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Martin Van Buren
Born
Before he was president, Van Buren built the 'Albany Regency' in New York and then the national coalition that elected Andrew Jackson in 1828: disciplined party organisation, partisan newspapers, patronage jobs for loyal workers and nominating conventions. He argued openly that permanent parties were good for democracy, a heretical view then. The mass party he designed raised turnout dramatically. It was also built on an alliance with Southern slaveholders that kept slavery off the national agenda.
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Mark Hanna
Born
Hanna, an Ohio industrialist, ran William McKinley's 1896 campaign as a business operation, assessing banks and corporations a share of their assets and raising perhaps $3.5 million, far more than any previous campaign. He spent it on hundreds of speakers and well over 100 million pamphlets in many languages. The model of the modern money-driven national campaign begins with him. It also prompted the Tillman Act of 1907, the first federal ban on corporate contributions.
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James Farley
Born
Farley ran Franklin Roosevelt's 1932 and 1936 campaigns, keeping a card index of thousands of local Democratic officials and writing them personal letters in green ink, and correctly predicted in 1936 that Roosevelt would carry every state but Maine and Vermont. As postmaster general he used patronage to bind the party's urban machines and Southern wing into the New Deal coalition. He broke with Roosevelt over the third term in 1940.
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Ella Baker
Born
Baker organised NAACP branches across the South in the 1940s, helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and in 1960 convened the meeting that created the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, insisting the students keep their independence. Her philosophy, 'strong people don't need strong leaders', meant developing local leaders rather than relying on charismatic figures. SNCC's voter registration work in Mississippi grew directly from her approach to organising.
More about Ella Baker5
Bob Moses (activist)
Born
Moses went to Mississippi for SNCC in 1961 and spent years doing slow, dangerous door-to-door voter registration work in counties where Black residents were systematically kept off the rolls. He conceived the 1964 Freedom Summer, which brought around a thousand mostly white volunteers to the state and drew national attention after three workers were murdered, and the Freedom Vote mock elections that proved Black Mississippians wanted to vote. That pressure fed directly into the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
More about Bob Moses (activist)6
Fannie Lou Hamer
Born
A sharecropper evicted for trying to register to vote in 1962, Hamer became a field organiser and vice-chair of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, which challenged the all-white official delegation at the 1964 Democratic convention. Her televised testimony about being beaten in jail for voter registration work reached millions. The party rejected a token compromise, but the convention pledged to bar segregated delegations from 1968, changing how Democrats chose delegates nationally.
More about Fannie Lou Hamer7
Cesar Chavez
Born
Before the farmworkers' union, Chavez trained with Fred Ross in the Community Service Organization, registering tens of thousands of Mexican American voters in California through house meetings in the 1950s. The United Farm Workers' later electoral work, including its turnout for Robert Kennedy's 1968 California primary win, made Latino voters a recognised force in the state. Critics note his union opposed undocumented workers in some strikes, a contradiction that complicates his legacy.
More about Cesar Chavez8
Richard Viguerie
Viguerie copied the names of donors to Barry Goldwater's 1964 campaign from public records and built the conservative movement's direct-mail fundraising operation from them, raising money in small amounts from millions of supporters outside the party establishment. The lists financed the New Right causes and candidates of the 1970s and helped elect Reagan. The technique, later moved online, is now how both parties fund insurgent candidates. Critics said his mailers kept large shares of what they raised.
More about Richard Viguerie9
Phyllis Schlafly
Born
Schlafly founded STOP ERA in 1972, when the Equal Rights Amendment had passed Congress and was being ratified quickly, and built a network of conservative women, many new to politics, who lobbied state legislators with homemade bread and testimony. Ratification stalled three states short. Her Eagle Forum organisation then became a durable part of the Republican coalition, bringing religious conservative women into precinct politics. Supporters of the amendment argue she misrepresented its effects.
