How Swing Left is learning to listen rather than lecture and rebuild trust door to door.
When I took a job as a church community organizer in 2010, I had no prior involvement with religion. As a secular Iranian-American, my knowledge of the Bible was limited to an English elective called “Gay Literature” in a Bay Area high school, where we analyzed homosexual innuendo in the books of Ruth and Samuel.
A few weeks into the job, an ambitious priest asked me to help lead an evangelization campaign for his parish.
“Trust me,” he said, offering faint reassurance. “We do it differently.”
Over the next few months we knocked on every door in the parish. Not once did he ask, “Are you coming to church?” Instead, he asked, “What keeps you up at night?”
When the people answered, the priest listened. He helped as much as he could and never made false promises. Are you worried about a park covered in needles? Join the church's efforts to reallocate city funds to build a better city. Overwhelmed by energy costs? The church will help you sign up for the city's home insulation program. Regardless of their connection to the church, everyone we spoke with was grateful that someone would listen and provide support.
One day we knocked on the door of a woman whose husband had died unexpectedly. She sobbed, ashamed that she could not afford the funeral and that she had no close relatives and friends who could see it off with dignity.
The priest served her touchingly. As always, he never asked, “Are you coming to church?”
Instead, he returned to the Mexican-American matriarchs who led the parish prayer group. They got to work preparing trays of lasagna and enchiladas that were delivered to her each day. And then they organized a decent funeral for the mayor.
I don't know if this woman ever went to mass. But I know that she believed that the parish made her life better.
This experience also had profound meaning for prayer group leaders. As true believers, they had long endured snide comments from family and friends: “The Catholic Church is corrupt and hypocritical and doesn’t care about people like me.” Instead of listing focus group topics from their diocese, they might respond, “I don’t know about the Catholic Church, but in my church, when someone is struggling, we come.” They could quote story after story, like about that funeral. Stories about listening rather than lecturing. Build relationships, not hand out brochures.
Today I knock on doors in a completely different context. As Executive Director of Swing Left, I help our 1 million-member community navigate political challenges with one goal in mind: helping Democrats take back power, starting by taking back the House of Representatives in 2026.
The differences between the organization of elections in 2025 and the organization of parishes in 2010 are, of course, enormous. But I am amazed at how much we Democrats can learn from the example of the priest who so shaped my understanding of public life.
Lesson one: We all have more power to make transformative change than we think. I regularly hear from volunteers and donors who feel stuck. “Fixing” the Democratic brand on any abstract national level seems impossible. Too many people are waiting for a presidential candidate to come and save us.
Just like those prayer group leaders: we need to save ourselves. As the political scientist Hugh Heclo once wrote, “Institutions are repaired the same way they are built: through countless small acts of responsibility.”
The second lesson I learned in San Antonio is that effective evangelism begins with listening. People trust leaders and institutions that listen to them and help them solve real problems. Many grassroots groups still organize this way, but national Democrats just don't do it with scale or consistency. But we must. To win in 2026 and beyond, Democrats must not only mobilize our true believers to action, but also attract new supporters.
We can do this by scaling up what that priest and those prayer leaders did. This means showing voters – not telling them, but showing them – that Democrats are not here just to ask them to vote in the final weeks of the election. We are here to listen and help today and in the long term.
This is what we strive to achieve withBasic truth“, a new program we're launching at Swing Left to reimagine how Democrats communicate with voters.
First of all, we talk to everyone. Not just likely Democrats or frequent voters, but every voter and potential voter in competitive House districts. Like the parish, a congressional campaign must serve the entire community.
Secondly, we are curious and open-minded. The priest never quoted scripture at the door. He asked what people were worried about and met them there. Our Ground Truth volunteers undergo the same training. They simply ask, “What do you think about the direction of our country?” They listen openly and without judgment. They don't immediately start “voting Democrat.” They take time. They are exploring. They share honestly. And thus they create fertile ground for persuasion.
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Thirdly, we are monitoring this. This priest could not do everything alone. He encouraged his parish prayer group to continue its work. Likewise, Ground Truth uses technology to make it easier to track events. When someone shares a concern, we help them.
But while the priest relied on a cell phone and a notepad, we have new tools, including artificial intelligence, to ensure that no interaction or information is lost. Technology cannot replace real human interaction. But it can capture and analyze information from long conversations—insights that were previously lost in notepads or reduced to flags. When used correctly, these tools help us focus more on people, not less.
And finally, we are moving fast and at scale. We need to fix the Democratic Party's brand, district by district, all at once. This means that we cannot rely on just one group of prayer leaders. We need hundreds of thousands of people to join us. And we don't have the luxury of waiting. Our democracy, our freedoms, our planet—there is too much at stake.
Early results from our pilot surveys in nine battleground states are encouraging. Nearly half of all voters — Republicans, Democrats and independents — say they are disillusioned with both parties. But despite this frustration, two-thirds of those who answer the door have real, meaningful conversations. And many say they are surprised that Democrats were willing to listen rather than just ask for votes. This is the point we're betting on: that when Democrats show themselves differently, we can win converts and win elections.
To achieve this, we cannot simply be against Trump. We need to be For anything. This something needs to be anchored in real relationships with real voters in real communities. The work of rebuilding trust begins with one door, one conversation, one plate of enchilada at a time.
So we make our way as we go: piloting, learning and adapting in real time. Ground Truth launched a pilot project in fall 2025 and will expand nationwide in January 2026. It's messy, ambitious and necessary.
And if we get it right, when someone says, “The Democratic Party doesn't care about people like me,” someone else can respond, “I don't know about the National Party. my district, when I needed someone to listen to me, the Democrats showed up.”
This is how we recover. This is how we win.
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