Democrats won the fight on November 4th, and now it’s time to expand the strategy for the 2026 midterm battles.
Yasmin Radjy, Executive Director of Swing Left, unveils their new initiative Ground Truth, a deep-canvassing strategy aimed at not only speaking to voters face-to-face, but implementing their feedback directly into a candidate’s policy proposals. As Radjy and Jen discuss voter frustration and distrust of a “broken system,” it becomes clear how vital a grassroots campaign for voters is needed to take back the House in 2026.
Transcript has been edited slightly for formatting purposes.
Jen Rubin
Hi, this is Jen Rubin, Editor-in-Chief of The Contrarian. I’m delighted to have back Yasmeen Raji. She is the head of Swing Left. Welcome, Yasmeen.
Yasmin Radjy
Thank you so much, Jen, it’s great to see you!
Jen Rubin
Absolutely. Swing left, targets House seats, that are either vulnerable or really, quite, likely to be picked up, by Democrats. After the 2025 elections, are you perhaps thinking that list of seats might expand?
Yasmin Radjy
Jen, you, as… I think this is the second time that you are one step ahead of us. You’re, like, you’re previewing what we will be sharing soon, so the answer is yes, we are going to definitely be sharing more seats very, very soon, but I think there’s a couple factors that we’re weighing, so I cannot wait to share the updated list with you. They won’t be super surprising. Right now, we are… we’ve got 14, defensive districts and 8 offensive districts. And we really… I think the balance that we have here is we’ve gotta focus on the most competitive districts, so we’re talking about Democrats who won their races by 3 percentage points or less. Republicans who, won their races that we need to defeat, by either 4 percentage points or less, or The Republican won by more, but Kamala Harris won the district, so people split their tickets, so districts like Mike Lawler’s, where people assume he’s a moderate, even though he’s not. So we’re starting there, and then there is a dynamic that I’m sure you’re familiar with, because so many of your listeners and viewers are the same folks who volunteer and give to Swing Left. That a lot of folks are feeling a level of, sort of, paralysis about giving to house races, volunteering for house races, because they’re like. there’s so many redistricting fights, it’s a whack-a-mole game, and so I can’t keep track, so I’m not gonna do anything. And so, what we will be sharing soon, and I can’t wait to share with you, is, first of all, what, how our California map has just changed with Prop 50, which is very exciting. Thank you to your home state, to my home state. But then also, to your point. we’ve got to get a little more aggressive, right? But we also, I think there is a risk when we are both riding high from these incredible wins in 2025, we are riding high on, you know, we won back so many voters that we lost in 2024, maybe everything is different, and I think our job is to stay really sort of steady, pragmatic. We consider ourselves the smart political friend of so many people who don’t know where to put their time, where their dollars, to make sure that we are winning the House. And there is a reality of the math is still the math. These are districts that are still… there’s only so many, and unfortunately it’s a shrinking number rather than a growing number, with a redistricting asterisk, of competitive races, and so we’ve got to stay the course.
Jen Rubin
Now, the House of Representatives and the Senate, Republicans just went to the mat because they didn’t want to lower people’s cost of healthcare insurance. That seems to be a really difficult vote. Is that the primary issue, that you’re focused on some of these vulnerable Republicans, or are there other issues that you think have the same salience?
