TL;DR
No silver bullet talking point wins an election. What wins is a personal story that voters can’t push back on, delivered by someone actually willing to be vulnerable.
The best field training is about showing, not telling: modeling every type of voter reaction, over and over, until organizers feel ready to walk out the door.
If someone leaves a training feeling ready to try, that’s a win. Building confidence starts with every single door after. Everybody gets better the more they do it.
See more of our conversation with Alyse Maye Quade at @TrainDems on Instagram, and keep an eye on our training schedule to see when she’s training on organizing and power mapping next.
At NDTC, our trainers are organizers, strategists, and advocates who bring hard-won experience into every session they lead.
In this series, we’re introducing you to the people behind our trainings. This month, we’re spotlighting Alyse Maye Quade. She’s a field organizer, trainer, and Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party (DFL) coordinated campaign staffer based in Minnesota who has spent over a decade having the kinds of conversations most people try to avoid. Alyse trains with NDTC on field organizing and power mapping, the component of a campaign that involves talking to voters one-on-one, persuading undecided voters, and getting voters to the polls on Election Day. She brings to every session what she learned the hard way: that the doors are where elections are actually won, and the only script that works is your own story.
NDTC: You’ve spent your career in field. What makes it the work you keep coming back to?
AMQ: At the end of the day, field is the side where we’re actually talking directly to voters — having that back-and-forth conversation, hearing what matters to people, building relationships that last beyond a single knock. If you’re a local state house candidate and you come back a year later and talk to the same person, you’re building trust. That’s how we win elections. It’s also just the most rewarding work I can do. Everything else on a campaign is building bricks. Field is where you put them together.
NDTC: What’s the biggest mistake you see candidates and organizers make when they’re getting ready to talk to voters?
AMQ: People want talking points. They’ll say, ‘But where’s my script? What are the things you want me to say?’ And then they get completely stuck when they don’t have one, as though without a script they can’t do the work.
But there’s no silver bullet message that just wins an election. What actually works is stepping back and learning to talk about what you care about from your own personal perspective. A talking point is a prompt — here’s the issue, here’s what this candidate believes. But instead of reading it word for word, you ask: what is the impact of this on real people? What’s my story that connects to this?
When you’re at someone’s door and you start spouting facts and figures, the person you’re talking to isn’t necessarily going to believe you. They’ll push back on the stat. They’ll question the source. But they cannot push back on your own personal experience. That’s where the real conversation starts.
NDTC: Can you walk us through what that looks like in practice?
AMQ: I worked at Everytown for Gun Safety — Moms Demand Action — and while I was there, something happened that became very personal to me. A volunteer I worked with had a husband with a law office. Someone came in and shot and killed the clerk working at the front desk. And when I found out the clerk’s name, I realized I knew him — his name was Chase, and I’d worked with him on a campaign when I was in college.
So there I was, knocking doors for a gun violence prevention organization, and the conversation steered exactly where you’d expect: don’t take my guns away, I believe in the Second Amendment. And instead of shutting down, I said: I hear you. I grew up on a farm. My dad taught me safe gun handling. I know how to shoot. And then I told him about Chase, and about how a background check on all gun sales could have prevented what happened, because the man who killed Chase should never have had access to a gun.
I don’t know how that voter ended up casting his ballot. But he was empathetic. He was listening. Maybe I didn’t change his mind that day — but I gave him a kernel. And kernels are how we change hearts and minds over time.
NDTC: Is there a voter conversation that’s stayed with you or surprised you?
AMQ: I think about one all the time. I knocked on a door and asked what issue mattered most to the person, and she said abortion — and then said she was anti-abortion. And my immediate instinct was, oh no, this is going to go badly.
But I didn’t walk away. Instead of shutting down the conversation, I kept asking questions. Why? How does that make you feel? What does that mean to you? And we ended up in this long, genuine back-and-forth. By the end, she said: I would never force anybody else to make my same decision. I just don’t like this. And from there we got all the way to: would you be able to vote for a candidate who supports having that choice? And she said yes.
I could have walked away the moment she said anti-abortion. I’ve probably done that other times, honestly. But because I stayed in it and kept asking real questions, we found common ground. That’s the beginning of the battle.
NDTC: How do you train people to do that — to stay in the hard conversation instead of walking away?
AMQ: You can talk at people all day about how it’s going to go. Or you can show them.
We added a layer to our field organizer onboarding where we do a full hour of live modeling. Ten people stand in a row; the organizers come up one by one, and each person acts out a different type of voter — every reaction, every response, every curveball. They practice it over and over. We’re all great actors, obviously, but the scenarios are rooted in reality. How do you react when someone slams the door? How do you keep the conversation alive when someone goes cold? What do you do when the issue gets uncomfortable?
Being able to see it modeled and then practice it yourself — that’s what builds confidence. And then every single door after that is more practice. Everybody gets better the more they do it.
NDTC: One last thing: if you were walking into a presidential debate or a WWE match, what’s your entrance song?
AMQ: I’m going with Whitney Houston’s “I Wanna Dance with Somebody.” Everybody loves that song; everybody’s going to be on your side. Wider appeal. You can’t go wrong.
(For the record, her first instinct was EDM, specifically a song she loves going to dance to with her wife. But for maximum crowd appeal, Whitney wins.)
Alyse Maye Quade leads field organizing and power mapping trainings for NDTC and has spent nearly a decade at the Minnesota DFL. You can catch her next training — on using power mapping to target key community stakeholders — coming up soon.
Alyse put it plainly in this conversation: there’s no silver bullet message that wins an election. What wins is real people with real stories, equipped with real skills, willing to stay in the hard conversation. NDTC exists to give those people the training they need, completely for free. No cost, no gatekeeping, no prerequisites. Just show up.
Sign up for your first NDTC training at traindems.org.
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