My post (rant) a few weeks back about how Democratic campaigns are still (mostly) manually cutting turf in 2026 touched a nerve for many people. I got some great public and private feedback on it and I have some follow up on the turf cutting below.
I have a post or two I’m writing about my campaign life passions, Late Help and GOTV, but for now a return to the question of why we haven’t automated turf cutting.
First, let me be clear, I am not a man who is here to defend NGP-VAN. As I wrote previously, “Look, maybe this new turf cutter is absolutely horseshit, I mean it’s still NGP-VAN so I don’t expect it to be different when I log in later in 2026 or in 2028. But even if it’s bad, I have to ask, is it bad enough to really matter?”
The answer from those in the know is that the new auto turf cutter is bad enough to matter. This came from a current and experienced field hand and a very good and detailed comment from Mollie on my post that I encourage everyone to read in full, the crux was this:
“The reality is that it doesn’t actually matter that much how good each turf that the auto-cutter creates is. They could be pretty bad and still represent an improvement when you take into account the time savings from people not cutting turf by hand! For the auto-cutter to be usable, what matters is how easy it is for a person to review and correct the auto-cut turfs. Until that happens, maybe county party chairs and volunteers on small local races will get some use out of it, but it won’t be a viable way to cut all the GOTV turf for a state-wide coordinated campaign with multiple federal races as stakeholders.”
It seems the auto-cut turf tool is bad enough to matter, or it was too dropped late, or there’s no trust in VAN, or that old field hands don’t trust new tools, or all of the above.
More importantly, as Molly identifies (as I understand it), auto-cutting turf is fine but it’s really the inability to easily audit and fix auto-cut turf that’s the issue. Without that, auditing and fixing the auto-cut turf takes longer than manually cutting and fixing it. While I am not 100% sure that aggregate math adds up (see the 79 turf cutters I referenced in my last post), it certainly takes more effort for the auditors,
This is a classic product design and user experience mismatch, when the issue isn’t actually the auto-generated turf cutting, it’s being able to fix the auto-generated turf that matters. That’s where you could leverage and maximize the efficiencies of technology.
I did hear about a few products and workarounds that were able to automate turf cutting but sadly the VAN/Votebuilder monopoly still makes things complicated to use other tools.
In the interim, I understand that campaigns are going to be manually cutting turf, we’re a few weeks out from the election.
But what we should be doing is rigging up a way (chrome plugin?) this cycle so that we are capturing the full raw data from the humans manually cutting AND auditing turf so that we can use it to train a model after the election. We need to save the full data points, the clicks, the adjustments, the work to make the lines perfectly line up, all the process points to making good turf that we will need to train models on how to cut turf in the future. Right now we just have the finished turfs in VAN. Actually, I would guess that we probably delete all the old turfs to save storage space after the election. We probably shouldn’t do that this cycle, the DNC and VAN should be saving all of those turfs to train turf building models.
Actually you could even make the argument that at the end of every cycle Democratic campaign should turn their raw data over to the DNC for AI model training, like Google bought the enterprise data from Frontier airlines after they shutdown to train their models on complex enterprise work, to help us create campaign specific harnesses, models, or plugins that will help us in the future.
Since the 2028 campaign will start on Nov 4th, it would be nice if we could make sure that all the aggregate work, knowledge, and digital data from the 2026 is directed into making the AI models the 2028 campaigns will use be better fit for purpose.
But that’s a day after the election problem. Until then campaign folks, go, fight, win and I’ll see you out there.