Progressive Infrastructure: a Crisis Hiding in Plain Sight
Intro: We're Failing the People Who Power Our Movement—And Driving Them Away
We’re 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.
This is an introduction to an ongoing series exposing the infrastructure gaps that cost us elections and offering a roadmap for building sustainable progressive power. Based on GAIN Power's unique view of the entire progressive ecosystem—from party committees to consulting firms to grassroots organizations—we're documenting what's broken and what we can build instead.
While the media, Democrats, and progressives debate messaging strategies and the billions we poured into elections, we're missing the forest for the trees. A serious people crisis undermines every campaign, organization, and message we try to deliver, and few are doing anything about it.
The Crisis: We're hemorrhaging experienced professionals. At the same time, Republicans invest four times more in pipeline work (see Arena’s research on this). With 522 days until the midterms and nearly 200,000 public servants and democracy workers displaced by DOGE cuts, the talent pipeline should be under construction.
The Problems: Consultants getting rehired based on relationships rather than results, experienced professionals pushed aside for "fresh faces," and strategic coordination gaps that waste billions while conservatives build sophisticated networks.
The Human Cost: We hire based on connections rather than competence, underinvest in basic HR support, and treat staff as expendable. When people finally get jobs in our movement, poor management and lack of recognition drive them away. Few feel valued when employers treat them as replaceable. This is why recognition and appreciation programs aren't just nice-to-haves—they're essential for keeping the people who believe enough to show up. I know from my many information interviews and informal coaching sessions that our people are traumatized right now.
Our most popular sessions at RootsCamp weren’t about why we lost—they were about the bad work culture for so many organizers. Shout out to Chanelle Powe for leading the most engaged session, All Tea, All Shade: Untold stories from the field-what you wish people knew! Organizers need a safe space to share their stories, and it was sad to see how many had this in common. Our democracy work culture is terrible.
The Solution(s:) We have some recommendations, and I will write more about them.
Invest in People: We need a collaborative Talent Table that connects the right people with the right opportunities across cycles, sectors, skills, and communities. This includes training, but it is about so much more. This is about workforce development issues.
Spaces: Build permanent Democracy Center/Hubs where progressives can collaborate year-round.
Consultant Trust and Services Initiative: Establish political standards that reward consultants based on results, not relationships, and have more transparency in contracting and hiring practices.
Incentivize them by creating a political service marketplace.
Movement Mapping: Develop a comprehensive approach to prevent duplication and maximize strategic coordination.
Convenings, recognition, and community organizing professional development, cultural, and work health programs that sustain the relationships, making all other work possible, not just better talking points.
I’m glad some thoughtful others are talking about and doing somethings about this (now and in the past), including Micah Sifrey on the Connector, David Donnelly, and Doran Schrantz, We Choose Us, Maurice Mitchell from Working Families Party via The Convergence, Colin Delaney’s E-Politics, Lauren Baer from the Arena here in Newsweek and the Courier, Billy Wimsett at the Movement Voter Project. The fantastic team at the Center for Popular Democracy at The Forge, Chuck Rocha from Solidarity Strategies - who always talks this talk and walks the walk from his media coverage, see here and his Tío Bernie book. My friends, Paul Tewes, Tasha Cole, Heather Booth, Will Robinson,
, and Teresa Vilmain have also profoundly influenced and added to my thoughts. And I always appreciate the work of our friends at the Arena, Zinc Collective, Re:Power, the National Democratic Training Committee, and groups in the states like Lead Ohio, Great Lakes Lead in MI, tackling some of these issues locally.My colleague at GAIN Power including
, Stephanie Noguera, and my partner at Amplify Power helped me write and edit some of these pieces. Many others writing about why the Democrats lost and what we need to do now have further contributed to my resolve, especially the recent Catalist report about what happened in 2024.The diagnosis is clear. The solutions exist. The question is whether we'll invest in democracy infrastructure before it's too late.
GAIN Power Needs Your Help Today to Build The Solutions Needed to Power the Democratic Party and Progressive Movement.
If you’re getting this far, I hope you’ll join this conversation and share your comments. If you’re so moved, please donate to our work. We need significantly more investment in these programs. This series builds the case for transformational investment in progressive coordination infrastructure—a fraction of what we spend on elections, but potentially game-changing for everything we do.
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We’re 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.
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Any words on ageism? For example, has anyone speaking at your event actually been replaced by “fresh faces” and worked their way back in? Any of your employment listings or hiring practices even address ageism? The only place to go at a certain age is toward consulting- unless you just don’t want to own a house or have children. The movement loses wisdom all the time for shiny tech or popularity among donors or social media prowess. This is not the recipe for change or unity of purpose that topples dictators. I wish our movement work was a lifetime long and not just until you can’t afford it anymore or desire to live outside the bubble of purple states and DC.
One of the things that puzzled me was how quickly campaign staff were cut loose after Election Day with basically no post-campaign debrief or support. In the months since, I was left thinking, "you're deliberately going to lose all that institutional knowledge and enthusiasm for the cause? Just like that?" Like, you just had six months of people putting themselves in a pressure cooker learning and doing the work of electoral politics and after? Literal silence.
It struck me as a kind of hubris, like, "you'll be back; you always come back when we need you, but in the meantime, you're on your own." I dunno', this was my first campaign, so maybe it's natural to just drop folks who, at great personal sacrifice (career, family, etc.) and expense in order to relocate to another state, uproot their lives to do the work with no promises for what comes after.
I'm grateful for the opportunity to do the important work of protecting democracy (especially this last cycle) and for meeting and making all the new friends I now have in my life, but with nary a peep from the party after the election and what appears to be a lack of moral leadership from the party (I guess Bernie, AOC, and Booker notwithstanding) after the fact, it does make me wonder whether it was all worth it? Probably not, if the few I know who were lucky enough to find post-campaign work in the private sector is any indicator. It's almost like those folks are saying, "never again," and *I totally get that now.*