Early 2017 was a bad time to be a Democrat. Not only did Republicans have control over the entire federal government, the Democratic Party as an institution seemed to be twisting in the wind. Hillary Clinton publicly disparaged the Democratic National Committee’s lousy data operation, the DNC had less than $10 million in cash on hand, its former chairman was circulating claims the party had an “unethical” agreement with Clinton’s campaign during the 2016 primary, and the 2017 contest for DNC chair was unusually fractious, with left-wingers suggesting that Tom Perez was running merely to undermine Keith Ellison and damage the Bernie Sanders wing of the party.
The following four years were a rocky road back to power, and Democrats still have reasons to fret about the future (all Democrats, no matter their politics, love to fret). But the party’s institutions have quietly been rebuilt, and it’s worth pausing to take stock of reasons for optimism heading into the 2022 cycle.
The DNC has money, for once
As recently as 2019, the Democratic National Committee was spending more than it was able to fundraise, and its cash flow problems produced a steady stream of headlines. But after Biden’s nomination, money started pouring in, and on January 31, the New York Times reported that the DNC ended 2020 with a “roughly $75 million war chest” and just $3 million in debt.
The DNC’s financial woes last year didn’t mean the party as a whole was in trouble, as individual campaigns frequently outraised their Republican competition. But a flush DNC can make investments in off-years when fewer donors are engaged with politics, building infrastructure at the state and local level that may pay off down the line. In 2018, the DNC tried to engage in this kind of party-building with a grant program called the State Party Innovation Fund, but the national party was so cash-strapped it struggled to fulfill its promises. The current robust state of the DNC’s finances should give it room to maneuver in a way it hasn’t before.
Democrats have improved their data-sharing operations
Arguably, Perez’s most important achievement as DNC chair was building the Democratic Data Exchange, a private company that allows state Democratic parties, major PACs and other big players to share one master list of voter information, an innovation that the Republicans have had for years. The DDX helped Democrats win the 2019 Kentucky gubernatorial race in a test run of the system, and it will likely pay dividends for years.
The main obstacle to building the DDX was that state parties didn’t trust the DNC team enough to hand over their data and only came around gradually, a messy process that also saw a similar data-sharing venture, led by LinkedIn co-founder and Democratic mega-donor Reid Hoffman, compete with the DDX and eventually flop. The DDX will help different elements of the Democratic Party coordinate their efforts to reach voters, but its very existence is also a sign that these elements have an increased level of trust with one another.
The elevation of Jamie Harrison, former leader of the South Carolina Democrats, to DNC chair, may help this good relationship between the national party and state parties continue.
Voter outreach tactics have improved
In contrast to the Democrats’ investment in data solutions and things like bulk-buying phone numbers, the innovations in actually talking to voters have been decidedly old-school. Many progressive organizations and Democratic campaigns have embraced “relational organizing” in the past few years. Basically, this means getting volunteers to reach out to people they know rather than strangers, trying to leverage existing community ties to activate parts of the electorate that aren’t frequent voters. Democrats used this approach extensively in the Georgia Senate runoffs.
Some groups have also experimented with “deep canvassing,” which involves having long, extremely personal conversations with voters—and getting them to open up about their own lives—in an effort to get them to change their minds, a time-consuming tactic that has shown to be at least somewhat effective in political science research.
Using relatively fancy terms like “relational organizing” and “deep canvassing” can disguise how normal these strategies are. Parties were extremely involved in communities back in the era of machine politics, and effective canvassers often try to build personal connections with the people whose doors they knock on. What’s new is that campaigns and outside groups are investing in these old-fashioned outreach operations, treating voters not like consumers who need to be persuaded to buy through political branding and depersonalized messaging, but as individuals.
Will any of this matter in 2022?
The cloud hanging over all of this is that campaign tactics and data infrastructure rarely win elections all by themselves. Incumbent parties always face headwinds in midterms, and since GOP-dominated state legislatures will be able to gerrymander some Republican-tilting seats in a post-Census redistricting process, it will be extremely hard for Democrats to retain their slim majority in Congress.
Still, having a well-funded and smoothly functioning national party is nothing to sneeze at—especially because Democrats went several years without a strong DNC, with disastrous results. And in an incredibly partisan time in American politics when control of the federal government can hinge on only a few thousand voters, any edge, however small, shouldn’t be discounted. The Democrats may well lose the 2022 midterms. But if they keep their party infrastructure strong, it will pay off for years to come.
