The $165 Million Gap: Shortfall for Grassroots Field Operation in Key Battleground States
Democrats’ victory hinges on the “Grassroots Ground Game” — hundreds of year-round voter organizing groups optimized for turning out the hard-to-reach voters we need to win. Here are the budget gaps.
Nate Silver recently wrote: “In 16 years of election forecasts, I’ve never seen such a close election.”
The last election was decided by 43,000 votes. This one could be even closer.
The most important funding gap for Democrats right now is the local ground game. The Harris-Walz campaign has raised over $678 million. Political ad spending is projected to top $10.2 billion. A fraction of this would close all the budget gaps of the hundreds of local organizations who are best positioned as trusted messengers to persuade skeptical voters and turn out sporadic voters over the next six weeks.
The #1 thing we can do now is make sure these organizations are well-funded.
Sampling of Battleground State Budget Gaps
As an update to our recent memo, here is a sampling of budget gaps for Movement Voter PAC’s partner organizations in our Top 9 states (updated as of September 23rd):
AZ - Living United for Change in Arizona (LUCHA): $5 million
AZ - Our Voice Our Vote (OVOV): $4.9 million
AZ - Chispa AZ: $2.9 million
AZ - Rural Arizona Action (RAZA): $ 2.2 million
AZ - Fuerte Arts Movement: $1.2 million
AZ - AZ Poder: $800,000
AZ - Arizona Asian American Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander Advocates (AZ AANHPI Advocates): $600,000
GA - Black Male Initiative (BMI) Fund: $5.2 million
GA - Asian American Advocacy Fund (AAAF): $1.3 million
GA - 1000 Women Strong: $1 million
MI - Michigan United Action: $1.4 million
MT - Western Native Voice Action Fund (WNVAF): $500,000
NC - A. Philip Randolph Educational Fund (APREF): $1.1 million
NC - Down Home North Carolina: $500,000
NV - Make the Road Action Nevada: $600,000
PA - Asian Pacific Islander Political Alliance (API PA) Votes: $2 million
PA - One Pennsylvania: $1 million
PA - Make The Road Action PA: $850,000
PA - Pennsylvania United: $428,000
WI - Voces de la Frontera Action: $500,000
Multistate - Mi Familia Vota / Mi Familia Decide (AZ, CO, CA, FL, GA, PA, NC, NV, TX): $17 million
Multistate - Rapid Resist Action, a program of Movement Labs (AZ, GA, MI, NC, NV, PA, WI, MD, MT, NE, NH, OH): $16.1 million
Multistate - Black Male Voter Project (GA, MI, NC, PA, WI): $13.4 million
Multistate - UNITE HERE (NC, NV, OH, PA): $10.1 million
Multistate - Working Families Party (GA, WI, PA, AZ, NC, MI, OH): $9.6 million
Multistate - Empower Project (GA, WI, MN, PA, MI, MT, NV, AZ, NC & OH): $8 million
Multistate - Equality Federation (GA, MI, PA, WI, AZ, NC, MT, OH, NV): $6.4 million
Multistate - Black Voters Matter (GA, MI, NC, OH, PA): $6 million
Multistate - Community Change Action (WI, MI, PA, NC, GA, AZ, NV): $5.7 million
Multistate - NextGen America (AZ, MI, PA, NV, NC, NH, TX, VA): $5.3 million
Multistate - Color of Change PAC (multi-layered program in CA, FL, GA, MI, NC, OH, PA, WI; digital-only in AZ and NV): $3.5 million
Multistate - Center for Popular Democracy (CPD) Action: $3.5 million
Multistate - MoveOn (MI, PA, WI, GA, NC, AZ): $3.5 million
Multistate - Care in Action (GA, NC, AZ, NV): $3.2 million
Multistate - Alliance for Youth Action (AZ, FL, GA, MI, MT, NC, NV, OH, PA, WI): $3.2 million
Multistate - One Fair Wage Action (AZ, MI, OH): $3 million
Multistate - Project Freedom (Black Church PAC, Until Freedom, Woke Vote, Kairos Democracy Project, MPower Action Fund; NC, MI, GA, NV, AZ, NY, PA): $2.5 million
Multistate - People’s Action (MI, NC, PA, WI, and more): $2.2 million
Multistate - Sister District (AZ, GA, MI, MN, NC, NH NV, PA, WI): $1.8 million
Multistate - Climate Emergency Advocates (Field program: GA, NC, PA, WI, MN; Digital program: MT, FL): $1.75 million
Multistate - The Movement Cooperative: $1.5 million
Multistate - Civitech (WI, MI, NC, and more): $1.2 million
Multistate - National AAPI Democracy Fund (AZ, GA, MI, NC, NV, PA, WI): $1 million
Multistate - Vote Pro-Choice (Action Fund & PAC - AZ, FL, GA, MI, MT, NV, NC, OH, PA): $815,000
Multistate - American Family Voices (PA, MI, OH, WI) $800,000
Multistate - Seed the Vote (MI, NV, AZ, WI, PA): $600,000
Multistate - National LGBTQ Task Force Action Fund (FL, NC, PA): $600,000
Multistate - Poder Latinx (AZ, CA, FL, GA, NC, TX, WA): $573,000
Multistate - Showing Up for Racial Justice (SURJ) Action: $503,000
Multistate - Gen-Z for Change: $500,000
The gaps above total roughly $165 million. Again, this is just a quick sampling of large 501(c)(4) and PAC gaps, shared with permission to give a sense of the overall scale of funding gaps. This is not in any way a comprehensive list or an attempt to highlight which gaps, organizations, or states are most important. There are a lot of excellent, important organizations with large gaps not listed here. And for legal reasons, we are only listing partisan political gaps, not their entire voter engagement budgets.
