In Groundbreakers, Elizabeth McKenna and Hahrie Han seek to document how the 2008 and 2012 Obama campaigns recruited and sustained 2.2 million volunteers to mobilize voters, providing a “detailed primer on how the Obama ground game achieved both quality and scale” (p. 12). In so doing, their goal is to “show how modern campaigns … have the potential to repair rather than undermine democracy” (p. 4). Using an in-depth qualitative case study, they demonstrate not only what the Obama campaign did to sustain their massive field efforts, but also how. Using a wealth of data, including 10 months of participant observation during the 2008 and 2012 campaigns, an analysis of nearly 100 internal campaign documents, and interviews with 46 Obama for America (OFA) field staff and 25 volunteers, they tell the story of how OFA engaged in this work, the conceptual frameworks they used to guide it, and the pitfalls they encountered during its implementation.
At the core of their argument is the proposition that if campaigns allow volunteers to take real responsibility for electoral work and embed their efforts within a strong relational framework, the campaign has the potential to not only be successful but also to be transformational for the volunteers. Thus, “the felt experience of power among millions of volunteers is … an important [campaign] outcome worth understanding” (p. 15). They note that the majority of research around electoral mobilization efforts focuses solely on the get-out-the-vote (GOTV) portions of those campaigns, which make up only a very small percentage of the total campaign effort. They also observe that most stories about OFA’s success have focused on its technological innovations, particularly in relation to big data. But, without the staff and volunteers in the trenches, the campaign would have found itself “with accurate lists of voters and nobody to do the work of talking to them” (p. 12). Instead, they show that there was a symbiotic relationship between OFA’s ground game and its target and analytics work, that “the power of big data is diminished when it is not coupled with a robust ground game” (p. 188).
The book begins with a historical overview of campaigning in the United States, connecting the decrease in campaign investments in mobilization efforts in the field to the decline of local party organizations during the 1970s. This, combined with the growth in mass media, led to the rise of a political “consultocracy” that emphasized media buys over mobilization in political campaigns. McKenna and Han trace OFA’s roots through Howard Dean’s campaign, particularly the house meeting model he developed in New Hampshire, using frameworks provided by Marshall Ganz. Many key OFA staff, such as Jeremy Bird and Buffy Wicks, cut their political teeth in the Dean campaign, learning that electoral campaigns could be run differently.
They then discuss how OFA’s focus on volunteers and a community-organizing model largely came out of necessity during the 2008 primary season, with Obama’s status as an underdog leading them to innovate. Because OFA was unable to hire the staff necessary to mount the mobilization effort Obama needed to beat Clinton in multiple primary states, those staff they had needed to use their time to recruit others to do outreach, rather than doing that work themselves. Through trial and error, OFA adopted a neighborhood team model, also called a “snowflake,” which allowed field organizers to focus on building relationships while relying on volunteers to carry out the on-the-ground canvassing operations. In the final chapters, McKenna and Han document how the spirit of innovation that characterized the 2008 campaign was less present in 2012, with some volunteers complaining that the 2012 effort was too top down and focused on metrics, making the overall experience less transformative and often more stressful for staff and volunteers.
This book is not typical of what is the norm these days in American politics research. There are no regressions, nor any claims of causal inference. Instead, the authors present a rich and highly readable story about a campaign that made history, not only in terms of whom it elected but also how it did it. That is the greatest value of this book—its ability to tell us the how of the OFA story and the authors’ ability to connect that back to lessons for practitioners and scholars. Their analysis reminds readers of the “social, interactive nature of political behavior” (p. 193) and the importance of considering the “relationship between campaigns and the strength of a democracy” (p. 195). At its core, this book shows readers that “democracy can work when people are given power” (p. 201).
McKenna and Han’s thoughtful analysis also provides a useful and practical guide for practitioners, emphasizing how each piece of the OFA approach was interdependent, establishing that the whole was greater than the sum of its parts. They make it clear that OFA’s success was not just about relationships: “The relationships may have been the glue to hold the people together, but the structure, training, delegation of real responsibility, and metrics made those volunteers productive” (p. 188). Importantly, they caution practitioners about the OFA model’s potential to unwittingly reproduce race and class inequalities. OFA found that it was sometimes difficult for low-income volunteers, who often held more than one job or had less flexibility at work than middle-class volunteers, to commit the large numbers of hours necessary for this volunteer-based model to work. This resulted in less robust field efforts in some low-income communities of color, a key reminder that “organizers need to develop campaigns that maintain the same commitment to developing leaders among a diverse set of voices who are entrusted to shape the campaign itself to fit their particular circumstances” (p. 196).
My main critique of the book is that I would have liked for the authors to have included more of the stories they gleaned from their respondents. Very little of their 4,500 minutes of interviews made it into these pages. Instead, the authors do an admirable job of synthesizing that wealth of information, producing a highly readable book that centers on their core findings about what made OFA successful. Its accessibility makes it likely to be read by practitioners and easily adopted for undergraduate and graduate courses. Its core message—that democracy is about relationships, reciprocity, and collective engagement for change—should resonate strongly with us all.
