916: Difference Between Organizer & Strategist
Documentary inspiration
Back in 2021, we planned a retreat with a bunch of then-new friends to plot out a path for WelcomePAC. A Covid surge killed it, but I still have hope that we’ll be able to do one part of it: two movie nights, one for each documentary on how a midterm election can reshape the Democratic Party.
First, HouseQuake (Amazon Prime Video), which “Captures political theater as the Democratic Party executes its stunning takeover of the U.S. House of Representatives in the 2006 elections.” It follows Rahm Emmanuel and his motley crew of recruits, from Tammy Duckworth to former NFL quarterback Heath Shuler, as Democrats picked up 31 seats.
Second, Knock Down The House (Netflix), which follows the Justice Democrats team and their 2018 recruits - including AOC.
There is a fascinating scene with AOC and her boyfriend in the middle of what was supposed to be a longshot campaign. But they feel like they’ve stumbled upon a secret: the establishment is cooked.
And while it clearly thrills them, it also seems to scare them.
AOC’s boyfriend cuts to the point: “One of these core, core issues for the Democratic establishment is that their consultants are garbage. They’re losing. It’s scary that this is the fourth most powerful Democrat in the country, and this is the type of stuff that he’s doing?”
There is another memorable line.
AOC frames the difference between their campaign and the establishment as “the difference between an organizer and a strategist.”
When ActBlue’s fundraising numbers came out for the first six months of the year, it was clear AOC had done a lot of organizing:
There is a lot of strategizing in Democratic politics.
For centrists, there needs to be more organizing.
Since our inception, we’ve talked about our aspirations for building the “Justice Democrats of the Center”. As we wrote in our first post here on Substack, that means investing in building real-world, on-the-ground organizing capacity to mirror what’s been achieved on the far-left.
As Steve Teles and Robert Saldin explain in their 2020 paper The Future is Faction, moderate and mainstream elements of both parties have long assumed that they would be fine simply outsourcing much of the hard work of politics to third-party institutions. This meant externalizing policy shopping to think tanks, comms and outreach to traditional media outlets, and campaigning to existing party establishment infrastructure.
In other words, mainstream Democrats have backed away from true organizing:
“Perhaps because they believe the broader public is already on their side, they tend to think control of politics by those mobilized at the ideological poles is illegitimate. Hence, they look for ways to redesign rules to allow the sensible but unmobilized middle to have its preferences govern without needing to do the hard work of organizing for action within the two major parties.”
As moderates stepped back, ideologues at the poles stepped forward. They put in years of work and planning to build their own independent ecosystems within their parties. Those investments have paid dividends in recent years as mainstream candidates on the left and right have been out-organized by more extreme elements in both parties.
If we in the center want to fight back, we need to organize.
If mainstream Democrats want to win back the ground we’ve lost to the unpopular far-left faction, we need to make our own investments in faction-building.
916 days left until the first presidential primary. 455 days until the midterms.
The 2006 midterm documentary was about Democrats beating Republicans. The 2018 midterm documentary was about progressives beating Democrats. Seven years on, that organizing continues.
The takeaway from the 2026 midterm needs to look far more like 2006.