More about Phyllis Schlafly10
Paul Weyrich
Born
Weyrich co-founded the Heritage Foundation in 1973 and, in 1979, with Jerry Falwell, the Moral Majority, which registered millions of evangelical Christians who had previously voted little. He also founded the American Legislative Exchange Council, which circulates model bills to state legislators. In 1980 he said openly that conservatives' leverage 'goes up as the voting populace goes down', a remark often cited by critics of later voting restrictions.
More about Paul Weyrich11
Ralph Reed
Born
As executive director of Pat Robertson's Christian Coalition from 1989, Reed built a precinct-level network in churches and distributed tens of millions of voter guides before elections, contributing to the Republican capture of Congress in 1994. The method, organising congregations rather than broadcasting to them, became standard on the religious right. His later lobbying ties to Jack Abramoff damaged his reputation, and he went on to found the Faith and Freedom Coalition.
More about Ralph Reed12
Karl Rove
Born
Rove's contribution to organising was the 72-Hour Task Force and microtargeting used in George W. Bush's 2004 re-election: consumer data to identify persuadable and low-propensity Republican voters, and a volunteer network in evangelical churches and exurbs to turn them out. Turnout rose sharply on both sides, but the Republican operation was widely judged the more effective. Critics associated him with divisive tactics, including the same-sex marriage ballot measures that coincided with that election.
More about Karl Rove13
Howard Dean
Born
Dean's 2004 primary campaign pioneered online organising and small-donor fundraising through Meetup and blogs, though it collapsed in Iowa. As chair of the Democratic National Committee from 2005 he pushed the '50-state strategy', paying for organisers in every state including Republican strongholds, against fierce opposition from party strategists who wanted to focus on swing states. Democrats won both houses in 2006 and gained seats in red states in 2008; how much the strategy contributed is still debated.
More about Howard Dean14
Marshall Ganz
Born
Ganz left Harvard to work in Mississippi's Freedom Summer, spent sixteen years with Cesar Chavez's farmworkers, and later designed the training model for Barack Obama's 2008 volunteer organisation: 'Camp Obama' sessions teaching volunteers to tell their own stories and lead neighbourhood teams. Thousands of volunteers led their own teams under it. He has since criticised how quickly the network was folded into a party apparatus after the election.
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David Plouffe
Born
As Obama's 2008 campaign manager, Plouffe built a strategy around delegate maths and caucus states that Hillary Clinton's campaign neglected, and around a field operation of paid organisers and volunteer teams that registered and turned out record numbers of young and Black voters. The campaign raised hundreds of millions online from small donors. He was later a senior adviser to Kamala Harris's 2024 campaign, which lost, a reminder that methods alone do not decide elections.
More about David Plouffe16
Thomas Hofeller
Hofeller was the Republican Party's leading redistricting strategist for decades and a key mapmaker behind the 2010 REDMAP project, which targeted state legislative races so that Republicans controlled the drawing of congressional districts after the 2010 census. He used detailed voter data and software to draw maps that held up through the decade. Files discovered after his death in 2018 showed his work on the citizenship question for the census, and courts struck down several of his maps as racial or partisan gerrymanders.
More about Thomas Hofeller17
Stacey Abrams
Born
Abrams founded the New Georgia Project in 2013 to register Black, Latino and young voters, and after losing the 2018 governor's race created Fair Fight Action to litigate and organise against voter roll purges and other barriers. Registration grew by hundreds of thousands, and Georgia went Democratic in the 2020 presidential race and both 2021 Senate run-offs. Demographic change in Atlanta's suburbs did much of the work too, and her refusal to concede in 2018 was criticised as undermining trust in elections.
More about Stacey Abrams18
Charlie Kirk
Born
Kirk founded Turning Point USA in 2012 at 18 and built it into the largest conservative campus organisation, with chapters at thousands of schools and colleges, then launched Turning Point Action, which ran a large voter-turnout operation in Arizona and other swing states in 2024. Exit polls showed Republicans gaining among young men that year. Critics accused the group of targeting professors through its watchlist. Kirk was shot and killed while speaking at a university event in Utah in September 2025.
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