The Authenticity Primary

Most advocacy campaigns talk to at least two audiences at once: some slice of the public, and the lawmakers and regulators who write the policy. This year’s primaries raised an important flag about those audiences: the gulf between them is now wide enough that the same message won’t necessarily land with both.

With the general election just weeks away, that gap won’t stay on the campaign trail. Whoever wins will carry voters’ expectations into the very offices you’re trying to persuade. If your organization has an issue in front of Congress or a statehouse next year, the standards voters used to judge candidates are about to become the standards used to judge you.

Written by: Alex Dickinson

Managing Partner,
Beekeeper Group

Those standards are easy to read in this year’s primary results. Voters rewarded people who showed up, who didn’t seem bought, and who sounded the same in every room, and they did it in both parties. In Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed beat Rep. Haley Stevens for the Democratic Senate nomination despite being heavily outspent. In Florida, state Rep. Angie Nixon beat Alex Vindman, a nationally known candidate who outraised her more than 16 to 1. In Detroit, state Rep. Donavan McKinney unseated two-term Rep. Shri Thanedar, who had House leadership behind him. In Texas, Ken Paxton ended Sen. John Cornyn’s career in the Republican runoff. By September, the cycle had produced one of the highest rates of incumbent primary losses in decades, even though most incumbents still held on.

It’s tempting to read these results as a left-right story. I don’t think that holds up. Brookings, analyzing the 2026 primary wave, found the common thread was economic populism and a rejection of top-down party machinery rather than cultural progressivism, and noted that candidates backed by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have lost nearly as often as they’ve won. The winners share a profile more than a platform: people the party didn’t manufacture, who read as rooted in their communities and not beholden to anyone. The same instinct reshaped the Republican Party over the last decade, and it is still shaping GOP primaries today.

The backdrop is a deep loss of institutional trust. Gallup’s latest measure, published in July, put average confidence in major U.S. institutions at 27 percent, with Congress at 9 percent. When the institutions that used to lend credibility have so little of it, borrowed credibility stops working, and contact matters more. Zohran Mamdani’s campaign says its volunteers knocked roughly 1.6 million doors in the 2025 New York mayoral primary. Nixon, outspent by millions, ran on neighborhood organizing and concrete economic issues. This means drawing on people power.

Here’s the hard part. The public now rewards what these primaries rewarded: causes that feel real and unbought. But the people who write policy are the establishment. The outsider signals that win over a voter can read to a committee chair as noise, or as a threat. Persuading the base and persuading the committee are different jobs, and a campaign that confuses them can win the room and lose the vote.

Which brings me back to the flag I raised at the top. If the two audiences trust different things, do you need two different messages? I’ve heard more than one communications leader argue lately that you don’t have to say the same thing to everyone, and that tailoring your message to each audience is just good practice. They’re right, up to a point. A committee staffer needs the data and the bill language. A member from a small district needs to know what happens to the plant down the road. Speaking to each in the terms they trust isn’t spin.

It breaks when the substance changes along with the framing. If what you’re asking for in the committee room quietly contradicts what you’re telling your advocates, someone will eventually put the two side by side, and it doesn’t take much effort anymore. Being authentic doesn’t mean using the same words in every room. It means you’d be comfortable if either audience read what you told the other.

The traditional tools aren’t dead. The primaries showed this, too: endorsements still moved votes when a real base came with them, as Trump’s did for Paxton, and fell flat when they didn’t, as a Trump-endorsed incumbent learned in Florida. The same is true of coalition letters, association endorsements, credible data, and long relationships. They are still the currency lawmakers trust, but they aren’t enough on their own anymore, and when they show up without a visible base behind them, the public reads them as manufactured consensus.

The organizations that are winning run both campaigns at once. With advocates, trust is earned by showing up and being real. With institutions, it is earned by bringing evidence and keeping your word. The skill is connecting the two: turning grassroots energy into proof a policymaker can act on, without draining the authenticity out of it along the way.

It’s tempting to file all of this under primary season and move on. I’d resist that. Whatever happens on November 3, the nominees who came out of these primaries learned that showing up beat money and endorsements, and the ones who win will bring that lesson with them in January.

Some of them will arrive having beaten their own party’s establishment to get there. They will owe more to the voters and volunteers who carried them than to leadership, and they will size up advocates the same way: by who is actually behind you. Organizations that wait for the results to start building those relationships will be introducing themselves to offices that already have a view of them.

The work to do now is the work this piece is about. Make sure your advocates are known in the communities that will send new members to Washington and to statehouses. Get your evidence ready for offices that may be skeptical of the usual channels. And be honest about whether your coalition looks like the people these new members ran to represent.

The questions I’m asking

I’ve been putting a few questions to myself and to the leaders I talk with. Am I in coalition with the right people and organizations? Am I adding something real to the issue conversation, something that gives advocates a reason to believe in the work? And am I willing to listen to the advocates who criticize it?

Organizations with good answers have a real advantage in a year this short on trust. They treat members and advocates as partners, they lift up the groups doing the work in the spotlight, and in doing so they keep grassroots participation healthy, which is good for their issues and for the system around them. If these questions hit close to home, I’d like to hear how you’re thinking about them. Get in touch.

About Beekeeper EDGE

Beekeeper EDGE is Beekeeper Group’s new senior advisory service that provides upstream senior counsel to strengthen campaign execution. Clients engage EDGE as a standalone strategy engagement or as an embedded strategic layer within an existing Beekeeper relationship.

At its core, EDGE is a senior brain trust. We bring judgment, perspective, and disciplined planning to the moments when direction matters most. Learn more at edge.beekeepergroup.com.