Inside the uproar over a liberal group’s pandemic-era door-knocking campaign

Maddy Lewis remembers how a simple face-to-face conversation put her health at risk.

In the early summer, the Progressive Turnout Project sent the 22-year-old staffer to a neighborhood near Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to speak with potential Democratic voters — one of hundreds of entry-level employees the liberal political group had deployed across the country.

Lewis walked door to door until she reached the home of one woman who, after a minutes-long conversation, made a startling revelation: Her husband, sitting inside the home, was sick with COVID-19. The woman wasn’t wearing a mask, and she hadn’t tried to keep much distance between herself and Lewis while they spoke.

“I’ve just had full conversation with you, and you didn’t mention that you were exposed?” Lewis told McClatchy, recounting the experience. “I called it a day after that one. That was too much for me.”

Days later, Lewis developed a fever and was convinced she had contracted the coronavirus. A test for the disease eventually came back negative, but the experience left her shaken.

“It was still a really scary thing,” said Lewis, who quit the group this week because she said their decision to continue canvassing for as long as it did was ethically indefensible.

Lewis said she always followed the Progressive Turnout Project’s safety protocols when she canvassed: She wore a mask, attempted to keep her distance from people, and immediately reported when she felt sick — all measures the group mandated.

For about a month, in a dozen states, the Progressive Turnout Project — a well-funded liberal super PAC whose mission has been a subject of increasing scrutiny in Democratic circles — attempted to run a door-to-door voter outreach program amid an ongoing pandemic, insisting that personal communication with voters was an essential element of defeating President Donald Trump and flipping the U.S. Senate from GOP control.

It went poorly: On Tuesday, Progressive Turnout Project executive director Alex Morgan announced to staffers in an email, obtained by McClatchy, that the group was suspending its canvassing effort “until further notice,” citing a rise in coronavirus cases across the country. The group will ask its hundreds of field staffers to reach out to voters on the phone instead.

In an interview Tuesday, Morgan pointedly did not rule out resuming the door-to-door program before November, though he declined to say whether he considered such a restart likely.

“Hopefully we can reach a point where we are able to resume our program, depending on the conditions in locations we’re working on,” Morgan said, adding that the country’s COVID-19 caseload “is a constantly changing environment.”

“Things have changed day by day, week by week, and that’s why we’re going to continue to watch the number of cases,” he said.

‘The worst two weeks of my entire life’

The move to suspend canvassing came less than 24 hours after the Progressive Turnout Project’s leaders gave field staffers the option to opt out of the program, which they otherwise planned to continue in Colorado, Georgia, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Maine, Michigan, Montana, North Carolina, Nebraska, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

It also came just two days after the group planned to begin its door-knocking operation in South Florida, according to two field representatives there, despite the region’s influx of COVID-19 cases, and about a week after a mid-level staffer publicly resigned from the group because she was concerned for her colleagues’ and the voters’ health.

Morgan denied that the program was set to begin door knocking in Florida this coming weekend, saying the group always has its staffers prepared to begin canvassing operations even though senior leadership was cognizant that the region’s high prevalence of coronavirus cases always made it unlikely they would launch that soon.

The group’s rapid series of decisions this week were the product of mounting outrage within the group’s ranks. In interviews with 10 current or former Progressive Turnout Project employees, all expressed a visceral frustration, concern and anger with the group’s door-to-door voter contact program, arguing that it deteriorated into an hazardous nightmare whose mission they no longer understood.

Worse, these same staffers say that for weeks when they presented their concerns to top officials at the group, senior management insisted that their program was safe and were dismissive of complaints, even after they were confronted with testimony that their employees were being put in harm’s way.

“Mentally, it has probably been one of the worst two weeks of my entire life,” said one district field director, who like many interviewed for this story were granted anonymity because they feared retribution from management.

The concern has pushed fresh scrutiny onto the Progressive Turnout Project, a relatively new group that occupies a unique place in the larger firmament of the Democratic Party, including harsh criticism from some veteran Democratic operatives.

“They’re literally risking those people’s lives to do something that can be handled over the phone and via a text message,” said Chuck Rocha, a senior adviser to Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign who masterminded efforts to contact voters in battleground states.

And with less than 100 days until Election Day, it has underscored the difficulty any campaign or political organization will face trying to run their own canvassing operation, pitted between a traditionally integral tactic to reach voters and the health and safety of everyone involved.

‘Not super concerned about coronavirus’

Field staffers for the Progressive Turnout Project describe an operation where even the best laid plans to stay safe are often punctured instantly by the prospective voters they’re trying to speak with.

