People launched the Harris campaign before there was one
Rebecca Traister just published the New York Magazine piece she was working on when I spotted her at the DNC in Chicago. It’s long. I just finished and don’t have time to synthesize anything. But I’ll note something said about organizing.
Traister describes how Kamala Harris pulled together her campaign for president on a very short schedule. More specifically, how grassroots supporters leapt at the chance to make her their candidate after Joe Biden stepped aside on July 21.
Stacey Abrams commented on the work of grassroots organizing:
“In organizing,” Abrams told me, “one of the terms of art is ‘If you stay ready, you don’t have to get 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.”
At a Raleigh fundraiser the night before Biden stepped aside, Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi asked to meet privately with our county’s organizers attending the dinner. A Pelosi acquaintance had talked up our accomplishments. We have been building infrastructure for twenty years. Abrams’ comment reflects what we do.
Most presidential years, someone asks in January when we are going to start preparations for November. Our answer: We started preparing for November the day after the last election. “If you stay ready, you don’t have to get ready.”
From past posts:
I tell this story in my trainings about how good planning builds on itself:
You all know these guys. They show up every presidential election. You’ve never seen them, don’t know their names. All they want is a yard sign. But if at your storefront they see volunteers arriving for a phone bank, signs bundled and staged to go out, people with clipboards headed out to canvass? I’ve seen this multiple times: People who are never going to knock a door or pick up a phone get their signs and – unprompted – pull out a checkbook and ask, “Who do I make the check out to?” And leave $100.
Because they can see with their own eyes your team has got it going on. And they don’t even know what It is. But it smells like victory and they want a piece of it.
The grassroots wanted a piece of the Harris campaign before party leadership. They were itching for it. Ready for a woman to take the Oval Office. They could see themselves in her.
What Harris and her sprawling, stitched-together team were expert at was capably crowd-surfing the happy-to-be-there energy that rose to meet her, reflecting the release from purgatory right back at the cameras and crowds, flashing her enormous smile and letting loose her wacky laugh. “One of the superpowers that she has,” said Butler, “is all those videos out there of her dancing with young people, cussing, marching with workers on picket lines or talking about her experience at McDonald’s — it’s like the grass roots can see themselves in her.”
“Great organizers,” said Poo, “embody that Maya Angelou quote, which is that people don’t remember what you say; they remember how you made them feel.” Harris was making people feel good and hopeful about the future, and she seemed to understand in her gut how important that was to actually winning an election. Early on, CNN reported that veteran Democratic pollster Geoff Garin had advised the campaign to stop saying “We’re not going back” and using the term weird. Harris declined to follow Garin’s advice, CNN noted, asserting that she “wasn’t going to listen to the pollsters herself and would instead trust the instincts she had buried under self-doubt for so long.”
Read the entire piece at New York Magazine .
