Ask, and Don’t Take No for an Answer

The Value of Persistence . . .

By Steve Schear

In 2022, Harley Augustino was a lead organizer for a longshot campaign to flip a Congressional seat in Washington’s Third District. Republicans had held the district for 16 years, and FiveThirtyEight gave Maria Gleusenkamp Perez only a 2% chance of winning. She received virtually no money from the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, which considered the district out of reach.

But Augustino volunteered for the campaign and created the “Call Squad,” a dozen volunteers, half local and half from his group Base Building for Power. The Call Squad used phone banking not to win votes, but to gather more volunteers. Gluesenkamp Perez had only one paid staff member, but her campaign recruited 500 volunteers who knocked on 40,000 doors. She won by fewer than 3,000 votes. Last November, she won reelection by 16,000 votes.

Over twenty years ago, Augustino learned the art of organizing from the legendary Dolores Huerta, who co-founded the United Farm Workers with Cesar Chavez. He’s been organizing ever since. For seven years, he was the Director of PUEBLO, a California-based organizing group. He spent another 14 years as a lead organizer for UNITE HERE, the hospitality union that leads canvassing operations in swing states during each election. Then in 2021, Augustino founded Base Building for Power, which trains, mentors, and supports organizers. “We have a network of about 300 organizers all over the U.S. and Canada,” says Augustino.

In 2023 and 2024, while training more than 200 organizers in swing states and congressional districts, Augustino knocked on thousands of doors. I interviewed him to find out his thoughts about how we can improve our field operations.

A Lot of Room for Improvement

Last spring, when Biden was still in the presidential race, Augustino tried an experiment. He signed up to volunteer with both the Biden and the Trump campaigns, just to see how each would respond. The Biden campaign responded with a flood of fundraising appeals, but never asked Augustino to volunteer. The Trump campaign, on the other hand, sent him emails focused solely on volunteering. MAGA offered him several opportunities, including becoming a precinct leader in Arizona, where he was organizing at the time.

Augustino also saw that instead of recruiting volunteers, many pro-Democratic organizations were relying on paid canvassers. Canvassers’ pay was often based on quotas of doors knocked or voters I.D.’d, rather than conversations with voters. As a result, there was an actual financial disincentive for many paid canvassers to try to persuade undecided voters.

Ask People to Step Up

When we talked, Augustino focused on the importance of asking people to do more than just vote. “There’s all these people knocking on doors,” he said, “and there’s all these people behind the doors who are willing to do something. But very few canvassing programs had any volunteer component to engage people in doing more than voting. So we have this problem where people are willing to do the most effective thing, and nobody’s asking them to do it.”

How to change this? First, Augustino says, “don’t use the word ‘volunteer.’” Canvassing for the Harris campaign, he asked each supporter he met at the door just to help. “That’s great, that’s really important for you to vote,” he would say. “But this election, we all need to vote. The stakes are too high. The best thing you can do is talk to five or ten of your friends or family, and convince them to vote. Would you be willing to do that?”

“You’ve got to believe in people,” Augustino said. “You shouldn’t disempower them by not asking.”

Get a Commitment

Augustino says 80% of the Harris supporters he met agreed to encourage friends and family to vote. But he didn’t stop there. At first, he used a paper pledge form, and got people to fill it out with the names of the people they were going to contact, and the supporter’s phone number, email, address, and signature. Later on, he started using the same kind of form on his own phone, taking down names and phone numbers of people each voter planned to contact. He would follow-up later, calling each voter as many times as necessary to make sure they followed through with their commitment.

And Keep Asking

Augustino emphasized the importance of persistence. In the Gluesenkamp Perez campaign, for example, his Call Squad phoned each volunteer several times a week, assigning shifts and offering encouragement and advice. Augustino’s favorite story is about a woman that he spotted at a debate in 2022 between Glusenkamp Perez and her MAGA opponent, Joe Kent. Augustino could see that Mel Finn-Kamerath had lots of energy and didn’t like Kent at all. So after the debate, he approached her about volunteering. “She told me had never done that kind of thing, and she was kind of guarded, but she gave me her number.”

Augustino “called her over the next three weeks. She said ‘no’ to me like five times, and then finally she came to the campaign office.” Finn-Kamerath then went canvassing with Augustino. By the third door she was doing effective persuasion, drawing on her own background as a Republican and mother of three.

Augustino’s persistence paid big dividends. Finn-Kamerath lives in Kalama, Washington, a small town in a red area. “She knew everybody in that town,” said Augustino. “I don’t know how many voters she got, but she got a lot of voters through her personal networks.”

The Fighting Spirit

When asked about organizing this year, Augustino said, “the most important thing is fighting spirit. We are not gonna have a lack of issues, but there’s a lack of fighting spirit among some people. I think the best thing we can do is get people in a fighting spirit, and then to take action and build. Find out what is the issue that you care about, talk to other people in your network, and then take action.”

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