Yasmin Radjy
You know, it’s so… so we, the week after Labor Day, we started the pilot for our new deep canvassing program called Ground Truth, which I’m excited to share, more about, sort of, what makes it so different, but I think the headline is. We know that we need to get out there and listen to voters way earlier than we typically do. We need to do more asking and probing, rather than sort of lecturing people about why they ought to support Democrats or why they ought to change their perspective on XYZ. And so we started that… September 6th was our first Canvas. We’ve been out every weekend in swing districts all across the country. And to your question, my assumption, going into this pilot of this program. was all we’re gonna hear about is affordability, because affordability is all that we are talking about, right? And much to my surprise, much to our team’s surprise, affordability was not the number one issue. The number one issue, which is related, is a broader feeling of the system is broken. I don’t trust either political party, and nobody cares about me, my community, my district, whatever the case may be. And that was the overwhelming top issue with Republicans, with Democrats, with independents, with people who are frequent voters, infrequent voters, the full gamut, and… I think for us, again, it is not that that means affordability is somehow not an extremely important issue. Of course, that’s how we won in Virginia, in New Jersey, all the different races that we just won in 2025. As you said, it’s been so central to the shutdown fight. But I think talking about affordability in a vacuum, without the sort of emotion of… people are upset about their grocery prices, rightfully so, they are also really upset that they feel like nobody gives a damn about them. And so, if we talk just about prices without the sentiment of. it’s not just that people want fighters because they want policy change, they want fighters to feel listened to, to feel heard, and so a huge part of what we are seeing in our program is, not just we’re learning about the issues that people care about, but there is such a vacuum in people going out and listening that so much of the feedback we’re getting back, even from voters who are not gonna vote Dem anytime soon, hopefully we’ll keep working on them. But they still want to talk, and they still want to unpack, sort of, how they’re feeling, how they’re digesting, and I think that piece of the story is not lost on everyone, but it’s lost on a lot of the, kind of, national conversation on these issues.
Jen Rubin
Absolutely. And I think what we’ve seen over the shutdown was this contrast, talking about not interested in people like me. The… administration going to the Supreme Court to stop giving food, to children, tax cuts for billionaires and rampant corruption at the same time that affordability… there is this sense, and maybe the term is fairness, that people are so frustrated about. Is that an issue that Democrats really need to focus, that. Republicans are interested in themselves and their rich donors, and Democrats are willing to Fight for you.
Yasmin Radjy
Absolutely, and we need to be able to take the big, the meaty, the sort of, like, esoteric, and turn it into the really local. That is so much of… that is why Abigail Spanberger is the next governor of Virginia, that’s why Mikey Sherrill is the next governor of New Jersey, and, you know, we can go through all of the wins that really were anchored on that, of not talking in the abstract about You know, to your point, the issue of fairness, the issue of, you know, access to a dignified life is really what economic issues are about, is people work hard, they want to live a life with dignity. But what I’ve seen some of, you know, our candidates do really, really well, you know, our team went up to Ulster County, we did an event with Congressman Josh Riley, Congressman Pat Ryan, and something that I saw both of them do, that I think is really the model of the kind of ways that we can talk about these issues is. When they talked about the impact of cuts to food banks, they didn’t say, nationally, this many people are going to lose food. They’re like, you guys know the food bank on the corner of this street and that street that you drive past every day? Go look at the shelves. When I went on Saturday and looked at the shelves at the food bank that you all know, because you drive past it all the time, the shelves are empty. And this is what that means for the families, and it’s sort of that local color and context. And we have just… again and again, we fail, I think because the numbers, for those of us who read the numbers every day, the numbers themselves tell a really, really powerful story, but we also know that’s not how the human brain works, right? Like, the numbers are so big. When you talk about a trillion dollars, what is a trillion dollars? I can’t… I mean, I can’t contextualize that. I can contextualize what it means to walk into my food pantry and not be able to find beans when that’s what, you know, I, as someone who can no longer afford beans, am gonna depend on.
Jen Rubin
Absolutely. One of the other lessons that we learned in New Jersey and Virginia is you’ve got to show up. You know, even within a district, that may be relatively competitive, too often in the past, Democrats would have said, well, I’m not going to go talk to those groups of Democrats because I’m going to lose those.
Yasmin Radjy
food.
Jen Rubin
or I’m not gonna go talk to that group of Republicans or independents. It would seem that the ability to reduce margins, even in areas you don’t win, or to plant the seeds, as you were saying, for a future election, is very important. Is that something that you gleaned from the election the same way that I did?
