The banner that welcomes visitors to Ground Game LA’s website offers a striking image: A large group of smiling people surrounds Sen. Bernie Sanders. A few of them are holding up Bernie for President signs.
But despite the photo of a two-time presidential candidate, Ground Game’s area of focus is not on national politics — instead, it situates itself in local communities. Unlike many other campaigns that work to improve voter turnout for federal or state elections, Ground Game targets local elections.
Voter turnout in local elections, however, has continued to stagnate in recent years. According to Governing.com, Mayor Bill de Blasio won the mayoral race in New York with the “lowest voter turnout since the 1950s.” In a Governing.com study conducted in partnership with the University of Wisconsin, researchers found that voter turnout in local elections dropped by approximately 5% from 2001 to 2011 among the 144 largest cities in the U.S.
This poses a significant problem. “Low-turnout elections typically aren’t representative of the electorate as a whole, dominated by whiter, more-affluent and older voters,” Governing.com reports.
According to Ground Game, “Eighty-eight percent of Angelenos don’t vote in city elections.” Ground Game argues that the electorate base in Los Angeles is a lot more progressive than the politicians who represent them in government. Ground Game LA’s chief goals are two-fold: to mobilize Angelenos to vote in local elections and to assist those who want to get involved in local government.
“Our strategy is to grow the electorate,” said Ground Game Executive Director Bill Przylucki, “to activate people who don’t normally show up, who don’t normally come in, to build this new base of working-class, multi-racial, multi-linguistic, big working-class base.”
Ground Game is interested in motivating voters to participate in hyperlocal elections. “We’re the all-the-way-down ballot group,” said Przylucki. “We’re going to worry about the Burbank City Council race and the Culver City City council, and that local ballot stuff.”
Ground Game hopes to make a big difference by caring about the small local races that see very little voter turnout or media coverage. From City Council elections to judges’ races and the Board of Supervisors, Ground Game offers progressive Angelenos a voter guide to local elections.
But beyond mobilizing voters, Ground Game, whose motto is “Vote Today, and Mobilize Tomorrow,” also wants to help Angelenos get directly involved in city and community leadership. Like Sanders, they want to do it through grassroots movements.
“Just like in issue-based organizing, it’s extremely important that we do it by doing grassroots leadership development,” said Przylucki, “that we build volunteer bases of people, and [that] directly impacted people learn how to run effective campaigns on their own behalf.”
Small but scrappy
This philosophy streams from Ground Game’s origins. In 2017, a group of activists worked on Jessica Salans’s city council campaign in CD13. Rather than choosing to focus on the priorities of interest groups, they instead looked to the community to steer the campaign. Although Salans’ campaign was unsuccessful, it sparked the beginnings of Ground Game, which is the 501(c)(4) arm of People Organized for Westside Renewal (POWER), a 501(c)(3) nonprofit established in 1999.
Ground Game is a small-but-scrappy organization. Its entire operating budget for 2019 was $15,000, according to organizer, Board Member, and Communications Lead, Kendall Mayhew.
“This year our expenditures will come in a little over $60,000, and we expect to continue increased fundraising for the rest of the year,” Mayhew added. Ground Game’s total C4 political expenditure for 2020 was around $20,000.
Its small budget, however, hasn’t stopped Ground Game from making a big impact on Los Angeles’ elections.
A better Los Angeles for everyone
According to Przylucki, who also serves as executive director of POWER, the core value of Ground Game, which was carried over from Salans’ campaign, is a belief in community self-determination.
“The agenda is set by directly impacted people,” Przylucki said. “Winning that agenda is everyone’s job.”
In order to do so, Ground Game strives to “empower residents to actively shape the Los Angeles they want to see” by offering assistance and connecting them with the resources they need, including technical assistance, canvassing and workshops.
Among the key issues Ground Game engages are the homelessness crisis — which is exacerbated by an ever-increasing cost of living — pollution, over-policing and inadequate infrastructure.
In a video that explains what Ground Game is and what it stands for, Mayhew said, “Our political leaders haven’t just been asleep at the wheel. They’ve been accelerating us into an apocalypse through ignorance, corruption and greed.”
“We could make big changes in the city just by getting involved and getting our friends involved. So yeah, vote, but we can do more,” said Mayhew. “Talk to your neighbors, start a tenants organization, organize your workplace, go down to City Hall. It’s time to organize and demand the city that we want to live in.”
Mayhew added, “We believe that real change only happens when more people are brought into the movement, and that means bringing the movement to them.”
Ground Game’s success offers an important lesson for progressives across the nation: Don’t ignore small local races.
“We have been making the case from the beginning that doing the work of informing voters of the power of these local offices and asking how we should use that power leads to greater progressive voter engagement and greater long-term engagement in general,” explained Mayhew.
“All of our endorsed candidates built on this model with great success,” she added. “Even those candidates we endorsed that did not win their races brought more people into the electoral process.”
Electoral victories
Several of the candidates Ground Game LA endorsed won their elections, including Holly Mitchell, who was elected to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors for District 2, and Nithya Raman, who was elected to the Los Angeles City Council in the 4th District, unseating incumbent David Ryu.
Konstantin Anthony, whom Ground Game endorsed for Burbank’s City Council, is currently leading the vote count, but the race is still too close to call.
“We are excited to see that as we anticipated, the new engagement of tens of thousands of Angelenos has resulted in progressive victories across the board,” Mayhew said.
“We are overjoyed at these wins for our endorsed candidates and look forward to working with each of them to make the kind of changes working people in Los Angeles have been demanding for years and years now. We take endorsements very seriously at Ground Game.”
Even while celebrating their electoral victories, Ground Game LA is already looking to the 2022 midterm elections. “Our endorsed electeds need allies, and our agenda is expansive,” said Mayhew. “There’s no time to waste in preparing for the next big electoral cycle.”
She added, “These results bring us a lot of hope for the future, but we also know that there is much more work to be done to build a Los Angeles that takes care of all of us.”
