THE SOCIAL NETWORK
In November 2017, Emily Isaac packed her belongings and flew to Texas. More specifically, to the 21st Congressional District, gerrymandered to include half of San Antonio, a scoop of Austin, and a large rectangle of Texas hill country, where a Bernie Sanders acolyte named Derrick Crowe was running for Congress. “We did all of the right things,” says Isaac, who had spent six months as a field organizer on Sanders’ 2016 presidential campaign. Crowe’s team built a massive door-knocking operation “dwarfing what our opponents were doing in terms of volunteers.” Isaac expected Crowe to win, but he came in third. “I left feeling like, ‘Wow, did any of that move the needle?’” she says. “That’s when I realized voters at the door will tell you whatever you want to hear to get you off the doorstep.”
A few months later, Isaac drove 150 miles east to work for another Democratic congressional candidate: Sri Kulkarni of Sugar Land, outside of Houston. The district has been a Republican stronghold since the 1980s, but there was promise for Democrats in its growing diversity, including immigrant communities from South and East Asia. Unfortunately, the voter file provided by the Democratic National Committee lumped them all together as “Asian,” an overly broad category for people with different cultures and languages. So Isaac’s team tasked volunteers from those communities to sort the 85,000-row spreadsheet by surname, dividing entries into more than 20 community categories, from Arab Christian to Zoroastrian. The campaign would ultimately run phone banks in 15 languages.
As the volunteers pored over the spreadsheet, they added personal notes: “This family moved” or “in college and needs an absentee ballot.” One star organizer was a student named Chris. “We would give him a list of the 18-year-olds zoned to his high school, and he knew like 160 of them.” But he could also spot who wasn’t on the voter list and needed to be registered. “It was this lightbulb moment,” says Isaac. “Not only are our volunteers able to reach these folks in their preferred language, they personally know so many of them.”
Though Kulkarni narrowly lost, his organizing strategy was a clear success, bringing him within five points of his opponent—the closest margin the district had seen in over a decade. Kulkarni announced another run in 2020, but Isaac didn’t stick around. This
