Photo: Jasmine Rivera was an organizer with the Shut Down Berks Coalition, and curated the exhibition “Queremos Justicia: Cómo cerramos Berks,” at the Vox Populi gallery in Philadelphia in 2023. (Peter Crimmins/WHYY)

By Jeffrey Lichtenstein

One PA

Jan 7, 2025 – We’re holding several big questions as we move into 2025 that we hope to learn and struggle through together with our funding partners. All of our work, especially our organizing, advocacy, and outreach efforts, will be working through these questions.

 Quality vs Quantity of Doors

Where and when can we initiate and join conversations about the quality of field work rather than simply the quantity of door knock and phone call attempts? The efficacy of canvassing in low-salience elections is statistically unquestionable but in presidential election cycles there is suddenly a great amount of noise. Some of this noise is the result of large-scale vended field programs with weak quality control practices or very low contact rates.

What could it look like to move toward an eco-system wide model for field work that prioritizes the number and quality of conversations, volunteers recruited, and leaders trained? One PA prides itself on high contact rates and rigorous quality control but we still have much to learn. We hope to share and leverage best practices across locally rooted partners and begin to shift the paradigm around field work from quantity alone, to quality and quantity.

Making organizing power more legible

Even the strongest most rigorous electoral field program faces structural challenges with management, hiring and training under conditions of limited funding and time. These efforts also, by their nature, are demobilized and dismantled after an election, even when we know there is another election just around the corner, not to mention countless other opportunities for voters to flex their voice in government and strengthen their civic participation. Political and civic organizing, unlike electoral campaign mobilizations, grow rather than diminish in efficacy and power over time. What would it look like to quantify, validate, resource and scale the civic power of organizing? One PA was successful in 2024 in using every door conversation to begin an organizing pathway. We identified 33,000 hot leads to join One PA. We’re proud of this work, but we have real areas of growth in learning how to maximize the conversion between hot leads and new volunteers. 

Dimensions and Cost of Building Precinct Based Structure

The term ‘organizing’ has been stretched in recent years to mean all manner of engagement. At One PA we are working with multiple battle-tested organizing models in an attempt to integrate the best practices of each in a way that can be quantified, studied and validated at every stage using contemporary data tools and tech. Our model combines dues-based membership, structure based organizing units, systematic leadership development, polarizing campaigns and experimentation. We are proud of our work in 2024 to launch a guardians of democracy and elections captains program.

In the year ahead we plan to scale the program by a factor of five, and are holding questions about what level of resource and training this will require at each level of the organizing structure. Independent Voice It is clear our movement must get upstream of elections in the battle to make meaning out of our communities’ lived realities. By the time candidates win their primaries, the ability to shape what that election will be about is out of the hands of most people except the elite few with an extraordinary amount of influence on the candidates. We are asking ourselves the question: what capacities and practices do we need as a movement to help frame the questions in front of people long before an election?

How can we roll into a cycle with voters broadly knowing already that housing is too high because of slumlords and rollbacks on government investment, not because of immigrants? We know part of the answer is an independent voice for Black and multi-racial working class communities, to help compensate for brand weakness in the Democratic party, to ensure voters feel they are heard, and to guarantee a more healthy mix of ideas about what it will take to fix this country. How can we build the power and independence of this voice in a way that our more traditional and conservative allies won’t attempt to smother in its cradle?

Winning the Internet

We’re also holding questions about how to respond to the reality that the Internet is increasingly becoming a place our communities rely on for social and political queues. Cynical or hateful voices have a head start in offering narrative frames in the digital space. We are holding questions about what it looks like to bring an organizing approach and significant investment in mass communications to organize our base in digital space, win over leaders and taste makers in non-legacy media, and contest for narrative primacy on the internet.

Training to Win next quarter and next decade

Training is critical for nearly every aspect of our plan, especially the proposition that we grow in capacity and power over time, and the responsibility to rebuild a majority. We are clear that we must level up the rigor and scale of our training program, and sit with the question about what kind of training school and content will meet the need. We know curricula must include a breakdown of the structures and histories of power and resistance; song, poetry and other forms  of culture that bring people together at an emotional register; practical application of ideas through repetition of organizing, storytelling, writing and other skill practice. We’re sitting with the question: how can all those pieces best fit together and what kind of resourcing will it take to hold a training program sustainably that can meet these goals?

A renewed tech advantage

We’re also holding a question about technology. For about 20 years, democratic institutions and networks held an advantage in the use of tech in politics – the VAN, click-to-call tools, ActBlue and early P2P text platforms are all examples. But today republican networks and institutions have caught up or surpassed. What kind of tools allow us to easily give an inspired volunteer a list of the 50 closest target people to them, to register them to vote, get them to sign a petition, or have a persuasive conversation about candidates? How do we move away from site-based voter registration only, and use contemporary data to scale door to door registration programs? How do we use new models, like the Steven Phillips “New Majority Index,” to help us assess opportunities and threats?

Cities: Most of our base lives in cities.

Cities are the places where the housing and homelessness crises are worst. Cities are some of the places with the highest income inequality and violent crime. It’s difficult to live in cities unless you’re rich. There is a relationship between our bases’ weakened sense of political agency and their perception of the corruption of government on one hand, and the way our cities are being run on the other. What does it look like to have an intentional plan to broadcast positive accountability messaging when city leaders accomplish something that improves peoples lives? How do we combine that with real resourcing for primary campaigns to support candidates who are committed to using the government to deliver material gains for working class people.’ And what does it look like to add real resourcing for advocacy and pressure campaigns to encourage local leaders on the fence to move toward policies that will demonstrate in real terms how democratic governance is good for people?

Alignment

Last, we’re holding a question about how to build alignment between progressive base-building organizations to have sufficient power to help win the fights that each of us aren’t strong enough to win on our own. We’re proud of the work that we’ve done to build unity through the cycle of the last several races with several partners, especially PA United , Working Families Party , APIPA, Make The Road, 215 People’s Alliance and UniteHERE. How do we strengthen and build on these existing relationships?