Pundits keep insisting there is danger ahead for progressives. The “Democratic base” that will dominate among primary voters, they argue, has swung too far to the left, losing touch with the concerns of moderate swing voters needed to win the general election.

To which I say: When was the last time you knocked on 50 strangers’ doors in an afternoon to talk about an upcoming election?

Today’s Democratic foot soldiers — the folks out knocking on doors, not the ones posting on Twitter — started out ideologically diverse and pragmatic and have just gotten more so. Canvassing on behalf of midterm candidates, they met voters like the suburban mom who is a pro-union feminist but is struggling over late-term abortion. And the center-city African-American family who does not vote at all because it’s against their religious beliefs. And the man with the pickup truck and Trump-loving neighbors who was already sold on the Democratic woman in the race by the guys in the plumbers union.

These are real stories from progressive door knockers — and lots of progressives knocked doors. Last year, the number of Democratic volunteers was higher than for any midterm cycle for which we have nationwide data. In the midterm year of 2014, volunteers and paid canvassers working with progressive groups and Democratic campaigns knocked on 96 million doors, according to data provided by NGP VAN, Democrats’ shared voter database source. In the presidential year of 2016, that rose to 111 million. In 2018, the total was 155 million.

In other words, the Democratic presidential primary electorate has not encompassed this much personal experience with recent voter outreach since at least 2008, and possibly long before that. And nothing builds pragmatic knowledge of the American electorate like trying to win votes face to face.

Canvassers have discovered that markers the pundits have taught us to identify with the opposing party are a poor guide to who is persuadable. “Young NRA guys — those were my best conversations on the doors!” recalls one progressive woman who made a valiant run for state legislator in a southwest Pennsylvania district Donald Trump won by double digits and which hadn’t had a Democratic challenger since 2010. “I’d say, ‘We gotta protect schools and make sure people can own guns safely,’ and they’d say, ‘Okay, tell me. Concretely, how are you going to do that?’ It turned out there was common ground.”

An unprecedented portion of those 155 million knocks came not from campaign-generated volunteers but from local grassroots groups that have sprung up around the country, remaking regional political ecosystems on the left. In purple exurbs and rural/Rust Belt districts alike, it was new grassroots groups that took the initiative to recruit and support candidates up and down the ballot, for races the institutional Democratic Party had rarely bothered to contest.

The actual “activist” base is ideologically diverse and pervasively pragmatic

One upstart campaign in the Pittsburgh suburbs knocked on 35,000 doors to come within 10 points of unseating the GOP speaker of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives. Nearby, in a Trump+36 county, volunteers knocked on 15,700 doors in an effort to replace the state legislature’s most notorious homophobe with a mild-mannered local business leader married to his husband. He didn’t win, but he improved on the previous challenger’s margin by 19 points. Campaign theme: traffic congestion.

The actual activist base that made these and hundreds of similar campaigns nationwide happen has little overlap with the metropolitan millennial socialists getting all the press. The people doing the work on the ground are disproportionately middle-aged or older, female, and unlikely to tweet. What they do use their smartphones for is canvassing: individual users of the miniVAN app, which gives campaign field operations access to the shared Democratic voter database, tripled from 150,000 in 2016 to 460,000 in 2018. Field directors’ estimates of the portion of their canvassers who were women range from 60 to 80 percent. (Several noted a surge of younger and more male volunteers in the final days, joining the older women who had been there from the start.)

Grassroots volunteers can chew gum and walk at the same time, so even as they are currently knee-deep in active support for 2019 municipal races in most places, there are background conversations ongoing about the Democrats’ 2020 candidates. Priorities and preferences vary widely, with the desire to defeat the president a burning common denominator.

But people who have spent the past two years trying to get candidates elected know that the calculus of who can do that is not simple. There isn’t a single spectrum from center to left along which an optimal midpoint exists. Rather, there is a wide array of subgroups of voters, for whom specific issues spark strong appeal or sharp concern. The Venn diagram gets so complex, it begins to seem like any single policy stance costs as many voters as it gains.

Which may not matter, because most of all, voters have a visceral bottom line that is not about issues at all. Does this candidate see people like me? Do they understand what life is like for us, and do they care? Ultimately, this is the likability that matters most: not do I like this candidate, but would she like me?

When political volunteers are knocking on doors, they’re not hawking a bag of issues. They are representing a human being, to voters who want people in power who understand people like them.

That’s quite a different perspective than assuming the nation is full of swing voters just waiting for the low-tax, low-ambition centrist of their dreams. But it’s also far distant from the claim that America is full of passionate Leftist non-voters who have waited years for the revolutionary platform that will pull them to the polls.

The actually-door-knocking Democratic base knows better. Unlike the political hobbyists burning up the internet with hot takes, they have a hard-won and deeply pragmatic understanding of the regional electorates around them, in all their messy contradictions.

Lara Putnam is a UCIS research professor and chair of the department of history at the University of Pittsburgh. She is active in grassroots political organizing in southwestern Pennsylvania.

First Person is Vox’s home for compelling, provocative narrative essays. Do you have a story to share? Read our submission guidelines, and pitch us at firstperson@vox.com.