National Democratic organizers unveiled a concerted outreach effort on Wednesday designed to re-engage more than 1 million infrequent voters in states where contests are expected to be close, according to a DNC announcement provided to reporters.
The program, titled "Local Listeners," is targeted specifically at likely Democratic voters who cast ballots in the 2020 presidential election - when Democrat Joe Biden defeated Republican Donald Trump - but did not participate in the 2024 cycle, when Trump won a second term over Democrat Kamala Harris, the DNC said.
Organizers said the operation has already drawn in excess of 2,000 volunteers. The plan calls for a large volume of direct outreach, with organizers aiming for more than 250,000 phone conversations and over 50 in-person grassroots events across the country. In addition to direct contact, the campaign will pursue voter registration drives to add thousands of new voters in competitive congressional districts, the DNC said.
The conversations are structured around a "listening first" methodology. By centering conversations on voters' concerns rather than scripted persuasion, the DNC expects to gather information about the issues that matter locally and use those findings to shape messaging for Democratic candidates in the districts where the program is active.
The political math underscores the stakes. Democrats need to flip just three Republican-held seats in the 435-member U.S. House of Representatives to win a majority, while the path to a Senate majority is described by the party as steeper. Control of either chamber would enable Democrats to pursue investigations into the Trump administration and constrain much of the president's legislative agenda, the announcement noted.
Ken Martin, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, framed Local Listeners as a modernization of voter contact that prioritizes rebuilding trust. "Local Listeners is a massive voter contact operation built on a simple but powerful idea: If we want to keep earning back the trust and support of voters, we have to listen to them," he said. "This program modernizes the way we are talking to and hearing from the voters that we need to win elections now and for years to come."
The DNC's initiative combines traditional voter registration and grassroots events with extensive phone outreach and a data-gathering approach intended to refine campaign messaging. The program's focus on voters who shifted from participation in 2020 to non-participation in 2024 narrows the target population to a specific subset of the electorate, which party officials describe as critical in tight contests.
Details provided by the DNC outline concrete operational targets but do not quantify expected turnout changes or electoral effects from the outreach. The announcement emphasizes volunteer engagement and the listening-first conversations as the mechanism to inform candidate communication strategies in competitive districts.