RISE UP 2022
People’s Action's Rise Up 2022 strategy will boost progressive power in the U.S. Senate and House by organizing in competitive races to flip Republican-held swing seats in the 2022 elections. People’s Action will partner with its member organizations across the country to implement the Rise Up 2022 strategy, building on the power of its groundbreaking 2020 strategy centered around deep canvassing.
Our strategy aims to elect progressives in Democratic primaries and then win general elections in swing districts by using progressive policies to engage voters who are typically shut out of politics and ignored by the Democratic establishment.
HOW WE WIN
Listening sessions with candidates.
Deep canvassing campaigns to turn out midterm drop-off voters and move persuadable voters to vote for endorsed candidates.
Candidate-based and issue-based deep canvassing.
Other candidate events and forums.
DEEP CANVASSING: THE BACKBONE OF OUR WORK
Making Human Connections
Deep canvassing is one of the most proven and durable forms of persuasion and is far more effective than other forms of persuasion employed by traditional political campaigns. Deep canvasses are candid, two-way conversations where canvassers ask voters to share their relevant, emotionally significant experiences and reflect on them aloud.
Deep canvasses typically involve:
- Non-judgmentally soliciting voters’ views and asking follow-up questions about voters’ experiences.
- Sharing narratives about personal experiences with the issue that reinforce values relevant to the issue.
Caitlin Homrich-Kneilen relates the story of her first deep canvass conversation in the second episode of To See Each Other, a new People's Action podcast hosted by George Goehl.
Data + People = Power
We paired this breakthrough form of organizing with cutting-edge data science, using a machine-learning-informed method that lets us improve our ability to find conflicted voters in real time.
We also added a new team of distributed organizers–skilled campaigners who brought with them the commitment and savvy to draw in thousands of volunteers above and beyond those in our affiliate organizations.
BUILDING ON A STRONG FOUNDATION
People's Action's Movement Politics program recruits, runs, and elects progressives into local and statewide offices across the country. Since 2016, People’s Action has helped elect over 380 movement politics candidates. The program focuses on electing women, people of color, and low-income people who are grounded in progressive movement building with our member organizations.
Momentum from 2020
2020 was an electoral season of exponential growth for People's Action's Movement Politics work, during which we activated 23,000 volunteers and made 47.3 million attempts to contact voters in battleground states.
Through a combination of a national distributed volunteer program and powerful grassroots organizing in battleground states, People's Action set up a major progressive electoral upheaval and played a pivotal role in defeating Trump.
People's Presidential Forum Series
At every step along the way, People’s Action focused on building an organizing strategy with staying power while building up candidates who would govern alongside the progressive movement while in office. Its two-year endorsement process for the 2020 Democratic primary culminated in a People’s Presidential Forum series, which included an Iowa forum hailed by The Nation as the “most in-depth, people-powered forum” of the 2020 cycle.
By December, People’s Action had endorsed Bernie Sanders for President, who included People’s Action’s Homes Guarantee in his housing plan.
Building on 2018
The explosive growth in People’s Action’s electoral organizing has its foundation in careful, intentional work done over the last two election cycles. In 2018, People’s Action and its member organizations assisted winning campaigns in 23 House districts, seven Senate races, 10 gubernatorial races, 115 down-ballot races and 10 ballot initiatives. The organization entered the 2020 cycle with an intention to escalate, and, informed by its long-term agenda, it published a People’s Platform for 2020 to guide its electoral efforts.
