Field Director

A Field Director sits at the top of a political campaign's field department, the team responsible for direct voter contact. Reporting to the campaign manager, the field director designs the voter-contact plan, sets daily and weekly contact goals (doors knocked, calls made, IDs collected), hires and supervises regional or deputy field directors, and oversees the organizers who in turn manage volunteers.

The role is built around a simple theory of campaigns: persuasion and turnout are driven by repeated, personal contact with targeted voters. The field director translates the campaign's strategic targeting — which precincts, which voter universes, which persuasion tiers — into an executable ground game. Day-to-day responsibilities typically include:

• Building the field plan: vote goals, contact goals, staffing ratios, and a timeline working backward from Election Day.
• Managing the organizer table, including hiring, training, and weekly one-on-ones.
• Running the volunteer pipeline: recruitment, shift confirmation, retention, and leadership development.
• Overseeing data hygiene in tools such as VAN/VoteBuilder, ensuring canvass and phone results are cut, distributed, and synced.
• Coordinating with the digital, comms, and political departments so that field events, surrogate visits, and paid media reinforce each other.
• In the closing stretch, directing Get Out The Vote (GOTV), including staging locations, ride-to-polls, and poll-watching operations.

On U.S. presidential and statewide races, the title usually refers to the state-level head of field; nationally, a National Field Director sits above state directors. On smaller campaigns, the role may be combined with that of campaign manager or political director.

Academic work by Donald Green and Alan Gerber (Get Out the Vote, multiple editions since 2004) has shaped how field directors weigh tactics, generally finding face-to-face canvassing more effective per contact than mail, robocalls, or untargeted digital outreach.