To regain political power, Democrats need to better direct their message at people of color who aren’t voting instead of conservative whites who have stopped listening to them.

That’s the conclusion of San Francisco’s Democracy in Color, which on Monday outlined a road map to victory that involves spending $1 billion on field operations — instead of TV commercials — designed to turn out 10 million new progressive voters of color in 17 key states for the next presidential race.

Among the target states: longtime GOP strongholds of Georgia, Texas and Arizona, whose demographics are becoming less white and probably more welcoming to Democrats.

“There’s a reflexive default among the party to try to appeal to conservative white swing voters,” Steve Phillips, the San Francisco civil rights attorney, best-selling author of “Brown Is the New White” and founder of Democracy in Color, said Monday. “Absent any evidence that we can make headway with those voters, we should try to focus on those who we can.”

The 17-page report, “Return of the Majority: A Roadmap for Taking Back Our Country,” is also a guide for what those in the anti-President Trump resistance can do in the near term to help the Democratic Party turn around its priorities.

A key first step: winning the special congressional election in a suburban Atlanta district next month to replace former GOP Rep. Tom Price, who is now secretary of health and human services. While Price won the district by nearly 25 percentage points in 2014, Trump barely beat Hillary Clinton there.

A new poll out this month shows that Democrat Jon Ossoff is polling 40 percent, twice as much as his closest Republican opponent, giving him a solid chance to make the runoff. Supporters from across the nation have poured $3 million into the political neophyte’s campaign.

That race “is probably the most important political opportunity in the country in the next few months,” Phillips said. If Ossoff were to pull off an upset, “it will reverberate throughout the entire Congress for every Republican. If they see that seat is flipping, that will really shake things up.”

The good news, Phillips said, is that the Democratic Party has already put 20 people in field operations in battleground states — the earliest he remembers that happening. Nine are in the Georgia district where Ossoff is running, he said.

The plan, which is likely to be among the first of many autopsies of the 2016 election and prescriptive plans for how to fix the Democratic Party, comes from an organization led by people of color whose political operation has supported candidates of color, including Sen. Kamala Harris, D-Calif., and Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J.

The value in Monday’s report is more long term, as it encourages Democrats to make fundamental changes in how they fund and run campaigns. Instead of spending hundreds of millions of dollars on TV commercials that Phillips said, “don’t make much difference,” it urges Democrats to invest in field operations in the 17 key states.

It describes how to partner with “community, family and neighborhood social networks” to reach eligible nonvoters who wouldn’t be wooed by TV ads.

“Democrats and progressives still tend to waste hundreds of millions of dollars each election cycle on television ads trying to change the minds of people who are not, and most likely will never, be with us, “ the report says.

The report also calls on progressive voters to “help be a watchdog of Democratic Party and progressive spending to make sure they’re spending the half-billion dollars in expenditures in the right places with the right strategy.” It encouraged activists to ask the top left-of-center labor, environmental and party groups that spent a collective $1.3 billion in 2016 to give a better accounting of where — and how — they spend their money.

Dave McCuan, a professor of political science at Sonoma State University said, “That’s a very provocative strategy. It is a re-engineering of the Democratic Party that was Joe Biden’s Democratic Party.”

But McCuan predicted changing the party’s mind-set would be a heavy lift. And while he agreed with Phillips’ assessment that the operations of the party needed to be retrofitted. The party has other needs, too, like finding a strong figure as its face and to hone its message.

“It’s a 2024 strategy — 2020 might be too early,” McCuan said. First, the party needs to hone its message. “Right now, the Democrats are speaking with 1,000 voices.”

Joe Garofoli is The San Francisco Chronicle’s senior political writer. Email: jgarofoli@sfchronicle.com

Twitter: @joegarofoli