Five Hard Truths about What We're doing Wrong
A series on our progressive infrastructure.
GAIN Power is organizing the Powerful IDEA (Impacting Democracy, Elections, and Advocacy) Awards and Democracy Expo, where we’ll discuss this and more on June 24 and 25 in Washington, DC.
Last week, I decided to share some of my thoughts on progressive infrastructure and have been surprised by the feedback. The responses to my first posts (here and here) in this series —some public, but most private have been heartbreaking. So many are afraid to share their honest thoughts. The following is a small sampling, followed by more thoughts on what we’re doing wrong. To be clear, I think these are fixable problems. They take a lot of political will and yes $$$ to repair, but I know, not only can we, we must.
💬 What I Heard After Part 1
Current and former campaign staff, consultants, organizers, and trainers flooded my inbox with raw, honest, and deeply familiar stories. The most common comment has been:
“I feel seen”.
One organizer shared:
“Campaigns ask you to give up your life. And when they’re over, there’s no plan, no safety net, no thanks. Just silence.”
Another put it this way:
“I’ve been in this work for 15 years. But now? I feel like I’ve aged out. If you’re not a rising star or a ‘name,’ there’s no path forward.”
And perhaps most cutting:
“Our movement asks for resilience when what we’re actually doing is surviving.”
These aren’t exceptions. They are evidence of the deeper crisis we face.
It’s not just a workforce issue.
It’s a strategic and moral one.
We are losing not just talent—but trust, institutional knowledge, and entire communities of practice.
The Messaging Mirage
Since the election, we’ve seen a flood of new narrative initiatives and messaging labs. But we haven’t addressed the underlying infrastructure failures that render even the best messages ineffective.
As Charlotte Swasey recently said:
“Every cycle, we sink more time, money, and staffing into the mechanics of campaigns while also building new tools and organizations.”
Meanwhile, as Micah Sifry observed in The Connector, the scale-driven “meta-machine” we’ve built—texts, calls, predictive models—may now be delivering zero or even negative returns.
If the message isn’t delivered through authentic, trusted relationships, it doesn’t land.
If the messengers are burnt out or pushed out, it doesn’t matter.
🔥 Five Hard Truths
1. We Reward Relationships, Not Results
You can lose a campaign and still get rehired. You can run the same ineffective strategy and still get funded. You can burn through staff and never be held accountable.
“The amount of free labor I’m asked for is debilitating,” one commenter wrote. “And the same firms keep getting hired even when their work falls flat.”
This creates a system where:
The same strategies get repeated regardless of results
Innovation is discouraged
Familiar faces get the resources—regardless of impact
Young professionals burn out while consultants bill six figures
🛠 What We Can Do:
Create transparent consultant scorecards
Require post-campaign evaluations
Tie future funding to impact, not connections
2. We Treat People as Disposable
We rebuild entire workforces from scratch every two years. We train, deploy, and discard people like single-use field scripts.
“I was cut off the campaign Zoom 48 hours after Election Day,” one field staffer told me. “No debrief, no thank you, no plan.”
Another said simply:
“We are not just data points. We are people.”
🛠 What We Can Do:
Fund off-cycle bridge positions
Build transition programs and alumni networks
Provide mental health and trauma-informed support after campaigns
3. The Pipeline Is Designed to Exclude
We love to talk about equity. But our pipeline favors the well-connected, the well-funded, and the young. If you’re working class, a parent, disabled, older, or just not interested in 100-hour weeks—you’re often shut out.
As Chuck Rocha has said:
“There wasn’t an entry point into power or politics for working-class kids… especially Black and Latino kids.”
Another reader put it this way:
“Unless you’re a consultant, there’s no path that supports a long-term career in this movement.”
🛠 What We Can Do:
Create non-campaign entry points
Normalize career paths that don’t start with unpaid labor
Build programs for retention, not just recruitment
4. We’ve Lost Touch with Our Organizing
Data targeting skips doors that don’t fit our model. We outsource our field presence. We send polished messages to voters we’ve barely invested in—and then wonder why they don’t show up.
One field organizer shared:
“They flew in 200 volunteers from out of state to knock doors in neighborhoods we hadn’t built relationships with. It felt extractive. And voters knew it.”
🛠 What We Can Do:
Hire and promote organizers from the communities we serve
Fund long-term local infrastructure, not just short-term turnout
Shift from transactional contact to relational organizing
5. We Still Operate in Silos—While the Right Coordinates
Progressives love innovation, but we hate integration. While conservatives are building interconnected, year-round ecosystems, we’re still treating each campaign, issue, and state effort like a solo act.
Even a MAGA-aligned strategist told The New York Times:
“We weren’t focused on door knocks. We were focused on relationships built.”
GAIN Power is one of the only legal entities in our space that works across party committees, advocacy orgs, unions, and firms. We see how much alignment is lost to ego, legal barriers, and lack of connective infrastructure.
🛠 What We Can Do:
Invest in legal coordination tools that span entity types
Create shared infrastructure for learning and staffing
Build tech—and relationships—that foster collaboration
🧭 What Abandoning Infrastructure Really Costs
Let’s not forget what’s at stake.
As Paul Tewes warned:
“We don’t even show up anymore. And when people don’t see Democrats, they don’t see themselves inside the Democratic Party.”….
In 2008, Obama lost rural voters in WI, MI, and PA by 23,000 votes combined.
In 2020, Biden lost those same voters by over 730,000.
This isn’t just about rural areas. It’s about everywhere we’ve replaced people with programs.
Infrastructure with narrative.
Relationships with reach.
💡 Final Thought
If we want to build lasting power, we have to build something that lasts between elections, not just during them.
You are not the problem.
The system is.
And together, we can change it.
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