DNC Rolls Out New Organizing Playbook Ahead of Midterms

The Democratic National Committee is out with a new comprehensive guide for coordinated campaigns and state parties as it looks to revamp its organizing and voter outreach strategy ahead of the midterms. 

The roughly 200-page DNC “Organizing and Political Playbook” isn’t the postmortem that was promised after the party’s defeats in 2024. But it still reflects on some of the tactics and strategies that failed Democrats in the past. 

Democratic campaigns, it says, have become “obsessed with massive, shiny output numbers from traditional tactics.” The traditional organizing model “provides no incentive for organizers and volunteers to actually build relationships with the voter, follow up, and feel ownership to move them closer towards turnout over the course of the cycle.”

In 2024, for example, former Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign made more than 300 million phone calls, but just 3 percent of them actually resulted in contact with a voter, the document notes.

“When success for an organizer is defined by quantity over quality, they spend most of their day tethered to their laptop inside a field office, disconnected from their turf, focused on making hundreds of cold calls rather than showing up and building connections face-to-face with voters,” the playbook reads.

The guidelines recommend three strategic shifts for Democrats’ organizing strategy: modernizing organizing tactics by expanding contact methods beyond traditional door knocking and phone outreach, prioritizing building deeper relationships with voters and redesigning the day-to-day work of organizers. 

“Campaigns should merge ‘traditional,’ digital, and coalitions organizing under one unified department,” the playbook advises.

The release of the playbook, timed to coincide with the launch of a nationwide voter registration blitz, is part of a larger effort by the DNC to refocus on grassroots engagement amid long-simmering concerns that Democratic committees and campaigns have fallen behind on voter contact.

The playbook emphasizes the need for campaigns to adopt new “non-traditional” tactics focused on expanding the universe of voters they’re talking to; tactics like volunteer relational outreach, voter registration and high-traffic canvassing. 

The document also encourages campaigns to adopt a process of systematic voter follow up, called “layering,” in which “each follow-up with a voter is treated as an additional layer of engagement.” In other words, a single contact with a voter isn’t enough. Organizers and volunteers should always consider the next action they can take to engage a particular voter.

It also seeks to reframe how campaigns think about their organizing operations. Digital organizing shouldn’t be separated from the organizing department, the playbook argues. “All organizers should be expected to utilize digital tools, tactics, and social media networks as a core method of volunteer recruitment, such as email newsletters, volunteer group chats, and posting in online community groups,” the document reads.

The playbook appears built around the voter contact effort announced by the DNC earlier this year. The committee said that it wants to engage more than one million infrequent voters in the first quarter of 2025 by taking a “listening first” approach to voter contact. 

That program marks an effort to address a long-running complaint from local and state Democratic groups and activists, who say that the national committees’ voter contact efforts frequently come too late in election cycles to make a meaningful impact on turnout, especially among less-engaged, infrequent voters.