What a grassroots PAC can teach us about winning back Congress in 2024

By Bradley L’Herrou

They won a key swing district in 2022. Can they do it again?

New Mexico is not at the center of our political discourse in the USA, but it is home to a very interesting Congressional district. New Mexico CD2 runs from the suburbs of Albuquerque to the border with Mexico. This is the setting of Breaking Bad — though it’s not so yellow in real life. It’s one of only 10 seats Democrats picked up in 2022, a year when Dems lost ground, but beat expectations. From that small group, this New Mexico district is by far the most rural Democratic pickup.

The key thing to know: New Mexico CD2 has flipped back and forth between Republican and Democratic control. In 2016 it was won by incumbent Republican Steve Pearce. When Pearce left Congress to run for Governor in 2018, Democrat Xochitl Torres Small squeaked out a win with 50.9% of the vote in a very blue year. In 2020 it flipped back to Republican control by a healthy 7.4% margin. Then in 2022, Democrat Gabe Vasquez won another tight victory, this time by just 1,346 votes.

A key PAC helped Vasquez across the finish line in 2022 — and the results in 2024 depend on whether they’re able to replicate their stunning results.

Blue CD2 New Mexico: A different kind of PAC

Typically Political Action Committees function as a way to legally spend large amounts of money on paid communications. In contested Congressional seats, these PACs can easily spend millions or tens of millions in a single cycle. That money gets spent on media buys — covering the airwaves with broadcast communications.

But the outcome of the 2022 election in CD2 hinged on the work of a PAC that raised only a fraction of that — and they spent their budget mainly on supporting the volunteer actions that comprised their electoral work. Blue CD2 New Mexico is a volunteer-run PAC that ran a two-prong effort targeting this swing district in 2022.

First, they organized a massive grassroots campaign to register Dem-leaning district residents who weren’t yet registered to vote. More than 300 volunteers devoted thousands of work-hours to send roughly 90,000 postcards to these targets, encouraging them to register. Critically, they touched their targets 3 separate times. In the end, more than 5,000 new Democrats and left-leaning independents from their target list registered to vote in 2022. Of those newly-registered voters, 2,508 voted in 2022.

Second, Blue CD2 NM ran a Get Out The Vote blitz targeting low-propensity Democratic voters. These are people who are Democrats, but don’t regularly show up to vote. Volunteers sent another 20,000 postcards to these voters, knocked on their doors, and targeted them with social media and programmatic digital advertising. In the end, 6,738 of the targeted low-propensity voters showed up to vote for Gabe Vasquez.

That’s 2,500+ new voters and 6,500+ existing voters who turned out to vote in this election as a direct result of this volunteer effort. Democrats won the election by just 1,346 votes.

Lessons for Democrats

Volunteer efforts can swing elections for Democrats, but they require three key things to work:

One, clearly-defined goals and well-targeted lists — you can’t just write postcards to voters and expect that to accomplish anything. You have to know who you’re targeting, design a message specific to that group, and then touch those targets repeatedly.

Two, devoted volunteers — a few hours of phone banking isn’t going to do it. You need a core collection of people willing to devote a lot of skilled work hours to the project. You also need a large pool of volunteers ready to do less intensive (but still significant) work.

Three, a real budget — even volunteering isn’t free, unfortunately. To run an operation like BlueCD2’s, you need to design and print postcards, you need reliable voter data, you need software to manage the project, and you need targeted ad spending to back up your volunteer efforts. You can do this on a comparatively small budget, but you still need real money to run a real electoral program.

In addition to these prerequisites, there’s another thing to note: the volunteer effort specifically targeted “high-hanging fruit,” leaving the low-hanging fruit to the well-funded campaign. Anyone who has worked in campaigns knows that sometimes Independent Expenditures and official campaigns step on each other’s toes — it’s inevitable when coordination is legally banned. But Blue CD2 successfully complemented Gabe Vasquez’s campaign rather than duplicating efforts and muddying the water for voters.

The volunteer team were able to do this because they knew what campaign priorities typically are — spending the campaign budget on the most efficient voter outreach. By contrast, Blue CD2 devoted a significant portion of their resources to one of the less efficient ways to win votes: registering new voters.

This helped them avoid stepping on the campaign’s toes and it also had the benefit of forming a good long-term investment. Campaign communications come and go with each electoral cycle, but new voters endure. Every new Democrat who Blue CD2 registered in 2022 is someone who can now be targeted by campaigns for GOTV efforts in 2024. Meanwhile, Blue CD2 will be registering more new voters. It’s a virtuous cycle.

A dedicated grassroots PAC like this in every contested Congressional district could be a gamechanger. If you’re interested in more details, Blue CD2 have put out a short report on how their successful 2022 program worked. You can read it here. If you want to support their work directly, you can donate here.