One field staffer said that last weekend, she knocked on the door of a woman who walked outside and promptly informed her that she had coronavirus, so that they probably shouldn’t talk. The staffer walked away and planned to take a COVID-19 test this week.

Another staffer, in a different state, said that over the course of four days and speaking with roughly 50 voters, they found only two people who wore masks when answering the door. This staffer eventually became sick and tested positive for coronavirus soon after.

This staffer said other people in their life with whom they were in contact were all tested, and all were not found to have the virus. It led the field representative to conclude that they must have contracted it from a voter they spoke with as part of the canvassing process.

“The demographic we target is on the fence, people who don’t vote a whole lot,” the field staffer said. “Most of them were not super concerned about coronavirus.”

Morgan said eight staffers at the Progressive Turnout Project have tested positive for the coronavirus, as McClatchy previously reported, including five who did so after participating in the canvassing campaign. None of the cases were spread from staffer to staffer within the group, he said.

Field staffers say the crux of the tension between themselves and senior management exists in the space between the idealized world of the safety protocols put into place by the group and how canvassing actually plays out. Morgan and other officials can talk endlessly about wearing masks or passing along campaign literature in sanitized Ziploc bags, staffers say, but those measures mean little when voters don’t follow similar procedures.

“It was very difficult to keep people six feet away, and even if you did manage to step back that far, a lot of people would come out and approach you,” Lewis said. “It never went well when you asked them to keep their distance.”

Even the Progressive Turnout Project’s mandates against mingling with coworkers were not always followed. The staffer who tested positive said they would eat lunch with some of their colleagues inside an air-conditioned restaurant to escape the summer heat. Knocking on the front door of strangers isn’t always pleasant work, the staffer said, and the camaraderie they felt then was a welcome respite. (The staffer said the colleagues they ate with all tested negative for COVID-19.)

Presented with an account of how Lewis, a field staffer, risked contracting the virus, Morgan reiterated that his group has worked extensively to prepare its employees to stay safe.

“I can’t speak to any particular situation because I’m not at that doorstep,” Morgan said. “We’ve taken on the overarching challenge in our return-to-work standards very seriously. We’ve laid it out in very start terms to the staff in terms of the importance of it.”

Particularly galling to some employees was a recent plan from senior leadership to send each field office a set of personal testing kits for the coronavirus, one that field staffers who fear they had been exposed could self-administer before returning to the office in a sealed case, where district directors would send them labs for testing. To the district directors, however, the notion that they would play any role in submitting the tests to health officials was inappropriate and dangerous.

“I think this is their answer to the newspaper article, ‘Look we’re testing everybody,’” said one district director, referring to McClatchy’s report last week on the Progressive Turnout Project’s canvassing efforts. “But it’s worse. We’re testing everybody, and we’re making our district leadership into, like, nurses.”

Morgan said the group had discussed using the testing kits, but that they hadn’t yet even begun training field directors how to use them.

“I don’t necessarily want to be on the record on the specifics and the confusion there may have been,” he said.

Progressive Turnout Project field representatives said that there was a fundamental disconnect inside the group between senior leadership who touted the program’s effectiveness and those doing that work, but potentially exposing themselves to the virus in the process.

And it wasn’t just about keeping employees safe, either: Many field representatives expressed a deep concern that if they became infected, they would spread the virus to voters. This fear ran especially deep because, in many cases, the canvassers were speaking with older and lower-income voters, who are at higher-risk for the illness.

Adding to the concerns was a decision from Progressive Turnout Project officials that, if their employees were found to have talked to voters while sick with COVID-19, the group wouldn’t contact those voters to notify them of potential exposure unless its employee was found to have not followed proper safety protocols, like wearing a mask, staying six feet away and using hand sanitizer after every interaction.

“I just think it’s really easy for someone who’s not doing it on a daily basis, who’s not getting exposed every day to whoever knows how many people, to sit and talk about how great the work is that we’re doing,” said the staffer who tested positive for COVID-19. “Because they get all the glory of saying we knocked on this many doors and got this many people committed to vote, but they’re not the ones worried about, ‘Oh, did I have a fever today, and will I bring it home to people I live with?’”

‘As good odds as you can get’

For more than a month, the Progressive Turnout Project, both internally and externally, insisted its program did not put anyone’s health in jeopardy.

“We’re doing everything we can to reduce your possible risk,” Dr. Joseph John, a South Carolina-based infectious disease specialist, told staff members on a recent Zoom call, a recording of which was viewed by McClatchy. “If one were to put a number on this, your risks are so close to zero, that they’re probably one in ten thousand to one in a hundred thousand. So those are probably as good odds as you can get for avoiding anything that’s offensive out there in the world.”

