AOC

With a big microphone, determining the fate of thousands of people, hundreds of thousands of people. Then you realize that it’s actually not too crazy to change that — that you actually can change it with a small group of ragtag people. There are so many places like that.

The Democratic Party, for a very long time, has not invested resources in organizing on the ground. Because of that, we were able to exploit a lot of openings. I hope that my win shows what the true strengths of the party or any party that is accountable to working people should be.

There is this cottage industry of electoral consultants. They recommend candidates spend money on things — not things that work but that are commission-based. A lot of consultants make 10 percent on every television ad that they place for a candidate. They’re not going to recommend things that win, they’re going to recommend things that earn commission. That is just the market-based incentive of a lot of this industry.

Here’s what we know wins: knocking doors wins, phone banking wins, direct voter contact wins. But it doesn’t make people money. We knew that that was a dynamic. I knew that [Crowley] was going to spend money on the mailers. I knew that he was going to spend money on the TV ads. But I had a hunch that he wasn’t going to spend a whole lot of money on field, because you can’t make a big commission on field. And it’s a big pain in the butt.

Where we win is on the ground. Anybody who wants to run a winning grassroots campaign needs to be counting how many doors that they knocked, and they need to be counting their IDs — your ones and twos. You make contact with the voter, and you rank that voter on a scale of one to five every time. We counted 15,900 ones and twos, and 15,900 people went out and voted for us on election day. It was not a coincidence.

I was amazed because for me as an organizer it’s like, counting how many people are voting for you just makes sense. I was talking to this person that has been involved in a lot of other campaigns before. I said, “Is this how everybody runs their campaign?” and he was like, “No,” and I was just like, “Well, what do other people do?” He said, “They run television ads and they run a lot of radio, and they get maybe like five to 10 percent of their win number. If you need 15,000 people to vote for you, you count 1,500 people.” I was like, “How does the person know if they’re going to win?” He said, “They don’t. They just spend a ton of money on TV, you do a really light amount of field, and then you just like pray.” I was like, “That’s how a three million dollar congressional campaign has run?” “Yeah, pretty much.”

This is why we’re losing. That’s why I think it’s important for us to open the hood on this stuff.