My new piece for Boston Review is about Groundbreakers: How Obama’s 2.2 Million Volunteers Transformed Campaigning in America by Elizabeth McKenna and Hahrie Han:

[A]s the title implies, Han and McKenna tell the story of the organization—from top political operatives to field staff to dedicated volunteers—that ran the biggest voter contact operation ever seen in 2008 and then repeated the feat four years later. While many modern campaigns rely on volunteers for little more than routine door-knocking, the Obama campaign adopted a “relational organizing” model in which volunteers took on progressively greater responsibilities, recruited friends and neighbors, and headed neighborhood teams. To paraphrase the old joke about spies (Q: What do spies do? A: Spies spy on spies), a true organizer is someone who organizes organizers, convincing friends, neighbors, or even strangers to adopt the cause and proselytize for it.

The book is also a great case for two things besides relational organizing: interdisciplinary collaboration, and academics embedding with political organizations to tell their stories from the inside. Han is a political scientist and McKenna a sociologist; the result is effectively a great sociological profile of a political organization. And it’s one that takes seriously some aspects of campaigns that organizers tend to obsess over and political scientists tend to ignore: chains of command, metrics, the day-to-day experience of staff on the ground. I’d like to see more of this approach, and I’d especially like to see it used to answer some of the questions I raise in the last few paragraphs.