A liberal grassroots group is trying a novel approach to win over Republican voters ahead of this year’s midterm election: talking to them.

Swing Left has launched a new program in battleground House districts across the country that relies on time-intensive, person-to-person conversations with Republicans in hopes of building relationships that eventually persuade them to back Democratic candidates.

Its leaders are confident they can succeed where the Democratic Party establishment has failed.

“As Democrats, we talk to people way too late,” said Yasmin Radjy, Swing Left’s executive director. “We start talking to people after Labor Day, essentially, and don’t really talk to them before. We talk to people really transactionally.”

“We tend to be talking to a very narrow set of voters over and over rather than the whole set of voters that we could, and should, be talking to as Democrats,” she said.

Known as Ground Truth, the outreach effort is already underway in more than 30 swing districts and will expand to more in the coming months, including into some Senate races.

The effort is different from the fast-paced and well-funded ad campaigns candidates usually rely on.

It is also an evolution for Swing Left, one of the many grassroots-oriented liberal organizations to form after President Donald Trump’s first election.

For years, Swing Left focused on volunteer-driven voter outreach programs meant to supplement the campaigning done by candidates and party committees, a way for rank-and-file liberals to pitch in for the upcoming election.

But this year’s program, which has already attracted the attention of Democratic Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Pat Ryan, is taking a more professionalized and central role in the party’s overall effort to win back the House majority in November. Swing Left’s leaders say the intent now is to do more than supplement the political work of the party establishment, including the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, but actively work alongside it, convinced that its more nimble organization is better able to execute on some parts of a campaign.

“The D-trip has politics that we don’t have, right?” Radjy said. “They have member politics, caucus politics, they have all different things. And so, just structurally, they have to make allocation decisions that are more complex than we have to make.

“We’re just like, ‘What campaign needs it the most?’ and ‘Can we move money and volunteers into those places?’” she added.

Swing Left’s campaign comes at a time when Democrats, stung by their defeats to Trump and congressional Republicans last election, are reexamining how they conduct their campaigns. That wide-ranging debate includes their policies, candidates and the methods used to engage voters.

Radjy, a former senior adviser at the Department of the Treasury in Joe Biden’s administration, said many of her party’s political efforts had grown stale. Her group is hoping to break down what she called “cultural sclerosis” within the party that embraces small changes while eschewing a more fundamental shift in how it conducts business.

“Part of the cultural shift that we want to see is taking on more risk, taking bigger swings, not just being like, we’re gonna tweet one word in how we speak as a party,” she said. Instead, we should just try things that feel fundamentally differently.”

DCCC officials say they see Swing Left’s campaign as a serious effort, especially because of the real-time data it gathers from voters at their front doors. The effort is complementary to the committee and candidate’s own traditional field campaign, they say.

Volunteers started knocking on doors in swing districts more than a year before the midterms. They are trained to take handwritten notes during their 10-to-15-minute conversation with a voter and record their observations into an app once they leave.

Importantly, Swing Left officials say, volunteers are trained to find common ground with their concerns — which is different than the scripted conversations many volunteers are instructed to have with voters, Radjy said.

“[Voters] are so ready for a Twitter debate, and instead you’re having an … emotional alignment on the fact they agree on a lot more than either party thinks that they do,” Radjy said. “They disagree on plenty, but they’re able to have a real conversation.”

Swing Left has already tried a proof of concept: In March, more than 100 volunteers canvassed with Reps. Ryan and Ocasio-Cortez in Ryan’s purple New York district.

“We need to reimagine how our party operates — that means going everywhere and listening to everyone. Ground Truth is what Democratic representatives and candidates in every district should be doing,” Ryan said in a press release.

The Federal Election Commission has said that door-to-door canvassing is not considered coordinated communication with a campaign, like a television ad or mailer. This means outside groups can spend unlimited money on coordinating strategy and canvassing without it counting as a campaign contribution. Sharing voter data, however, does count as a campaign contribution.

“With the rules of the game having changed dramatically overnight, that just opened up our imagination — what would it look like to marry the best elements of outside independent expenditure campaigns with the core of Democratic infrastructure?” Radjy said.

Few groups have capitalized on this rule change from the FEC, other than Texas Majority PAC (a statewide effort in Texas dedicated to helping elect Democratic candidates), which asked the FEC to give an advisory opinion on this, Radjy said.

“We expected to be the first out of the gate alongside Texas Majority PAC, who filed the AO, and then to look behind us and see a whole bunch of people following us [on the AO],” she said. “Nobody’s followed.”

At least on the Democratic side, that is. Republican groups Turning Point Action and Heritage Action met with Trump’s 2024 campaign to discuss plans to collaborate after the FEC changed its coordination rules, per Politico.

Radjy said the fact that the party is behind the GOP on some of these coordinating efforts is proof of why Swing Left’s program is important — and why Democrats can’t simply leave the party’s longstanding establishment to do all the most important political work itself.

“Who cares if we do that work at scale,” she said, “if we are standing on top of really broken infrastructure?”