John, who the Progressive Turnout Project retained to help design its field program safely, was a ubiquitous presence in recent months, holding multiple Zoom calls with staffers to answer any health questions they have. He was also referenced in so many emails from the group’s leadership that it became a running joke among field staffers.

He was also paid by Progressive Turnout Project for his services, though through the law firm of Perkins Coie, so his salary was not available in documents filed with the Federal Election Commission. Morgan declined to say how much the doctor had been paid.

“It’s a lot of work to review all the plans and protocols that we’re putting together and to have sometimes daily conversations about what’s happening on the ground in all our states,” Morgan said. “I can’t think of anyone who’d volunteer to do all that work and do all these trainings. He’s been an important part of developing these plans.”

Morgan said that Progressive Turnout Project closely monitored the guidelines of local health officials. In one case, the group already suspended its canvassing operation in Georgia, after officials there changed their recommendations.

Whether the group’s leaders listened as intently to its own staffers’ concerns, at least before Tuesday’s decision, is a matter of dispute.

The crescendo of internal frustration came Sunday, according to several current employees, during an Zoom call for field staffers meant to serve as a rally 100 days before the general election. Many staffers were eager to ask questions about safety procedures, and whether the canvassing program would continue at all.

Instead, they were given a rah-rah speech from senior officials, who repeatedly said they would answer health-related questions during a scheduled call later in the week. The Zoom then ended abruptly, after about only 10 minutes.

“This is a really important issue that I don’t feel like we should have to wait until the end of our work week to have answers for,” one field staffer said in the immediate aftermath of the call.

Kait Sweeney, a spokeswoman for the group, said the Zoom call, held at different times for staffers depending on their time zone, was meant to be a brief motivational moment and that the group’s management always endeavors to answer their employees’ questions.

Morgan said he and other leaders at the Progressive Turnout Project have done their best to adapt to an “unprecedented” challenge of running a campaign amid a pandemic.

“I think that every step along the way, we listened to our staff and adapted what we’re doing,” he said. “But, you know, we see where we are right now, and that led to the decision we made today.”

‘Canvassing will never be justified in a pandemic’

Progressive Turnout Project occupies an unusual position for a political group: As a hybrid between a super PAC and a traditional PAC, it is not legally allowed to coordinate with campaigns or party committees. And yet, unlike most super PACs, it chooses not to run TV and digital ads, but instead conduct its own field operation, even if it cannot do that work in conjunction with any other entity.

It also raises money primarily through small-dollar donations: Of the $22 million the group has raised itself through June, according to documents filed with the Federal Election Commission, $14 million came from unitemized contributions of $200 or less. The organization has also received about $9 million in contributions from two groups, Progressive Takeover and Stop Republicans, which raise most of their money from small-dollar donations.

Progressive Turnout Project’s mission, officials have long said, is to primarily target low-turnout Democratic supporters, using a door-to-door neighborhood canvassing program they argue is the most effective way to reach people.

So far this year, Progressive Turnout Project appears to be the only major Democratic group to deploy a canvassing operation since the pandemic began. Officials with Joe Biden’s campaign, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee say they have yet to resume door-knocking efforts.

Meanwhile, some GOP groups, including Trump’s campaign, have already started their canvassing efforts.

To many veteran Democrats, the Progressive Turnout Project’s decision to pursue canvassing in a year like this is a mystery.

“Every organization has been planning for this contingency,” said Amanda Litman, the co-founder or Run for Something, a Democratic organization that encourages young people to run for office. “And not just every organization, every campaign from presidential all the way down through the school board, most with much less resources and much less analytical support, have found a way to get into contact with voters in a way that is safe for the staff and for all voters.”

Litman and staffers within the Progressive Turnout Project, including those who were previously highly critical of the organization, were genuinely appreciative of management’s decision Tuesday to suspend canvassing. Many of them said senior leaders had finally heard and acted upon their concerns, and that they were now happy to participate in the phone-banking program.

Still, frustration that the decision didn’t come sooner persists. Liz Nimmo, a former district director from Iowa whose public resignation last week first brought to light frustrations with the group, said the Project’s suspension will “save lives.”

But she said it didn’t come soon enough.

“I’m incredibly relieved for PTP employees and voters, but it shouldn’t have taken press coverage and eight employees testing positive for COVID for this to happen,” Nimmo said. “Canvassing will never be justified in a pandemic.”