Happy New Year, Democrats. Kate here, the DNC’s Distributed Organizing Director, for a special edition of Ground Game. My role is to manage our Distributed Organizing program, meaning the ways supporters can get involved with the party at a national level, empower volunteers to become leaders, and share the responsibilities of organizing our communities to win elections.
Last spring, we rolled out our principles of organizing, centering our efforts on the organizing tactics that we know work, cut through the noise, and prepare us for the future. Since then, the DNC’s Distributed Organizing and Technology teams have been testing new tactics, tools, and planning for the future. Now, 2026 is here, and it’s time to take what we’ve learned and roll out new programs, continue to test new tools, and build energy ahead of November.
2025 Distributed Program Learnings
In 2025, the Distributed Organizing Team tested how to scale non-traditional voter contact without relying heavily on traditional relational organizing tools. Through our People’s Network programming, we trained over 500 supporters to organize within their own networks, resulting in more than 6,000 conversations with friends, neighbors, and community members, over coffee, online, and at local events.
At the same time, DNC volunteers made more than 1 million traditional voter contact calls, including Get Out the Vote efforts and redistricting pressure campaigns in states like Texas and Indiana.
Our biggest learning: Scaling non-traditional voter contact types takes time, dedication, and buy-in from supporters, who may be used to jumping on a phone bank, but are less accustomed to engaging neighbors or friends in deeper conversations.
Along with testing tactics, our team worked to pilot a number of new organizing tools, selected from our 2025 Organizing RFP process, to support those tactics both with organizers in the states and with our distributed organizing team nationally. Tools tested were everything from new events platforms for volunteers to seamlessly sign up to join our team, to volunteer management tools for organizers to better understand the relationships in their community.
Between testing the new tactics and tools, our team feels prepared to take on the challenge of organizing in 2026 head-on.
Strategic Imperatives for the DNC’s Distributed Organizing Program in 2026
As we build toward the November elections, our focus in 2026 is clear:
Activate and train supporters as the face, voice, and ears of the party in their communities.
Scale effective, non-traditional voter contact with the same urgency as traditional methods.
Continue testing and innovating within traditional voter contact tactics, including over the phone and on the doors.
Our new Local Listeners bootcamp is just the first step. Over the years, organizing work has skipped training on basic skills like active listening, leaving voters to feel like they aren’t being heard or represented by the party. Through this program, we will build thousands of skilled listeners, create strong feedback loops, and invest in our supporters who can authentically represent the party where they live.
Alongside the bootcamp, we are launching Local Listeners Phone Banks, where supporters will be trained on the same listening skills but over the phone, and put them to the test. The goal is to have meaningful, listening-first conversations with voters in strategically important districts, centering active listening and strong feedback loops. From this programming, we hope to:
Pilot qualitative data collection from phone conversations and test how we analyze and use it.
Strengthen callers’ ability to lead listening-first conversations in preparation for persuasion and vote plan work later this year.
Better understand the emotions and experiences of voters in key congressional districts.
Participants will receive additional training on open-ended scripts, best practices for engaging disillusioned voters, and managing non-traditional call flows. Notes from conversations will be collated and recapped into reports on the effectiveness of the conversations and pull out any key voter sentiments.
Lastly, our team will continue to test and work with tools that support us in these imperatives, and we are eager to share more later this year, roll out new parts of our organizing program, and more. We will be hosting an Organizing Briefing next Thursday, 1/15, at 8 p.m. ET to share more details about these programs and even more that will be announced in the coming weeks. I hope you’ll join!
2026 is a big year. We must show that Democrats are trying something new, reaching voters authentically, and scaling to win races from Senate to school board.
Thanks for being in this for the long haul. We’ve got work to do.
Kate
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I think one of the failings of the DNC planning committee and the leadership has been to only support Democrtic candidates against Republicans in some of the states and to avoid helping candidates in states where there is nascent opposition to powerful Republicans. Texas is a good example of the DNC NOT supporting the Democratic candidates against Ted Cruz for example. We need to support Democratic candidates in all 50 of the states during an election, instead of just supporting the ones with what the Central planning DNC deems winable. I would also like to see more Democratic elected leaders eschewing corporate funding—it invites being beholden to the corporate donors and gives them an outsized influence on the way the Democratic candidates view their role. Support Democratic candidates who depend on grass roots donations from actual consituents.