Yasmin Radjy
a thousand percent, I don’t know how to sort of, like, you know, ding, ding, ding, yes, everything. I couldn’t agree more. I’ll tell you two related stories. One is in, a 2024 competitive house district. Last cycle, I went out with the candidate to go knock on doors, and we took a little sort of selfie video as we’re out knocking, and said, you know, everyone come out next weekend and come knock on doors, it’s so great, etc. And it’s really weird to take a selfie video in the middle of a suburban neighborhood where people are just minding their business. They’re like, who are these people? So we put the phone down, I look across the street to see, I’m sort of, like, embarrassed by what we’ve just done, and I look and I see a guy washing his car, and he’s looking at us, and we’re looking at him, and I turn to this candidate for Congress, and I say, that guy over there, who’s standing 20 feet away from us, we should go talk to him. And she looks at her app, which has the list of voters that she needs to win to be able to win. She looks at his address, and she says, he’s not on my walk list, so let’s skip him. And to me, that was the encapsulation of just how much we have sort of over-engineered everything past the point of logic. Not just because… How meaningful is it? This is not a… it’s not even me as a volunteer there. It is the candidate. How meaningful is it for that person? Who knows whether he’s undecided? Who knows? There’s also an assumption that our data’s perfect. It’s not. Anyone who’s gone out and knocked on doors knows it’s not perfect. But it’s also, maybe that guy is a hardcore Trump supporter, but maybe his nephew isn’t, right? And when he goes to his family barbecue, and he says, you know, I saw that congressional candidate. I saw her 20 feet away from my house. She doesn’t give a damn about me, because if she did, she would have come and asked for my opinion. And so…
Jen Rubin
October.
Yasmin Radjy
you know, to me, that is… that’s foundational. The contrast is one of the candidates, Jessica Anderson, who just won a really competitive House of Delegates seat in Virginia, she knocked… I mean, she knew all the statistics of how many doors she’d knocked on that week, that month, that quarter. I mean, she just was a monster of going out and listening to people. And she showed me a text she’d gotten, this was, the Sunday before the election, showed me a text she’d gotten that morning from a Republican, a very conservative, not a moderate Republican, a very conservative Republican, who wrote her a Facebook message saying, I don’t agree with you on pretty much anything. But you have knocked on my door, you have followed up with me, you have listened to me, and for that, you’re getting my vote. And that is, I mean, that’s the spirit of what we’re trying to do at Swing Left with our new program, Ground Truth, is… people are smart, right? Voters are adults. We should treat them as adults. And as adults, we don’t… you and I, if we go and sit and have a beer together, we’ll find all kinds of things that we disagree on, even though on these calls, I always feel like I agree with you on pretty much everything. That’s okay, right? As adults, like, that’s completely fine if we can be authentic, if we can be honest, and… and this is a key that I think we’ve really lost, and it’s so intuitive and yet totally kind of out of our imagination, is… If we take the time to listen, and if we actually have the humility to talk to voters as though we don’t have all the answers, I think that is really, really key, and again, that is the kind of North Star of how we’re thinking at Swing Left right now.
Jen Rubin
Absolutely. It’s very much in common. I recently spoke, with Mitch Landrieu and his Working People’s Project. That is exactly the sentiment. Much of what you’re saying was really borne out in polling, in focus groups, and the rest, so it… there seems to be, a fundamental truth there. One last thing that I’m very curious about, Republicans, like Democrats, sometimes take their voters for granted. And in Texas, they decided they were going to gerrymander and try to secure 5 seats. And they assumed that because in one election, some Hispanic voters moved in their direction, that they’ve got a lock on these people, and therefore. They don’t need to worry about districts that are a little bit more competitive, because they can grab some more. Are you looking at some of those districts now that they have been gerrymandering and saying, you know. There’s maybe an opportunity in some of these places. We shouldn’t forget about some of these districts, because maybe we have some new opportunities, some new openings.