Want to help MVP fund the ground game? You can give online here or by other methods here, or contact us at advisor@movement.vote to help fill larger gaps for a group or a state.
In case you missed it: We discuss this at length in our recent memo, Bat Signal 4: Democrats’ Underfunded Ground Game. If you’d like a thorough understanding of the situation, please give it a read.
If you want the quick and dirty version, here are the key points:
Democrats’ Underfunded Ground Game
As Maurice Mitchell (National Director of the Working Families Party) put it, there are now three indispensable components of victory:
A Presidential campaign that is inspiring and well-funded.
TV ads and digital outreach by Super PACs to reach a lot of voters quickly.
A ground game to engage, persuade, and mobilize voters through direct person-to-person contact — not just the “party faithful” but lower-propensity Democratic voters who can tip the closest battlegrounds.
The Overall Need: $200-$300 Million
We estimate a total partisan budget gap of at least $200-$300 million in the top nine Presidential and Senate battleground states.
MVP’s goal for this cycle is to move $100 million in partisan funds to groups on the ground. As of September 23, 2024, we have moved over $62 million.
The money is there — see stats on charitable & political giving, and on the millions of modest millionaires among us.
We just need to channel a sliver of the enthusiasm for the Harris-Walz campaign into the grassroots turnout operation so that we can get them elected.
Why Are the Budget Gaps So Big?
First, Democratic donors dramatically decreased their giving after 2020. This is understandable, if we commit to steady, multi-year funding, we will reap the benefits in 2026, 2028, and beyond.
Second, everything costs more than it did four years ago, and local in-person voter engagement is no exception.
Third, our political and civic engagement sector is now bigger and stronger, but our funding is now spread among a broader array of strategies.
Fourth, the recent surge in money has gone to the Harris campaign, but most Democratic donors have simply not yet learned how or why to also strategically invest in the Grassroots Ground Game.
What is the Money Needed For?
Four key functions are needed in the electoral homestretch: Voter registration, voter persuasion, voter mobilization, and election protection.
For details, see our 2024 plan and recent highlights from our partners’ work on the ground.
“Isn’t the Democratic Party supposed to do this?”
Yes and no. The grassroots ground game doesn’t replace official Democratic efforts, it strategically complements them by filling essential gaps.
The “Coordinated Campaign” (i.e. the joint effort by the Democratic Party and its candidates) is optimized for turning out Democrats who vote each cycle, but it’s less effective at reaching new, infrequent, and skeptical voters.
Local organizations excel with these voters, because they deploy trusted messengers who are not from the campaign to be validators, speaking from a shared cultural context, with messages they resonate with.
A Potential Blue Wave (if we fund it)
Thanks to the audacious shake-up at the top of the ticket, we are now competitive in all seven top battleground states.
There is a real potential for a Blue Wave (see three scenarios below), but now is the time to be clear-eyed and leave nothing to chance.
Three Major Election Scenarios
Broadly speaking, this election will likely go in one of three directions:
Scenario A: MAGApocalypse: By the narrowest of margins, we elect Trump as President, backed by a loyalist MAGA Congress, Supreme Court and no guardrails.
Scenario B: The Mediocre Scenario: We win the Presidency but lose the House and/or Senate. We will be unable to accomplish anything federally until 2026 at the earliest.
Scenario C: Blue Wave: We win the Presidency, save the Senate, and flip the House, enabling us to do amazing things like pass sweeping policy on voting rights, reproductive rights, and more. A Blue Wave in 2024 would lead to so good things that it is worth our largest possible investment.
The Itsy Bitsy Difference Between Scenarios
A remarkable thing about these three scenarios is how incredibly close they could be to one another in terms of the sheer number of votes.
Given the non-negotiable timeline imposed by the climate crisis, we won’t get this big a chance to make this big a difference in the future of the world for the rest of our lifetimes. This is it.
We must act purposefully and strategically. Given early voting timelines, we need to take action now.
“OK, I’m fired up – What can I do?”
A simple option is to give through MVP and we'll redistribute according to our electoral strategy optimized for winning the Presidency, Senate, House, and key down-ballot races.
If you need help figuring out how and what to give, the MVP team is here to help. If you’re not sure who to talk to, email advisor@movement.vote.
In addition to giving through MVP, we’ve also put together recommendations for national organizations, and we can go deeper in any area of interest such as this list of Black voter engagement organizations where there are acute gaps and great opportunities for impact.
We’ve also partnered with allied donor networks Way to Win, Democracy Alliance, Committee on States, and others to launch Building for Democracy (BFD), which monitors state gaps and is a great resource for making the most strategic allocations in the final stretch.
The future is in our hands.
If you knew that, by making your biggest investment ever, you could help secure the few thousand votes that separates a Blue Wave scenario from a Trump/MAGA takeover scenario… Would you do it?
Thanks to the incredible situation we find ourselves in, that is exactly the choice before us.
As generations of donors and organizers before us have done…
LFGG: Let’s Fund the Ground Game +
LFG. Let’s Effing Go!