Perhaps most troubling was the Democratic National Committee's rejection of a Congressional Black Caucus proposal for a $10 million voter registration campaign in swing states, confirmed by prominent Detroit News journalist, Bankole Thompson. Despite having a record billion-dollar war chest, the party declined this targeted outreach effort that would have featured Harris headlining speeches alongside bus caravans and door-to-door registration drives.
This stands in sharp contrast to successful historical registration efforts. When I directed the Democrats' youth voter registration efforts at the Watergate DNC headquarters in 1972, young voters registered with the highest percentage to this date. DNC Chair Terry McAuliffe asked me at a holiday party how we did it back in 1972. I told him, with a lot of hard work.
We launched an aggressive youth turnout campaign with posters, charts, and youth ambassadors across every state and congressional district. We recruited coordinators for states, districts, and cities, seeking recommendations from governors, mayors, congressmen, and state party chairs. We aired nonpartisan PSA radio spots on 1,000 stations and recruited celebrities and officials for major events. In 2024, while Harris received endorsements from figures like Taylor Swift, the national campaign and the DNC failed to leverage these into large-scale registration initiatives.
The Republicans, meanwhile, effectively utilized resources like Elon Musk and X (Twitter) to build their ground game. As Chuck Levin, a longtime volunteer deputy registrar and founder of The First Vote, cited by the Los Angeles City Council and the California Secretary of State for registering record numbers in California, notes, "All of the youthful excitement, enthusiasm, and tireless social media support for VP Kamala Harris was indeed real and impressive during her 110-day candidacy. But if you are the Democrats, where was your preceding 18-month-long effort to register the new XYZ generations' voters to your cause in the swing states? If that does not get done, you not only squandered time, you also reduced your chances of likely success. The basics are more essential than press releases, glitzy conventions, polls, and TV ads."
The Democratic Party's messaging challenges-- from its handling of Gaza to its tendency to exclude divergent voices-- certainly contributed to their defeat. However, no message can overcome a basic numerical disadvantage, no matter how compelling.
It turns out that the election was a lot closer than Republicans first claimed - a mere 1.6 percent difference in the popular vote. With a record 1.5 billion campaign funding, failing to invest more broadly in voter registration represents a catastrophic organizational failure that must be addressed before the next election cycle. History shows that losing parties often rebound in off-year elections-- but not if the same mistake is repeated.
As Levin told us, "The circular recrimination salvos miss the real point. If you don't have the voters, you can't win the votes."
Robert Weiner was National Youth Registration Director from 1971-72 at the Democratic Headquarters during Watergate. He has also served in the Clinton and George W. Bush White House and worked for Congressman John Conyers, Charles Rangel, Ed Koch, Claude Pepper, Senator Ted Kennedy, and Four-Star Gen. Barry McCaffrey. Ting Cui is a 22-year old Political Science major at Middlebury College and a senior policy analyst at Robert Weiner Associate and Solutions For Change Foundation.
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