Yasmin Radjy
Totally. I mean, I take it one step further, which it’s not just about districts that we should be looking at, it’s also within the districts that are going to come down to a few hundred votes, a couple thousand votes, etc. We cannot be skipping over the people. To your point, we know they take voters for granted. We take voters for granted too, right? And I think, one of the disconnects that I see is we look at the trend lines, right? Like, the nightmares that we all have about the New York, New York Times red arrows all pointing to the right in 2024. We look at those things, we read the polling, we see all the stuff, and we see every single demographic group, except for college-educated, upper-income white people, are moving away from us, right? It is… this is not a 2024 singular phenomenon, it is happening cycle after cycle. 2025, we brought some of those folks back, so it’s not fixed, but they’re moving away from us. And then, something that we observe all the time is we then say, we’re not actually going to change the tactics, we’re not gonna change the strategy, we’re just gonna do more of it. And to us, that feels pathological, right? Like, if we are losing, just to give the most The strongest example, Black and Latino men, we are losing as a party, again, with an asterisk of, we want a bunch of them back in 2025, so hope is far from lost, but if we’re losing Black and Latino men more and more, and we are all, as progressive organizations, as democratic organizations. Still, not just taking them for granted, but only talking to them in the last couple weeks of the election to turn them out to vote. we are… we have lost the plot. And so, again, from our perspective, we, number one, need to start talking to folks way earlier, because people are not just their demographic profile, right? People are complicated and idiosyncratic and full of all sorts of nuances and contradictory opinions and whatever. If you’re talking to folks over a year before the election, which is what our volunteers are doing now with Ground Truth, you really are listening, open-ended, without an agenda of, I’m gonna quickly pivot to this, or whatever. And folks are saying, which, you know, I’ve been out on the doors myself just a couple weeks ago. folks have all kinds of complicated opinions if we really listen, and then we don’t just say, great, I did such a good job of listening, but we take those insights, and this is, I think, the magic of how we’re thinking differently this time, we share it back with campaigns that there is not a single House campaign that has enough resources to go out and do deep canvassing over a year before the election and do all the other things that they need to do, right? We can do that in coordination with them, thanks to a new… there’s a new federal election law that allows us to do that. And then we get those insights back to the campaigns, not just because it’s interesting, which it is, but so that folks can follow up, right? Like, if someone says. I just had a kid, and I’m broke, I’ve been working two jobs, overtime, I still can’t make ends meet, affordability… prices are through the roof. I can’t afford diapers, man, I don’t want to talk to you about politics. It is a bizarre thing to then, just like, as a human. say, well, I want to talk to you about Congressman so-and-so’s platform on affordability, and if you vote for Congressman so-and-so in, you know, a year and a half, or now a year, then he will propose a package. But Donald Trump is president, and we won’t have the Senate, probably, so it won’t pass probably till 2029, but then by 20, by 2028, 2029, we can get you affordable prices. Well, the kid is out of diapers, so our vantage point is, you gotta listen, you gotta be authentic, you gotta talk to everybody, so we’re out knocking every door, not just to the folks that I think we, as you’ve said, we’re taking for granted, we’re assuming they’re on our side, we might need to do a lot more persuasion. And, when people have questions, whether it’s about policies, whether they have needs, like, I need diapers, we gotta just meet them there. And if someone’s talking about diapers. We have so many people who feel a paralysis of, what can I do in this moment? I don’t want to just protest in front of a Tesla every single week. I want to do something. How meaningful it is. It’s not a big ask to say. This voter, maybe not even a voter who will ever vote for us, needs diapers. Let’s do that as an act of service. That’s the kind of reimagination of voter contact that we think is not just a nice-to-have, it’s actually necessary so that we’re walking the walk of, we listen, we care, and to your earlier point, we show up as Democrats.
Jen Rubin
Well, I, for one, am very anxious to see where you’re going to strike next, as it were, where you’re going, how you see the map, growing, and, I think, whether or not there are 5 seats, or 10 seats, or 50 seats that are in play, Democrats can’t afford to leave any one of them off the map. So it’s great work that you’re doing. Thank you so much, Yasmeen, for all the work you’re doing, and also for sharing all of your time with us. Contrarians, as you know, are very, very interested in these issues, so we’ll keep following it. Thanks so much, it was great seeing you.
Yasmin Radjy
Thanks for all you do, Jen!
