In 2020, the California Democratic Party faced an extraordinary challenge: implementing the most ambitious coordinated campaign the Party had fielded in decades in the context of unprecedented political & societal challenges AND a global pandemic. GroundWorks stepped up to run this volunteer operation at a massive scale, retooling & refining the program over and over through the many twists and turns of a truly extraordinary year.
Going into 2020, GroundWorks Campaigns had been engaged by the California Democratic Party to run, envision and implement a statewide Coordinated Campaign at a bigger scale than anyone had implemented in decades. While we were already preparing ourselves for the big challenges and opportunities that 2020 represented, none of us could possibly have imagined how the unprecedented events of the year would play out requiring constant pivots, adjustment and reimagining of the work over and over as we responded to the global pandemic, popular uprisings in response to police violence, and a historically bad fire season.
As we rang in the New Year in 2020, the broad goals of the Coordinated Campaign were to: elect strong California Democrats from the local to the state level, help pass progressive ballot measures, and play a concrete and meaningful role in ousting Trump and flipping the U.S. Senate from Red to Blue. We also envisioned a program that would run at a scale not seen in California in decades, if ever: a program through which tens of thousands of grassroots activists from every corner of the state would have the opportunity to be part of making millions of phone calls, knocking on hundreds of thousands of doors, and building the grassroots power and capacity of the CA Democratic Party in their own communities.
To achieve these goals, we knew we needed to be well-organized, draw on all the talents of our Party leaders, activists and partner organizations, and utilize the most cutting-edge technological tools. We began building campaign infrastructure in November, 2019: hiring staff, setting up offices, and coordinating with local activists. This work began to pay off during the March, 2020 Primary Election – the last “normal”, pre-COVID part of the campaign year, during which volunteers made over 1.1 million calls and knocked on over 57,000 doors.
And the whole world knows what happened after that! We had always intended to use the months from March-August to build our activist base and strengthen our organizational “muscles” to be ready to move into action for the Fall General Election – but after COVID struck we had to figure out how to do all of that virtually instead of in-person. Here’s what we came up with:
- In place of in-person meetings & trainings in campaign offices, we did over 500 Virtual Action Meetings & House Parties. These created a venue for people to connect even during COVID and broadened the Democratic base, giving both experienced and new activists opportunities to find each other, beat the isolation of “shelter in place”, share their stories, and find ways to take action.
- Instead of in-person phone banks in offices, we learned how to run virtual phonebanks with everyone working safely from home. This meant that first we had to learn as a staff how to run remote phonebanks and then we had to teach thousands of activists to use virtual call systems from their homes as well. Bit by bit and week by week, we made the switch, resulting in tens of thousands of volunteer shifts making COVID wellness check calls, census outreach calls, new Democrat “welcome wagon” calls, calls on issues like police accountability and ultimately voter persuasion and mobilization calls in California and nationwide.
- Rather than staging in-person rallies and events, we rolled out statewide virtual “days of action” to practice mobilizing and using virtual tools at a really big scale with up to 1,000+ participants as the months went by.
All of this work was undertaken in a spirit of determination to “never surrender”, but continue to try new approaches with persistence and creativity to meet our goals. And the investment paid off! In the end, the quantifiable results of the 2020 Coordinated Campaign included:
- 57,049 total volunteer shifts
- 15,002 participants in virtual action meetings / house parties, trainings, & meetings
- 20.3 million dials
- 57,453 doors knocked (pre-COVID)
- 627,006 1:1 conversations with voters – 627,006
- 12.3 million texts sent
- 880,057 postcards and letters sent.
Of these totals, we’re proud that a big chunk were calls we did as Californians into battleground states nationwide, especially during the last couple of GOTV weekends before the November 2020 General Election. This included over 15,000 volunteer shifts and over 200,000 phone contacts for key Senate races nationwide, plus almost 11,000 shifts and another 130,000 phone contacts for the Biden/Harris ticket in the last couple of GOTV weekends alone. In fact, as we all sat back and took stock at the end of 2020, friends from the Biden campaign reported that California Democrats made fully 30% of all the calls nationwide that went from non-battleground states to battleground states during those final weeks!