beholden to corporate interests and that the United States is complicit in the deaths of thousands in Gaza. One of the most important components, they say, has been face-to-face conversations with voters, even as the campaigns have also embraced smart targeting on social media and run some traditional TV spots.
Left-wing campaigns also argued that some of their more mainstream primary opponents had erred by spending most of their resources on advertising while failing to actually excite voters with direct outreach or by crafting positions that appeal to them.
In Wisconsin, Ms. Hong’s campaign has recruited about 7,000 volunteers, knocked on hundreds of thousands of doors and hosted roughly 500 canvassing events. Her most significant remaining rival, David Crowley, the Milwaukee County executive, held a fraction of that number.
“It’s one thing to just vote for a candidate that you like,” said Melat Kiros, a democratic socialist who ousted an incumbent House Democrat in Denver. “It’s another to be so inspired by their message that you want to play a part in bringing about the world that they’re campaigning on.”
The approach has worked in many primaries. But an unanswered question looms, particularly in such key battlegrounds as Wisconsin and Michigan, where the left’s ideology could be a tougher sell: Can progressives replicate their successes against Republicans in the fall?
Encouragement to go off-script
Some leaders of the Democratic Socialists of America said they took inspiration from Zohran Mamdani’s New York mayoral campaign. D.S.A. candidates said they borrowed his organizing prowess and decentralized structure, which empowered ordinary volunteers to become invested.
“It allows for quick leadership development, learning all the organizing skills that one could need,” said Patrick Wargo, a D.S.A. leader in Philadelphia and campaign adviser for Chris Rabb, a socialist who won a competitive House primary in May.
The group also eagerly welcomed non-D.S.A. members, he said. Many Rabb volunteers were ordinary community members or belonged to other left-wing groups such as the Working Families Party.
In Philadelphia, the D.S.A. cut video clips for Mr. Rabb’s social media accounts. In Ms. Kiros’s race in Colorado, the group’s national organization made 200,000 calls in a series of virtual phone banks alongside Hasan Piker, the progressive influencer. In the end, the campaign brought in 6,500 volunteers who knocked on more than 115,000 doors, Ms. Kiros said.
“The D.S.A.’s value add to so many of our campaigns is just the sheer power and discipline of their organizing,” she said, “which completely elevated our field game.”
In Michigan, the primary campaign of Dr. El-Sayed — who is not a D.S.A. member but shares many of the group’s positions — started with four people in a Jeep crisscrossing the state, and ended with nearly 15,000 volunteers, said James Gasber, the campaign field director.
Vastly outspent on television by Ms. Stevens, Dr. El-Sayed’s campaign focused heavily on its ground game, Mr. Gasber said. That meant making less of an investment in TV ads or mailers.
The campaign encouraged volunteers to touch on Dr. El-Sayed’s top priorities — Medicare for all and getting money out of politics — but emphasized that canvassers should offer their own stories of why they supported him and not feel beholden to stay on script.
“It was very important to us that people spoke from a place of heart and values,” Mr. Gasber said.
Ms. Hong’s operation has espoused a similar strategy, using those thousands of phone numbers and email addresses to recruit volunteers for phone banks and canvasses.
On Friday in Madison, several dozen Hong supporters prepared for two-hour door-knocking shifts in a steady drizzle, kicking off a final five-day sprint before the primary. The weekend before, volunteers knocked on 11,000 doors in Madison, but planned to double that number this time, part of an effort to reach a half-million doors by the end of the primary campaign.
Dillon Sheehan, an organizer, encouraged volunteers to offer testimonials, and bolder rhetoric, about why they supported Ms. Hong, and urged them to avoid negativity about her rivals.
“In the age of smartphones, spam texts, all of that, it is scientifically proven that the best way to get people to the polls, to get them engaged, is to talk to them face to face on their doorstep,” Mr. Sheehan said.
They also had fun, inviting their supporters to dance parties and game nights with Dungeons and Dragons and Loteria.
A torrent of cash
The left’s success has come despite a flood of hostile spending. In most of the high-profile victories by progressives this summer, the more traditional Democrats’ campaigns or outside groups outspent them.
In June, national Democrats injected $2.4 million into the race against Ms. Kiros through a group of super PACs, after it became clear that a longtime Democratic congresswoman, Diana DeGette, was at risk of losing.
That same month, allies of Representative Adriano Espaillat, the influential chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, flooded his primary against a democratic socialist in New York with $6.8 million in advertising.
And in Michigan, Ms. Stevens, a pro-Israel Democrat, got an astonishing boost of $53 million from groups including the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, dwarfing Dr. El-Sayed’s roughly $6 million in outside spending.
None of it worked. All three establishment favorites lost to their progressive challengers. Ms. DeGette lost to Ms. Kiros, a 29-year-old who made opposition to U.S. military aid to Israel a centerpiece of her campaign, by nearly 15 percentage points.
Some veteran Democratic strategists acknowledged how effective the D.S.A.’s tactics have been, but said candidates did not have to be far to the left to generate similar enthusiasm.
Others are more alarmed, because of their belief that Dr. El-Sayed and Ms. Hong’s far-left positions could cause them to lose winnable races against Republicans in battleground states.
“Having a good field campaign isn’t going to carry you over in the general election if you’re so out of position with what the state of Wisconsin wants in a governor,” said Eddie Vale, a spokesman for Mr. Crowley’s campaign.
Already, the G.O.P. is painting Democrats broadly as “communists” and too radical for the electorate.
Plenty of campaigns without a strong turnout operation have won in the past, while candidates with strong ground games but other weaknesses have lost. Many of the progressive candidates who have won this year have also relied on traditional TV advertising, albeit on leaner budgets than their rivals.
But the real juice this year has come from regular people, said Beto O’Rourke, a former member of the House and past candidate for Senate and governor in Texas who built a similar grass-roots ground game.
“If you’re knocking on a door because somebody paid you to do it, there’s just no real force behind that,” Mr. O’Rourke said. “But when someone freely of their own volition signs up to get out there” — especially in the summer heat — “you, the voter, will never forget that encounter.”
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