Biden to test ‘relational organizing’ in reelection bid
President Biden’s reelection effort will launch a pilot test of its 2024 organizing strategy in Wisconsin and Arizona next month, hiring about two dozen staffers and opening a Milwaukee office with a new focus on digital and in-person outreach that aims to directly leverage the personal relationships of volunteers.
The moves come as the Democratic National Committee has redirected its organizing efforts to a new smartphone app that encourages supporters to communicate with people in their own friend, family, and community circles and then report those contacts back to the party’s voter file.
This “relational organizing” has become a growing part of Democratic campaigns for several cycles, outperforming traditional door-knocking and call sheet lists that volunteers have long used to contact strangers during campaigns. But the scale of what the Biden campaign, in concert with the national party, is planning for next year has not been attempted before.
“At the DNC we can make phone calls and send texts and do a lot of cold calls and outreach, but we cannot cut through the noise in the same way you can,” Meg DiMartino, the chief of staff for organizing at the national party, told more than a dozen volunteers in a virtual training Wednesday. “You cannot unsubscribe from your mom in the way you can unsubscribe from other organizations.”
The initial pilot program will constitute four efforts, targeting Latinos, African Americans, women, and young people, initially focusing on the college communities in Wisconsin, the Black neighborhoods of Milwaukee, and the vote-rich Phoenix metropolitan area. Biden advisers plan to closely monitor the effectiveness of the efforts in concert with existing advertising campaigns before expanding across the seven major battleground states next year.
At the heart of the new effort is a concern among Biden aides that the traditional methods of campaign communication — television ads, direct mail, and voter contact from strangers — have lost some effectiveness in recent decades as voters have become more fed up with unsolicited appeals and spend more time consuming information on their phone, often over private text messaging chats or through networks such as TikTok that do not allow political ads.
The goal of the program is to arm a nationwide network of Biden volunteers by next year with content they can share in these places, and to empower them to take action in their own social circles to get Biden reelected and improve Democratic targeting data.