Democratic field organizers taking up residence in campaign offices across the country this cycle will have a friend in a high place.
No, not just the White House. Chelsea Peterson Thompson, general manager of NGP VAN, got her start as a field organizer — her first VAN login dates to 2006 — and sees sustained in-person outreach as the tactic that will shape the outcome of close races in 2024.
“I think it’s going to be absolutely critical to our success in 2024,” Peterson Thompson told C&E in a wide-ranging interview.
“I will tell you that our team has a number of former organizers on it, and any department you look at here, whether it’s sales, whether it’s product, whether it’s engineering, you have a tremendous amount of folks who have knocked on doors, who have registered voters, who have brought people to the polls.”
Before rising through the leadership ranks at NGP VAN where she started out in sales, Peterson Thompson rose through the ranks of field organizing. Going from working for Nevada Democrat Jill Derby’s 2006 congressional run as part of the state’s coordinated campaign to in 2010 serving as a regional field director for the DCCC in 13 midwest states. After the DCCC, she managed a district attorney race in San Francisco and a congressional in Northern California.
Now, presidential cycles usually manifest field programs like no other campaign, in part, because the historical figures running at the top of the ticket tend to inspire young people willing to shoulder the burden of running a volunteer and/or paid staff in a far-flung rented or borrowed outpost.
And part of the reason why a national field program will be so novel this cycle is because it hasn’t been seen in eight years — the last presidential was a covid cycle, Peterson Thompson notes, adding that this type of consistent outreach was sorely missed.
“We saw a lot of other great things happen in 2020 where people started picking up their phones and engaging in phone conversations with organizers and volunteers in a way that had been dropping off over the course of a decade,” she said. “But I am excited about the return of field. We’re excited to see MiniVAN back in the hands of organizers and volunteers, people out there knocking on doors all across the country.”
Influencer outreach and AI-generated digital content are the outreach tactics that have gotten the most attention as 2024 has gotten underway. But Peterson Thompson insists that campaigns discount traditional field organizing at their own peril.
“I think it’s critical to success, at every level of the ballot,” she said, pointing to how her children’s school reaches out to her. “I get emails from both of my [kids’ schools]. I get follow-up text messages, I get robocalls. If I’m on Zoom at work, I’m missing all of them,” she said. “But if somebody comes to our door, we’re much more likely to answer it.
“So when I even think about what would be the best way to reach me or my wife, that’s the way to do it right now because we’re getting so much just from school and soccer and all those other things out there.”
Peterson Thompson didn’t comment on what a coordinated effort between the Biden campaign and the state Democratic parties will look like this cycle. But she did say that the president’s effort would be field focused, despite the publicity around its influencer outreach strategy.
“I do think it’s going to be a huge emphasis on traditional organizing, which is exciting,” she said.
