The Scoop
Eighteen months after losing everything, left-leaning activists and unions have a comeback in their sights. All they need is money, aggressive turnout of their 2024 voters, and a president who keeps screwing up on the cost of living.
The Democratic Party could figure out its own problems later.
That was the overwhelming sentiment at the annual summit of America Votes, founded 22 years ago to coordinate the electoral work of left-leaning unions and climate groups. Semafor got an in-depth look at the group’s entire confab, where hundreds of progressive campaigners talked about what worked to motivate anti-Trump voters — and what could win over the people who’d turned on the president.
“Trump wants us to feel overwhelmed, like it’s never going to end — but let’s be clear, it is going to end,” America Votes President Greg Speed said onstage. “MAGA is sowing the seeds of the blue wave, fueled by midterm turnout, if we do our jobs.”
The mood was optimistic, described as a night-and-day shift from last year’s conference, right after MAGA had ripped through the Democratic coalition. As wins in off-year elections revealed cracks in the Trump vote, with younger and non-white voters peeling off from the GOP, the group’s leaders changed their theories about who could be persuaded to vote against Republicans — and how.
Speed’s goal for the America Votes network was to register 1.5 million new voters and persuade 5.6 million more to abandon the GOP, across 34 competitive House seats. The 75 million Americans who’d supported Kamala Harris had turned out more reliably since 2024 than the 77 million who’d supported Donald Trump, and the groups could build on that.
“We’re doing a better job of getting those 75 million back, and they’re doing a sh*ttier job of getting 2 million more than that back, and that will be the single biggest factor in how this election goes,” Speed said. “It’s not buyer’s remorse. It’s not necessarily folks changing their minds.”
While the Democratic Party’s plans overlap heavily with America Votes’, the group doesn’t think the Democratic brand needs to be fixed in order for its work to succeed. Union affiliates like the SEIU and National Education Association will lean on their members, climate groups will run ads blaming Trump for higher energy prices, and they would all share data.
“The coalition has a little bit more flexibility and a little bit more leeway, because they are the closest to the ground,” said Daria Dawson, the group’s executive director. “They are the closest to the communities.”
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America Votes was formed when George W. Bush’s GOP had a far stronger voter file and turnout operation than the Democratic Party; the multiplicity of progressive groups and unions was less effective, and doing duplicative work.
During Barack Obama’s presidency, conservative funders invested in grassroots organizing to beat the left’s turnout and persuasion machines. Countering that work after Trump won in 2016, progressive donors funded scores of organizations that promised to organize the people Hillary Clinton couldn’t win over.
Trump’s 2024 win reset the board again. Latino voters shifted to Republicans, as did young voters and, to a lesser extent, Black men. These were blocs that America Votes coalition members had focused on for years, with plenty of money and dedicated staff. Funders who were skeptical of the left, and believed it was now alienating many voters with new thinking on race and gender, invested in groups that would work around it.
But progressives who met last week weren’t overly concerned with their infrastructure and methods falling out of favor after Trump ran against “woke.” Buttons displaying preferred pronouns (he/him, he/them, she/them) were placed in the main conference hallway, free to take. What America Votes attendees said they had learned: Younger voters entering the electorate, and non-white Americans getting registered to vote, would not necessarily help them.
“There was an assumption made by some folks in certain strategic positions that if you register young people, they will vote a certain way,” said Arianna Jones, who took over the youth organizing group NextGen last year.
Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point organizations had years of success on college campuses by making their groups fun to join and separate from the Republican Party. NextGen was adapting, Jones said, by deploying “content producers” to reflect what students were saying, giving them space for dialogue that wasn’t “branded by a party.”
Affordability was a touchstone. Climate groups were focused less on the warming earth and more on energy costs. Democratic wins in last year’s Georgia Public Utilities Commission races had modeled a way to link the Trump administration’s pro-fossil-fuel, pro-AI policies to higher costs; The League of Conservation Voters has run successful digital ads around that.
“What keeps coming through in the research is, there are utility bills that are showing up in people’s mailboxes every month, and they’re only getting higher, with an unpredictability that is very tough for folks who are trying to manage all the other rising costs in their lives,” said Sara Schreiber, the LCV’s vice president of campaigns.
David’s view
One of my questions heading into America Votes was how worried progressives were about the Trump administration looking for legal avenues to suppress their work. I detected surprisingly little concern about that over my two days at the conference.
There was more short-term angst that Trump’s network would contest a GOP loss in the midterms, which everyone there expected.
What I saw instead was a consensus that the new swing voters were not suburbanites, who have swung left, but young voters disconnected from politics and old news sources, who swung toward Trump and have not stuck with him. When America Votes got started, John Kerry was winning the votes of union members by 19 points. Kamala Harris won them by 8 points. The decline in Black and Latino support was just as stark — more wins, but narrowing.
Had progressive groups that were supposed to take the frequent pulse of the working class and young people lost that touch? They saw it another, more upbeat way: Trump had made inroads and then not given his new voters a reason to turn out again, much less to become MAGA Republicans for good.
Notable
- In The Lever, Luke Goldstein and Katya Schwenk profiled Majority Democrats, one of the post-2024 groups set up by donors who think the Democrats need strategies and language that will win back less culturally liberal voters.