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Rebecca Traister has written an inspiring feature about the Harris candidacy that you don’t want to miss. She talks about the fact that the burst of enthusiasm around her candidacy was fuelled almost entirely by the grassroots, much of it led by women, especially Black women’s groups that have been around awhile, quietly going about the business of electing Democrats.
She writes:
As we settle into the second phase of this candidacy and old hands regain control in preparation for the presidential debate on September 10, the question is whether the cautious, moderating forces that have long guided Democratic electoral politics will tamp down the people’s power that was unleashed this summer and jeopardize Harris’s chances of victory. And also whether those in charge in the Democratic Party and in the Washington press corps even understand where that power comes from: a true women-led movement, built over decades and given new life in the aftermath of Hillary Clinton’s defeat in 2016, working in service of a female presidential candidate running on a set of policies around housing, care work, abortion, health care, and labor that this candidate understands to be inherently, but not exclusively, “women’s issues.” It is a movement galvanized by a devastating setback for women’s rights — for civil rights — that seeks to rectify that wrong and usher in a new era of American politics.
“It feels like finally our political culture is catching up to the extent to which women are shaping politics and shaping our democracy,” said Ai-jen Poo, senior adviser for Care in Action, a domestic-workers organization. “Women are owning and organizing to protect democracy in a totally different way.”
She describes how, in the days leading up to Biden’s withdrawal, all the Democratic poohbahs were determined to hold some kind of “blitz primary” and create some rube goldberg mechanism for “choosing” the right person to replace him. Those of you who read this blog regularly will remember that Tom Sullivan and I were adamantly against all of that, from the very beginning believing that Harris was the only choice and that the people who were pushing this nonsense were completely out to lunch. Traister points out that some of those people include Nancy Pelosi and Barack Obama. But then Biden endorsed Harris right away (I think she sort of ungenerously questions his motives there) and while it took a few days for the naysayers to come around, the instant grassroots enthusiasm left them no choice but to get onboard:
Whatever reservations these leaders might have had were swept aside by a fervor for a Harris presidency that few people in Washington could have predicted. In her first week, she raised $200 million, two-thirds from first-time donors; more than 170,000 people volunteered for the campaign. The first day alone, 28,000 people signed up, more than 100 times what the Biden campaign had been seeing on an ordinary day. Within 48 hours of Biden’s stepping aside, I was crossing the street carrying a newly minted HARRIS sign for my kids and was greeted by honking horns, thumbs-up, people yelling from cars, “Where did you get that?” As Eaddy put it to me, “If you’ve seen The Wiz on Broadway, it was like when they sing ‘A Brand New Day.’”
The Win With Black Women call “really set the tone for the energy and momentum we’ve seen,” said Harris’s campaign manager, Julie Chávez Rodríguez, who is the granddaughter of famed labor activist César Chávez and describes herself as “an organizer by birth and by blood.”
One person who worked for Clinton in 2016 and afterward for Biden called me that first week nearly in tears. “They were just there for her,” she said, marveling at that first Sunday call. “It’s like these women just knew what to do. They formed a protective cocoon or maybe a kind of platform that could raise her up with joy and confidence. It was just like, ‘We got this. We got you.’”
The party came together in an unprecedented show of unity. I’m still reeling to tell you the truth. But it’s because the “cringe” Resistance just kept going (as Hillary Clinton exhorted them to do) and when the time came they were ready:
“You can see people reaching in and wanting to be a part of this and fuel it,” said Whitmer, a co-chair of Biden’s campaign and now of Harris’s. “Normal people. People that were sitting on the sidelines are now activated, people that were at the Women’s March and see that this is the moment where we can use organizing to push Kamala Harris over the finish line. The reason we’re having so much success as a campaign is because that work has been done — not finished, but the ground game has been growing — at that grassroots level over the last eight years.”
It’s quite a story and a hopeful one. I highly recommend the whole thing. She concludes with:
The people have the power, Harris told the Women’s March. The strength of the nation has always relied on the organizers, she told the Win With Black Women call in 2023. When we fight, she tells us now, we win. Maybe this time, we finally will.
We have to.