What Does It Actually Take to Build a National Canvassing Operation From an Online Community?
Digital Ground Game did not start as an organization. According to organizing director Sam Cebula, who joined me on Purple Political Breakdown this week, it started as one impromptu canvassing event that Destiny organized for his online community during Georgia's 2020 Senate runoffs. Five years later, that same community produced an organization that, per Cebula, ran seven canvassing houses and knocked more than 330,000 doors in 2024, and is now running canvassing operations in Ohio and Michigan ahead of the 2026 midterms.
A few things stood out to me from the conversation that are worth sitting with, whether or not you agree with the organization's politics.
The first is the deliberate targeting logic. Cebula was direct that Digital Ground Game skipped bigger ticket Senate races like Georgia and North Carolina, not because they matter less, but because those races are already saturated with outside money. Instead, the organization is putting its two 2026 canvassing houses in Ohio's 9th District, Marcy Kaptur's seat in Toledo, and Michigan's 7th District around Lansing, betting that a digitally organized, nationally recruited volunteer base can move the needle more in underinvested races than in races national Democratic infrastructure already covers well.
The second is what Cebula calls the organizing fellowship model. The stated goal is not maximizing raw door count in any single cycle. It is training organizers who take skills back to their home states after six or seven months in the program, on the theory that the Democratic Party's bench problem, especially at the state and local level, is a bigger long term liability than any single House race. Cebula pointed to members who went on to become convention delegates in Washington State and to found a gerrymandering ballot initiative in Colorado as the kind of durable outcome the model is designed to produce.
The third is how the organization manages its relationship with political content creators, including its own origin in Destiny's community. Cebula described the org's role as a "shock absorber," absorbing backlash on behalf of creators so they do not have to carry the risk of political engagement alone, and described actively working to give creators who personally dislike each other separate lanes to contribute without forcing collaboration.
Where I would push back, or at least want more clarity: Cebula was candid that Digital Ground Game is not trying to persuade anyone outside its existing coalition. Its online strategy targets people who already lean left and moves them from talking to doing, not undecided or skeptical voters. That is a legitimate organizing choice, but it means the online to offline pipeline he describes is a mobilization tool, not a persuasion one, and the two should not be conflated when evaluating whether canvassing "works" in a district like Ohio's 9th, which leans more Republican after this year's redistricting.
Full conversation, including how the organization is thinking about 2028 and beyond, is on Purple Political Breakdown: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/what-is-digital-ground-game-how-does-it-help-democrats/id1626987640?i=1000788461558
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Navigating the vast amount of bouncing around the political spectrum my entire life I have finally figured something important out. It doesn't matter. I've been religious, been in the military, went to a liberal school and all in all none of the political biases matter. We shouldn't let toxic discourse cloud our judgement and find a solution through logic and conversation. In pursuit of this mission I created this podcast to focus on these important conversations.
