Democrats Used to Campaign. Now Everyone Has a 'Movement.'

Tired: Mounting a campaign for president of the United States.

Wired: Asking Americans to join your “grassroots movement” for president.

It’s unclear exactly how the two are different. But pitching your “movement’’ to voters is now in vogue for a sprawling and unpredictable field of Democrats, all vying to lead the party into its new era.

“Thank you so much for being part of this movement,” Gov. Jay Inslee of Washington wrote to his supporters recently. Inslee is running a long-shot presidential bid primarily about climate change. “I’ve said all along that this is a movement powered by grassroots supporters just like you.”

“Thanks again for making this movement possible,” said another recent campaign email, this one from Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.

Democratic candidates are desperate to brand themselves as true champions of the people, free of corporate interests and deference to big money. But while only three major candidates — Warren, Beto O’Rourke of Texas and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont — have, to this point, sustained their campaigns through small-dollar donations, it has not stopped others from characterizing their bids as true “grassroots movements.”

This includes Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, even as she gathered donations at the home of an investment banking mogul, and Kamala Harris and Cory Booker, two senators running for president who have feasted on California’s elite donor circuit.

The language shift also reflects a party that is seeking to appease its activist base, which has been emboldened since President Donald Trump’s victory in 2016.

In that election, Sanders and Trump stood out from other candidates for their willingness to frame the campaign as an existential struggle, using terms like “revolution” and “movement” to drive home their anti-establishment credentials. With Democrats now seeking to redefine themselves after more than two decades of dominance by the Clintons and Barack Obama, such phrases have become the norm, rather than the exception.

“You want to try to create the sense of a movement that’s new and will grow from the grassroots up,” said Joel Benenson, a key consultant on Obama’s campaigns and the chief strategist for Hillary Clinton’s unsuccessful run in 2016. “But no one has run a race for president without a well-run and well-thought-out campaign.”

Alexandra Rojas, executive director of Justice Democrats, the progressive group seeking to move the Democratic Party further left through primary challenges, said voters should be wary that every campaign claiming to be a movement may not be following through.

“You have to ask: Will they spend a bunch of money in paid communications?’’ she said. “Or are they genuinely going to build a grassroots movement that prioritizes the volunteer base and the small dollar base? If you’re not doing both those things, it’s hard to claim that you’re building a movement.”

The “movement” moment has several historical touchstones that predate the “outsider” efforts of the 2016 presidential contest. Democratic campaigns of the past, including Shirley Chisholm’s historic run in 1972 and Jesse Jackson’s “rainbow coalition” of working-class Americans in 1984, serve as a model for modern Democrats seeking to fashion their own bids as bottom-up endeavors.

Obama won plaudits for bringing together what became known as the “Obama coalition,” a demographic mix of voters who fueled his rise from the backbenches of Illinois politics to becoming the country’s first black president.

Michael Dukakis, the former Massachusetts governor who won the Democratic presidential nomination in 1988, said he hopes the focus on projecting an organic movement doesn’t come at the expense of implementing a solidly functioning campaign structure. He said in a crowded primary field, as he had in 1988, the campaign that quickly organizes and targets potential voters will have an advantage.

“I don’t think you win elections with movements,” Dukakis said, though he acknowledged the rhetoric may fit the moment.

“I know we have young people who want to get involved, and they’re not fans of Trump, but it’s more than that,” Dukakis said. “If you’re going to win an election, you need a regular old campaign.”

Warren, who was among the first major candidates to announce she was running, laid down a populist marker on her very first day, when she called for all candidates to reject corporate PAC money and individual super PACs. As other campaigns followed suit, Warren raised the stakes, eschewing all private and high-dollar donations in a move that has come at some political risk — and led to the resignation of her finance director, who disagreed with the decision.

Strategists have said Warren, along with O’Rourke and Sanders, will provide a test case for how much Democrats care about the language of movements being reflected in a campaign. Others have framed the question in a different manner: Is the Democrat base really as opposed to America’s wealthy and elite — or to the general principles of capitalism — as some of the presidential candidates believe?

“The base is still anti-establishment,” Rojas said confidently.

Rebecca Katz, a progressive consultant in New York City, said she was “happy to see so many people talking about movements,” but added that she hopes the candidates take “other lessons, and not just words.”

“Things like working together, listening and putting forward ideas that the majority of people want,” Katz said. “If you look at successful political movements, whether it’s for ‘Medicare for All’ or Green New Deal, I’m hopeful that they will listen and then fight for what the majority of us want.”

Campaigns have also sought to hire staff members with movement credibility, which has meant an influx of more racial and gender diversity, as well as senior staffers who don’t come from political consulting backgrounds.

But while Democrats have made staffing and language changes, questions persist about whether this is simply a cosmetic front, or a fundamental shift in where power lies in the top presidential campaigns. Though several staffs have put women and members of racial minorities in top positions and advising roles, many of the candidates’ closest political allies remain the insider strategists who helped them rise within the party.

The upshot is that Democrats could choose to adopt the language of grassroots movements, without the principled ideals. Even Warren, for example, made clear that her pledge to forgo high-dollar fundraisers was only a promise for the primary elections, and would not be true if she was the general election candidate.

“Every one of these people are running campaigns,” Benenson said flatly. “They can play with the lexicon all they want.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.